See, I like my Outlook to be able to display all the stuff I want to do on the left hand pane, without any need for a scrollbar. I have my RSS feeds permanently expanded, and as a result, my total number of RSS feeds is kind of limited by screen real estate. It’s a nightmare of my making, but still. I have a whole bunch of tech/gadget/smartphone/development RSS feeds (I’ll post a list some day), and I wanted to add some feeds for people I know. So I thought of making a People folder, then adding the RSS feeds and dragging the feed’s respective folders to the People folder, and well, that didn’t get me anywhere (it works though) because then I still have a scrollbar when I expand that folder. No deal. What I need is the entries from multiple feeds to go into one folder, and it turns out it’s pretty easy. It’s in how you do it.

You can do this when you add a new feed or editing a curent feed. In Outlook 2010 for an existing feed;

• Create the target folder. Right click on ‘RSS Feeds’ and click ‘New Folder’. Give it a name and hit OK.
• Press the Backstage button (Orange one in the top left labelled ‘File’).
• Click the ‘Account Settings’ drop down, and then select ‘Account Settings’. Redundancy is awesome.
• Go to the ‘RSS Feeds’ tab.
• Select the RSS feed you want to change delivery location for, and hit ‘Change’.
• Under ‘Delivery Location’, hit ‘Change Folder’.
• Select the folder you made earlier, and hit OK.
• Job Done!

If you want to do this when you add a feed, you just have to add it from this Backstage RSS Feeds view. If you just right-click RSS Feeds on the left hand pane and select ‘Add a New RSS Feed’, it will create a new folder with the feed’s title as the folder name. If you add it from Backstage RSS Feeds View, you can choose feed name, and delivery location.

Couple of interesting tidbits I found out about Photogallery; it uses some nice Windows 7 tech. I just saw it light up the Sensors and Location platform (so it can get your location), but more importantly, and relevant to what this is about, WIC, or Windows Imaging Component. It’s understandable for Microsoft’s own software to support Microsoft’s own technologies, especially when both have Windows in the name, but it’s great to see it there.

What Windows Imaging Component is; well honestly, I don’t actually know in entirety. I’m sure you could bing for it, but the long and the short that actually matters is that it enables codec support for imaging supports. For a lot people, you probably won’t care, if your camera generates a JPEG in camera, you upload a JPEG to Facebook/Flickr, and as far as you’re concerned, JPEG is where it starts and ends, but some of us use more interesting and exotic formats for various reasons (if you’re in the jpeg4lyfe crowd, you might want to stop reading and go do something else, cos otherwise you’re going to wonder why you wasted your time).

In the same way that you can install a codec (encoder/decoder) to allow various software to access different video formats and containers beyond their original abilities, and how you can do the same for audio formats, WIC allows Camera manufacturers to release codecs that allow the display and decoding of their formats. And Photogallery is WIC aware. See where I’m going with this? Photogallery can display, and show, and otherwise handle fun formats like Canon’s RAW (CR2) format, Nikon’s RAW (NEF) format, and my favourite and probably most important, Adobe’s Digital Negative (DNG) format. I’m sure there’s codec support for other manufacturers as well, but again, I’ll leave you to bing that one on your own, you just install them and…it works. And that’s how it works for the above mentioned codecs; you just install say, Adobe’s DNG codec, and you’ll be able to view DNG files in Photogallery. You’ll also be able to view them in Explorer, and you’ll probably bump into a few hidden suprises application-wise about where you see them.

That’s where the awesome stops, but I’m about to go one further.

64-bit love. Something approaching 50% of Windows 7 installations are 64-bit, and you’d be left high and dry here. WIC works in 64bit, but to date, no manufacturers I know about have released 64bit codecs, and none of the ‘big three’ mentioned above have released 64bit codecs. Crap. What’s more, if you go to install Adobe’s 32bit DNG codec on a 64bit system, it will block the installation. Crap, again. We’re going to have to get a bit dirty.

We’re going to have to modify stuff. Adobe have conveniently released their DNG codec as an MSI package (no, not the electronics manufacturer, a Windows Installer package, silly). MSI packages contain their payload, some instructions, and a database of stuff to do. Or not to do. In the case of the DNG codec, not to install on anything that’s not Vista or better, and not to install on 64bit OSes. Fortunately, we can change this (before any one asks, no, I am not redistributing modified, copyrighted Adobe files).

So, for EDUCATIONAL PURPOSES, here’s how one could hypothetically modify an MSI package. I’m going to use Adobe’s DNG codec for this example, as a completely random choice (hawhaw);
You will need either Orca, or SuperOrca (free yo!). Open the MSI file (duh), and navigate to ‘LaunchCondition’ on the left. Click it. You’ll see the Launch Conditions in the main window:

At this point, you could just drop the ‘Not VersionNT64′ row, by right clicking it and doing ‘Drop Row’ but let’s get all terminator on it and go a bit more serious. You might want to use the DNG Codec on XP (WIC was introduced with SP3), and besides, it’s more fun. Right click on ‘LaunchCondition’ in the left pane, and hit ‘Drop Table’. Do a File -> Save As and save it as ‘Awesomedobe DNG Converter.msi’, or something equally sweet, and then just run it, and install it as normal. It will…just work.

And here’s the quick and nerdy magic – your operating system may be 64bit, but Photogallery is a 32bit process. It will use a 32bit WIC codec, like the one you just installed.

Plus you know, you stuck it to the man real good there, and made Photogallery much more useful. Go you!

*Just kidding. I love Adobe, and their products (especially Photoshop/Bridge/Lightroom) are fantastic. I also have no idea what will actually happen if you install this on XP. If it breaks, it’s all your fault. If it works, I’m brilliant, but let me know either way.

Stay classy San Diego.

For the record, it should be noted that HP’s official comment on the subject at the moment is ‘We don’t comment on rumors or speculation’. Fair enough.

Engadget are citing the reason for HP ‘slating’ (hahaha) the Slate being that HP aren’t ‘thrilled’ with Windows 7′s performance on the tablet.

Heres the deal though – Windows 7 runs just fine on devices of the Slate’s spec. Hardware wise, apart from the form-factor, the Slate really is nothing new – a 1.6GHz Atom processor with 1GB of RAM. And this spec runs Windows 7 just fine. Sure, it’s not blazingly fast, but it is snappy, and for netbook activities, just fine.

As a platform, it also has some great tricks (Windows 7 multitouch and gestures, incredible handwriting recognition). And six-core i7 processors suck down a fair bit of juice and aren’t really suitable for the form factor, so it’s not really a problem with the hardware / operating system.

The other thing is, the Slate’s release date would be in June. About a month. HP have poured significant time and money into the Slate project. Admittedly, for a company with resources such as HP’s, money isn’t really the object, but time is something of a more precious thing that you can’t get, no matter how much you spend. If HP were to cancel the Slate device, assuming they were interested in the tablet market, the time spent/wasted on the Slate wouldn’t be recoverable, and would delay HP’s entry to the market for quite a while.

HP’s recent purchase of Palm certainly suggests a WebOS tablet is something of an inevitability, and sure, I don’t doubt that. Thing is, it would take HP at an absolutely minimum six months to bring a WebOS tablet to market, and realistically speaking, it wouldn’t see retail within a year.

It would make far more sense to bring the Slate to market now, enter it, learn something about it, and gain some experience for when they do develop the WebOS slate. Especially when the Slate is at this point pretty much fully developed, been hyped by HP, and is so close.

I’m sure HP are slightly busy integrating Palm into their company, having a good look at the selection of patents they’ve acquired, thinking of what they can do with WebOS, and are pretty busy bunnies at HP Towers right now. The HP slate might even see a small delay as a result, but I really don’t see the product being canned.

It doesn’t make much or any sense really. I’m sure I could be wrong, anything could happen, and this is just speculation, but I guess we’ll all just have to wait and see.

In Orange cinema advert style, here’s the whole thing; synopsisised;

• The HP Slate is about a month away from release
• HP have spent piles of money and time on the Slate
• It’s finished & ready to go
• Windows 7 runs just fine on 1.6GHz Atoms; HP even sell devices like this
• Windows 7 makes a suitable tablet OS due to its touchyness
• If HP do make a WebOS tablet, it will take about a year to come out. The Slate is ready to go now.

And for good reasons. Let’s take a look at a nice selection of threads from popular hobbyist/phone hacking community, XDA-Developers;

WP7 is complete FAIL,  Do you use your phone without data plan like me? If so WP7 isn’t for us =(, Why only high end devices?,  Microsoft Not Supplying 2D/ 3D Drivers

Paints a pretty negative picture. There’s a lot of hate and animosity floating around over there. It’s also a total waste of time. WP7 isn’t aimed at people who hack about with their phones and flash ROMs every other day, it’s not for people who are concerned that Microsoft aren’t supplying 2D/3D drivers. That’s not to say that WP7 isn’t aimed at the technically minded – it is. It is however, aimed at Microsoft’s so-called life-maximisers; for managing professional and personal lives, for using their smartphone devices to the full. Their target market probably understand perfectly how most of WP7′s technology works. But the fundamental is that while they might understand it, they don’t give a damn; they just want it to work and work well.

WP7 is for people who use their phones, not for people who fight their phones. If you’re trying to fight with WP7, you’re doing it wrong.

Have a nice day

According to DigiTimes, ‘Compal Electronics will manufacture two tablet PCs for Toshiba with shipments scheduled for the end of 2010 or early 2011.’. Which is kinda cool. But what’s more interesting is the actual Tablet devices; besides a blah Android tablet, one of the devices is a Windows CE7 device, with Dual 7″ Screens, powered by nVidia’s Tegra 2 platform. Incidentally, the last known information about what the Courier device was, states it as a device powered by Windows CEsomething (described as same CE based to the Zune HD and Windows Phone 7), having Dual 7″ Screens, and powered by Tegra 2.

So it smells like Toshiba are making themselves a Courier device. It smells somewhat like that indeed.

CE7? Check.
Dual 7″ Screens? Check.
Tegra 2? Check.

All the important stuff seems there

http://www.digitimes.com/news/a20100419PD217.html

via http://pocketnow.com/rumor/windows-ce-7-to-power-toshiba-dual-screen-tablet

Multitasking is, essentially as it says on the tin. Multiple tasks. Simultaneously. But with the iPhone OS 4 release, and WP7’s model with regarding, well, not multitasking…multitasking, hybrid multitasking (WTF?), it seems a bit complex as to what multitasking is, and what it’s become. So let’s take it from the top. With MT being thrown around as one of the important things for devices like Windows Phones and the iPhone, it’s probably important to bash out why it’s kind of not-really-an-issue-at-all.

First up of course, is classical, thread based multithreading. This takes a ‘task’ (aka process, or ‘app’ or ‘program’ it will be process from herein, later explained) and splits it into even more fundamental components; threads. These are essentially the fundamental units that execute, and a program, properly written will probably, depending what it is and how it does it, have multiple threads. Ignoring stuff like hyperthreading, crazy IBM chips that can run multiple threads simultaneously per core, and of course, multiple-core processors and multiprocessor systems, a processor is only capable of executing a single thread at any one given time. The illusion of multithreading is very transparently handled by switching between these threads extremely rapidly, so that in the space of a second, hundreds of thousands of threads have all executed a bit, and that apparently, progress has been made on lots of threads at the same time. You then get a complex thread lifecycle, which I’ll diagram but not detail too much, that looks a bit like this;

What you have is a system that’s capable of switching between threads and running multiple threads in sequence very quickly. It allows for threads to yield when they can’t do anything (waiting on data, disk reads etc), and generally, it’s pretty solid. What’s more, it’s absolutely vital for doing more than one thing; a single serial process that serviced everything in turn would be a nightmare. With this is mind, it’s important to note, that at the operating system, nearly everything implements this in an extremely similar or identical manner. This includes your desktop computer, your laptop, your BlackBerry, your Windows Phone, your iPhone, your featurephone, your crappy £20 pay-as-you-go dumbphone, your Sky box and so on. At the OS level, this is implemented by everything. iPhones multitask, Windows Phones multitask, they have to.

But iPhones (iPhone OS 3) can’t multitask, and Windows Phone 7 devices can’t multitask. And Android devices can, and your laptop can, and Windows Phone 6.5 devices can, and this is where it starts to get a bit more complex as to what multitasking actually means. As already covered, all these platforms can, they have to. It’s more about how the operating system treats non-system threads and API stuff. On the iPhone, the first-party apps have the benefit of being essentially system threads; you can open iPod, play music, carry on what you’re doing. It multithreads in the background as an allowed system thread. Do the same with, Pandora (as seems to be the popular use-case, I’ve actually never used it!), and you close the app and…the music stops. Equally, if you bust out a task manager on the iPhone or on the Windows Phone 7 emulator, you can see a whole bunch of tasks running, such as services, communications, updating stuff, Exchange clients, etc.

This actually has nothing to do with technical implementation of multitasking, as the OS is perfectly capable, it’s about what restrictions are placed on third-party apps. However, unlike desktop processors, you want to keep processing to a minimum to save on power, and the truth is, even the Apple A4 in the iPad, and Qualcomm’s Snapdragon line on 1GHz+ processors just aren’t that powerful to have tons of threads running.

What iPhone OS 4 and Windows Phone 7 do is have this smart multitasking. Essentially, when you hit the Windows button on a WP7 device, it bumps you out to the start menu. Your app’s ‘state’ is saved to memory, and it’s threads essentially killed off. You do what you do, and go back to the app. It’s threads are started up, and its state reloaded from memory. Microsoft call this ‘dehydrating’ and ‘rehydrating’ the app, and it’s a pretty good analogy. It’s still there, but it’s been freeze-dried and doing nothing. But, just add water, and it’s right back, where it was. The approach taken in iPhone OS 4 is nearly identical. And the thing is, it’s pretty damn clever. Multitasking of the desktop type just isn’t suitable for low-power devices like phones.

The only downsides are for certain types of apps; persistent network based communications clients, music programs and so on; which HAVE to be running to work. You can’t play music from a dehydrated thread, you can’t have Windows Live Messenger running in the background but not actually running. So the solution is exceptions for these few cases. Apple are allowing exceptions of the following; audio streaming, VoIP, GPS, and completing important tasks (such as completing upload of photos to Flickr). Windows Phone 7 takes a similar approach; apps like Last.fm and Pandora run through the Music hub, Flickr runs through the Pictures hub, communications like Windows Live Messenger are handled at OS level, and GPS is managed at the OS level, so it’s kept warm and spun up so it doesn’t have to re-lock when you switch back to your navigation app. Equally, locally and network generated notifications allow dehydrated apps to react to external activity, such as receiving an IM, an alarm going off, reaching a location. When these notifications cook off, you can then bounce to the app, and it’s as if it was…running. Smart-multitasking with these platform exceptions allow WP7 and iPhone OS 4 to satisfy the massive majority of multitasking critical situations without actually…multitasking.

It sounds like trickery, it sounds like you’re being cheated, and as Android and Pre users would probably have you believe, it’s not ‘true’ multitasking. Well, no, it’s not. But ‘true’ multitasking would be kind of stupid, now that you know what is, how it works, and what smart-multitasking is. Phones aren’t desktop computers, they don’t look like them, you don’t interact with them in the same way, and they shouldn’t have the same end metaphor of how stuff works as them. Because phones are not desktops.

What it really boils down to at the end of the day is this; users want to be able to bounce between apps, play music in the background, be available to talk to on IM programs. And what matters is that you can do this. How you do it isn’t so important; but doing it right is important. This ‘true’ multitasking crap is getting thrown around, with ‘Windows Phone 7 can’t multitask’, and ‘iPhone OS 4 can multitask’, or ‘Android multitasks’, but it’s just that; crap.

Addendum;

Processes vs Programs – You think of software as a ‘Program’, or as the term on smartphones seems to be, an ‘app’. The distinction between a process and a program is that a program can just be software on disk. A process is a running task. A program can run processes, but it may just be doing nothing. It’s an important distinction when you get down to threads and processes and stuff running, and it’s something I’m glad was slapped into me, semantic though it may be.

Thanks to William Hook for the iPhone process list. I don’t have an iPhone. trolololo

There has to be a massive associated cost of running these services, and Microsoft aren’t the only company, although they do have probably the highest running costs due to variety of services offered and number of users. Equally, Google is forking out massive amounts of money to provide similar services for free, and then there are the myriad of similar services from Yahoo, Flickr, Facebook, blogspot/wordpress and so on. There is so much available, so much taken for granted on the internet at the moment that’s just freely available, and it has an associated cost that’s just flat ignored by the end user.

So how and why do these services exist? They have to be a fairly huge drain on resources, and yet web services seem to be at the forefront of pushed technologies, and currently the big thing, but furthermore, the next big thing; ‘Cloud’ services that exist on the web are where the direction of things are headed. How are they funded? One could argue that Microsoft, as a large, profitable company, has a degree of social and community responsibility to ‘give something back’. But I’m also not a Microsoft account, I have no true idea of how much these services cost to run, or how they’re funded. The only obvious source of revenue is advertising. Users will object at obnoxious or large advertising, advertising that detracts from the experience. But if the advertising doesn’t detract or isn’t obvious, it will get ignored, which brings me to the sustainability issue. I’m fairly sure the MTV generation, and the facebook generation have grown up so wholly immersed in advertising, it has no real use any more.

You see adverts every day, I do, on the internet, on the side of buses, on TV, on buildings, on billboards, on taxis, on consumer goods, in the newspaper, on barrage-baloons in the sky. It’s everywhere. And consequently, in terms of actual impact…it might as well be nowhere. I can’t ignore the subconscious effects of advertising being so widely spread that may well trigger and spark impulse buying and drive consumer direction in ways one can’t even realise, but for the vast majority of advertising, it appears to be a money hole. I used a GMail account from when they were invite only as the service first launched in late 2004. I used it pretty exclusively until jumping the Google ship in late 2008 for Windows Live services, enticed heavily by Exchange access provided by MS on my slightly special live account. In that four year period with which I used (and I USED) the service, I clicked on not one advert. I ignored everything, and very much used the GMail service as a completely free service without generating any practical, measurable revenue for Google. I’m convinced I’m not the only user in the world who completely ignored the advertising. And if you plug a GMail account into a desktop client or a phone using IMAP or POP3…where’s the advertising? Then the backend powering is being done by Google, paid for by Google, and they can’t even display any adverts.

I’m fairly sure this is a situation that has to get worse, and further new generations consume and use more and more web services, as more users in general use these services, and as the penetration and drive effect of advertising has less and less grip on people. With this, I have to wonder how sustainable these free services really are. This is as much an advertising issue as it is a business model/funding issue, but regardless, there is a distinct issue around the sustainability of these services.

With that in mind, 7 is what Vista needs in more ways than one. At its heart, 7 is Vista; it’s kernel revision isn’t 7.0, but 6.1 (Vista was 6.0, Server 2003/XP Pro x64 was 5.2, XP Home/Pro was 5.1, 2000 was 5.0 etc). While the build versions are 7xxx, it’s kernel, the very core of the operating system, is a minor revision over Vista. This means that indeed, 7 really is a slightly different version of Vista.

But why should this be a bad thing? Vista has many names, resparked the ‘M$’ moniker, and was generally badly received by the media, and in my opinion, was the first time something had been communally target by the ‘blogosphere’.

I loathe the word, but it’s appropriate. The blogosphere is essentially a snowball of opinions with little else behind it. Vista received a massive stigma, because it was released to a world where everybody had an opinion, informed or otherwise, experienced or otherwise, or even had used the operating system. One person with a dislike to change and an xp4lyfe attitude makes some remarks about what is wrong with Vista (correct or otherwise), and these are echoed as fact by a thousand others, and then you have a fission reaction of posts, comments, which snowballs  (fission and snowballs, odd mix) that then boil over to mainstream media, and inevitably form what makes up the sheep like public opinion.

And so it was; Vista was ‘bad’, a ‘downgrade’, ‘ME2′, and so on. It was a bad and rubbish operating system that ran slowly and represented a regression. This is of course, irrespective of the massive talent of the company that produced it, the $6 billion spent on its development, or the fact that it was, and is, an outstanding operating system, and incredibly secure.

My girlfriend (and this entirely anecdotal without source) in one of her event management textbooks had something regarding first impressions; the numbers on this may be slightly off, but the core point remains the same.

• first impressions are formed within seven seconds, and imprinted and exceedingly difficult to change within thirty seconds

And there you have it. Public opinion was formed on the back of other opinion. If the first thing you hear about something is that it is bad, and everybody around you is saying the same thing, you would certainly be excused for following the flow of things. It doesn’t mean it’s right, but it’s understandable.

Vista was released in November 2006. Despite how apparently awful it was, it sold very well, and did great for Microsoft. But it did, and still has (a slowly receding) stigma of hate behind it. In July 2008, Microsoft launched an extremely interesting, if scientifically dubious, social experiment; the Mojave Experiment.

Essentially, all the Mojave Experiment was trying to prove was that Vista’s reputation was unfairly tarred by people who had no idea. Public opinions were taken by people of what they thought about Vista. They gave a rating of Vista from 0-10, with Vista scoring 4.4 out of a possible 10. Following this, the participants were hand-held through a demonstration of ‘Mojave’, purportedly Microsoft’s next operating system, following the ‘failure’ of Vista. Mojave was again rated by the participants by the same scale, receiving a score of 8.5 out of 10.

But the white rabbit in the hat that was Mojave, is that it was just Vista. It wasn’t a new operating system, it wasn’t anything new, it was Windows Vista. The Mojave Experiment, whilst scientifically dubious and criticised of having deliberately chosen their results, made an outstandingly good point.

Public opinion was…wrong. Very wrong.

Windows 7 is now approaching RTM, and shortly after that, will become available for retail purchase, and will begin appearing on consumer’s computers. Microsoft chose to keep the public codename of ’7′ as the operating system’s release name. It was codenamed by Blackcomb and Vienna, as a result of it’s predecessor, Vista’s, odd split development path. Before it’s name was released, it was just called 7 by people, owing to it being the next version of Windows (with Vista being NT6.0). Microsoft chose to keep its name as 7, and it will shortly be on shelves with ’7′ on the box.

Microsoft have had some interesting names over the years; Vista, XP (eXPerience), ME (Millennium Edition), but prior to these, versions of the operating system on the NT kernel (as apposed to the long deprecated and unused 9x kennel) were termed by number; NT4.0, 3.51, going further back, Windows 3.1, ultimately, Windows 1.0.

But more importantly, 7 entirely disassociates with the name ‘Vista’. And visually, with the Superbar, it’s a fair bit different. In fact, there’s enough subtle changes that make it not seem like Vista.

Windows 7 is Vista. But visually, and as far as public opinion, the consumer, and anyone is concerned, it’s not; it’s miles better, it’s completely different. In essence then, being that it’s the same thing, but given a new name to emerge from its stigma…Windows 7 is really the Mojave Experiment taken a step further.

And it works. It’s not even out yet, and people seem to love Windows 7. Is it sly and wrong? No, it’s great, and it’s an excellent piece of marketing, for which I entirely applaud Microsoft.

In case you are one of the Vista haters, and you see this through your haze as yet another Vista is bad, or ‘yet another nail in the coffin’ (it’s remarkable how overused that term was), or worse yet, as a reason why 7 is bad, you’re taking away entirely wrong point. 7 isn’t bad because it’s Vista, which was bad; 7 is good, Vista was good, there was never anything wrong at all. Baaaaaa.

Because we still live in a very heavy printed world. RFID isn’t taking over any time soon. And HCCBs, they’re freaking awesome. They’re cool. The idea is cool, the concept is cool, the potential is cool.

What are HCCBs? HCCBs are printed patterns of cyan, magenta, yellow, and key (black) with white lines. They look kind of funky to start with, but it gets better. HCCBs are extremely resilient. Their technology, and readability is meant to work, unimpaired, with a cell phone camera (very poor low light performance, poor colour distinction, awful white balance correction, usually slow shutters, generally low resolving power), and low quality print. So you can do things to HCCBs, and they still work. You can drop them into black and white, you can replace the triangles with an arrangement of…smarties, in short, as long as your final image represents the generated HCCB, you’re pretty much good to go.

That kind of covers what an HCCB is, but of course, the next question.

What do HCCBs do?!!

HCCBs contain approximately 13 bytes of information after error correction, and can ‘contain’ a number of different things. Essentially what an HCCB is, is a computer-vision readable link. Your eye and brain can’t decipher it, but it makes sense to Tag Reader. Tag Reader decodes the visual image into its contents. And it’s contents can be a number of things. It can be a basic text string, a web link, a VCard, or a dialer through to a phone number. The 13byte limitation isn’t a limitaiton, because of how the HCCB works – the HCCB doesn’t actually contain its contents, it contains a compressed link to the ultimate target on a Microsoft target. Think printed tinyurl or minify. Your Tag Reader equipped device decodes the HCCB, sends the decoded content to the MS server, and the server responds with what the HCCB is meant to have. The potential here becomes quite awesome. The obvious things are printed business cards with full vCard information electronically, a reinvation on the classical buried treasure, physically linking the web and the real world, or stamping someone else’s phone number on the back of a public restroom door with promises of a ‘good time’. Yes, it’s 2009, move with the times.

But beyond the possibilities of what you can do with it, is where you can put it. It’s printed, so it’s physical, it’s real, and it can go anywhere. You can have printed stickers and slap them wherever you want. You can, in a Banksy-esque style, deface classical art with youtube links to Rick Astley classics. You can be boring, and use it to provide ‘more information’ in traditional printed media (newspapers magazines). You can be vain and hang the HCCB for you on your wall at home, next to the visual interpretation of your DNA. You can project it on a wall, you can stick it on a 100ft high billboard. You could put it on a hillside and put yourself inside google maps or virtual earth.

Pretty damned cool for barcodes.

Want more?
Visit www.microsoft.com/tag for more of an overview
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