Wictor Wilen

ECMA International has started a technical committee, TC46 - XML Paper Specification (XPS), to “produce a formal standard for an XML-based electronic paper format”. One of the points in the TC46 programme is to consider a submission of the XPS format as an ISO standard. This is really good news to all users of the XPS format and is really vital if XPS is going to be able to compete with the PDF format (which already is an ISO standard, ISO 19005-1:2005/ISO/DIS 32000).

I have recieved five invitations for the alpha of Freebase, the first five comments on this post with a valid e-mail adress will be invited. Freebase is “a structured, searchable, writeable and editable database built by a community of contributors, and open to everyone”. Everyone are allowed to edit and add data and topics, categorized into domains, types and instances. Read more about it on the Freebase FAQ. Freebase is like a more structured Wikipedia. Freebase has a nice API for creating Freebase enabled applications. You can easily query and edit the Freebase for information using JSON.

I found an update to the Microsoft XPS Essentials Pack on Microsoft Download Center today. It does not look like an update but on Vista you will get an Windows Update (.msu) package and when I run it it says that it does not apply to my machine. The download link points to the same link that the Essentials Pack was available on before, but it has a new published date (6/19/2007).

NiXPS v1.0 has been released and is now available as a 30 day trial or for purchase. It’s available for the Windows and Mac OS/X platform. NiXPS is an XML Paper Specification, XPS, tool which can be used for inspection and manipulation XPS documents. The main features are extraction of pages, fonts and images from the document, merging of documents and find and replace. The other major feature is an inspection tool for examining the XPS document structure and XML as well as editing the XML.

Yet another It sucks post! Yesterday I installed the Apple Safari browser on my Windows Vista machine. I thought that it would be nice to use the fastest web browser in the universe to do some application/site compatibility testing without having to have a Mac OS/X system. Yes it is a beta, so I won’t complain about all the bugs and rendering problems (it might of course be the sites I’m testing but in some cases I don’t think so) - I will instead complain on the ugly look and appearance of it.

Windows Home Server, WHS, is a great addition to the Windows Server family, a product that I have wanted to have for a really long time. It will really help me connect my machines at home and provide great features to the connected home and make me share my digital media easier between Media Centers, laptops etc. I have hoped that I could turn my current Media Center, a quite powerful machine, into a Home Server later this year once it is time to build my own new Media Center. I would like to make a clean install of Windows Home Server on that old (2 1/2 years) machine after picking WHS up from my local store.

My favorite Windows Explorer replacement has finally been released in it’s 7th version. Total Commander, which much remainds of the classic old Norton Commander, is a fast and intuitive file and folder manager by Christian Ghisler. It performs much faster than Explorer and has nice built-in features such as packing (ZIP, RAR…), FTP support, multi-renaming, quick-access to common directories… you name it! Version 7 contains a number of new features and fixes, read more about them in my previous post on the subject or on the Total Commander home page.

I previously blogged about the lack of Office 2007 file format support in Windows Mobile 6. Today Jason Langridge revealed that you will not longer need any third party application for this - but instead Microsoft will provide an update to Microsoft Office Mobile 2007 with support for the new Office 2007 file formats (.docx, .xlsx, .pptx). A free update will be available for Windows Mobile 6 and 5 devices and all new shipped devices will have it in the ROM, all starting in Q3 of 2007.

The Windows Media Center Components Database is now live! MCE components is a site which targets Windows Media Center self-builders with help to choose components and to see how the components work together. To help build the database you can add your own system and grade it to help others out. There are currently about 100 systems entered into the database and it will keep growing, as long as you help out. When you are adding your system you will rate it, on a scale 1 to 5, in stability, noise and performance. You can also enter your Windows Experience Index stats, if you are using Vista.