It’s been a while but I’ll try to finish up my series of reviews on Windows Vista. Here’s a look at it’s new features for pictures and video.

Pictures:

Vista includes Windows Photo Gallery which is for photo organizing and editing. The first feature that I noticed is that it has a picture importer which pops up when you plug in your camera or insert your memory card. I liked it and it had more options than most usually do such as options of how to name the folders. Once you have your photos on the computer the organizer makes it easy to find what you are looking for by showing you thumbnails sorted by date. You can also add tags and ratings to the photos. Actually the importer gives you the option to add tags when they are imported which makes it easy to import and tag you pictures from an event. Once you’ve found the picture you are looking for you can click the "Fix" button to go to a simple editor to do things like remove red eye, crop, and make adjustments. It will even do automatic adjustments if you want which are pretty good for most situations. Overall it is a lot like Google’s Picasa. I’d also say it has some of the same limitations as Picasa. For example both only allow one level of tags so you can’t have sub-tags like Website->November, and it isn’t easy to add a tag to multiple pictures at once. So power users will probably prefer with something like Adobe Photoshop Elements.

Video: 

Vista includes everything you need to create and burn movies to DVDs, assuming you have a DVD burner. Yes, your Vista PC will not only be able to burn but also play DVDs with no additional software which was required in XP. Vista has an updated version of Windows Movie Maker which makes it easy for you to edit your video. It’s easy to use and lets you deal with video, audio, and still pictures all together. After you’ve made your movie and you want to burn it to a DVD, simply fire up Windows DVD Maker. That will walk you through adding your videos and making your DVD menus and chapters. It had an impressive number of templates. When you are done just burn away. I was pretty impressed with what was built in and it will be more than sufficient for most home users. If you are a power user and want more options you still have the option to pay for third party software.

These new features of Vista were included with the basic home user in mind and will allow them to manage, edit, and share their photos and videos with friends and family. As with everything, if you want more functionality you can always pay for third party software with more bells and whistles but most people won’t have to do that.

In case you hadn’t heard, Microsoft recently released Internet Explorer 7 (IE7) and Windows Media Player 11. And if you hadn’t heard, you probably will soon since Microsoft is going to be pushing IE7 out via Automatic Updates. Don’t worry though, it will prompt you to choose to install it or not and you can always uninstall it later and go back to IE6. I’ve actually been testing beta versions of both for a while now and I’d give them both a thumbs up.

You can check out IE7′s new features on their page here. My favorites are the tabbed browsing, printing (yeah, it finally prints the whole page like you’d expect), and the new search box. The search box it pretty cool because you can add different search engines to it. Then when you want to search for something, simply type it into the box, click the pull down menu, and select your search engine. I’ve got searches set up for Google, Wikipedia, Froogle, and even our search here at Drozmonkey.com. IE7 also has support for RSS feeds, but I prefer a full fledged RSS solution like Google Reader or RSS Bandit. Oh, and they’ve made security improvements to help protect you from phishing scams. IE7 paves the way for more improvement like Windows Defender which is still in beta and is going to be a free tool from Microsoft to protect against spyware.

Windows Media Player 11 has a sleek new look but overall I haven’t found it that much different. I do like their improvements for Internet radio and integration of MTV’s URGE music store. I haven’t bought any music from them but I have listened to their free radio stations to switch things up at work. So for Windows Media Player 11 I’d leave it up to you if you want to upgrade or not. It won’t be pushed out via Automatic Updates so you’d have to go get it here.

In Vista, Microsoft has bundled some ‘new’ applications for common tasks. To start, they’ve basically included the capabilities of Microsoft Outlook in Vista. Windows Mail is a new application for all of your email tasks and it is very similar to Outlook. It has everything I’m looking for in an email client and since it isn’t very different from Outlook, I won’t spend much time on it.

Windows Calendar, another new application, fills the role of keeping your schedule. Again it is very similar to Outlook’s calendar but it does have a few new features. One nice thing is that it allows for multiple calendars which is useful since most homes have the same Windows user for everyone. Now each person can have their own seperate calendar, but you can see them all overlayed together. For example, I set up seperate calendars for Jenny and I as well as another calendar for family activities. That way I can put things like my dentist appointment on my calendar and family vacation days on the family calendar and I can look at all of the activites that I am included on together by showing both of those calendars. Another new feature is the ability to subscribe to other calendars through the iCal protocol. I went out and found a calendar for Nebraska football which I subscribed to. Now all of the Husker games are on my calendar and it automatically updates the game time and TV station.

Vista also handles your contacts for you with Windows Contacts. Each contact is a seperate file (*.contact) so it is more of a new built-in file type rather than an application, but it handles everything well.

The thing I think is really cool about all of these things being included in Vista, is that you no longer need Microsoft Outlook. Outlook was really the only piece of software which a typical user needed for which there wasn’t a good open-source (free) solution. Open Office is an excellent replacement for the rest of Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, and Powerpoint) and its free. So that will save you some money.

Next time we’ll take a look at some of the multi-media features they’ve included with Vista.

Back in my day, we had to actually drive the tractors ourselves. Not anymore, check out the new intelligent Total Equipment Control (iTEC) system from John Deere. It uses GPS, probably RTK GPS, and integrated systems in the tractor to know exactly where the tractor is and it controls the entire system. That means driving the tractor (including turning at the end) as well as operating the implement controls. It sounds like a pretty impressive system technologically speaking. Hey Galen, does this mean your new tractors are going to start coming standard with DVD players?

I particularly liked how they listed "reduces operator fatigue" as one of the benefits. My dad had a much cheaper solution. He would send me out to disc with the tractor without a cab that had a worn out seat with a screw sticking out of the back rest. Any time you got a little tired and leaned back you got a little ‘encouragement’.

Asked anyone if they’ve sent you email today? Probably not because you would’ve seen it in your inbox. So why do you go to websites to check if they’ve been updated when RSS is like an ‘inbox’ for the web. That’s right, another post on RSS. If you haven’t caught on by now, I think you should be using RSS. For all of the details on RSS you can refer back to my original post on RSS. Now I realize that in order for you to try it if you aren’t already using it, it has to be easy to get started and easy to use. My previous post’s main suggestion was a desktop RSS reader and lacked a suggestion for a good on-line RSS reader. An on-line aggregator has some attractive points. You don’t have to install anything and you can access it from anywhere such as work and home.

Well, Google has come through again, this time with its on-line RSS reader called Google Reader. I had tried it out at the time of my previous post and I didn’t think it was ready for prime-time yet. Last week it got an update and I’ve been test driving it and really like it for an on-line RSS reader. I’ll let you go and take a tour of it yourself, but it now has folders showing unread feeds just like most desktop readers. In order to get you jump-started here are links to all of our feeds:

• Blog Posts: http://www.drozmonkey.com/feed/
• Blog Comments: http://www.drozmonkey.com/comments/feed/
• Photos: http://picasaweb.google.com/data/feed/base/user/drozmonkey?kind=album&alt=rss&hl=en_US&access=public
• JR’s Shared Items in Google Reader (as seen in the sidebar widget on the right): http://www.google.com/reader/public/atom/user/13604510482216828753/state/com.google/broadcast

One of the biggest mistakes that most Windows XP users make is to always login as an administrator. (And by most, I mean 99%.) That basically means that you, and any other piece of software running, have unresticted access to the entire computer. It also means that your children are probably using the same account and can install whatever software they want and do whatever they want.

Windows Vista has a couple of features to help address these issues. First, Vista has User Account Control (UAC) which means that even when logged in as an administrator, Windows runs as a normal user and when it needs to do something limited to an Admin, it will prompt you for permission to continue. Vista also makes it easier to run as a standard user. Well, that may not be so much of Vista’s doing and more that software makers now must make it easier or else UAC dialogs will annoy the user.

For the typical home user with children one of the most compelling features will be the built in Parental Controls. You can setup a standard user account for your kids and enable the parental controls for that account. It can filter their internet content that they look at and block things you don’t want them to be able to access like mature content, pornography, drugs, hatespeech, and weapons. (That right there would have gotten this page blocked.) Its a similar concept to a V-chip in your TV, which you should give a try as well. Its pretty configurable too and lets you customize the categories that it filters for and lets you allow specific sites. I couldn’t resist giving it a test and I have to say that it works pretty well. Some pages it will block completely and other pages it will just block part of the content. Just like UAC, when something is blocked, you have the option to ask the administrator for permission and the Admin can enter their password and allow the content. The parental controls include activity reports of the websites the user accessed (including which ones were blocked). The activity reports are pretty comprehensive and will even show you account logins, failed logins, instant messaging activity, and more. You can also specify which programs they can use and you can limit games based on their rating. I think it really will enable parents to keep their kids safe, which is a concern for a lot of parents.

By Vista, I mean Windows Vista, the new operating system from Microsoft which is expected to release in early 2007. They currently have it available for people to beta test and I decided that I’d give it a spin on my laptop. I installed it last weekend and so far so good. Windows Vista has a lot of new features, which makes sense if you consider that Windows XP was first released in 2001. There are a lot of sites which describe and discuss the new features, so I won’t be going into all of the features in great detail. But I’m planning on blogging on some of the features that I think would be interesting to the typical home user in upcoming posts. Future topics will include: Parental Controls, User Access Control, Windows Photo Gallery, Windows Movie Maker DVD, Windows Mail, Windows Calendar, and more.

But before I dig into Vista itself, I’ve got a little commentary on some interesting trends in computing in general that merit discussion. A computer’s operating system is its foundation, which allows it to do all of the basics like running programs and accessing the hardware like the hard drive. The two main operating systems are Microsoft Windows, Vista being the latest, and Apple Mac OS X. There are a lot of similarities between features in both. Beyond the basic tasks generally associated with an operating system, they seem to be incorporating typical tasks that users expect of their computer. For example, most home users use their computer for email, calendar, contacts, music, photos, videos, making slideshows and DVDs, and surfing the web. Microsoft and Apple have both figured out that people expect those things to be "a part" of the computer. Now Vista incorporates all of those things into the OS or applications that come as part of the OS. So for a typical home user, there would be very little additional software that you would need to install. Looking forward, for things that aren’t built into the operating system, a lot of these additional tasks will be handled by web-based applications which you access through your web browser. These type of applications are known as Web 2.0 and include sites like www.writely.com which I’ve posted on here. So I’m betting that in the near future things will either be built into the computer’s operating system or you’ll use an online application.

Incorporating more things into the operating system isn’t new. Bundling Internet Explorer too closely into Windows got Microsoft into anti-trust trouble before. Now critics complain that Vista doesn’t include virus protection, while security related software companies complain that Vista’s security features aren’t open enough. There is a need for a balance between useful features and anti-trust, but for now you just can’t please everyone.

I’ve posted on a few tools from Google, like Picasa, Picasa Web Albums, and SketchUp. Well, www.writely.com is another tool which Google has acquired. It is an online word processing tool and much more. You can log in and create text documents or upload existing documents that you’ve made on your computer in Word, or another similar program. It’s a WYSIWYG editor (What You See Is What You Get) and has all of the common features of a word processor like spell checking, fonts, hyperlinks, inserting pictures, printing, creating PDFs, and more. It also has more advanced features like adding comments and keeping a revision history so you can go back to previous versions. Having this as a web application opens up some interesting use cases.

Blogging – A lot of blogging software already has a built in WYSIWYG editor, although if you are running your own blog it might take some work to get it all set up. Writely.com lets you write blog posts in their nice friendly editor and then post it directly to your blog. I’m doing that with this post right now to test it out.

Online Collaboration – You can share your documents with others and even work on them at the same time. This sounds like an ideal system for a group of students who have to work on a group paper. Everyone in the group can work on the same document at the same time. They can leave comments for others. And if someone makes changes which the group later decides they don’t like, they can go back into the revision history and compare it to the previously saved versions. No one has to worry about who has the "master" file, integrating changes, tracking revisions, or worrying about losing it. Since it is web based, it also doesn’t matter if members of the group are using Windows, Mac, or Linux. I’d be interested to hear how it starts getting used by students. It also provides RSS feeds for groups of documents and individual documents. So members could "watch" their documents via RSS to know when someone else in the group updates it.

Will it replace desktop word processing software. No, but I think it does open up some cool uses. And it is open to using it with desktop software so it doesn’t have to be a choice between the two.