Microsoft enhances Windows Live Services

Microsoft has been sprucing its Live.com services lately, though things are yet a little patchy and at times they simply won't work!

I saw a nice feature in Live Mail today. If you get a .mp3/.wma file as an attachment, you can directly play the file from your inbox. Live Mail shows a play-pause-volume toolbar in the message. I don't know if it works for other media formats as well.

I just wish they could make the actions a bit faster. Switching views (like moving from Inbox to Sent to Folders) is much slower than GMail or Yahoo! Mail.And why was it showing a mail from IRCTC.co.in as phishing attempt? That message didn't even ask me to login anywhere!

If you are using Live.com, then you can select many more gadgets which are available in Live Gallery. Microsoft seems to be positioning Live as a one stop shop for all the users of MSN Space, Live.com and Vista users who have got Sidebar on their desktops. However the number of gadgets is still much lesser as compared to Google's collection.

And perhaps you can also share your feed collection on Gallery. But I have not been able to do this. Each time I try to publish my setting Gallery shows an error!

Read in Economic Times that MS is increasing the Google War Chest! God help them.

Comments

How I converted a table in an email to a graph on a website? Hint: Azure Functions and Logic App

This mini-project started as a necessity. I get an email like this everyday, which gives daily numbers for different metrics. The problem with such an email is that it is difficult to keep track of or gauge the rate of growth of these metrics. If you want to know how what the previous day's numbers were you need to go to the previous day's email. The better option any day is to have a graph that shows the values of the metrics every day. Something like this: With this goal I set out to make this system but with as less coding and expenses as possible. First obvious step in the process was to get hold of the email and extract its text. The easiest way to do this is to use Azure Logic App. Here is what my logic app looks like: When any new email arrives in my Outlook 365 account, with a subject that contains "System usage Stats as on", it passes the body of the email to an Azure function named 'EmailTextCleanerFunction' (code below), whose job is to clean an...

Changing Eclipse Workspace Directory

Recently I moved my entire Eclipse installation directory but the workspace was still getting created in the older location only. And worst there was no option to select the Workspace directory in the Window->Options->Workspace menu. To change the workspace location in Eclipse do this. Goto ECLIPSE_HOME\configuration\.settings directory, edit the org.eclipse.ui.ide.prefs file and change the RECENT_WORKSPACES value to the desired location. If you want that Eclipse prompts you to select workspace when you start it, change the SHOW_WORKSPACE_SELECTION_DIALOG value to true. And you are done!

Hands on review: Yahoo! Mail app for Windows 8

Before you start mocking me for using Yahoo! Mail, let me explain that this is NOT my primary mail account and I use Gmail and Outlook.com for my daily use. Yes, this Yahoo! account was once my daily haunt but that was during college days and those days are long gone. I don't use Yahoo! Mail much but still there are some group subscriptions and I just log in once in a while to see what's happening in those forgotten groups. And due to this reason, I have always kept track of changes in Yahoo! Mail and the fact is that you can blame them for everything but not really lack of trying. Though most of those tries just ended up cluttering the UI and adding somewhat needless features. However, now we hear that new CEO Marissa Mayer is focusing once again on the mail and first major product to come out is Yahoo! Mail app for Windows 8. So how is it? The Login screen is pretty neat and purple background with an envelope watermark is very pleasing, very Yahoo!. However why ...

Running Commentary

Search This Blog