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March, 2007
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M9 is Live!
Over the past two weeks, I’ve had the pleasure of watching another PM on my team work with the Customer Support team and Operations to gauge customer satisfaction and look for any signs of problems on M9. Watching them do their thing leads me to just one conclusion: they rock! After two weeks of 24/7 monitoring, I’m happy to announce on their behalf that M9 is stable and is cruising along just fine.
Now that it’s out there, let me highlight what I feel is the biggest improvement in this milestone: Windows Live Mail is faster. I’ve heard echoes of this on blogs and comments all over the place, so I’m glad you guys are feeling the speed too.
Aside from that speed boost, I also encourage you to check out the Classic experience, which allows you to:
- Read, find, and sort your email and contacts faster than ever
- Choose contacts quickly when composing a message by using the Contact Picker (this shows up on the right side of the compose page, letting you add recipients to your message with a single click)
- Tweak Windows Live Mail to use your favorite color
- Find information about your contacts quicker using alphabetized contacts filtering
- Write professional-looking emails with the rich-text editor
- Reply, forward, and delete messages easier with a toolbar that appears below each message (don’t worry, we still kept the top toolbar =])
The Full experience also has some new features, three of which I want to mention here:
- Sort and search your messages easier with additional options
- Make your emails stand out with message importance indicators
- Interact with Windows Live Mail better with an improved context menu (which appears when you right-click on a message in the message list, for example)
Both the Classic and Full experiences also have:
- Support for importing and exporting your contacts
- Updates to the Today Page
- Detail-oriented improvements on the user interface
Thanks to all of you who have forwarded feedback and comments. Please keep it up! As usual, keep your eyes on this blog for the latest!
Benjamin Poon
Windows Live Mail Program Manager
P.S. For those who are using the Windows Live Mail full experience, but prefer to use the fast and simple Classic experience, here’s how to switch:
- Click the “Options” dropdown on the upper right of your screen
- Choose the “More Options…” menu item
- Click the “Click here to use the classic version, which is good for slow connections.“ link
March, 2007
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GEORGE VLOSICH Etch-A-Sketch Man
ART NEWS
GEORGE VLOSICH - Etch-A-Sketch Man
This is about the Etch-A-Sketch artist George Vlosich. I can always remember Etch-A-Sketches when I was a kid. I can remember my parents buying me one every year for christmas. But I could never do anything on them, and still can't. When I came across this artist, I was amazed what he could achieve with an Etch-A-Sketch. Apparently he started when he was just 10 years old. He went to Washington with his Etch-A-Sketch and drew the capital on it, and that's how it all started. Now at 27 he's world famous. His subjects range from portraits of famous people to baseball players. He has been on TV and radio and featured in over 250 newspapers all over the world. Apparently it takes him around 50 to 55 hours to complete a picture. Today, he still does demos of his work to people at the cooperstown baseball of fame, prints and originals are for sale.
I have to say not anybody can do this type of art, me for one. But it's amazing what people can do with different things you wouldn't expect from. Enjoy his work.
CLICK FOR A LARGER VIEW
HAVE A GO YOURSELF. USE YOUR ARROW KEYS TO PLAY
CLICK BELOW TO PLAY
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 2.5 License.
March, 2007
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Talking about Windows Live Blogger search
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Windows Live Blogger search
The Spaces team are looking for people to run blogs and you’re invited to be an official Windows Live Blogmaster.
Start up a Windows Live Space on a particular theme, make it look great and the Spaces team could promote it on the Spaces network. Your Space could grow into a worldwide community!
What kind of Space? Whatever floats your boat – anything from a Space supporting your favourite football team, your favourite TV show, tips and tricks on an area of your expertise, to exploring the weird and wonderful. You’re the voice of the Space.
Some inspiration:
Spaces based on...
· Major Festivals and events
· A celebrity
· Tips or advice – recipes, buying guide, relationships, technology, biggest excuses, surviving exams, etc..
· Fan sites – football, sports, etc..
· TV series/shows
· Seasonal spaces (Christmas, Valentines, holidays)
· Types of people, like a Mums Space etc...
· Spaces based on a particular experience or life-stage
· Location based Spaces
· Other Communities
· Animals, Arts, poetry, hobbies ...
· Anything else! ..
If you already have a Space like this going you can sent it in to the Spaces team, i-kellyc [at] microsoft.com and suzcook [at] microsoft.com or me : hack.msn.spaces@gmail.com
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Windows Live Blogger search
The Spaces team are looking for people to run blogs and you’re invited to be an official Windows Live Blogmaster.
Start up a Windows Live Space on a particular theme, make it look great and the Spaces team could promote it on the Spaces network. Your Space could grow into a worldwide community!
What kind of Space? Whatever floats your boat – anything from a Space supporting your favourite football team, your favourite TV show, tips and tricks on an area of your expertise, to exploring the weird and wonderful. You’re the voice of the Space.
Some inspiration:
Spaces based on...
· Major Festivals and events
· A celebrity
· Tips or advice – recipes, buying guide, relationships, technology, biggest excuses, surviving exams, etc..
· Fan sites – football, sports, etc..
· TV series/shows
· Seasonal spaces (Christmas, Valentines, holidays)
· Types of people, like a Mums Space etc...
· Spaces based on a particular experience or life-stage
· Location based Spaces
· Other Communities
· Animals, Arts, poetry, hobbies ...
· Anything else! ..
If you already have a Space like this going you can sent it in to the Spaces team, i-kellyc [at] microsoft.com and suzcook [at] microsoft.com or me : hack.msn.spaces@gmail.com
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Make a difference by playing games in Messenger
Today Messenger announced the i'm making a difference campaign. With i'm, conversations you start using Windows Live Messenger will contribute towards a donation to one of nine great global charities - you select which one to support. And the best part is, this goes for games as well! Each time you start up a game in a messenger conversation with a friend, it also counts as a chat session that will contribute towards a donation to your selected charity.
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Try our newest game Quarto today!
Challenge your friend to a strategic game of Quarto. Your goal is to make a line of pieces that all share a common attribute but your opponent gets to choose which piece you will play on the board.
March, 2007
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“Dear Messenger”
 posted by Steve
Hi out there! Welcome to my first MessengerSays blog posting. I’m the new guy, Steve, and my role on the messenger team is to process all the comments, letters and other missives we get from a quarter of a billion (would that be one deci-Sagan?) customers – and make sense of it all.
By the way, we do get and read pretty much every single piece of feedback we get. But that’s another topic for another post down the road.
There’s another way to reach us, too, and that’s through technical support. Support’s a little different. A customer has a problem and needs some information that they can’t find in the help pages. This is supposed to be a dialog. The support page asks for your email. It asks for greater detail about the specific nature of what you’re having trouble with. And if your issue is unique enough to be something we don’t have a ready answer to, you wind up swapping emails with one of our support techie peeps – top notch folks who KNOW this system inside and out. Great for you ‘cause you get your problem fixed and great for us because we learn more about the complex and unique ways one deci-Sagan’s worth of customers use our product.
I’ll answer the first question first. Feedback is intended to be used for things like new feature requests: “Hey, you guys thought about doing this...?” Think of it as suggestion box (gee, maybe we ought to rename it that?!) And as with any suggestion box, the input is valuable but nothing ever comes back saying, “Yeah, we got that, we hear ya.” Even though we definitely do.
What goes in support?
“Yo! I can’t log in!” “My buddy list won’t come up.” “My display picture’s green and I look like Ugly Betty.”
You get the picture. It’s the place to go for issues which you can’t find in our extensive (and growing, we heard you when you told us to make that bigger and friendlier!) help pages.
As to the second question, yeah, there ought to be just one place to send “stuff” to the Messenger team. Ideas, complaints – and *gasp* even praise. By the way, THANK YOU for sending kudos our way, we tremendously appreciate hearing how much you love Messenger. Particular thanks to the very touching letter from the person who recently lost her hearing and now uses messenger to communicate with her sister and kids. Woah. Very cool.
But yeah, all that kinda stuff should go in one big bucket and we Microsofties should sort through it and figure out what’s support related and what’s feedback. We hear ya. We’re moving in that direction but these things take time.
So for now – rule of thumb: Support if you want a response. Feedback if it’s just a suggestion.
Now, how do I get support? Well, first you have to use our help system. Search for and read the pages which relate to your problem. Chances are really good that the answer's there already. If not -- and this shouldn't happen very often -- then click all the way down in the lower right hand corner "Get additional help" That will bring up a page of additional help options -- and Get Technical Support will be one of those options.
Ciao for now!
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