Archive for Microsoft tag
Windows Mobile 6 on the HTC TyTN with a Mac
It’s been a while coming but HTC have announced Windows Mobile 6 for the TyTN (Hermes, Dopod 838Pro, iMate JASJAM , SoftBank X01HT).
Curiously the update isn’t available on their site yet despite the announcement however the enterprising folks at XDA Developers Forums have made the official HTC versions available for download.
Upgrade process
The Windows-only (crack out Parallels) upgrade process didn’t go too smoothly, perhaps because I’d been running an unofficial pre-release version.
The first two attempts failed despite following the instructions to the letter. On the third attempt I left it on the familiar red-green-blue boot-screen a previous attempt had left it on and just ignored all the on-screen instructions and it flashed just fine.
Sync on the Mac
There is no official Windows Mobile sync software available on the Mac however Missing Sync for Windows Mobile is a capable, if somewhat temperamental, solution.
Version 4 is required for Windows Mobile 6 compatibility and is capable of syncing files, music, notes, bookmarks and photos as well as the expected contacts and calendars.
The initial problem is getting the Bluetooth to start syncing is a bit of a nightmare. The best advice is if it fails to do anything when you try to sync then delete both ends of the Bluetooth pair, reboot the Mac and follow the help instructions again.
Calendar sync problems
Everything was now syncing nicely with the exception of the iCal entries. The log gives the cryptic error:
Mark/Space Calendar Events: NSInvalidArgumentException [ISyncConjunctionFilter shouldApplyRecord:withRecordIdentifier:]: the record com.apple.syncservices:0845AD5F-A4C7-48D3-B1D3-B5809C9D000E should have an entity name, but instead it is {}Over in iCal I couldn’t find anything looking corrupt but a quick Back up Database… followed by a Restore Database Backup… took care of it.
[)amien
Font rendering philosophies of Windows & Mac OS X
Jeff Atword asked What’s Wrong With Apple’s Font Rendering? and as I answered in the comments it comes down to philosophy:
The primary difference is that Microsoft try to align everything to whole pixels vertically and sub-pixels horizontally.
Apple just scale the font naturally – sometimes it fits into whole pixels other times it doesn’t.
This means Windows looks sharper at the expense of not actually being a very accurate representation of the text. The Mac with it’s design/DTP background is a much more accurate representation and scales more naturally than Windows which consequently jumps around a lot vertically.
Jeff and Joel both wrote follow up posts agreeing that it is one of philosophy but both are of the opinion that the Windows pixel-grid approach is the better whilst our displays are only capable of low dots-per-inch (DPI).
What they don’t seem to appreciate is the compromise this causes.
Here is an example of Times New Roman on Windows (left) and Mac OS (right) scaled over whole point sizes with sub-pixel precision:
The two thing to note here arising from this “pixel-grid is king” approach are
- Windows does not scale fonts linearly as the rough line points out
- Windows scales the height and width but not the weight of the font
Neither of these may matter to a casual user but for professionals preparing material destined for high DPI (film or print) then it’s a world of difference. How can you layout a page on-screen and expect the same result on the page when the font isn’t the same width?
The issue is reminiscent of the “I hate black bars on wide-screen films” brigade who believe that the film should be chopped, panned, scaled and otherwise distorted from the artists original intention simply so that it fits better on their display.
Typography has a rich and interesting history developed and honed over centuries. It is a shame to misrepresent typefaces especially as the pixel-grid approach becomes less relevant as displays reach higher resolutions.
Update
Some additional comparisons and a note that the gamma differences between Windows and Mac will affect how you see the “other” systems rendering on your machine.
Further update (21 August 2007)
Thanks to Daring Fireball and ZDNet we’ve had a few more great comments which I’ve summarised here:
George thinks the philosophy idea is wrong because “What percentage of Mac users sit around all day doing nothing but pre-press work?” but as Fred points out Microsoft’s desktop-user optimised rendering ends up on images and videos all over the web, thus escaping the environment for which it was crippled.
George also claims that Vista’s rendering is improved, I can’t vouch for that one way or another but from looking at his screen shots the difference there could simply be the contrast level as adjusted by the ClearType tuner.
Nathaniel believes that it’s not Microsoft’s job to manipulate a typeface and that if you want on-screen readability then choose a font designed for that such as Microsoft’s own Tahoma or Apple’s Lucida Grande.
I’d go further and say that Microsoft’s own aggression in sticking to the grid kills font choice at the regular reading size of 10/11 point by optimising everything to a generic sans or serif look:
Windows XP
Mac OS X
James points to an article called Texts Rasterization Exposures that proposes a combination of using vertical hinting only and calculating horizontally to 256 levels and has some convincing screenshots showing the benefits. Probably too late for Leopard or Vista SP1 though.
[)amien
Xbox 360 misleading advertising?
I really enjoy my Xbox 360 – surprising considering I held the opinion my Xbox 1 was an ugly waste of space and that my PlayStation 2 satisfied my needs.
Microsoft have done many things right with this machine (Online, XNA, dashboard, media center, high-def). Sure, the hard disk should have been bigger especially now they are selling movies but my real complaint is that there STILL aren’t enough titles I want to play on it.
Imagine my surprise when flicking through this months PC Gamer (UK) magazine and finding an advert on page 59 with the words
“Feel the intense power of having way too many options to choose from. Jump in. Xbox 360″
Followed by a giant hand-print of hundreds of games. Wow, I must have missed something. There must be lots of games just waiting for me!
A quick scan through revealed a lot of dull EA Sports licences (FIFA, NHL, Madden, NBA blah blah blah) and a lot of duplicated titles.
A thought struck me – If I crossed out all the duplicate images what would we have left?
Something a little closer to reality. Click the image to zoom.
Update
Yes, dupes of Burnout, FEAR and Ultimate Alliance were missed. I’m not taking a new photo :p
[)amien
My development tools
Christopher Bennage wrote about his development tool set-up and encouraged others to do the same so here’s my current set-up.
Daily tools
- Visual Studio 2005 – IDE of preference despite it’s sluggish behaviour
- SQL Server 2005 Management Studio – Took getting used to but it’s an improvement on 2000′s Enterprise Manager
- AnkhSVN - Subversion support inside Visual Studio 2005
- .NET Reflector – Searching .NET API or to find out what it’s doing
- Web Application Projects – Stop using VS’s web sites and start using web applications!
- Web Deployment Projects – Deploy to dev, test or live servers as easily as building a project
Not quite daily
- CodeSmith – Need to get to grips with v4 to build our whole database layer in one hit
- Trac – Bug tracking, milestones & wiki with integrated support for Subversion
- TortoiseSVN – Check-in/out of non-project items (e.g. art assets)
- Web Developer Extension – Trying CSS changes on-the-fly, validating pages etc. from Firefox
- Firebug – Examining pages, the page DOM etc. from Firefox
- KDiff – Excellent 3-way diff tool that works great with AnkhSVN
- Subtext – Blogging system running here
On occasion
- Visual C# Express and XNA – Messing with 3D graphics, controllers and pixel shaders
- Ogre – Steve’s object-oriented 3D engine
- XCode and Cocoa – Still quite alien with it’s message-based calling mechanism but obviously powerful
Keeping an eye on
- Eclipse – IDE for developing Java (C++ and C# support in various stages too)
- Ruby on Rails – Interesting RAD approach to web development – Apple also supporting on Mac OS X 10.5
- Sandcastle – Microsoft’s documentation tool that already seems to have had an impact on NDoc
- SubSonic – Build-provider that generates an ORM on the fly and provides automatic developer-only db editing pages
Not used lately, still installed
- Delphi 5/6 – Borland’s great RAD tool for non-.NET development, later versions support .NET too
- JBuilder – Java development although I’d probably move to Eclipse
- Visual Studio 2003 – Still required for the odd .NET 1.1 application/testing
[)amien