Microsoft Photosynth

Adding to the excitement was the use of Photosynth to present the ‘moment’ of the oath using a huge multi-touch screen by a CNN anchor (click here to see CNN’s Photosynth of the moment). Microsoft’s Photosynth can create an interactive 3D panorama from multiple still images.

Around 2 million people were present at the ceremony according to CNN and thousands have sent photos to them which was added to the Photosynth of the moment.

A special moment “captured” in 3D.

Thanks to Photosynth, the 44th US President’s historic swearing-in moment is captured in 3D and can be revisited by future generations, to experience it from many angles (unlike recorded video, which is not interactive… at least until ‘Holographic Video’ becomes a reality!)

So, go ahead and experiment Photosynth (which you can install if you don’t have it already)

The Royal Navy has begun using a modified version of Windows XP on their nuclear submarines. And about security (since these are nuclear submarines), they have mentioned that all hack-prone elements of Windows XP were fixed during the modification (wonder if anyone can buy this Windows For Nuclear Submarines!)

Take a look at this modified version of the Bliss wallpaper in flickr. It would be a perfect match for the workstations in the nuclear submarines

Then I googled (as usual) to see whats up and got to know that the .NET logo has been changed… cool!

It looks better this time in my opinion. I didn’t like the lowercase “.net” in the old logo, so this makes me happy! And it also reminds me of the Silverlight logo which I like so much.

I saw some negative comments too, in some forums, saying that the new logo is ‘not cool’ for several reasons… one of them is “everything is becoming blue recently when it comes to Microsoft and the web”.. and I also agree with that.

Anyway, Microsoft’s reasons for the logo change are given in this post. And they say “The design is strong, simple and distinctive”… Checkout what they are talking about, here are the vertical and horizontal logos.

Lets embrace the change

For this reason, I always think twice (or more) before touching anything that is open source, to be used with production code. The ASP.NET AJAX framework was so easy to use because of the pre-built controls provided by the Ajax Control Toolkit team. I had very few occasions where I needed to write some JavaScript code in the applications.

But when there were some advance pieces of code which demanded some JavaScript, I realized how much of JavaScript can be reused… and how handy it would be to use a JavaScript library for that purpose.

When I stumbled on this great JavaScript library called jQuery, I was skeptical because of its size… just played around some sites to explore animations and other functionalities that this library offers. But I never used it… sticking to what Microsoft offers through the ASP.NET Ajax framework.

And now I’m really excited to know that Microsoft and Nokia are adopting jQuery as part of their official application development platform. This shows the real power of jQuery. And what I am really excited about is the javascript intellisense support for jQuery that Microsoft will provide through Visual Studio!

Here are the posts of this great news from my favourite industry experts on the subject:

• Scott Guthrie on jQuery and Microsoft
• Scott Hanselman on the same subject

You can read the jQuery team’s announcement here. It must be a great turning point to the jQuery team.

Happy coding…

Go here and register with a .NET passport account, and you are good to go.

Don’t loose the promotional code they provide you and it will be valid only for 30 days (if you don’t use it to register for a course).

And the offer expires on June 30, 2008!

The catch:
The code will provide you with access to one e-learning course… In their words – “Your code can be used for a course within a collection but will not provide you access to the complete course collection”…

Hope that helps