with the latest release of the maps.live.com site and virtual earth v6, there are some cool end-user features that you can take advantage of as well.  one of them is the ability to create a virtual tour of your collections (a collection is a group of waypoints you've saved in your profile.

perhaps you have a collection of your favorite vacation spots, or your locations of your organization's offices, or your an individual speaker and want a virtual tour of your stops for some odd reason.  well now you can and there are a few ways to do it.  first, head on over to http://maps.live.com and sign in (not required, but is required to save a collection).  to create a collection, simply search for locations and then you'll have the option to "add to collection" which you would do.  i created a collection of places starting at my house, then to a few baseball stadiums, then to disney and vegas...c'mon, sounds like a great trip!  here's what it looks like:

after i have a collection, i have a few options.  from the actions menu (of the collections pane) i can immediately do a tour in 3d:

this uses the virtual earth 3d control, which is available as a download (free) for internet explorer and firefox.  when i choose that option, the 3d tour starts and my first point in my collection.  on the left side i now see a tour pane:

had i edited the properties of my waypoints with other metadata like a photo, notes, etc. they would have showed up in this area.  you may also notice the play and record buttons on the bottom of that area.  here's were some of the other sharing comes into play (note: i can click the share button to send someone an email link to the tour as well).  let's say i want a video of this location tour for youtube, soapbox or whatever...simple, use the new record feature to create a windows media video file of the 3d tour.  when you hit record, it starts the tour over.  now the recording takes considerably longer than the normal playback, but that is because it is recording the various frames and encoding at the same time to create the resulting file.

when completed, you'll see that you have a completed file.  you can now post this wherever you'd like.  for example, here's my tour using silverlight streaming (note: i've realized you just have to let your machine record...some of mine seemed to have got screwed up by me doing other activities -- and the titles are automatically added based on the waypoint titles):

pretty cool new feature i think provided by virtual earth and the live platform.  go forth and create.

last week i was at a team meeting in a town called bodega bay (near the area where scenes from the birds were filmed).  it is about an hour or so north of san francisco.  a nice little town, but my most enjoyable moment were the louisiana hot oysters i had on the last night...mmm...tasty.  ok, back on track.

i had not thought ahead and accidentally (well at the time purposefully) made my return flight reservations for 06:00 AM from SFO international.  yeah, do the math.  that means i would have had to leave bodega bay, oh at 03:30-ish in the morning to drive to SFO and make it there in plenty of TSA approved time.  yeah, wasn't looking forward to that.  so my comrade anand offered for me to crash at his place the night before in the city.  sweet, i'm in.

about half way through the last day of our meeting, anand emails me an invite with the note "want to geek out tonight in the city" which intrigued me of course.  the invite was for a 'spontaneous drinking event' at a bar in the city.  those that know me, know that i don't drink, but i was still wanting to go see what this event was all about...after all it was the city!  oh yeah, and the event was organized via facebook completely.

we rolled in and headed to the house of shields bar in the city (roughly 2nd and market).  it was a nice little bar, but one of those places that you wish could hold a lot more people.  it was a bit narrow, but had that really cool old bar vibe to it.  took me a while to get the bartender over to my side and i'm sure he was extra pissed that i only asked for a glass of water...hey, i still tipped him!  i strolled around a bit and was introduced to a few people.  one of them was terry chay, of lunch 2.0 and cindyb.  terry is a very nice guy with an obvious interest in other people as well as photography.  terry was walking around with a digital camera from leica.  it was unique looking in that it was  digital SLR that was so thin it was amazing.  i got a lesson on who leica was as a company and how this camera operated making use of different mirrors rather than more elements and straight-on lens reflections.  terry was very kind to let me take some shots and mess around with it.

i talked with some more people about a few things and had some great mini-conversations (wasn't there long).  someone came up and asked me about operating system things, etc. and we discussed what we did/didn't like about vista, osx, etc.  it was one of the rare tech conversations going on in that detail.  even the bar owner was walking around and mingling.  he wasn't behind the bar, he was in front of it...getting to talk with his customers, being a part of the action...and pitching some of his own ideas to these young entrepreneurs.

and that is just it.  between every other word being 'facebook' it dawned on me the buzz that is the 'bay area' and the encompassing energy in the tech world that exists.  the bar (occupancy limit 49, attendance 75+) was filled with 20-somethings and lower 30-somethings, all with incredibly high energy, filled with ideas, and stinking of entrepreneurial aromas.  it wasn't about bits and bytes, but rather ideas and connections.  the collision of thoughts and intersects of partnerships.  in the hour or so i was there, i desperately wanted to be a part of that.  sure, there are user groups, but after that user group meeting is over, do the conversations continue with such passion?  the bay area has that passion...everywhere.  c'mon arizona, where is this passion?  where are the new and innovative ideas?

i was thankful to have felt that energy for a while that night...oh and if you live in the bay area...did i mention we are hiring? :-)

thanks also to anand who has a bitchin' pad in the city...ahh to be young and single...

 

if you don't have 8 minutes to spare, don't watch this now.  you seriously need to stop what you are doing, put on some headphones (or gather some co-workers) and watch this video.  this is some amazing video footage caught on home video of survival of the fittest in action.  the video is safe for work (unless you work at PETA i suppose).

let me boil it down: lions waiting to pounce heard of buffalo, they get one, other buffalo escape, alligator gets buffalo, other buffalo return to kicks some arse, initially targeted baby buffalo walks away...alive

seriously, amazing.

when vista came out, clearly one of the biggest pain points to end users was user account control (UAC).  this is the feature that requires authorization to run certain applications which would require elevated privileges...most notable being installations.  osx, of course, has had this feature for a while.  osx requires the user to authorize elevated changes like changing account information or other system settings, as well as installations.  osx differs slightly in that once you authorize in certain areas (like sys prefs) it remains 'unlocked' until you lock it again explicitly or other actions do.

another thing that vista (and actually xp sp2) introduced was protecting users from downloaded files.  if you downloaded a file and then tried to use/execute it, vista would prompt you that you downloaded the file and should be cautious, etc.  a good feature IMO.  after prepping my clean pave of leopard i downloaded a few of my apps and when launching one saw this:

looks like leopard implemented a similar feature.  it is good to see security taking a priority in updates to operating systems.  sometimes they are annoyances (i actually think this one is in vista and in leopard), but i get it, to the 'lay user' software developers have an obligation to do their best to protect the system, user and networks while at the same time balancing that with proper user experience.  i've seen other leopard security improvements as well that catch up to some of the introduced features in vista...good to see it taking a front seat, or at least i think so.

well, it's been over 12 hours since leopard was available to the masses and the early reviews seem to be in.

yawn.

i just got my discs and will be updating my machines soon to see (i'm going to try to update one and clean install the other).  but i'm reading the reviews and they aren't promising.

dave winer says the upgrade process went fine, but he seems left with wondering what did he upgrade too? he says:

Net-net, my first impression of Leopard is that it isn't a big deal one way or the other.

interesting.  i thought this was supposed to be apple's biggest os ever.  i'm sure to some it will be.  when i look at the 'over 300 features' i laugh a bit.  since when do we call fixes and critical updates features that count toward a benefit to upgrade?  i see some key updates in leopard.  spaces, time machine, some UI glitz (transparencies and new dock features), etc.  but are those core enough to make it that much better?  ichat backgrounds...do those improve your daily experience with leopard?

and what is with the blue screen of death on leopard?!?!? i thought that was trademarked by microsoft?  i love the comment that at least steve jobs could have picked a different shade of azure or someting ;-) -- if more of these BSOD reports come in, wikipedia will have to change the definition of BSOD!

i'm doing a little wayne's world flashbacking in my head about all the vista reviews of how the UI improvements were crap if that is all that was included in vista.  flip3d, yawn, etc., etc. -- so there is some of that happening with leopard.  maybe the geniuses of user design/experience should have been more public with their beta to get feedback?

matt neuburg has a write-up that caught my eye as rather than just pointing out general statements he articulates on some of the key 'features' and what he sees the problems are.  i think his points are valid and does make me wonder about the user experience design elements that went into some of the things he's pointing out.

it also gets me wondering about what i just paid for.  did i just pay for a service pack?  sure, spaces and some things are new, but are those incremental improvements?  when i look at the 300 improvements i seem to see some service pack-y things rather than features:

• Descriptive Error Messages
• Dashboard -- are these new improvements or just new widgets?
• Improved full-screen interface
• Video quality improvements
• improved iCal interface (not a new version, just 'improved')

you get where i'm going with this.  it somewhat bothers me as a msft employee a bit that leopard (OSX - 10.5) is considered a 'new operating system' when really it is an incremental improvement over tiger (10.4).  really, i think i just paid for a service pack.  apple has always said that microsoft took 5 years to update their operating system, but at the same time has considered 'dot' releases to OSX as major upgrades.  by that definition, what is XP, XP SP1, XP SP2, etc. -- those are 'dot' releases providing improvements and incremental updates.  c'mon apple, fess up that leopard is a service pack with some glitz.  it's okay to admit it, people will still by it.

i'm starting my upgrade/install now and will see how it goes.  i'm jaded by some reviews already but they seem to hit features that i use, so if i'm negatively affected, i'll be upset.  what is funny is that leopard seems to enable the ability to go back to different modes, but it involves terminal commands.  at least windows gives users UI options to toggle to their preferred settings.

another fair review from macworld themselves states "...in reality the changes are a mixed bag"