One of the demos Microsoft had for us was to show us wher they're going with Maps.Live.com

The part that got interesting for me was that they're putting together tools to make it easier for on-line communities to create 3D models for buildings in their area.

While Google Maps does let certain places be showin in 3D, what Microsoft is doing seems to be the next level -- open it up and try it yourself.

Meetiing with the Microsoft Live team today. It's been very interesting.

Microsoft has a very cool little tool on Live.com that is still in beta. But it will make it easy for people using Live Instant Messenger to find the location of their various contacts and help organize a get together or whatever. You can try it out here:

http://dev.live.com/mashups/partycrasher/

Most of what they mentioned is under NDA but they are doing a lot of cool mapping stuff. They also wanted to remind the world that Microsoft has been doing on-line mapping and virtual earth stuff for a very long time.

It's like being a kid in a candy store. 

Two days from morning to late night meeting with people from Microsoft. Big kudos to Microsoft's Nick White for putting together these meetings as it's been incredibly educational.

See the link below for the latest info.

Fun with USB flash drives

One of the neat demos Microsoft gave was how easy it is in Windows Vista to share a network connection. If you have a net connection, you can plug in a USB key and you can turn it into a quasi-wireless share device. Then hand it over to other people and once they plug in that USB key, the auto-run on it will set up the network connection automatically.

You could imagine how easy that would make getting a LAN game going or something. You could share connections under XP, but it was a lot more tedious. This, by contrast, was incredibly easy.

There's a LOT of stuff about to pop out from CES.  The NDAs we're under expire at 7pm PST tonight so shortly after that you'll start seeing a lot of "stuff".

You can see the index of blogs by clicking the link below.

Got to meet with Bill Gates today and had the opportunity to ask him several questions with regards to Windows today, tomorrow, and Microsoft's goals for Windows.

I'm under NDA until 7pm PST so check back then for the stuff!

I remember watching Harry Potter and seeing how pictures in frames were animated and thinking "Wow, this is cool!"

For years, many people have wanted to have animated wallpapers. And for years, developers would try to put something together but inevitably, the results were not acceptable for the target audience.

But now, with Windows Vista Ultimate, things have changed.  Now you can have animated wallpapers that on a modern, high end machine use very little CPU.

Having a good engine to run animated wallppaers, is only half the story of course. You also need to have animated wallpapers that people would actually want to use.  After all, if they're distracting or obnoxious, people won't use them.

For many months now, we've been working with Microsoft on a project to create and provide animated wallpapers to users of Windows Vista Ultimate.

We'll have more details soon.

The ants in Las Vegas are addicted to Advil. That's the only explanation I have for how, at the hotel here, that armies of ants came crawling out of the wall, streamed right up to my bottle of Advil and went inside of it.  They have a problem. They won't admit it. But they do.  You haven't lived until you've seen the inside of a bottle of Advil 1/4th full with piles of ants.  Damn bugs.

Having been using the "gold" version of Windows Vista for a few weeks, I am pleased to announce that it's pretty good. It's not buggy in any major way. There are, however, various device issues. I'm not yet satisfied with the compatibility of games and Vista but I suspect that by the time it's generally available, the video driver makers will have provided some decent updates.

Most of the first two days we're spending time talking to Microsoft about some of the cool features of Windows Vista that are not very well known. 

Next up, fun with USB flash drives..

Greetings all! We've just arrived in Las Vegas and this week we'll be meeting with Microsoft nearly every day to get the latest/greatest news about Windows Vista.  There will be a LOT of announcements this week and a lot of interesting news.

Stay tuned to this page all week!

One of the things that has helped make space strategy games really shine in the long term is the community of modders.

Whether it be Master of Orion 3 which benefited greatly from third party moders to the Space Empires series to of course Galactic Civilizations II, modders are a very important part of the community.

One of the top modders for Galactic Civilizations II who helped us on Dark Avatar too, Stefan, has gotten together with other like minded folks and set up a new site called i-mod-productions. It's a site where people who like to mod games can get together and discuss modding.

You can see a link to some of the things they've done below.