Brandon Live!

So I was reading Kevin Daly’s comment to Chris Pirillo’s response to Andre Da Costa’s rebuttal to Chris’ post about WinHEC and Longhorn.

I made this so I could link to it to explain to people how Windows versions relate to each other (since microsoft doesn’t always make it very clear).

http://photos9.flickr.com/11421415_dd5a28bdce_o.png

I never thought I’d hear myself say those words.

Disclaimer: I haven’t tried it myself, and I’m sure it’s got plenty of flaws.  You don’t need to tell me about all of them.  But hear me out.

Real has finally one thing right (being a first for Real since the company’s inception, this is a big event):

With their newest update to their Rhapsody service, they’re supporting multiple codecs, even those made by their competitors.

They even have Rhapsody To Go now which supports “janus” Windows Media DRM devices (like my Zen Micro or the iRiver H10), which is essentially Napster’s “To Go“ service, except not.

They also seem to have updated their “Harmony” support for the iPod, meaning that users of Apple’s crippled MP3 players can buy music from Real and listen to it on their devices… that is, until Apple realizes that someone is trying to give their customers an actual choice and once again releases a firmware upgrade that kills Harmony.

Unfortunately, Rhapsody To Go still won’t work on an iPod.  And it seems that it probably never will, given Steve Jobs’ attitude toward subscription models.

But it’s good to see someone in the industry catching on.  The codec wars have got to be one of the most anti-user phenomena I’ve ever seen. 

By supporting the greatest number of media codecs that you can, you reduce the chance that one of your customers or potential customers is going to find your product useless, or become frustrated when it only works with some of their media.

The thinking behind a lot of the current strategies is that:  If we make people like our codec, they’ll use it for all their stuff.  Well newsflash:  Most of my media wasn’t encoded by me.  And I’m not just talking about the more nefarious methods of obtaining media in a format beyond your control, though the number of people who have that problem these days is huge.  I’m also talking about:  Media encoded by a device (DVR box, portable player/recorder, Media Center, roommate’s Mac, digital camcorder) or downloaded from another source (movie/game trailers, podcasts/videoblogs, news clips, videos sent by family/friends, etc).  And then there are the 3 different legal DRM’d music download distributions, and un-DRM’d music distributors (like livephish and DMB’s live trax - which use unprotected FLAC, mp3, and wma).

Get it out of your marketing genius head that I’m even ABLE to have all of my media in your format.  That’s just not going to happen.  So if you want me to use your product, do what Real has done here.  Do what made Xbox Media Center (the homebrew one) so popular… Support every format that I might find a file in.  Every single one.

Sweet.

And never wanting to see one again?  I seriously have spent hours over the last few nights trying to figure out a seemingly random error that would occur every few searches (sometimes every 10^th, sometimes every 40^th) in the search app I’m building.  It turned out the problem went back to that self-inclusive length property that’s part of the SHITEMID structure (ie. the IDL part of the PIDL).  So I’ve fixed that.  As such, my current code won’t support queries over 92 characters in length, but that’s only temporary.
So now that I’ve got that working smoothly, I can start working on actually making something useful.  I’ve got some ideas, but I need more!
If you look at the screenshot I posted – I can give you some idea of how it works at this moment.  When you launch the app the “What to look for,” “Where to look,” and “Group by” widgets are all that you see.  When you check “Documents,” the Documents options appear (and the search immediately updates to show just documents).

I’d like to offer two main uses for this app:

1)      Better searching.  By exposing search fields like the Author field you see above.  And by giving you advanced options relevant to the type of item you’re looking for.
2)      Search by browsing.  If you’ve seen Tesla or the Longhorn demo that was given during Bill Gates’ keynote at WinHEC today, you’d know how great this idea is.  Unfortunately, because I don’t have any direct access to the data indexed by MSN yet, I can’t pull out tags like “authors” (looks something like this).  I hope that a future release of the MSN DS will allow us to do grouping in that way, one way or another.
Actually, I’ve given myself a third goal:
Convert Chris from Copernic

This is why I love developing in .NET

Hopefully later this week or next I’ll be able to post a beta version and start looking for some feedback (although feel free to post any right now, just know that this is very early work).