Microsoft Research has developed a sleek solution which it calls Street Slide, a direct competitor to Google Street View.A multi-perspective street slide panorama with navigational aides and mini-map. It allows you to Zoom out of your panoramic bubble and the street is presented as a dynamic, multi-perspective “strip” giving you an instant visual summary of the surroundings — similar to viewing the entire 360 degree view of street from a distance. Cool isn’t it? Check out the video below.

Although Microsoft in February has laid out strict restrictions for Windows Phone 7 UI customizations by OEMS, HTC says its custom software, which it calls “Sense”, will live on, even on Windows phones 7 in some way. Drew Bamford, who heads HTC’s user experience design team, said HTC is applying Sense to its first Windows Phone 7 devices, which are expected to launch in October.

On Left you can see one of the expected layouts of Sense UI for WP7, which looks prettyintegrated and  sleek.

“Microsoft has taken firmer control of the core experience [in Windows Phone 7], but we can still innovate,” Drew Bamford, head of HTC’s user experience design team. According to him, the forthcoming version of Sense would be quite different from the solution present on the company’s current Windows Phone 6.5-based devices. The existing Sense was designed to integrate with most of the platform’s core apps. “We won’t be able to replace as much of the core Windows Phone experience, but we will augment it,” Bamford says

HTC research is working on new and innovative ideas for SmartPhone UI as part of flexible rollouts and some of these features have rolled out overseas. HTC’s Wildfire phone, which is available in Europe and India, sports a widget that lets users recommend applications to friends. Bamford says HTC plans to incorporate the function into other phones.

Via SoftPedia

PocketGear has acquired Handango, the announcement was made just a few days back. This might come as a surprise but the benefits are truly amazing, at least for PocketGear, quite simply because this lone move now gives it access to some 140,000 apps of various categories. This includes paid as well as free titles. This might as well be termed as  the creation of so far the largest cross platform, open app store on planet Earth.

The two stores are known to have generated over $ 400 million in revenue resulting from sale of mobile apps. This they say is spread across 175 countries, and the variety of mobile devices supported is well over 2000 in number.

PocketGear’s developer base alone has expanded to some 32,000 strong giving it more variety and reach. This will help improve its stats further as the company has already worked in conjunction with Samsung, Microsoft, LG, Sony Ericsson, RIM, Verizon and AT&T. Simply put more developers and more companies mean more variety and hence more revenue. And remember this is for a variety of devices unlike Apple.

PocketGear supports supposedly all brands less the “i” category Some of the brands under its belt are Java, Linux, Microsoft Windows, Android, Palm, Blackberry and the ever present Symbian.    

PockerGear’s strength comes form its business model which supports developers more than other competitors. PocketGear’s developers get to keep up to 90% of the share as against 70% in case of other models. Besides this the company CEO Jud Bowman says it has perfected its systems in a big way and Handset manufacturers or carriers can now launch their own customized stores in weeks.

Microsoft Research Image Composite Editor is  an advanced panoramic image stitcher which is available for free. Creating high definition panoramic photos using this tool is amazingly simple and does not require user input or advance image editing skills to modify images in Adobe Photoshop, All user has to do is to takes a set of overlapping photographs of a scene shot from a single camera location and pass it to ICE, the program analyzes the pictures and creates a high-resolution panorama incorporating all the source images at full resolution.

Nowadays if you are not tweeting then you’re not in the circle. Most of us tweet or retweet using a PC, however, there are other options available as well. One can make use of his/her mobile phone, PDA or smart device. The Zune HD that was hit the markets sometime back created quite a stir. Then came news of the Bing app for iPhone and now there is a Twitter app for the Zune HD.

Frankly, the kind of service Twitter offers suits mobile devices. I mean most of us tweet several times a day as random thoughts hit our minds. The convenience for tweeting offered by a mobile device is much more as compared to a PC/Laptop.

The application is free! It allows users to read updates as well as update their posts from the Twitter account. The Zune HD requires a WiFi connection so connectivity can be limited depending on where one is located.

Previously users had to use the Browser, now the app will make it easier to cache pages and view their tweets offline. I guess not we are waiting for a Facebook application. More info the app is available here.

Bing Maps has gone 3D! The map service which has been trying hard to rival Google’s maps has gone a step ahead of them, now it is Google’s turn to throw in something new. To us this service one will have to install the 3D patch which can be downloaded by clicking the 3D button on Bing maps. After running the installation simply click on the return to maps and you will be taken to the maps showing 3D views of the selected locations.

Three options are presented at the start to choose from, that is, “Best Performance”, “Balanced” and “Best Quality”. Choose the one that you want to use and enjoy a 3D experience of viewing maps. The other options of tilting camera, zooming in/out, increasing/decreasing altitude are also available. The street views are pretty good and one can get directions easily, or even enjoy moving along a road as if flying over it. Actually it is plain old digital photos that have been analyzed using Microsoft Photosynth to create a 3D view .

The features are great and it is one impressive utility but what bothers me most is if the same service is abused by people who want to plan terrorist attacks, isn’t this making it one more step easier for them to plan?

The kind of furor created and maintained by iPhone will perhaps take a lot of time for other phone manufacturers to catch on. It is not merely the product that matters, people need innovation, they need something new, always. If you can deliver this you are a winner. Nokia and iPhone both have achieved this by not merely making a phone but by making the tools available to the general public at large for development of applications for these phones. Microsoft aka Windows has had to follow suit, simply because it is a” dog eat dog world out there”, and because there was no other option left but to do this. So now the eagerly awaited Windows Mobile 6.5 based phone like HTC Pure was released on 6th October. Microsoft has said there will be over thirty devices sporting this OS, quite impressive I must say. And according to reports HTC, Sony Ericsson, LG, HP, Samsung, Toshiba and some other big names have joined the bandwagon, guess everybody wants a share of the pie. These devices have their own Windows Marketplace which is an applications store, just like iTunes Store for iPhones. The Windows team has promised users  improved browsing, which will soon be confirmed. Also included is the My Phone service which allows users to find their missing mobile phones, ring their bells aloud even they are in silent mode, and remotely lock them or delete all data contained in them. These devices are being dubbed as the Windows phones, which can only be confirmed in case we come across the BSOD. (Blue Screen of Death)

While Apple is giving thoughts over revamping its Mighty mouse by incorporating multi touch features and other aesthetics and wireless options, Microsoft is also unleashing latest technology in the pointing device arena. Microsoft Research and the Applied Sciences Group have developed five input device prototypes that harvest multitouch sensing features. Now that’s interesting coincidence or planned tactic that the timing of both companies touching the pointing device and unleashing the news in tech world.

Although details about mighty mouse multi touch features are still unknown at the moment, in contrary Microsoft prototype devices explores a different touch sensing strategy via a different form factor.  I really like the ORB multi touch mouse since it can be used in games and different actions can bring gaming to next level with multi touch features. These prototypes are really cool and can be of great interest to gamers, graphic artists, computer researchers and casual windows users as, but one thing is for sure Microsoft is definitely extending the idea of pointing device beyond simple mouse and it will be interesting to see how Apple can reply with its mighty mouse for new generation of snow leopard OS.

There is a cool video available below and is a must watch:

I’ve been using windows 7 RC since it was available on my work laptop. The main usage is mainly done for enterprise application development, emails,  documentation, project management, recreational activities and blogging as you can see. I’ve got loads of software installed including backend servers like IIS7, SQL Server 2008 database and integration services,ASP.NET,  MySQL 5, PHP etc are always running in background. With these I’ve noticed that performance is degrading day by day on my pretty fast Windows 7 laptop, even though I’ve got duo core 2.1 and 2 GB of ram.

So I took time out and started to figure out how to tune up windows 7 for maximum speed and performance that I used to get from fresh install. Here are my checklist items and to do list in the way I proceeded in this adventure of mine.

Quick Checks:

1. Check whether you have enough free hard drive space available on your primary and secondary partitions. As you can see below in the screenshot, I had only 6.82 GB free space on my primary partition, and well this is an obvious problem as hibernate files, Page file and temp folders require space for optimal performance. So I removed and moved files to free up 10 GB additional space, which I guess is good enough. Try running Disk Cleanup utility which can be pretty helpful..
2. Other option is to check the Disk for fragmentation, but in Windows 7 this is not an issue anymore and Windows manages defragmentation in background and defragmentation is scheduled to run periodically as illustrated in following screenshot. 
    
   However you can also check when the last disk defragmenter schedule has been run. So all is good in this regard.
     
   If you are an advanced user and want more control over your disk defragmentation, try this O & O Defrag software.
3. Uninstall unnecessary and unused software, special focus should be given to the software which are running in background.
4. Turn off unwanted services which are running in background and are really not required by a general user. Use MSCONFIG.EXE  utility to see which services are in running state and use Google and Bing search engines to see the description of a services in case you fail to identify its functionality and whether it is critical for windows 7 to function.
5. Check the widgets running on Windows Sidebar. If you have too many widgets loaded on your desktop and specially widgets which are loading lot of data consider turning them off, since these widgets are using processing power and memory in background and mostly on runtime. If you don’t really use sidebar gadgets, turning off the sidebar is really the good option. This can be achieved by launching MSCONFIG.EXE utility and un checking windows sidebar.exe from launching in “startup” programs. See screenshot below.
   
6. Lighten up the Windows personalization: If you have selected a heavy Windows 7 theme and have loaded lots of wallpapers in slide show, trying keep things simple here. Heavy wallpapers do take memory and also slide show always involve processing power, can be helpful in lightening up things.
7. If you are using Windows 7 on laptop, tablet or portable device, then consider using high power profile when you want to avail full power of your PC. Since low power device profiles by default have low CPU throttling and cap utilization to consume less battery power. See the following screenshot of a high power profile advanced view.
   
8. Use Windows ReadyBoost: Ready Boost is a great feature of Windows 7 which can improve your systems performance. Ready Boost is a facility that can utilize your USB 2.0 (high speed compatible )flash drive for providing quick access memory which the operating system can use as surplus RAM. Readyboost is useful If you have 2GB RAM or more, with less RAM you will not feed any visible difference.To set up Ready Boost, follow the steps given below:
   Connect a USB flash drive.
   Open ‘My Computer’.
   Right-click the USB Drive.
   Select the ‘Ready Boost’ tab.
   Select the ‘Use this device’ checkbox.
9. Viruses and Malware always hog up your PC resources, use a powerful an light weight anti-virus software and perform frequent virus scans to keep your system clean. I personally am using Microsoft security essentials, and it is really light on windows resources and does the threat detection and cleaning job nicely.

In-depth and advance tips to tune up your windows 7

• Turn off Windows 7 Aero features: Windows 7 Aero features are visually appealing and makes the windows experience very cool, but comes with a processing cost.  If you don’t want to completely turn of Windows Aero desktop features, consider turning off features like “Animate windows when minimizing and maximizing”
• Turn of Windows Features which are not required. By default minimal set of tools and features are installed, but Turning off XPS Services and XPS Viewer can be helpful if not required.
• Improve Windows boot up time by Investigating the software which loads up when windows start, removing unnecessary software from loading can result in significant Boot-up performance and overall performance.
  An Advance Utility Autoruns for Windows from Microsoft is a very good utility meant for tech savvy users and professional users who want to keep an eye on every file that loads on startup and manage them.  Launch the exe by unzipping the package, All startup objects are located under “Logon” tab. Make sure not to disable the entries “explorer.exe” and “userinit.exe”, since they are responsible for the logon process and your desktop. See the screenshot below.
  
  Alternately if you are not a power user and wants to simply tweak the startup applications use MSCONFIG.EXE from run command prompt. This little utility lets you tweak the simple startup programs and services, and also lets you customize your boot up sequence as well. Furthermore, there are common available tools which can be launched from “Tools” tab to perform various windows management tasks.
   
• Remove any unwanted network shares from your computer. Access the network shares by Right clicking on “My Computer” and select Manage. Among the items, 3rd menu is of “Shared Folders”, removing these shares can be helpful if you are using windows in a network and many people connect to your machine for accessing shared information e.g. your shared songs folder.
• Clear Windows Event Log on periodic basis, Average user does not pay attention or even is not aware of Windows Event Log, this log is mostly useful for system administrators and developers, and overtime can grow up extensively that even for windows writing into this log can slow things. Clearing up windows event log can be a useful step in overall performance tuning. Right click on the log category such as “system” and select the clear option to clear up log entries.
  
• Do not meddle with Windows Prefetch folder and let windows manage contents and recycling, Prefetch is the technology Microsoft introduced in Windows XP and subsequently added in Windows Vista and Windows 7, the idea behind is that Windows determines and loads the files needed by software in a special folder “windows\prefetch” one time and subsequently will be loaded from this prefetch folder, this resulting in lesser loading times for frequently used software.  Read more about Windows 7 pre-fetch performance here
• Making Internet explorer load faster : Internet explorer (IE8) although fairly quick in loading, can be bogged down by different installed add-ons and plugg-ins. IE8 lets you see the load time of different add-ons, Click Tools > Manage Add-ons, check the Load Time in the right-hand column, and you’ll immediately see which browser extensions are slowing you down

Stay tuned to the next post where we will try to identify which processes, services are hogging up your CPU power, memory, Disk IO, and network. Further more we will also see how to use the performance analyzer facility and also see how viruses and malware can affect the windows performance.

Please do send us any other tips and tricks which can be used to boost the Windows 7 based pc performance which we have missed.

Finally Microsoft has released its long awaited free version of Antivirus which supersedes Windows Live OneCare after three months of extensive beta testing. The new tool has been renamed as “Microsoft Security Essentials” or MSE and serves the purpose of real time consumer antimalware which can fight against viruses, spyware, rootkits and trojans.

MSE is available for Windows XP 32-bit, Windows Vista 32/64 bit and also for Windows 7 32-64 bit and on its base is Microsoft Windows defender.