WebSlices, meet desktop. Desktop, meet the web. Sean Lyndersay, ironically a former Microsoft IE developer (now Live Search), has developed a rather ingenuous solution to display WebSlices on the desktop using a very simple Sidebar gadget he calls the “WebSlice Viewer Gadget“. It’s still in alpha so it’s all Microsoft’s fault if it breaks.

In a nutshell, because WebSlices are actually stored as feeds inside the native Windows RSS platform, desktop applications including Sidebar gadgets can very simply fetch and display the data without much hassle. In this case, it couldn’t be any simpler to pick the WebSlice you want to display in the gadget, and have it appear in a simple frame on the desktop.

I think many people underestimated the potential of WebSlices by implying it was redundant in IE8 because you could just as easily load the full page which is true inside a browser, I think this gadget outside of the browser is a much better example of demonstrating where “subscribing” to a portion of content on the web is extremely convenient and powerful.

Also as opposed to RSS where you’re subscribing to new content, WebSlices focuses on updates to existing content, for example an eBay auction which would never have worked in RSS.

I only wish the Internet Explorer team had integrated the gadget in the first place, much like what OSX 10.5 Leopard did with “Web Clips”. Credit where credit is due – Apple’s implementation is actually far superior because users themselves define the portion of the webpage they want to clip, not rely on the discretion of the web developer. That way they can subscribe to anything and everything. Someone outside of eBay and Facebook will implement WebSlices, right?

Trust the open-source lovin’ contributors at Wikipedia to be early adopters of Microsoft web technologies. Beginning just a couple of days ago, Wikipedia user “Soum Yasch” began building Wiki templates to support the new content-subscription feature in Internet Explorer 8 called WebSlices which allow you to save and retrieve snippets of information from web pages without loading the whole page.

So far the template is only implemented on the “Acid3” Wiki. On this page it allows users to save a WebSlice of a table which records the web standards test result of different layout engines. As a result, you can then just bring up this table by clicking on the toolbar. As a built-in feature of WebSlices, if the content is ever updated, it will also be highlighted in the toolbar.

Obviously the implementation is a little rough at the moment – the toolbar pop-out is not styled at all and cuts off at the bottom, but it’s a great start to build more adoption for WebSlices and what better place to start than the world’s most popular encyclopedia.

Has anyone seen any implementations WebSlices beyond those originally demoed by eBay, Facebook and MSN?

Speking of which if you’re a Firefox user, you can get in on some of the WebSlices action too with the extension “Webchunks” which emulates the same function. “Anything you can do, I can do better.”

What does Microsoft and Hello Kitty have in common? They both have products packaged in hot pink. As a special promotion for the Japanese market, an upgrade version of Windows Vista Home Premium is bundled with a year’s subscription of Windows Live OneCare and a copy of a Vista tips and tricks book. If that deal isn’t sweet enough, then you better know it comes in a pink box with little flower petals plastered all over. Imagine checking out of the electronic store with a copy of Crysis in one hand, and this in the other.

Photograph credit and copyright Robert Clarke

All-in-one security protection for children in public spaces since 2005.

Out of all the stock photographs of self-confident system administrators with their arms crossed standing unworried between rows of servers, what are the chances two competing products pick the same one. Well at least Citrix knows how to take care of her. How could Microsoft be so careless as to remove bits of her head and arm. You can tell by her smile she can’t get enough of this virtualization stuff.

During the betas, one of the few new functionality Windows Vista Service Pack 1 added was the ability to create a Windows recovery CD with an easy-to-use GUI interface. Up and until then, it was slightly harder but still possible to do so through a command line. Update: To avoid confusion, this is not the type of recovery discs you find in prepackaged computer systems. This recovery disc does not reinstall Windows, it merely offers tools to fix it if it ever becomes unbootable.

Whilst all Vista install DVDs include the recovery functionality natively, it’s probably useful to burn yourself a spare copy to take with you. You can also download an ISO from NeoSmart.net but you might not have bandwidth to spare.

For unknown reasons, the functionality was then pulled out of the final release of SP1. If you look inside your system files, you can still find recdisc.exe which is the utility’s executable, but clicking on it does not launch anything. The shortcut in the Start Menu was also removed, indicating it was removed on purpose.

Out of curiosity, I decided to find out if by copying a version of recdisc.exe from a beta build of Vista SP1 and placing it in SP1 RTM would work. Thanks to Chris123NT for digging up a copy, it did work. If you also want to make it work, there’s a bit of file permissions involved, so here’s how.

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