Josh Bancroft’s TinyScreenfuls.com

Windows Vista Command Line RSS Reader
Originally uploaded by JoshB.

Here’s some more sample code from Amar Ghandi that will walk the Vista RSS store of subscribed feeds, and display the title of the feed, and the title of any items within that feed. Perfect for RSS lovers who never want to leave the command line environment!

Seriously, though, this code shows how easy it will be for any application to access the centralized RSS store in Windows Vista.

How IE7 Presents Extended RSS
Originally uploaded by JoshB.

At Gnomdex 5.0, and again here at PDC, Microsoft showed off some extensions to the RSS namespace to handle other types of data than reverse chronological order posts. LIsts and Calendar items were the two examples given.

Here, we see how IE7 generates a page for an RSS feed with extended calendar item information in it. You can see the ability to wordwheel search, sort by Speaker, Date, or Title, and filter by session type. This page was dynamically generated based on the contents of the feed. Pretty impressive stuff, with far reaching implications.

Samsung i730 and HTC Universal
Originally uploaded by JoshB.

Derek, who was on the “Future of Windows Mobile Hardware” panel, was kind enough to show off his Samsung i730 with speedy Verizon EVDO, and let me snap a picture with my new HTC Universal/i-mate JASJAR.

Thanks, Derek!

I’m not anywhere near done blogging about PDC05, but after getting home last night, I needed a bit of rest. I’ve got lots of stuff I want to write about, and hundreds of photos to sort through and share. So keep an eye out. The “Future of RSS” panel, “Future Mobile Device Hardware”, the ultimate PDC swag, and lots of other stuff. I just need to recuperate a bit first. That, and my girls (Rachel and our daughter Emma) are coming home in a few hours (they went to Eugene while I was in L.A.). I haven’t seen them for a week, and I miss them terribly. Can’t wait for them to be home!

Technorati tags: PDC05

Attended a very interesting session today - Extending MSN Virtual Earth to Windows Mobile devices. Steve Lombardi of the MSN VE team presented some of the cool things that people are doing with the Virtual Earth control, and demoed the Pocket Earth application for Windows Mobile devices. I’ve been playing with it, and it works pretty well, even over GPRS (which at times is more reliable/faster than the WiFi here at the conference).

Dr. Neil, the keeper of ViaVirtualEarth.com, was there, too. He and I chatted a bit at the Universal Studios party last night, and I promised him I’d talk about Pocket Earth here. Well, here it is. You can get the .cab file (source coming soon!) in the Gallery at ViaVirtualEarth.

The link to the PocketEarth.cab file was broken today, so Dr. Neil fixed it by borrowing my SD card, and re-uploading the copy that I happened to have left over from installing (Windows Mobile 5 doesn’t delete .CAB files after installing them! Woo!). I was happy to be able to help, but alas, I have the older version that doesn’t include caching of the tile map images. Steve demoed the newer version, and promises that it will be available soon.

There’s also a Virtual Earth development contest going on. The first 25 entrants get a copy of MS Streets and Trips 2006 with GPS, and the winner of the contest gets a thousand bucks. I’ve got some ideas for making a Pocket IE-compatible version of the Virtual Earth site, based on some of what was in today’s session.

Other notes: Steve promises that Pocket Streets 2006, which should be available after the beginning of the year, will “blow [our] doors off”. He’s not allowed to talk about any specific features, but I could tell he was excited about it, and that makes me excited, too.