Vaibhav’s Blog

Amid huge excitement worldwide, Apple announced iPhone 4 and iOS 4 at WWDC yesterday. With his extraordinary presentation skills and attitude Steve Jobs rocked the conference with what has been perceived as the largest update since its inception to iPhone platform.

iPhone 4 key features:

• Specially Engineered ultra-durable and scratch-resistant glass instead of plastic
• Retina Display with 4 times more pixels compared to 3GS
• New Apple A4 processor and extended battery life
• Three axis Gyroscope supporting 3D rotation gestures
• 5 MP camera with LED flashlight
• Front camera to support Video calls over WiFi using FaceTime
• 2 Mic noise cancellation

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On Friday April 16th, Microsoft announced that Office 2010 has been released to manufacturing. Office 2010 along with Sharepoint 2010, Visio 2010 and Project 2010 will be launched to business on May12th with sales beginning from June 2010. MSDN and TechNet subscribers can download these products from www.msdn.com from April 22 onwards. Also, for the first time Microsoft is launching Office Starter 2010 a reduced functionality office suite free of cost for non-commercial use which would be Ad-supported.

Apple launched iPad on April 3 with selling massive 300,000 devices on day 1 itself. A brilliant 9.7” LED touch screen device very similar to iPhone (a bigger iPhone without phone maybe ) is costing around $499. It is expected that by 2010 end, Apple would be selling approx. 5 Million iPads. Keeping aside the natural buzz that any Apple product receives nowadays, it is a significant milestone in computing world as it looks like Apple has created a much awaited “third screen”.

Apple iPad showing YouTube videos

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Microsoft is a supporter of the jQuery JavaScript Library. Currently, Microsoft is shipping it with Visual Studio and ASP.NET MVC. Microsoft also builds features making it easier for ASP.NET developers to create rich standards-based web application using the jQuery JavaScript Library. At MIX10, Microsoft announced that it will take a more active role participating in the open-source, community-driven development of the jQuery JavaScript Library. Microsoft will work in concert with the jQuery JavaScript Library team to accelerate the creation of new features designed to simplify and expedite the creation of rich-web applications on any platform. Microsoft’s latest deliverable to the community creating the jQuery JavaScript Library is to propose a powerful templating feature that makes it easier for developers to build client-side, data-driven web applications.

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http://silverlight.net/learn/

• Microsoft delivers the premier mobile application development experience.

o Today, with the combination of Windows Phone 7 Series, Silverlight, the XNA Framework, Visual Studio, Expression Blend and Windows Phone Marketplace, developers have the richest, most productive development tools and platform for creating and deploying high performance, compelling mobile applications.
o Microsoft offers a familiar and flexible development experience for mobile applications with Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone and Expression Blend for Windows Phone.
o The Windows Phone Marketplace offers developers a low-cost, easy, transparent and predictable way to publish, distribute and monetize their applications.

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2D barcode based technology that allows you to put certain information in a “tag” which you can publish/print anywhere. And then, just install Microsoft Tag Reader application in your camera phone and when you just point your camera to the “tag”, it will automatically reveal the information, within seconds…

This Beta version can be used for pointing to vCard, URLs or plaintext information. Plus, with custom tags you can use any picture of your choice and just embedd it with tag graphics.

Here is my vCard tag as sample:

vCard of Vaibhav Sathe

When you will point your phone to this tag, it will automatically load the vCard details as per Contact format of your phone – (Supported: iPhone, WinMo, Blackberry, Symbian or J2ME). All you need is an average quality camera and a GPRS connection.

“] Microsoft Tag reading my vCard tag on iPhone

Contact read from tag can be saved as new or added to existing

More information on MS Tag can be found at: http://www.microsoft.com/tag/

Also you can see – High Capacity Color Barcode on wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Tag#Microsoft_Tag

Bing is real surprise !!! I never imagined MS will build something so great, so innovative, so different…

Bing is really cool with every feature it has right from the first page photo – even though certain websites are proudly making 20 Billions from a text box and a button, as Ballmer says there is lot more to do in search.

Bing homepage displays different photo everyday and also you can see all previous ones. It has got real cool set of photos and they don’t even take time to load. Not just that but every photo would include information with video links about the place.

If you would like to have Bing Homepage photo set and updated everyday as your Windows 7 desktop wallpaper, Click Here. It is really very simple and quick to create your “bing theme”.

Search results are very relavent and you get relavent links and sections - if you search place name, you would get left hand links with Tourism, Weather, Maps and Restaurant. If you search person, you would get personal links like Books, Accomplishments, Facts etc. You search university, you would get Admissions, Alumni etc.

As said it is real “Decision Engine”. Really something beyond conventional search.

Coolest feature i loved is if you search video – within search result you just take your mouse over it and it will start playing automatically within search result page – no matter it is from Youtube or any other video site.

Reviews all over web also are great and this is definitely start of new “era” in search engines.

Next time you need something, Just “Bing” it..

Note: I assume most of features are only availble on US website of Bing, so don’t forget to change Country from Top Right Menu to United States.