Microsoft’s TechEd 2009 conference kicked off today with a fairly forthcoming keynote that included not only the announcement of a Windows 7 release date season but an indirect demonstration of the forthcoming Office 2010 Technical Preview build. The best-I-can-do-from-a-streaming-video screencaps above comes from Bill Veghte’s quick demonstration of Windows 7 in which he launched 3 Office applications: Excel, Powerpoint and Outlook.

Compared to the screenshots of Outlook 2010 that were leaked to ZDNet’s iGeneration a month ago, not much has changed, but the effects of a new fade-to-Aero gradient in the header bar is much more obvious. In terms of the actual applications, Excel does not seem to have changed at all whereas Powerpoint has a new “Transitions” tab possibly indicating improved effects and animations behaviors. Outlook’s changes are pretty self explanatory. Each application’s “Ribbon button” is also colored differently, allowing easy differentiation between the applications.

Having said all that, I have no idea what’s going on with “Office 2010 The Movie“. A viral campaign for business applications? Sure, bring it on.

Could you imagine the mockery if this reached Slashdot. A fairly unknown Polish website called “CentrumXP.pl” today published some images of what were portrayed as renderings of the Windows 7 packaging and box art. Since my Polish is as good as Google Translate is, I can’t say for certain the website actually claimed this to be leaked images of the official box art but it was certainly implied to some degree and has already begun to spread to at least Bink.nu, Softpedia and forums.

At first glance, the images are quite interesting and that is probably the only thing to take away from. Details like the butterfly and lens flare certainly raise suspicion of its authenticity, but you never know with Microsoft, like the bird on the Windows 7 login screen. The subtle however most conclusive evidence that this is a fake lies in the “Windows 7” logo. The official logo uses the fonts Segoe Light for the letter “7” which is not the case here.

The Windows 7 packaging secret lives to be leaked another day.

Update: Now people claiming to know something say these are not fakes. We’ll find out soon enough.

Update 2: I was wrong. There’s now undeniable proof that these are indeed real.

After reading last month’s Microsoft Surface installation horror story, it’s a nice surprise to see the Surface not taking itself too seriously during the setup process. Flickr user “mulmatsherm” captured these photos of the Surface when it was presumably just being initialized for the first time. The text on screen reads “I’m just a table right now – Check back later”. At least it’s honest.

Ninemsn, the Australian-subsidiary of MSN with an identity crisis, has come up with a pretty interesting and rather cute way of explaining Windows Live to the masses using liquid blobs morphing and connecting the different products and services on offer. In addition to the 30-seconds television commercial, there’s also a pretty casual and friendly mini-site drawing on the same blob mentality to explain more about the Windows Live offerings.

In a way, the blobs reminds me of the liquid-metal T-1000 Terminators, however unlike their humanity-annihilating counterparts, the Windows Live blobs are harmless, for now.

Microsoft’s Live Labs group may have scaled back and reorganized, but its ambitions are still strong if a job advertisement published today is any evidence of its new focus to commercialize its research into products within Microsoft.

Live Labs’ flagship project, Seadragon, which was recently ported to the iPhone now has its targets set on Windows 8, Windows Mobile 7 amongst other Microsoft platforms. The gossipy job advertisement reads,

Are you excited to work on technology that leapfrogs Microsoft products ahead of the competition? Are you ready to dive into a new technology that pushes the envelope to create new markets and products? Do you get stoked by the idea of working in a start-up atmosphere as part of a growing incubation team that bridges the gap between research and product?

The Seadragon team – http://livelabs.com/seadragon/ – is part of Microsoft Live Labs, and we’re creating innovative new content visualization technologies that are revolutionizing both web and client applications. The team has been busy shipping components to multiple Microsoft product teams and experiences externally. Not familiar with Seadragon? Maybe you’ve heard of Photosynth – http://photosynth.net/Default.aspx, that killer photo demo that maps photo collections onto 3d space; Photosynth is powered by Seadragon. How about Silverlight DeepZoom – http://livelabs.com/seadragon/silverlight/; that’s Seadragon technology under the hood! We’ve even done smooth zooming in Ajax via Seadragon Ajax – http://livelabs.com/seadragon-ajax/.

We are a very bottoms-up organization, comprised of passionate self-driven individuals who define our direction on a daily basis. We run the gamut from creative designers to low-level graphics developers. Our technology spans back-end server to CSS pages, managed to unmanaged, OpenGL to DirectX, Silverlight to Javascript. Heck, sometimes we even work on iPhone apps! We don’t limit ourselves by platform or language. If it’s the right tool for the job, we use it. If you are the type of creative individual who likes to lead and is passionate about creating great user and developer experiences, you may make a good match for the Seadragon team.

We’re currently seeking a Lead Developer who’s excited to make a huge impact on Microsoft by bringing Seadragon concepts and code to Microsoft products. We have already put Seadragon in Silverlight. Now we want to take it everywhere: Windows 8, Windows Mobile 7, WPF, XNA. You will be the one building and leading the team to accomplish this challenging task. Experience working as a lead or IC in one or more of these platforms is beneficial, but the ability to quickly ramp up and deliver features in any foreign codebase is crucial to success. IC skills of expert C and C++ are an absolute must, while managed interop experience is also great to have. API design skills and, in particular, the ability to collaborate with another team on how Seadragon technology can be properly exposed according to the native environment will be necessary attributes.

Experience in any of the following will serve you well in this position: .NET/C#, Silverlight, ASP.NET, SOAP/XML web services, Objective-C/Cocoa, Java/J2ME, Flash/ActionScript 3.0, HTML/CSS/JavaScript/JSON, TCP/HTTP networking, GDI+, DirectX, OpenGL, CoreGraphics/CoreImage, WPF/WIC.

If you’re a web developer like myself wanting to jump on the new Windows Mobile 6.5 web applications “widgets” bandwagon, then you can get a quick sneak peek at what to expect with a technical MSDN article titled “Developing Widgets for Windows Mobile 6.5” posted by accident a couple weeks ago and pulled soon after. With a little help from Google, one can now take an early look at how one develops for this platform.

From what the article describes, widgets are packaged into ZIP files with the file extension “.widget” and can be deployed from both the Windows Marketplace for Mobile and a local computer. This package which contains HTML, JS, CSS and image resources will then be installed to the device’s “Program files” directory.

One significant limitation of the widgets platform this article reveals which hasn’t been discussed before is the security model which is highly restrictive. Because the widgets run inside a chromeless Internet Explorer wrapper, it is confined inside the Internet Explorer Sandbox. The widget therefore cannot access contacts, messages, calendars, registry or the file system (besides the files in the widget package). To access other resources, a few protocols (mailto:, sms:, callto: and tele:) can be used to initiate some phone functionality. Network access too is disabled by default and each widget must request access when it is installed.

To compensate for the restrictions, Windows Mobile does make available a number of properties through a couple Javascript objects to reveal information such as display rotation, phone operator, roaming state, signal strength and battery status. Furthermore, widgets can take advantage of the soft-keys by attaching functionality on the left and right menus. A flexible localization system is also supported that enables widgets to not only be translated in the device’s language but display regional information (ex. stock market – US/Dow Jones, UK/FTSE).

Can’t wait to see what developers can do with the Windows Mobile 6.5 widgets platform.