James Senior has taken the concept of “embrace and extend” and applied it to Windows Vista screencasts. His current life ambition is to beat me on Live Search for “Vista Screencasts”. So I thought I should help him along. He has done to-date 8 screencasts looking at various specialized features of Vista, much more in-depth than your average overview videos. And some of them are in the series called “3 Minute View on Vista”, which gives you all you need to know about a feature, in a feature-full 3 minute long presentation. They’re worth checking out, and so is James’ blog.

Remember that cool health application from PDC a few years ago? Well, it’s back and James has it covered in the “next generation applications”.

Update: You can also win some funky looking Vista-themed lanyard to earn all sorts of brownie points around the office, school or home.

And you thought magazines were dead. Think again, and think really really hard. If our most beloved print media disappears, what will we read in the bathroom? Bet you’ve never considered that. Now moving right along.

The very kind magazine editor Paul Douglas from Future publishings has made available 5 copies of their soon-to-be-released Windows Vista Preview Magazine, the officially Microsoft-endorsed magazine for Windows Vista, to be given away right here. I will also be writing for this very magazine in the near future, and I’ve been in regular contact with the wonderful team at Future contributing many silly ideas and useless feedback. So if this magazine flops, you know who screwed up.

The Windows Vista Preview magazine is slated for released on November 1st, and features 164-pages of previews about the most delayed operating system in history. It also comes with a hands-on interactive DVD which allows viewers to explore the look and feel of Vista without installations. It also has a collector’s cover inside and a cool embossed Vista orb logo on the front. The inside looks pretty cool too.

Expect to find guides on nine key features in Windows Vista, from music to security. There’s also an aid to picking the most appropriate edition out of the 5 available, a concept many “Vista Ultimate is too expensive M$ sucks ROFLMAO!!!oneone1”-people don’t get.

If you can’t wait for the magazine, then I recommend you check out the magazine’s blog, where contributor Jon Hicks always puts up a few neat Vista tips and tricks. You can also subscribe and feel good about yourself.

Enter the giveaway to win 1 of 5 copies of the official Windows Vista Preview magazine
Competition closes Friday 3rd of November, 2006. Open to residents of any country with a postal service.
This is a random prizedraw, the quality of your response will not be judged.

If you happen to crash-land and lose a wing, the solution is to huddle with any other wing-less moths and fly together towards the light. Another smart idea brought to you by the Zune.

Music: So Many Ways by Mates of State

One of the best blogs at Microsoft has just gotten better. The official Windows Vista team blog has just updated their blogging software and design to a brand new Vista-inspired look-and-feel.

Using the latest version of Community Server (version 2.1), an ASP.NET powered community solution, the blog now includes a gallery and ability to integrate multimedia content. Previously the blog was powered by the generic TechNet blogging engine, which has several limitations as many Microsoft bloggers have pointed out. The new Vista blog runs on its own domain and presumably server. The blog design has also been updated from a generic TechNet blogs template to a Vista-Bliss inspired theme with enough transparency to make Aero Glass look amateurish. Surprisingly, the design works almost flawlessly between Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 2, something most Vista-related resources designed by Microsoft can’t do.

It is interesting to note that the new design portrays a darker theme with a white-text-on-black approach. Perhaps a sign of times changing, it was first the Windows Vista website turning dark, followed by the black taskbar, black Sidebar and now a dark blog. Perhaps Microsoft is attempting to appeal to the Gothic community.

It was no other than Windows Vista’s godfather Jim Allchin who announced the new Vista blog. An unexpected but not surprising approach as Jim has been working extremely close with the Vista enthusiast community, frequently communicating directly to key community leaders. Something that most other Co-Presidents or company executives can’t get their head around. It’s a shame that Jim doesn’t have his own blog.

Nick White has done a terrific job up-till-now aggregating and writing the best and most official Windows Vista news and resource. It could only get better, and it already has.

File this under “silly bugs-by-design recognized by Microsoft but can’t do anything about but ruin a great user-experience” (see footnote), and also, “very useful Windows Vista tips from Long Zheng”. The latter being most important. This guide will show you the best way to stretch and apply wallpapers in Windows Vista whilst maintaining the best quality possible.

The problem

As many of you may have stumbled across this problem when trying to set your favorite Pokemon pictures as wallpapers, Windows Vista has a critical design flaw that prohibits wallpapers from being interpolated when stretched to the appropriate screen resolution. Take a look at this visual comparisons to see what I mean:

The jagged curved edge is caused by a lack of image interpolation. Without doing into too much detail, image interpolation is a mathematical method of upscaling images when the ratio is not dividable by 2. This is a problem because you are trying to scale for example 1 pixel into 1.3 pixels. Technically that is impossible, but with image interpolation, you could ‘mix’ pixels to create a perception of smooth gradual transitions between two pixels. Here is the above example in greater detail:

In Windows Vista, for some silly reason, the desktop control panel does not perform image interpolation correctly on JPEG images. Therefore, when you apply a wallpaper not exactly the same size as your screen resolution, the end result can be awful. But however, bitmap (BMP) images ARE properly interpolated from the control panel. Go figure that one.

The mind-blowingly simple solution

Quite simply, use the “Set as Desktop Background” function when you right-click images.

The “Set as Desktop Background” function utilizes the PIX engine, which powers the Windows Photo Gallery application. PIX supports image interpolation, and applies it correctly to images when you set as a wallpaper. As a side note: it’s unsure why the Windows Photo Gallery itself doesn’t use image interpolation on photos when zooming in pictures, but add that to the list of strange behaviors by-design at Microsoft.

An insider tell me this is a recognized problem even by the Microsoft designers themselves, but unable to fix because of the legal and legacy issues surrounding it. But at least you now know, the right and best way to apply desktop backgrounds in Windows Vista. But don’t tell your friends, let them suffer.

In addition: At least Vista maintains image aspect-ratio when rescaling to wallpapers, a concept XP never understood. So it’s not that much of a step backwards.

Update: Microsoft reads. Microsoft listens. Microsoft fixes. All in a day’s work.

“Next Week in Tech” is going to be a new weekly pictorial feature speculating on the hottest technology headlines, next week. This first edition has been produced with the helping hand of Ed Bott. Images credit Microsoft and Engadget.

The name Next Week in Tech comes from my favourite technology podcast, This Week in Tech by Leo Laporte.

Microsoft Annual Report 2006 says,

Catastrophic events may disrupt our business…A catastrophic event that results in the destruction or disruption of any of our critical business or information technology systems could severely affect our ability to conduct normal business operations and, as a result, our future operating results could be adversely affected.