Windows Experience Blog : Jump List

The Windows Platform, Silverlight 4, and Facebook

Brandon LeBlanc — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 21:02:33 GMT

Last week, we announced the availability of the Facebook SDK for .NET developers. The SDK supports coding for both Silverlight and the Windows Platform (WPF, etc.). Yesterday, Scott Guthrie, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft's .NET Developer Platform, took the stage for his part of the Day 2 Keynote at PDC09 where he announced Silverlight 4.

During the keynote, an out-of-browser Silverlight 4 application called SilverFace was demonstrated. SilverFace was developed using the Facebook SDK we announced last week.

SilverFace lets you do all kinds of things on Facebook directly from your Windows desktop such as update your status, upload photos, view friend’s photos and videos, and much more. This application is meant to serve as a proof point for the capabilities of Silverlight 4 in combination with the Facebook SDK and is not an actual product. You can think of this as more of a “technology showcase” and a demo of what the technology can do.

For those of you wanting to try out physical code (and is pretty cool), I’ve got something just for you.

Today, we’re making available an application for Windows 7 called Fishbowl for Facebook. This application is a sample application created by UXLabs@Microsoft that showcases the Windows Platform (when I say Windows Platform = .NET Platform) and takes advantage of key Windows 7 features.

Download: Fishbowl for Facebook Preview

Fishbowl for Facebook lets you quickly post a Status Update to Facebook, watch your Facebook News Feed, post comments, browse your friends and their photos and upload photos directly from their Windows 7 desktop. Let me take you through a few key areas of the app. I’ll start with the Windows 7 integration.

When running, Fishbowl for Facebook takes advantage of new Windows 7 features such Taskbar Previews and Jump Lists.

For example, when moving your mouse over the Fishbowl for Facebook icon on your Windows Taskbar, you get a Taskbar Preview. This allows you to quickly navigate quickly between Home (you’re News Feed), your friends list, your profile, and photos. You can also quickly go to Facebook’s homepage too.

If you right-click on the Fishbowl for Facebook, you get a Jump List that lets you see your most recent notifications. It also lets you switch to “mini-mode”.

You can upload photos to Facebook using Fishbowl for Facebook – simply by drag-and-drop!

Just put a title in, choose the album you want to add the photo to (or create a new album), and hit upload! Here I am dragging a panoramic photo I created in Windows Live Photo Gallery from my visit in September to the U.S.S. Hornet in Oakland, CA.

See the red lines under the “U.S.S.” and “SFO” text? Yeah, that’s spell check. Fishbowl for Facebook comes with spell check to help ensure you don’t accidently spell important words wrong that your friends can make fun of you for the rest of your life with. Trust me, it happens ;-)

While browsing a photo album, you can view the album in a slideshow, save photos, print photos, and zoom in and out.

And Fishbowl for Facebook supports Windows Touch too.

Ok, one last thing – when browsing your friends in Fishbowl for Facebook, you are given several ways of sorting through your friends. You can sort by name (display name or family), last Status Update, Upcoming Birthdays, or Interest Level. And you can also adjust Interest Level of individual friends by simply clicking on a friend and viewing their profile. Interest Levels let you control how much of that friend’s stuff hits your News Feed. If you have an annoying friend, just turn the Interest Level way down.

There are a lot of neat experiences you can have with Fishbowl for Facebook so give the app a spin yourself! Remember, you can download it here.

Fishbowl for Facebook will run on Windows XP and Windows Vista but requires .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 to be installed (this is not needed if you’re on Windows 7 as it’s built in). For the best experience with Fishbowl for Facebook, it is recommended you use Windows 7 to take advantage of all its features. Fishbowl for Facebook with automatically update when updates are available as well so when we make updated available, you’ll get them! But please note that Fishbowl for Facebook is meant as a sample application showing what developers can do with the Windows Platform and the Facebook SDK. This is NOT an officially supported product.

Stay tuned, Yochay from the Windows 7 for Developers Blog will be posting some behind-the-scenes geeky developer stuff shortly. For you developers out there, this will be a must-read. I can’t wait to see more applications like this for the Windows Platform.

New Zune Software Update for Zune 4.0 Optimized for Windows 7!

Brandon LeBlanc — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 07:13:21 GMT

Today, Zune 4.0 hits. Zune 4.0 comes with awesome new devices (the Zune HD), new software, and new online services. For the complete announcement for today’s release, see this press release [Link coming soon] or see this post by my Zune pal Brian Seitz over on Zune Insider.

There’s been a lot of talk about the amazing Zune HD. Having the honor of using one for the last few weeks, I can say it truly is one great device. However, I want to talk about what’s in new Zune software update. The Zune Team has put a lot of work into the software update – including optimizing it for Windows 7! More on that in a bit…

The Zune 4.0 Software Update brings in several key new features designed to make discovering new music and playing music in your collection even better.

Quickplay is a new screen in the Zune software that gives you quick access to your content.

Here, you can pin your favorite content (up to 6 items), see new music and videos added to your collection, and view your history of recently played music, podcasts, and videos. Quickplay also showcases 5 Smart DJ mixes of your favorite artists or bands you pick.

Speaking of Smart DJ…

A Smart DJ “mix” automatically creates a playlist of music from your collection - but goes the extra mile by ALSO mixing in music from Zune Marketplace. These Smart DJ mixes are available by right-clicking on an artist, a song, or an album in your collection. When a Smart DJ mix is created, it pulls in music from your own collection and also the Zune Marketplace. If you have a Zune Pass, all songs including those from Zune Marketplace will play for you. If you don’t have a Zune Pass, “suggested” songs in the Smart DJ mix will be grayed-out.

If you prefer not to see “suggested” music from Zune Marketplace in your Smart DJ mixes, you can unselect a radio button and only your personal collection will be listed.

You can also choose to save the Smart DJ queue as a playlist, with finite control in the “edit playlist” setting, for listening at a later date.

The below screenshot of the Smart DJ mix for Weezer playing shows what playing a Smart DJ mix looks like with the options to save as a playlist and the ability to choose not to play songs from the Zune Marketplace.

But wait, there’s more!

The Zune software now comes with Mini Player Mode. This allows you to keep the player always on top of other applications while browsing the Web, checking email, or whatever else you might be doing on your PC.

And if Mini Player Mode doesn’t do it for you, you can also add playback controls to the Windows Taskbar (right-click on taskbar, choose Toolbars, and then choose Zune).

As I mentioned above, the new Zune software is optimized for Windows 7. That means it takes advantage of key Windows 7 features!

Using Jump Lists in Windows 7, you can access albums you’ve “pinned” under Quickplay as well as your preconfigured Smart DJ mixes of 5 of your favorite artists or bands. It also lets you shuffle all music and resume playing music if on pause.

With Taskbar Previews (just hover your mouse over the Zune button on the Windows Taskbar in Windows 7), you can move to the next song, go back to the previous song, and pause your music and rate songs!

And with Aero Snap, you can resize the Zune software to the top or bottom, left or right of your screen.

Zune now also features for the first time download-to-own, or rent full movies in combination of their growing TV show library. These movies and TV shows can be downloaded in standard definition (SD) or high definition (HD). A remember, Zune Pass is only $14.99 and now comes with unlimited access to streaming music online! Oh and you also get 10 MP3 song credits a month to redeem too.

Give the new Zune software a try for free by clicking here.

Disclaimer: My music tastes do not represent that of Microsoft ;-)

Jump List Tricks for Windows Media Player in Windows 7

Brandon LeBlanc — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 21:45:00 GMT

Back in June, I blogged the first of 6 blog posts dedicated to tips and/or tricks for Windows Media Player in Windows 7. I had originally intended to post the remaining 5 blog posts over the course of 3 weeks. However, that didn’t quite happen. I intend to post the remaining posts, starting today with the 2^nd blog post, but won’t commit to any specific timeline.

Windows 7 introduces Jump Lists as one of the many enhancements to the Windows Taskbar. And Windows Media Player takes advantage of this feature for quick access to your digital media.

Here are a few tips for working with the Jump List for Windows Media Player:

You can drag most items off of the Windows Media Player Jump List and onto the desktop to create a shortcut that can be used on any computer to do that query and return local items.
Doing a search on a view and double clicking one of the result items will log the search query to the Jump List. For example, can go to all songs and search for ‘NOT genre:Christmas’ and you’ll get a Jump List item of all your music with no Christmas music (see above screenshot).
You can pin any file Windows Media Player will play in the Jump List by directly dragging and dropping the file onto the Windows Media Player icon on the Windows Taskbar.
Clicking “Play All” or playing a stack view from File Explorer will log to the Jump List.
If you go to Organize, then Options, and then Player - the last option in Player settings “Save recently used to the Jump List instead of frequently used” toggles what shows on your Jump List.

Hope you enjoyed these Jump List tips for Windows Media Player!

The New Windows Taskbar in Windows 7

Brandon LeBlanc — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 21:20:00 GMT

In Windows 7, we're introducing a brand new Windows Taskbar. I touched upon this briefly in my notes from the PDC Keynote a few weeks ago. However last Thursday, the Windows Engineering Team over on the Engineering Windows 7 Blog published a much more in-depth look at the new Windows Taskbar in Windows 7. They take a close look several new features within the new Taskbar including Jump Lists, Pinning, Interactive Grouped Thumbnails, Aero Peek, and Color Hot Track. The overall goal behind the new Windows Taskbar is to allow people to be able to manage their application windows much easier as well as give them quick access to the information they need.

If you are interested in getting a "sneak-peek" at what's coming for UI changes in Windows 7 specific to the Taskbar - definitely give this post a read.