Category: Windows Vista

Auxiliary displays

Here’s a feature you’ll start to see on portable PCs around the end of next year. The auxiliary display is a tiny LCD-style screen (plus navigation buttons) embedded into the outside of a notebook or other portable computer. The idea is simple: You can check an appointment, look up a phone number, pull up a music playlist, or do some other light task without having to open the PC and wait for it to wake up. Great idea!

Microsoft’s “Metro” format aims to replace PDF

One of the most intriguing demos at WinHEC yesterday was a sneak peek at a new document format code-named “Metro.” According to Microsoft’s white paper [in Microsoft Word format] on the new technology, it’s “a complete specification for a fixed-layout document format based on XML that offers ‘electronic paper’ for use by any application on any platform.”

Sound familiar? If the spec succeeds, it would obviate the need for Adobe PDF files.

Metro will reportedly be backward compatible with Windows XP. You’ll be able to print directly to a Metro file, use a universal viewer (like Adobe’s Reader) to open files, and send them to any printer that has a compatible driver. Yesterday’s demo of a Metro-optimized printer showed off the capability to print color pages that have the same sort of gradients and shading you see on the screen. Metro-optimized printers probably won’t be ready until 2007.

The new technology should be in Beta 1, which is due this summer. Developers can get the full spec here

WinHEC: What’s the opposite of liveblogging?

I was really looking forward to liveblogging Bill Gates’ keynote address at WinHEC today. I’m sure a few other folks were as well. But a funny thing happened when I made it into the exhibit hall. Someone had decided to (1) Disable Wi-Fi in the exhibit hall (but not announce it – it’s amusing to watch people try every possible setting in the Windows XP wireless dialog box); (2) Squeeze the media (print and online) into a specially reserved section without any tables (why do you think they call them laptops?); (3) Provide no power outlets (thus giving my old Toshiba a real-world stress test).

So, you don’t get the benefit of my real-time analysis of BillG’s keynote, and instead you have to put up with my after-the-fact pontificating based on notes I wrote in the dark until my battery died with a half-hour to go. The last 30 minutes was just a blur.

It was a low-energy keynote, without a clever, self-effacing video clip like the ones that have become a hallmark of Gates appearances in recent years. The geeky audience got an appropriately geeky talk from the Alpha Geek, who had (in classic Microsoft style) three key messages to pass along:

  1. Windows for 64–bit platforms is here now. But it will be a while before it lands on your desktop. Windows XP 64–Bit Edition is a start, but it will be another year before 64–bit desktop PCs reach the mainstream and several more years before the 64–bit drivers and apps reach critical mass.
  2. Longhorn! Longhorn! Longhorn! Honest, this is not going to be Windows XP Service Pack 3. In fact, Gates got a big laugh when he said, after a particularly impressive Longhorn demo (and I’m paraphrasing),  “Wow, every time I see one of these demos I ask why we can’t ship this right away.” Heh. I’ll have a lot more to say about Longhorn in a later post.
  3. All sorts of surprising new PC form factors are on the way. Tiny tablets. Well-connected media devices. Killer color printers (no kidding). All in the Longhorn timeframe, of course. I want one of everything.

Bonus geek content: The Longhorn demos were using build 5060. If you downloaded anything older via BitTorrent, you are so last week

(Good news: This afternoon’s sessions, including a fascinating presentation on new hardware designs, were held in rooms with tables! Bad news: Still no power strips. So I had to drag a chair to the back of the room, next to a power outlet, and blog from long distance. Good news: My battery is back up to 70% charge.)

Bloggers’ lunch tomorrow at Tulio. Don’t expect me to liveblog it.

Stay tuned.

Reporting from WinHEC 2005

I’m here in Seattle at the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference, where Microsoft is laying out its vision of what sort of technology will be running your office and living room in the coming years.

There’s lots of good stuff, including some nicely detailed looks at Longhorn. I’d be sharing all sorts of details with you, except that the rocket scientists who set up the conference facilities didn’t set up these facilities to be blogger-friendly.

Stay tuned. I’ll be passing along details soon enough.