Graham Wheeler's Random Forest

Last week the Channel 10 team visited us and shot some video of us demoing the Live Search for Mobile client, including some of the features of our upcoming release (real soon now!) I’m not sure when the edited video will be available - I guess after the release - but will update this posting with a link when it is.

I love stories like this…

I just wanted to share this information that one of our Blackberry devs, Didier, sent to a customer who was having problems as it may be useful to others: Since Live Search for BlackBerry is distributed as an independent third party application, it works only if such applications are allowed to do network requests, which may depend on both your carrier network policies and your subscription type. We support three connection modes in Live Search for BlackBerry: Direct HTTP, BES/MDS and WAP Gateway, but for CDMA devices only Direct HTTP and BES/MDS are possible (WAP is specific to GPRS/Edge carriers).

My daughter bought a Webkinz today. These are cheap stuffed animals that sell at a premium because they have a ‘secret code’ that allow you to access the Webkinz website and play games, etc. So of course she wanted me to set her up to access the site (her PC was locked down to only allow access to PBS Kids). We go to the site, sign her up, and then sign in.

My wife has been bugging me to make it easier for her to use our scanner and printer to make copies. I could buy a cheap all-in-one but she actually needs laser copies, not inkjet, for her hobby of stamp carving (she can iron a laser-printed image to make a basic transfer). The scanner and printer are attached to my PC but she wants to make copies without having to log on to my PC or bother me.

We often get asked why we don’t have a menu item in the Contacts app on the phone to map a contact, but Google does. The comments can sometimes be quite disparaging (like what’s wrong with you people in Redmond, anyway?). So here is the tale, told by an idiot, without much sound or fury. Early in 2006 I wrote the code to hook into Contacts. It worked pretty well, and we planned to ship this in our v2 release in July ‘07.

A common source of confusion for our users is the distinction we make between ‘what’ and ‘where’. We generally search for ‘what’ (which is the text you can enter on the main form), centering the results on the ‘where’ (which is the location shown just below). If you want to change the location, or if you want to search for an address, you need to click on ‘Choose a new location’; you can then enter the address on the Location screen and click ‘Find’ (note: the screen shots shown below come from a test version of the app we run on the desktop; the menus at the top will be on the bottom on your phone, accessible via the two softkeys; I just used the desktop version here as it was quicker for me):

I run a mostly Windows-only setup at home these days. My home setup consists of: an SBS2003 server mostly for Exchange mail, which also runs FreeBSD in a virtual machine to keep some older services running on Apache (primarily the redirector from my domain to Live Spaces and my subversion repository). a Windows Home Server, which has taken over the file server functionality from SBS2003, as I like its more flexible file replication a media center PC running Vista Ultimate a kitchen internet appliance running Windows CE Vista Ultimate PCs for each of my kids (and a laptop for the wife) a desktop PC and a Tablet PC for me with Vista Ultimate an oldish Mac Mini G4 which was running Leopard I’m mostly pretty happy with Vista.

We get a lot of people reporting problems with their hardware keyboards on phones like the VX6800. When they press the letter keys instead of letters they get numbers and symbols. Unfortunately this is a problem with the IME (input method editor) in the phone. IMEs are often customized by the phone OEM or the mobile operator to add functionality like predictive text input. For a number of phones, an IME was added that breaks text input from the keyboard with all .

One thing we have found is that our zoom UI is not very discoverable. It’ll probably change in the future as a result; it seems we over-engineered it in the current app. But until we come up with a replacement, here are some tips: obviously you can use the menu Zoom In/Zoom Out to change the zoom by one level if you hit the D-Pad center button you will go into ‘zoom mode’.