The "German" Show: Blog

» 8 Essential Strategies to Saying “No”

Tue, 07 Aug 2007 21:34:31 GMT

Great article!

» 8 Essential Strategies to Saying “No”

For geography junkies out there...

Tue, 07 Aug 2007 21:16:36 GMT

http://www.mapmsg.com/games/statetris/usa/

They don’t have a Mexico version but they do have a Europe version.

http://www.mapmsg.com/games/statetris/europe/

Talking about When you speak, we listen. New features launched today!

Sat, 21 Apr 2007 00:55:38 GMT

New Spaces features!!! COOL!

My favorites: Guestbook, Private Messaging (!!!), Custom background and Messengert Profile on the Profile page (I helped ship this last one, LOL!).

-German

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When you speak, we listen. New features launched today!

Thanks to everyone who has sent us feedback over the last few months. We’ve heard what you’ve been asking for with Spaces, and we’ve been working hard to create new features, which we hope you enjoy.
There are a lot of features here, so sit back, take a read, and then go try them out. Next week we’ll be posting more about each feature – one per day – so stay tuned for more. Sign up to get alerts when there’s a new Space Craft post.
Also, please keep the feedback coming— both in the comments on the Space Craft as well as through the Spaces Feedback form. We care about what you want, and we’re listening!
— Chris
Product Manager, Windows Live Spaces

New in Spaces:
Communication
There are brand new ways to communicate with your friends, as well as with new people that you’d like to meet.
Your new Spaces home page
Now when you log in, you’ll see a new page dedicated to keeping you up-to-date on changes to your space and what’s new with your Windows Live Messenger contacts. In one glance you’ll see who has updated their space and who has added comments to your space. Roll over their picture to see who’s updated their photos, who’s posted a blog entry, and who’s added new lists.

Messaging
Keep in touch with your Spaces friends and meet other people on Spaces by sending them messages. Just put your cursor over their profile picture and you’ll see a “Send a message” link.   You can also use the link in the Visitor tools module on a person’s space.


Guestbook
Add the guestbook module and people visiting your space can leave comments with rich formatting, including images and video. Add the guestbook to your space by clicking here.

Customization
There are many new customization options for Spaces, so you can better control how your space looks.
Custom background image
Now you can upload whatever picture you want from your computer and use it as the background of your space. Upload your image in the Customize menu under the Advanced tab.

Additional colors and themes
There are now more themes to choose from and an easy-to-use color picker. You can also change the fonts!

Gadgets and Modules
With the changes we’ve made to gadgets and modules, now you can customize them to create the layout and design you want for your space.
Size and style
Most gadgets and modules can span the full width of a column, and you can now remove their borders or change their titles to whatever you want by clicking on the arrow in the right hand corner of the gadget or module when you are in Edit mode.

Other cool stuff
You can have multiple modules at the top or bottom of your space that span all of the columns – perfect for your space title and tagline. You can also have more than one version of the same gadget on your space. And if you’re on someone else’s space and see a module you like, you can add it to your space by clicking the “+” sign in the upper-right corner of the module.
Check out and install some spaces gadgets today from the Windows Live Gallery.

Photos
With over 18 million photos uploaded by Spaces users every day, we know that improving the experience of managing photos is important to you, so we added a few new features.
Managing your photos
There’s a brand new page for viewing and editing albums on your space.

Viewing photos
There’s a new layout for the individual photo pages so it’s faster and easier to view your photos and see all of your comments at a glance.

Mobile
There’s been a dramatic increase in Spaces mobile usage over the past few months, and we wanted to provide great mobile interaction with Spaces. Here’s what’s new:

See at a glance the recent updates and comments on your space
Add, delete, view, and browse your friends
View profile information

Interested in learning more about mobile features for Spaces? Read this Space Craft blog entry

Lists
Lists are now easier to use – and they look even better.
Music lists
Now you can show specific music lists on your spaces home page as well as see multiple results when searching for music on Amazon to create your list.

Book lists
Same as with music! Search for the book and add the information and picture from Amazon.com to your list.
Looks better in narrow view
We’ve make some improvements to make your lists look better when in narrow columns on your space.

APIs and Feeds
We wanted to give you the ability to access your Spaces information from a variety of locations and services, so we added new RSS feeds and opened up our APIs to allow you more freedom. Go crazy with your Spaces data!   Visit: http://dev.live.com/spaces over the next few days for more information. Note: Only spaces with permissions set to “public” can use RSS feeds and APIs.

Profile Updates
There are some new, cool additions to profiles.
Enhanced contact updates preview
When you see a profile picture on Spaces, just put your cursor over the picture and you can see a lot more information about the person than ever before.

Have fun using the new features! We’re looking forward to seeing what you do with your space.   And if you got this far, leave us a comment and let us know what you think.

Technorati tags: Windows Live Spaces, Spaces, Microsoft, Social Networking, New Release

New on Spaces - VIDEO!

Thu, 25 Jan 2007 05:56:58 GMT

Video: A Good comic video found some where on Net

Talking about What’s new in Windows Live Spaces

Thu, 09 Nov 2006 22:58:51 GMT

A new version of Spaces went live yesterday! (Our 11.0 release for those of you keeping count).

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What’s new in Windows Live Spaces

Just a couple of hours ago we released an incremental update to Windows Live Spaces. Most of the work in this release occurred under the hood – improving performance, fixing bugs, and increasing usability – but we’ve also shipped a few cool new features in this release. We’ll talk in more detail about both the “behind the scenes” improvements and these new features in future posts, but for now we wanted to give you a quick recap of the new features you can use starting today.

In this release I was the tester for the new Amazon Music List integration. Now all your music lists can have a cool album cover thumbnail next to the song title. If you import the list from Windows Media Player it won't work right away (perf issue, sorry), you have to Edit then Save the songs to get the album art.

Another way cool feature I got to test is the Custom Colors tab! Formerly known as "Tweak UI Powertoy", you can now change all sorts of stuff about your space, from text and link colors to backgrounds and borders. If you ever wanted to make your WL Space just right, now's your chance. Just make sure to remove the Tweak UI Powertoy if you had it installed before you save any changes to your space.

We also have new Movie Lists! They work just like Book lists in which they load thumbnail images that we get from MSN Entertainment. They also have this cool feature that actually lets you choose the title you want from several search results. Neat, huh?

I was also the tester in charge of measuring the (browser-side) performance improvements in this release. But more on that later...

It's here: IE7!

Thu, 19 Oct 2006 17:24:29 GMT

The English language version of IE is available as a free download! Finally! Enjoy!

Coming Zune

Thu, 12 Oct 2006 23:26:27 GMT

How cool is that?!?! It's the new Zune. Thanks Joe!

IE7 and FireFox

Tue, 22 Aug 2006 18:40:18 GMT

I was working as a web developer in Mexico for a while, and I recall that I almost always used Mozilla FireFox for my developing duties. Why? Three reasons:

1. Tabbed browsing is the best thing since sliced bread. I'm so serious. Juggling several windows is so 1990's. I love FireFox becuause of this. Yes, the idea came originally from Opera (or so they say), but the FireFox implementation is very cool.

2. The Web Developer extension by Chris Pederick. Awesome. It made web development so much easier I can't even begin to explain it. Very cool.

3. FireFox renders CSS closer to web standards than IE6. No, it's not perfect, but it's a whole lot bette than IE6.What I used to do was develop my web code in FireFox, make sure it was working and looking nice, and then I would check it in IE6 just to see how broken it was and make quick fixes. IE6 is not cool with CSS and general HTML standards. Such was life. It kind of sucked to develop in a browser that most of my users did not use, though.

Also, FireFox was kind of the "cool" and "new" browser. That didn't hurt either.
Fast-forward to 2006. IE7 is now in Beta 3 and it's so much better than IE6 I can't even begin to explian. Yeah, you work at Microsoft and now you use IE7, big surprise. I know, I know, I agree with skpetics that my turnaround was rather sudden. Let me explain. I still use FireFox for my everyday browsing needs. I just like it better, period. But now IE7 is a much more robust developing tool. Its CSS rendering is much more compliant and it even has it's own web developer toolbar. Plus, the tabbed browsing makes it much less of a pain to work with multiple browser windows. I actually think IE7 got the tabbed browsing better than FireFox, and Mike Torres seems to agree:

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Switching to Firefox... on the Mac
...I didn't like the way the tabs worked [on FireFox for Mac]. I like being able to close tabs by clicking on the (X) on the tab itself, not all the way over to the right. Well, I was able to fix that too through an extension called Tab X which adds a close button to each tab. I also wanted to make sure that if Firefox crashed that I don't lose what I'm browsing... well, there's another extension that handles that: Tab Mix Plus.

You gotta love those FireFox extensions, huh? ;-)

All in all, even though FireFox is still my personal browser of choice, I'm very glad IE7 has risen to the standard that FireFox set. IE is no longer a pain for web developers to use, and you can now do your development and testing in a very popular browser and not make too many tweaks or hacks to get your code to work and look great. Thanks IE team!

Why the London theme?

Tue, 15 Aug 2006 23:28:22 GMT

Why does this guy have the London theme on his Space? He's from Mexico for crying out loud! What gives?

Yes, dear readers, that thought may have crossed your mind when looking at my Space. Or maybe not. Big deal, I'm gonna write about it anyway.

Well, first of all I lived in London for a few months. It was about 6 months after I graduated university. I travelled there with no real plan or purpose. I had some college friends living there and decided to move in and have some fun. Aventura! was my mantra. And wow, what an amazing city.

The tall Edwardian houses and the small local pubs of south Islington /Angel were my neighborhood and their charm won me over in a second. The city is an amazing mix of really old, majestic buildings and ultra-modern ones. Cool.

I could go to the theater every weekend if I wanted (and if my budget permitted it, I mean). The museums are FREE! Seriously! How cool is that? The clubs were amazing and the people I met were from all over the world and all had fantastically unique stories to tell. I love hearing other people's stories. What a delight.

Even though I moved back to Mexico, I really did love this city, I mean seriously, it's gorgeous. So, applying the London theme to my Space is my tribute to this wonderful place that holds a special place in my heart. That and the box of PG Tips black tea in my office. Yum. Who knew tea and milk were such a great match?!?!?!

I want your Friends!

Tue, 08 Aug 2006 16:39:04 GMT

I was browsing the Space of a fellow work colleague (who will remain nameless) and I saw that he had a HUGE amount of Friends in his list. I mean it's not like I was jealous or anything, but he had like 76 friends on his list as of this morning. My currenttally is 43, almost half! I want 76 friends! I want to be popular too! L

Anyways, while I was whining, I remembered that the Contact Controls (the little pictures of people that show up on Spaces and other Windows Live sites) have a GREAT feature that would help me get an edge in the popularity contest I was dreaming up in my head. When you hover over the Contact Control with your mouse, a little menu drops down and then a little option called “Invite to friends list” appears! You click it and it’s the same as manually adding a Friend via the traditional “Add” link on the Friends module in your Space.

So yes, just by browsing the Friends list of your own pals, you can immediately add their contacts to your own Friends list! Cool, huh? This very much levels the playing field for us newbies and let's you easily expand your network of trusted Friends.

Granted, the people you add will not appear on your Space until they actually approve you on their Friends list. But hey, it’s a start, right? Massive popularity, here I come!

Windows Live Spaces has launched!

Wed, 02 Aug 2006 16:01:41 GMT

Finally, Windows Live Spaces is here!

This was my first release as a Spaces team member and it was really exciting seeing everyone's hard work go live for the entire world. You can read more about it on The Spacecraft.

I'm a relativelye new employee at Microsoft. I was an intern at MSN Messenger (now Windows Live Messenger) and I'm now an full-time SDET for Spaces. In case you're wondering, SDET means Software Design Engineer in Test. That means I help delvelop tools that "test" Spaces. In other words, I make code that pounds and grinds Spaces so that we get as much bugs out of it as possible. I also oversee the testing for several features. So I'm a tester at heart, but who also develops code.

I'm originally from Tijuana, Mexico. I went to school at the ITESM Campus Monterrey and I love all things Mexican and Latin American!

In this release, one of the things that I was in charge of was Themes. In case you haven't noticed, lots of the Themes went through a huge makeover. Pretty cool, huh? I was working together with Eileen to get this feature out the door. Thanks for putting up with me, Eileen!

Hope everyone enjoys the new Windows Live Spaces!

First post!

Tue, 25 Jul 2006 20:41:50 GMT

This is my new Space! Blogging about work should be fun.

Getting ready to ship something new and very cool! Stay tuned.