From Neowin: Windows Vista is now available for me (and other MSDN Subscribers) to download.

*Starts Download now*

Views on Vista : Photosynth Technology Preview is Live!

I havn’t had time to check this out (doesn’t run well behind my work connection, apparently) - but it looks very interesting.

I’m just hoping I can load a whole bunch of my photos into it of a given area for it to analyse, etc.

Someone needs to develop a Vista Sidebar Gadget that incorporates the guide data from IceTV and adds MediaCentre recording info…. (i.e so I can click on something from the sidebar, and it’ll record).

To get a little more fancy, a local P2P network that linked up other MCE boxes so you could say “Record on so and so” == even better.

Who knows, maybe I’ll do it in .NET 3.0 w/ WPF over my forced holidays.

Only a few hours to wait until Windows Vista goes “Gold”. That’s the time at which it’s Released To Manufacturing (RTM).

I’ve been running Vista at home for a few days, and I’m looking forward to installing the RTM version on my HTPC when it becomes available.

(Source: Neowin)

Vista - Kinda Cool
Windows Mobile Device Center - Kinda Cool
Windows Media Player 11 - Okay (Much better than anything after Media Player 6)
Podcasting - Kinda Cool

Mix ‘em all together - and you get a whole load of problems.

Juice doesn’t work - as I mentioned before, so I’ve been using Doppler to get my podcasts. It would be OK if it wern’t so damn buggy and non-responsive. They seriously need to learn the meaning of “background worker threads”, or at the least - “asynchronous interface”.

Doppler chokes on the Battlestar Galactica directors commentary (it won’t sort by release date, and thus keeps trying to download the commentary from Episode 9, Season 1), and has other random b.s going on with it. Their interface is also truely crazy. To get feed details, you click on them. To remove something from the queue, you err… double click on it. Then it asks if you want to add the item to the history… wtf? No…. oh, wait… now the damn thing is being downloaded again. Argh!

Juice runs once under Vista, every subsequent time it just dies for some inexplicable reason. (It’s not admin rights, I checked that).

So… someone find me a decent, sane piece of podcast fetching software.

Features Required:
- Downloads enclosures from an RSS Feed (i.e downloads podcasts, vodcasts)
- Imports/Exports subscriptions from OPML.
- Can save them to a directory
- Has a sane UI

See, not so hard, is it?
Niceties:
- Automated downloading
- Queueing of podcasts to download
- Simple rules for automatic fetching
- Easy to add something to the queue, and remove it.
- Tag/Rename based on feed details, if empty.
- Export feed notes etc to a html file that sits alongside the podcast. *

Big Bonus points for it all running on a PDA running Windows Mobile 5. (* If running on a PDA, keeping the HTML and showing it while playing back the podcast would be ultra neat too)

Now, on to Windows Mobile Device Center - it’s kinda cool, but it doesn’t have any automatic media sync stuff that was present under XP with ActiveSync 4.2 and WMP 10.

Windows Media Player 11 is also missing the customisable playlists that display things based on rules… i.e only show items _x_ days old.

end of rant.

If you’ve got a Windows PDA, and Windows Vista, then get Windows Mobile Device Center.

It’s currently in Beta 3, and improves upon the built in functionality in vista.
(Like, for instance remembering your device password — although it took 4-5 dock/undock cycles to get it to do this for me).

Now… just to get Juice working under Vista.

Tonight I installed Vista RC2.

I haven’t played around with it yet, but it looks fairly much the same.
Install time was down a little, again. Overall though, not much is initially different.

A few people have suggested I get the Battlefield 2142 Demo, and have a go… so, I did. Infact, after installing a few drivers (to make Sound go) and Firefox, that’s pretty much the only things I’ve done.

So… how did the BF2142 Demo go? Well.. it’s a little rocky.

Step 1: Install the Game.
This isn’t hard. You run the installer. It installs.

Step 2: Run the Game …or not.
I got this lovely error message.

Luckily Paul had a link for me in IRC… so on to:

Step 3: Install DirectX9

I Downloaded the “D3DX All Updates” from this page, extracted the zip file and ran as admin.

Step 4: Run the game, and register account.

You’ll need to register an account, but if you’ve played any EA game online (like, Battlefield 2, for instance) - you’ll probably find your account name isn’t available. This is something EA needs to fix.

Step 5: Find that Punkbuster doesn’t like Vista’s default settings.

Any game server you try and join that has Punkbuster, will boot you out if you’re not running BF2142 as an Admin.

This is… not great, but acceptable.

Step 6: Run BF2142 as Admin