I don’t usually post “tips” but this issue has frustrated me to no end for many months and I finally found a simple but instant effective solution. It’s too good not to spread the word about.

In the last couple of months, I started noticing that clicking the “Downloads” folders in Windows Explorer took around 15 seconds to load. This become quite annoying as I frequently access downloaded files from browsers. I tried deleting clearing out the folder but that didn’t have a lasting effect.

After a bit of research, it turns out apparently Windows 7 (and Windows 8) tries to guess-timate what the contents of the folder are and assigns special “rules” to them to optimize the view settings and sorting.

For some reason, the “Downloads” folder likes to be categorized as a “Pictures” folder (I’m guessing because people store a lot of JPGs in it). The problem with this view is that it tries to generate thumbnails for all the files in this folder, even if they’re not pictures.

The fix is to ensure the folder settings for “Downloads” is optimized for “General items”. This should have an instant effect (the next time you add files to the folder since the thumbnails are otherwise cached anyway).

Unfortunately, this change doesn’t seem to always stick as Windows may change the option as you download more files, so you may have to check this setting once in a while.

Microsoft Australia has caught the hackathon fever. After hosting the first Windows 8 AppFest hackathon at the Microsoft TechEd Australia 2012 conference a couple of months ago, the developer evangelism team wants to share the love to Sydney developers who weren’t able to attend on the Gold coast.

#AppFest Sydney (yes, the hashtag is in the name) will be running next weekend (8th & 9th) at the Microsoft Australia North Ryde office supported by Microsoft evangelists and local industry experts to help keen developers hack together apps for Windows 8, Windows Phone and Windows Azure. There’s also an optional free training-day on the Friday.

Since I’m a big fan of community events and hackathons, it’s a shame that Microsoft Australia has decided to once again charge for this type of event which is suppose to encourage developer interest. At a cost of $110 for the two days (food provided), it’s a little bit pricey for a weekend event. Hopefully this changes as the event moves to other cities.

Having said that, I do have 4 tickets to give away to some aspiring Aussie developers. For a chance to win a free ticket, please leave a comment in response to “Why do you want to attend #AppFest Sydney?”. Eligible winners (who can attend in person will be picked on COB Friday 30th November.

You can see the #AppFest Sydney event schedule and register here.

In the same UX WEEK 2012 presentation where Jensen Harris showed off some early mockups of Windows 8, he concluded his talk with an interesting tidbit about the design of Windows 8.

The default lock-screen images that shipped in every copy of Windows 8 are actually Easter eggs carefully picked by the design team.

Jensen explains, “every one of them was selected as an Easter egg to showcase one of the (design) principles. … Something no one’s going to notice, we’ve encoded the principles of our design language into Windows 8 itself.”

Clockwise from the top left…

• Bee hive / Win as one (internal motto) – bees working together to do something greater than just the sum of the parts
• Colored lines / Authentically digital – the idea of no ornamentation
• Train / Fast and fluid – beautiful train zooming around the bend into the city
• Shell / Do more with less – beauty of what you can do with basic shapes that are in nature
• Piano / pride in craftsmanship – ivory keys of a piano that has been hand carved and polished

And now you know.

A friend recently forwarded me a MetroTwit for Windows 8 cameo in a UX Week 2012 presentation by Microsoft’s Jensen Harris from the Windows design team. Watching through the entire presentation, I noticed that Jensen showed off something I’ve never seen before – early mockups of the Windows 8 UI.

According to the Fast Company profile on Windows 8’s redesign, the first mockups of Windows 8 in 2010 (a year after release of Windows 7) was codename “Pocahontas”. In Jensen’s talk, he reveals the mockups (below) were used at an internal “vision day” to unify the vision of all designers within the Windows team.

Without further ado, here are the early mockups of the Start screen (above), lock screen, charms, Snap and soft keyboard.

Although I can only assume this is just a tiny sample of the entire mockup set, it’s interesting to see just how little (ex. the lock screen) and how much (ex. charms icons) the early ideas have changed. Even many of the fundamental elements of the Start screen remain unchanged since all the back in 2010.

And just to put things in perspective, the first iPad was released in 2010.

After learning how it actually works behind the scenes at BUILD, last weekend I got to spend some quality time with Xbox SmartGlass from the perspective of a normal person, a Xbox gamer.

My eager interest in SmartGlass is fuelled by a partial need and desire to do more with the big TV screen. After recently purchasing a Samsung Smart TV with built-in WiFi, DLNA and HTML5 apps and even a web browser, my expectation for what a TV can and should do raised dramatically.

I had set up the Xbox SmartGlass app on a Windows 8 slate, the iPhone 5 and the HTC 8X Windows Phone. It’s quite a straight-forward process on each device but the slate was definitely the favourite due to the size and screen real estate.

During the course of an evening, I played with the native Xbox remote feature, the Xbox Internet Explorer app and integration into two AAA Xbox games. Here’s some thoughts on how well they work.

Xbox Remote

Xbox Remote is the most generic feature of SmartGlass, a feature that has been carried through from the previous Xbox Companion mobile app with some improvements. As I would compare it to a universal remote, this is a convenience feature rather than a replacement for a Xbox controller.

Although it’s a practical alternative when a controller is not within easy reach, sliding on the large touch canvas to navigate between items and menus is a bit awkward. Slide too little and you don’t get anywhere – slide too much an it navigates between menus rather than individual items. Tapping, which presses “A” is also prone to misclicks if you don’t do the slide gesture quick enough.

The on-screen keyboard feature is where the remote feature steps into a league of its own. Naturally a keyboard, even touch, is far better to use than any controller input. The simple things like being able to type a full search term into Xbox Bing is such a good experience. Unfortunately it does not work with the YouTube app search box.

Internet Explorer

Internet Explorer is a new app introduced in the last Xbox Dashboard update. Even though there’s no HTML5 video/Flash video I couldn’t get HTML5 video to work on youtube.com, it’s still a very capable browser for the large screen and image-centric sites like reddit.com.

Using SmartGlass with Internet Explorer is where the “second-screen extension” aspect of the platform shows off its prowess. Navigating, panning and zooming are all practically fluid and responsive on the tablet considering there’s only a WiFi connection between the device and the console.

Personally I hope the next version of Internet Explorer SmartGlass also has a view of the browser page on the device so that they could move away from the cursor-based navigation to a direct touch manipulation method.

Forza Horizon

Forza Horizon is one of the two game “launch titles” for Xbox SmartGlass. As a racing game, the game implements a full-screen road map view on SmartGlass encompassing the entire game world (a region of Colorado). The current driving route is highlighted and users are also suppose to set new routes by tapping (however I couldn’t get that to work).

This SmartGlass implementation was a little disappointing because of the poor execution. The map’s zoom range is quite limited and the cartography design makes it quite hard to distinguish the road and the terrain. There is also no rotation meaning it was quite hard to read when the car is zooming at 140mph.

What I envisioned for a racing game SmartGlass implementation is a live list of the race positions, a GPS-like direction arrow and distance countdown and map markers of other cars in the race – none of which Forza Horizon has.

Dance Central 3

Last but not least, Dance Central 3 is the other Xbox SmartGlass launch title that was promoted at the E3 press conference this year.

Like a modern karaoke machine, Dance Central SmartGlass clients (up to 4 users on 4 devices) can view songs from the library and add them to a “party mode” queue while other players are currently dancing. Other functionality includes viewing a list of achievements and rewards.

Even though this implementation is also quite limited in scope, the value delivered by this functionality is quite crucial to the gameplay mechanics. In previous Dance Central games, it was quite common for the inactive players to want to queue up the next song but couldn’t without setting up a playlist ahead of time. Now SmartGlass makes this possible without disrupting the pacing of the game.

TV, movies, future

As SmartGlass expands its line-up of supported XBOX applications, movies, TV shows and games, I’m sure the variety and depth of integration will continue to improve as well. Technically it’s a worthy alternative to Apple AirPlay, but current implementations in some apps leaves a lot of room for improvement.

Microsoft today announced that the highly-anticipated, live-action, made-for-web Halo “movie” Forward Unto Dawn has generated over 46 million total views across YouTube and other channels to date. The 5-episode series began October 5 and finished a couple of weeks ago on November 6.

Although its no acclaim like Gangnam Style with its 720 million views, there seems to be no shortage of people who still appreciate the idea of a movie from the Halo universe including myself who has never played through a Halo game. The series currently has a 8.7 rating on IMDB from 2,728 users.

I personally watched through the entire series in one sitting over the weekend and although it was a little slow to start with a lot of character back-story, drama and even a little bit of romance, the action started at the end of episode 3 and lasted all the way until the last minute. The production budget was notably large (rumored between $5 to $10 million) with very impressive box-office movie-quality visual effects, set pieces, props and costumes.

The scenes with Cortana and Master Chief are my favorite.

If you haven’t seen the series at all, here are all 5 episodes embedded below for convenient viewing.

Update: Annoyingly, Microsoft removed episodes 3-5 of Forward Unto Dawn from YouTube. I’ve since replaced the embeds with Halo Waypoint versions (which too have been removed, but the embeds still work).