Story by
Alex Wilhelm
Alex Wilhelm is a San Francisco-based writer. You can find Alex on Twitter, and on Facebook. You can reach Alex via email at [email protected] Alex Wilhelm is a San Francisco-based writer. You can find Alex on Twitter, and on Facebook. You can reach Alex via email at [email protected]
Friday is a magical day every week, but this is a special day, it being just moments after the US Thanksgiving. Let’s take the next 5 minutes and go over the big Microsoft stories from the last seven days while still in delicious food-comas.
Grab a leftover turkey leg, turn on some music, and let’s get into it.
Microsoft Goes To Twitter Town
We ran into a very pretty Twitter application that Microsoft had put together on the sly called The Archivist this past week, and when we showed it to the world, the world loved it.
Why is The Archivist special? The application is a gorgeous Twitter statistics visualization tool that has more eye candy than nearly every other market offering.
Be sure to check it out and tell your friends, they will love it. Think of this as our early Christmas present for you.
Windows Turns 25
It has been a full quarter century since Windows 1.0 came out, if you can truly believe it. Happy Birthday, Windows.
To celebrate the important date we took a long look every major Windows release, well, ever. Oh, and if you never saw that Steve Ballmer commercial selling Windows, you really have to.
The Kinect Lightsaber
We have been talking about Kinect hacks since the darn gadget came out, but perhaps no hack has caught our eye like this one.
Using wooden sticks and the Kinect a very smart developer hacked the motion sensing controller to give the users on-screen lightsabers. We are nearly positive that a game will be released eventually that contains lightsabers, but for now this is your bets bet if you just have to have to get your Star Wars fix.
How Windows Works
Google Docs Plays Nice With Office
Google introduced Cloud Connect for Docs this past week, bringing new levels of collaboration between Office and Docs. We were not sure if the move was a net positive for Docs or not, but the feature is sure neat.
According to the Google Docs Blog, “people can continue to use the familiar Office interface, while reaping many of the benefits of web-based collaboration that Google Docs users already enjoy.” This would seem to be huge news.
The productivity wars are going to rage on for years to come, but it seems that there will be, if nothing else, higher levels of interoperability than we are seeing now.
That is all for this week folks, we will keep bringing you the biggest Microsoft news the moment that it happens.
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