Easton (The Quince Man Quincy) Royce

This is a post that should probably have been made a little earlier, but we’ve been rather busy cranking out new EasyBCD versions and working on some exciting new developments. We’ve had a lot of questions regarding EasyBCD‘s compatibility with Windows 8, and what our findings are regarding the new Windows “touch-enabled” bootloader screen. In this post, we’ll cover the new bootloader and what works and doesn’t with EasyBCD.

The New Windows 8 Bootloader

Literally the very first thing you notice when installing and testing Windows 8 Developer Preview is the new boot screen. I personally find it to be very cluttered and unorganized, and generally aesthetically unappealing. However, compared to the decades of text-based boot selection menus that people are accustomed to, reviewers are seeing this as a dramatic improvement.

Some of the interesting things we’ve noticed about the new Windows 8 bootloader:

1. The new look
2. Completely new process of loading an OS
3. Integration of repair tools into the bootloader itself

New Look

Hopefully the designers at Microsoft can get their hands on the new boot screen before Windows 8 goes RTM. That said, Microsoft has explained the rationale behind the redesign as being purely function over form – the new boot screen is part of the general overhaul of Windows to use the touch-friendly Metro UI. Microsoft is claiming that the new boot menu is intended to be a more touch-friendly interface – and you can’t really disagree with that, as the appallingly-oversized buttons and labels make it very hard to miss-click “miss-press” with one’s fingers. However, just how many people will be dual-booting on a PC with a touch-only input device, ummm, remains to be seen.

That out of the way, the new boot menu is more than just a visual overhaul, it’s virtually a complete rewrite of the BOOTMGR/BCD bootloader that was first revealed during the Windows Longhorn/Vista beta program. Some of the changes are a little subtle, but the Windows 8 DP builds have introduced some very tricky concepts, evolving the bootloader from just a selection menu to something rather more complicated.

New Boot Sequence

For reasons we have not yet been able to discover, though we are confident they will be revealed in time, Microsoft has chosen to completely change the manner in which operating systems are loaded once selected from the boot menu. The usual boot process that just about any bootloader goes through is something like this:

With Windows 8, this boot process has been changed completely, and now something more along these lines takes place:

It’s a subtle change as the boot menu is not shown the second time around, but the PC actually reboots after making the selection. We’re not clear on why Microsoft is doing this, but if I’d had to hazard a really wild guess, I’d say it’s to clean up the environment that’s been altered/modified/corrupted by the new boot menu. Basically, it seems that the new boot menu interface has become it’s own mini-OS, and is possibly running in protected mode (vs the traditional real-mode bootloader), and as such, needs to reboot to bring the system back into a real-mode that the Windows 8 kernel can initialize from and bring the system from real to protected mode itself. In short: the new boot menu is more of an OS and less of a boot menu than ever before.

Repair Tools Integration

If you were still in any doubt as to just how different the new bootloader was, and how much more of a complete and standalone OS it has turned into, you need look no further than the new repair tools integration. Windows Vista introduced the recovery center, a WinPE-based environment with some tools for both automated and manual repair, on the setup DVD, Windows 7 (in some SKUs and as of certain revisions) copied the recovery center image to the local hard drive and could, if the bootloader itself has not been wiped out, automatically provide an option of loading the recovery center from disk. With Windows 8, Microsoft has gone a step further, integrating the repair tools into the Windows 8 boot menu itself.

As you can see from the screenshots above, the bootloader no longer contains an entry/link to the repair center WIM image, the bootloader and the repair center have instead been merged together. Still, the same problem with the Windows 7 implementation remains: if the bootloader itself has been wiped (which is the most common problem), the recovery center cannot be accessed. In fact, we see no benefits for this implementation over the Windows 7 method, and can only see the drawbacks of enormously-increased complexity and longer load times.

EasyBCD and Windows 8 Developer Preview

Now for what you’ve all been asking: how does EasyBCD play with the Windows 8 Developer Preview? The short answer is, EasyBCD supports Windows 8 DP. The long answer is rather more complicated.

It seems that out-of-the-box, the Windows 8 “pretty” (and we use that word very loosely) boot screen supports only Vista and up. It will not show Windows XP, Linux, or other OS entries (in preparation for Secure Boot? Perhaps). EasyBCD can be installed on Windows 8 (though it will attempt to download the .NET Framework if you haven’t manually activated it, because Microsoft has done a 180 and biting the hand of the developers that powers it, has disabled .NET 1.0 – 3.5 compatibility out-of-the-box in Windows 8), and can be used to add, remove, rename, configure, and generally do whatever you want with entries and the Windows 8 boot menu.

The catch is that as soon as you use EasyBCD, Windows 8 will detect something along the lines of unsupported changes to the bootloader and cease to use the new boot menu / boot screen. It will revert to the Windows 7-style boot menu, including the text-based interface and the original boot sequence. Now, while we personally prefer the older menu, we realize that the majority of Windows 8 DP users are rather anxious to both keep the Windows 8 touch-enabled boot screen and retain usage of EasyBCD’s wonderful goodiness, having apparently never heard of the saying “you can’t have your cake and eat it too.” ;-)

Now we’re not sure how/why the Windows 8 boot menu reverts to the Windows 7 menu, because in fact, it is possible to force the Windows 8 boot menu to add unsupported entries if you use only very particular bcdedit commands; but as even something as minor and unimportant as changing the order of boot menu entries in EasyBCD causes Windows to use the old boot menu, it seems we’re missing something. Rest assured, this will all be taken care of in due time, though at the moment it seems rather folly to waste time trying to implement support for what is clearly the alpha stages of the new boot menu and the appropriate course of action would appear to be waiting for the next Windows 8 beta build (rumored to be sometime around February 2012).

EasyBCD, when used from within Windows XP – 7, can be used to add a Windows 8 entry to the bootloader in the same manner that you would a Windows Vista/7 entry. So, in short, EasyBCD supports Windows 8, but Windows 8 does not support EasyBCD :)

written by Easton Royce

Just a quick and friendly note to all our users: we’ve been working on the NeoSmart Technologies image gallery and have pushed out a number of updates that should make it both easier on the eyes and easier to navigate.

Some of the changes include nicer icons for all the albums (verses a mosaic of contents), links to full-size images on our extensive collection of tech-related wallpapers, fixing of overall alignment, and a few other cosmetic issues. If you have any suggestions, recommendations, or feedback, please do share because we’re (as always) all ears.

For lovers of beautiful backgrounds, we have two “new” collections to share: the official Windows 8 wallpapers to date, and the OS X Lion wallpapers bundle. We’ll be updating the Windows 8 backgrounds with each released build, so check back often! Some samples after the jump.

written by Easton Royce

Yesterday, Microsoft made available the first public beta of Windows 8. The developer preview can be downloaded on the Microsoft website, and has received plenty of media coverage and has been the subject of much scrutiny and review. However, in our testing of Windows 8 for compatibility with NeoSmart software and products, we came across a rather, shall we say, interesting approach that Internet Explorer 10 now takes to its crashes. With Windows 8, as with previous versions, when an application hangs or crashes, an error reporting dialog is displayed prompting the user to select an action to take with the crashed program.

What’s different with Windows 8 and Internet Explorer 10 is that Microsoft chooses to deflect the blame from itself, and pin it instead on the unfortunate owners of the website that the user had last visited. In the following screenshot, Internet Explorer 10 has crashed after being unable to handle some of the web scripting on our website. Except instead of the error dialog you would expect (something to the effect of “Internet Explorer has stopped responding,” an error caption which we are all familiar with and of which the web is full), the error dialog instead reads:

neosmart.net is not responding.

Come again? Really? To us, this seems like a rather mean and dishonest approach to dealing with the shortcomings of the web browser. While it is true that at this moment in time, Internet Explorer is more prone to crashes and hangs than it would be in the final (RTM) release of Windows 8, this does not in any way give Microsoft the right to assume that in the future any hangs or crashes in IE are to be blamed on the designers/coders of the website being visited.

In fact, no code even if purposely meant to crash the browser should succeed in doing so, and certainly should not be held to blame. If Microsoft cannot make a crash-proof browser, that does not mean that they should dishonestly deflect and redirect the blame towards and innocent third party.

written by Easton Royce

Almost four years ago, NeoSmart Technologies published a Windows Vista repair and recovery CD that could be used to treat common boot issues and recover from catastrophic system failure in case you didn’t have a Windows setup CD handy.

Over the years, we’ve added more recovery CDs to the collection, ending up with a complete portfolio of repair CDs for Windows Vista and Windows 7 in both 32- and 64-bit flavors. We’ve had the good fortune of being able to host these CDs on our site in one form or the other for free download to millions of users around the globe.

Three months ago, we were contacted by the legal department at Microsoft Corporation asking us to discontinue hosting these files. Until this point, we were not aware that Microsoft was displeased with our hosting of the CDs and in fact enjoyed a rather healthy relationship with the Microsoft support forums where victims of PC crashes would be directed to our site to download a copy of the repair CDs.

Since then, we have been in talks and negotiations with the Microsoft legal and licensing divisions, trying to work out a method whereby we could provide our users and visitors with access to these CDs once again. Today we’re excited to announce that these CDs are once more available for download!

There’s some mixed good and bad news, however. The good news is that all downloads will be direct HTTP links, so no need to learn how to use a torrent client or fiddle around with open network ports: just plain, standard, direct, and very fast HTTP downloads for all our ISO images. We’ve also taken this opportunity to update the repair CDs and add a virus scanner (powered by ClamWin) as well as some command-line tools and utilities that were missing from some of the images.

The bad news is that there will now be a nine dollar download charge for each CD. There was no way for us to avoid charging this, as we now pay a licensing fee to Microsoft in exchange for making these CDs available, and also pay per download to outsource the high-speed web hosting for these large CD images (150 to 200 MiB, each) to an outside service.

We look forward to updating these repair and recovery CDs over time and adding more tools and utilities to help you save your PCs from the brink of death. We thank you for your patience with us over the past few months during which the downloads were suspended, and truly appreciate your understanding of the situation.

Download Links

Windows Vista Recovery Discs (x86/x64)

Windows 7 Recovery Discs (x86/x64)

written by Easton Royce

Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 has been officially released for 3 months now (to the day), and to be pedantic, it has also been available in beta form since October 2008. Its bugs not withstanding, Visual Studio 2010 been a pretty successful hit. Besides the huge improvements to the .NET language and platform, big on the list of features for C++ developers is basic support for C++0x (the next standard version of C++, with lots of new & revolutionary features) and plenty of IDE enhancements. Intel’s C++ Compiler is the industry-standard with regards to performance and optimizations, still doesn’t support Visual Studio 2010 or C++0x.

As numerous postings on the Intel forums indicate, a plethora of users are in pressing need of an update to the Intel C++ Compiler. Questions on the matter are brushed-off, with short and rather-useless replies such as:

“This question has been discussed several times recently. The first such integration would come in a beta version of icc 12.0, which hasn’t yet been announced.”

No one has seen neither hair nor hide of Intel Compiler 12, not in private form or anything else. There is no information on the Intel site to even indicate that such a release is forthcoming. And until that time, developers will have to either resort to using the built-in MSVC++ compiler or hold off on migrating to Visual Studio 2010 and C++0x. Despite the information floating around on the net, the Intel C++ Compiler in its latest incarnation still does not support certain integral parts of C++0x such as r-value references (N2118) such that even if you were to attempt to manually compile your VS2010 project from the command-line by modifying the Intel compiler command-prompt to use the VC10 toolkit (as we’ve tried to do), you’ll find that it doesn’t even support the STL library headers that ship with VS2010. And linking to/against the VC9 headers results in DLL-hell with no way out.

The bottom-line of it all is that Intel still, almost a year after Microsoft made available development builds of VS2010 to corporate partners and TAP members, does not yet have anything that C++ Developers can use to build their solutions using features proposed and adopted for the next C++ standard years ago. And, perhaps even worse, there has been no corporate response to indicate when or even if such a possibility will happen. Intel’s customer support have been extremely vague on the matter of VS2010 support, have issued no official public statements on the matter, and are going out of their way to make their customers unhappy. Thank you, Intel. We really appreciate it.

written by Easton Royce

One of the biggest, bestest, and most-hyped features of Windows Vista (according to Microsoft, that is) was the brand spanking new TCP/IP networking stack. Ask us, it sucks. Network performance hasn’t improved any over the ancient stack used in XP (nor should it – it’s not like there’s anything new in IPv4) though it does add better IPv6 support out-of-the-box and ships with some even more functionality in Windows 7. But more importantly, Microsoft threw out decades of testing and quality assurance work on the existing Networking Stack and replaced it with something rather questionable.

We’ll be following up some more on this topic from a technical side later in another article, but for now, an example that most of you are sure to have come across if you’ve ever tried to map network drives before:

This popup is shown at system startup if you have any mapped network drives to UNC shares which are not protected with a username and password. If you map a network destination that does require authentication, Windows will map the drive OK. To further complicate matters: this message is shown only when you startup from a cold boot! If you restart your PC (vs shutdown and powerup), it won’t appear.

Resolving the issue is straight-forward enough: just double-click on the network drive in My Computer and it’ll automatically, instantly, and silently connect. Which makes one wonder why Windows couldn’t connect in the first place.

Good question.

While working an update to Genie Timeline, I ran across this issue. Windows wouldn’t connect a mapped network destination at startup for some of our customers, meaning that our backup couldn’t continue (assuming you’re backing up to the network drive) until you manually intervened and opened the mapped drive yourself. Definitely not cool.

As an in-house R&D test, we attempted to manually re-establish the connection via the command-line. By running

net use Z: \\remote\path\

we were able to re-establish the “disconnected” network drive. But when we tried to implement this in code, we came across a funny issue. If you try to run this very early on during the logon procedure, it will fail with error code ERROR_FILE_NOT_FOUND – basically, it’s unable to contact the network path. The funny thing is, explicitly testing to see if we can connect to the network path [GetFileAttributes(networkPath)] doesn’t return any error. But Windows itself is unable to establish a connection. Using ‘net’ from the commandline was just a workaround for R&D purposes, so we turned to the trusty old WNetAddConnection2 function – and it too failed with ERROR_FILE_NOT_FOUND even though the network path both definitely existed and was perfectly accessible as a UNC location!

Attempting either of these techniques to establish a mapped network drive connection later on – say 2 or 3 minutes after logon – works just fine. As does attempting to establish a connection to a UNC path that requires authentication. Or attempting to connect to the network drive after a restart and not a cold boot.

In the end, we resorted to calling WNetAddConnection2 at timed intervals after startup if the UNC path is accessible and the mapped network drive is not. It got the job done, but it really does speak volumes when developers have to run through hoops to address issues that have been out 2 OS releases and 5 years ago. We have no such problems with Windows XP.

written by Easton Royce \\ tags: Networking, Windows 7

A November 2009 post on the Visual C++ Team Blog by Raman Sharma delved into the improvements Visual Studio 2010 was purported to have made to the “Find All References” feature of Visual Studio. This feature is a must-have for any developer in almost any language. As a project grows in size and complexity, it becomes a real chore to remember and locate exactly where a particular variable was defined – which is something that’s quite useful to know.

According to the VC++ blog post, VS2010 now uses a “speed-mode” by default to locate these references. It’s a bit less accurate in that it generates a lot of false positives, searching by name rather than by usage, but that this reduced accuracy comes with greater speed. And the option remains to further filter out results by having the compiler and the intellisense databases resolve the actual results and determine whether or not they indeed reference the search term.

Except that’s the way it’s supposed to work. In truth, that’s not what happens:

1) Visual Studio 2010’s “Speed Mode” of Find All References is slower than it was in Visual Studio 2005.

2) Visual Studio 2010’s “Speed Mode” not only generates extraneous false positives, it also fails to show items that do match the search term.

On any project of considerable size, “Find All References” will cause a hang of the Visual Studio 2010 user interface for up to a minute as it does nothing more than plain-text search for the selected variable or function. It blocks the main user thread, it hangs the UI, and it takes forever. Much longer than Visual Studio 2005/2008 did with its more accurate compiler-based variable references search.

And as for point 2, the time-lapse screenshot below (to show both the selection, the menu, and the resulting dialog) should speak louder and clearer than a thousand words.

(Click the image for a full-size screenshot)

Unfortunately, Visual Studio 2010 seems to be exemplifying the ongoing trend at Microsoft of slowly giving less and less attention to C++ developers as they continue to push .NET (now at version 4.0 and growing strongly) at the cost of everything else… while still refusing to embrace the .NET platform for their own technologies, leaving their once-content developer-base fighting against their own IDEs for life.

This is the first of several posts about Visual Studio 2010, it’s advantages, and its shortcomings. We love Visual Studio and despite everything else, its still the best IDE out there and a damn good one at that. But some things just need to be said in hopes that they will be addressed at some point in the future.

written by Easton Royce

With Windows 7 released and currently making its way to shelves in time for the holiday season, we’ve taken this opportunity to upgrade our copy of the official Windows System Recovery Discs for compatibility with Windows 7.

If you’re like most PC users, you probably got Windows 7 with a new PC or laptop. And if you’re like 99% of the population, you get your new machines from one of the major manufacturers. Dell, Acer, HP, Toshiba, Lenovo; who all have one thing in common: they don’t give you a real Windows 7 installation disc with your purchase. Instead, they bundle what they call a “recovery disc” (that’s if you’re lucky – otherwise you’ll have a recovery partition instead) with your machine and leave it at that.

It doesn’t matter that you just paid a thousand dollars for a machine that comes with a valid Windows 7 license – your computer manufacturer just don’t want to spend the money (or perhaps take on the responsibility) of giving you a Windows 7 installation DVD to accompany your expensive purchase.

The problem is, with Windows 7, the installation media serves more than one purpose. It’s not just a way to get Windows installed, it’s also the only way of recovering a borked installation. The Windows 7 DVD has a complete “recovery center” that provides you with the option of recovering your system via automated recovery (searches for problems and attempts to fix them automatically), rolling-back to a system restore point, recovering a full PC backup, or accessing a command-line recovery console for advanced recovery purposes.

Thankfully, Microsoft seems to have realized this problem, and have thankfully made a recovery disc for this purpose. It contains the contents of the Windows 7 DVD’s “recovery center,” as we’ve come to refer to it. It cannot be used to install or reinstall Windows 7, and just serves as a Windows PE interface to recovering your PC. Technically, one could re-create this installation media with freely-downloadable media from Microsoft (namely the Microsoft WAIK kit, a multi-gigabyte download); but it’s damn-decent of Microsoft to make this available to Windows’ users who might not be capable of creating such a thing on their own. You can make your own copy from Windows 7 Ultimate Edition, but now you have an easier alternative.

NeoSmart Technologies is hosting a copy of the Windows 7 Recovery Disc for your convenience. It’s a 143 MiB download (165 MiB for the 64-bit version), and in the standard ISO format, ready to burned directly to a CD or DVD. Don’t wait until your PC crashes to download a copy! Download and burn your recovery disc today, so that when the time comes, you’ll be ready!

What it does: The Windows 7 Recovery Disc can be used to access a system recovery menu, giving you options of using System Restore, Complete PC Backup, automated system repair, and a command-line prompt for manual advanced recovery.

What it doesn’t do: You cannot use the Windows 7 Recovery Disc to re-install Windows – it only fixes (not replaces!) Windows.

Why you need it: If you bought your PC from a major retailer, you didn’t get this CD with your hefty purchase.

Download Links

Windows 7 Recovery Disc 32-Bit (x86) Edition

Windows 7 Recovery Disc 64-Bit (x64) Edition

Please note that the above links point to .torrent files. Torrent files are like a shortcut, they tell a download manager on your PC where to download the actual files from. Downloading large & important system files with torrents is highly recommended since torrents are protected against corrupt downloads and tend to be faster when well-shared.

(All torrents are currently being seeded by 100mpbs servers, they should be blazing fast).

You can download the Windows Vista recovery discs from here.

Instructions

1. Download the appropriate .torrent file from above that corresponds to the version of Windows 7 you have installed.
2. Download and run µTorrent.
3. Open the .torrent file you downloaded with µTorrent. (File -> Add Torrent)
4. Select where you want µTorrent to save the 7 Recovery Disc.
5. Wait for it to download.
6. Burn the .iso file that µTorrent downloaded to a CD using these instructions.
7. When you want to use the recovery center, put the CD in your drive and boot from it. This is usually done by pressing F8 at startup, or changing the boot drive order in the BIOS.

Support

Please don’t ask for help below, it’ll get real cluttered real soon! Open a support thread at http://neosmart.net/forums/ and we’ll help you resolve your problem ASAP.

written by Easton Royce

Kudos go to my girlfriend for sussing this one out.

Recently, we came across a conundrum concerning the computer game Sacred 2 running under Windows 7. Long story short, it just wouldn’t work. It should be noted that the reason for this not working, has nothing to do with Nvidia / ATI Graphics cards, but it is related to Physx/Ageia. Make sure you have the latest version of Physx installed. Sacred 2 does come with the last version of Physx known as Ageia Physx (before nvidia bought it and rebranded it to just Physx). You can also obtain the latest stand alone Physx package from the nvidia website. Even if you have an ATI graphics card, you still need to have this installed to play Sacred 2 and any other games that require Physx. So long as your CPU supports it and it is powerful enough, you’ll get CPU powered physics, instead of physics powered by your graphics card. Some people call this “Software Physics” or “Software” mode. I’ve noticed no performance difference between a computer playing Sacred 2 with an Nvidia graphics card and a computer with an ATI graphics card.

This fix should work for owners of Sacred 2 under Windows 7, regardless of the version you have (Steam, Impulse, Stand alone or whatever).

1. Create a shortcut to the Sacred 2 executable. You’ll find it in the game directory, in another directory called ‘system’. For me, it is: D:\Games\Steam\SteamApps\Common\Sacred 2\System\Sacred2.exe
2. Put the shortcut on your desktop, or somewhere handy.
3. Right click the shortcut and select properties
4. Click the Shortcut tab
5. In the Target field, you need to add the following: -skipopenal -nocpubinding. The contents of my Target field look like this: "D:\Games\Steam\SteamApps\common\sacred 2\system\sacred2.exe" -skipopenal -nocpubinding
6. Click Apply and Click OK.
7. Double click the shortcut and play Sacred 2!

Still can’t get it to work? Leave a comment and I’ll see what I can do to help you out. Further comments and suggestions are welcome. These are just simply the steps that worked for us. In case you are wondering, we are using the RTM (Release To Manfacture) version of Windows 7 (we are Microsoft Technet Partners). This is the same version that is available to consumers and end users as of mid October 2009.

written by Easton Royce \\ tags: Ageia, Computer, Game, Impulse, pc, Physx, Sacred 2, Steam, Windows 7

After going live just a little bit early, Silverlight 3 is now an official release. The third iteration of Microsoft’s rich internet application platform largely viewed as the chief competitor to Adobe Flash (but really an AIR rival) was officially launched this morning at a Microsoft event in San Francisco alongside Expression 3, the latest [...]

written by Easton Royce

Users attempting to upgrade from Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate Edition to Windows 7 Build 7100 (the unofficial RC1 release leak), are greeted with the following "compatibility warning" dialog:

Windows Vista Ultimate Edition’s "Ultimate Extras" have been a constant source of derision and anger from Vista users ever since its release 3 years ago. If the blog posts are to be believed, millions of users purchased Windows Vista Ultimate Edition in the hope that the added-value "Ultimate Extras" package – which was left un-described and of unknown worth at the time – would turn out to be a good investment.

Ultimate Extras are a couple of the minor Ultimate Edition exclusives that Microsoft used as a selling point to get users to purchase the most expensive version of Windows Vista. It was originally marketed as something similar to the ancient "Plus! for Windows" package that was quite popular back in the days of Windows 98; except it never really panned out that way.

Ultimate Extras was something of a hoax for the first couple of years, bringing nothing more than animated wallpaper and extra cards game to the table. Since then a couple of new themes/sounds have been added to the package along with a couple of other lame games – all of which made Vista users feel all the more "tricked" into purchasing a more expensive version of Windows that they, in all honesty, didn’t need.

Well, it looks like Windows 7 will be doing away with the Ultimate Extras though it’s anyone’s guess what the final SKU lineup will look like and what the selling points and feature-sets of each of the editions will stack up to. But here’s to hoping that Microsoft learns from (even more) of its mistakes and provides something of real worth with the more expensive editions of its latest OS offering.

written by Easton Royce

A recent article on OSNews highlights the changes expected to come in Google’s Chrome 2.0 for Windows and the progress being made on the Linux and OS X fronts for Google’s new browser.

In the article, Ben Goodger, lead Chrome UI developer, states

[Google avoids] cross platform UI toolkits because while they may offer what superficially appears to be a quick path to native looking UI on a variety of target platforms, once you go a bit deeper it turns out to be a bit more problematic.” [... Your applications end up] speaking with a foreign accent.

But there’s something we’re not getting here. Obviously given enough brilliant programmers and a good team lead to keep the different codebases in sync, going with native APIs is the better approach. But the reasons Goodger is offering aren’t very convincing.

The problem is…. Google’s Chrome for Windows doesn’t look native. In fact, it’s about as far from native Win32 as you can get. We had originally explained away the non-win32 looks by assuming it was because Google wanted an interface that was consistent across the different platforms and different at the same time from any of the operating systems native UI toolkits: in line with Google’s vision of turning the browser into an OS, regardless of the platform beneath.

A non-native UI that looks the same on Mac, Windows, and Linux would be the answer to such a browser OS. It would indicate that Chrome is its own product – from the codebase to the user experience – and that to the end user it shouldn’t matter what OS you’re on. And that in the future Google could ship a standalone (OS-free) browser that looks like Chrome and acts like Chrome, regardless of the platform beneath?

Otherwise there is no good explanation for the horrendously-different user interface that comes with Chrome. It requires learning the tips & tricks to a whole new UI, and forgetting a number of “niceties” you may have been accustomed to (such as pressing the ’spacebar’ to OK pop-up dialogs, etc.).

With the preliminary screenshots of Chrome for Mac, the platform Chrome runs on begins to peek through.

Does this mean that Google’s vision of Chrome as its own OS has come to pass – with Google now content to just launch a cross-platform browser without attempting to lull users away from the platforms they’ve come to love?

Whatever the case, it’s sure to be interesting watching and waiting to see what Google has planned for its users. Whether its a cross-platform browser experience that’s different enough to be the same across all platforms while retaining a feel of the platform or if it’s paving the way for the OS to come it’s quite obvious that the gears are now in motion and something big just might happen.

written by Easton Royce

NeoSmart Technologies’ gallery of Windows Vista wallpapers has been a huge hit over the past several years – despite what anyone might say about Vista itself, its collection of wallpapers and fonts is top-notch. And now it seems that Windows 7 isn’t going to be any different – from what we’ve seen, the wallpapers shipping with Windows 7 are pretty darn good.

The Official Windows 7 Wallpapers are now available for download from the NeoSmart Image Gallery. Only several wallpapers have been released accompanying various Windows 7 builds thus far, but we’ll keep adding new ones to the gallery as they’re shipped.

Here are some of our favorite new wallpapers:

You can see these and more at the gallery here, along with the old Windows Vista ones here and here.

We’re taking hundreds of screenshots of Windows 7 and its new features & components even as we’re posting this – keep your eyes peeled, they’ll be joining our extensive collection of Operating System screenshots in the same fashion as the Windows Vista screenshots were added: build-by-build with all the little details covered in true geek fashion.

written by Easton Royce

A couple of hours ago, the Google Security Team posted an article claiming that Google’s made the switch to OpenID, joining Yahoo! and Microsoft in the ranks OpenID providers.

But it looks like someone may have been a bit to hasty to pull that switch (perhaps itching to get some of the limelight Microsoft has been receiving for adding OpenID to all Live ID accounts just the day before yesterday)… because whatever it is that Google has released support for, it sure as hell isn’t OpenID, as they even so kindly point out in their OpenID developer documentation (that media outlets certainly won’t be reading):

1. The web application asks the end user to log in by offering a set of log-in options, including Google.
2. The user selects the "Sign in with Google" option.
3. The web application sends a "discovery" request to Google to get information on the Google authentication endpoint. This is a departure from the process outlined in OpenID 1.0. [Emphasis added]
4. Google returns an XRDS document, which contains endpoint address.
5. The web application sends a login authentication request to the Google endpoint address.
6. This action redirects the user to a Google Federated Login page.

As Google points out, this isn’t OpenID. This is something that Google cooked up that resembles OpenID masquerading as OpenID since that’s what people want to see – and that’s what Microsoft announced just the day before.

It’s not just a “departure” from OpenID, it’s a whole new standard.

With OpenID, the user memorizes a web URI, and provides it to the sites he or she would like to sign in to. The site then POSTs an OpenID request to that URI where the OpenID backend server proceeds to perform the requested authentication.

In Google’s version of the OpenID “standard,” users would enter their @gmail.com email addresses in the OpenID login box on OpenID-enabled sites, who would then detect that a Google email was entered. The server then requests permission from Google to use the OpenID standard in the first place by POSTing an XML document to Google’s “OpenID” servers. If Google decides it’ll accept the request from the server, it’ll return an XML document back to the site in question that contains a link to the actual OpenID URI for the email account in question.

This is shown quite clearly in the following image (courtesy of Google, ironically):

As you can see, steps 3 & 4 are not part of OpenID and leave Google’s implementation of OpenID, such as it is, incompatible with everyone else.

Google actually mentions this in passing:

Starting today, we are providing limited access to an API for an OpenID identity provider that is based on the user experience research of the OpenID community. Websites can now allow Google Account users to login to their website by using the OpenID protocol. We hope the continued evolution of both the technical features of OpenID, as well as the improvements in user experience. will lead to a solution that can be widely deployed for federated login. One of the companies using this new service is www.zoho.com.

Eric Sachs, author of the blog post in question, doesn’t actually come out and say, but he does come very close.

Basically, Google has rewritten OpenID. Not only is it not exactly the same as the current OpenID protocol, it’s so different that existing OpenID relying parties won’t be able to use it. Only a handful of “partner sites” have been updated to understand Google’s perverted version of the OpenID standard, and anyone else hoping to authenticate via “OpenID” to Google’s servers will need to do the same.

But OpenID is an open, community-based standard. Stabbing them in the back by creating an incompatible standard “based on” the same technology and masquerading under the same name isn’t the way to go. Google may have the best interests of decentralized authentication in mind, and perhaps even the better protocol to boot; but this is no way to prove a point.

OpenID is on tenterhooks as it is, and cannot withstand any more efforts to splinter its adoption. Never mind the fact that almost all the big names adopting OpenID are joining only as providers and not as relying parties (rendering the whole basis of OpenID useless) – now even the provider side of things is chaos.

Thanks, Google. Good to see you’re still doing the whole “Do no evil” thing, the community really appreciates this kind of approach to improving de facto standards and pushing decentralized authentication!

written by Easton Royce

For the past decade-and-a-half, “Windows” has been synonymous with “PC Gaming” – after all, no other PC platform has managed to satiate the undying hunger gamers are quite famous for. But now it seems that Windows is on the verge of losing its distinction as the gaming platform of choice – with nothing but Microsoft’s own machinations to blame.

Despite PC users’ widely-varying taste and preference in operating systems and platforms, gamers need Windows. In fact, one of the biggest reason people around the globe tend to dual-boot is their undying love for gaming and the fact that no other OS out there can boast the wide range of gaming titles and genres available for their platform like Windows can. The traditional choice faced by most non-Windows users has been to either install and dual-boot Windows or bite the built and buy a gaming console – ask us, we would know.

But this is all about to change, thanks to Microsoft’s reckless abandon for one of its few truly-loyal userbases.

When Microsoft first began its frenzied Vista marketing campaign in 2006, one of the points it focused on most and repeated over and over again was just how big of a gaming revolution Windows Vista was. Gaming was a large part of the Vista WOW campaign, but it has since failed to disappoint. But this isn’t an article about Vista, it’s about how Windows is poised to lose its gaming advantage if Microsoft doesn’t get its act together sometime soon.

The problem is that Windows – standalone or in a dual-boot – is quickly becoming the lesser-appealing option when compared to a gaming console… in large part thanks to Microsoft’s ridiculous, biased, and fairly infuriating decisions to release games for Xbox and then for PC.

A major part of the gaming/entertainment Vista PR that went out around the same time as the OS: Microsoft Announces Spectacular Windows Vista Title Lineup. Spectacular? Hardly so. Take a look at the Microsoft Game Studios release history for 2006 and 2007, you’ll find a great disparity between the number of titles MGS released for Windows verses those for the Xbox (360)…

If you ignore expansion packs (the Zoo Tycoon development team seems to love these), you’ll find that Microsoft Game Studios released a total of nineteen titles for the Xbox over these two years, compared to a mind-blowing six titles for the PC over that same period – half of which were either available on the Xbox simultaneously or years before!

But what does Microsoft have to say about the obvious deterioration of the Windows gaming market?

The Windows gaming world continues to evolve, and we believe in the future of that property.

-Shane Kim, Microsoft’s Vice President of Interactive Entertainment

Sorry Mr. Kim, but we find that a bit hard to believe. Mr. Kim’s statement came in response to the recent (shocking) news that Microsoft’s (PC game development) Ensemble Studios – authors of Microsoft’s Age of Empires claim-to-fame hit series – would be shut down for "fiscal reasons."

Obviously Microsoft is in a hard place here, needing to cater to both of the (competing) PC and gaming console markets at the same time. However, due to the serious 3rd-party hardware/platform competition in the gaming console market it seems that Microsoft’s decision has been to give Xbox the priority here.

It’s obviously not Microsoft’s job to develop games for its own platform – technically, all they have to do for either the PC or the Xbox is develop the APIs and provide 3rd party gaming developers with the tools and support they need to make it work. And 3rd party developers have not let anyone down, with astonishing numbers of titles being published for both platforms.

But if Microsoft wants to ensure that its platform retains its current hold on the PC gaming market they’re going to need to do a bit more to convince potential Windows gamers to stick to their platform and not go out and get a gaming console instead. It’s quite a logical choice to focus on Windows here – there are literally millions of Windows users who would be using something else if it wasn’t for Windows’ vice-like grip on the gaming market.

The fact is, PC gamers and console gamers aren’t the same market targets. It won’t kill Microsoft’s Xbox division to treat their Windows gamers with a little bit more respect than they’re currently doing – if not for the users’ sake then for their own.

But no matter what Microsoft Game Studios does or doesn’t do, it can’t actually damage the Windows gaming platform – all it does is create a scenario wherein another OS can work hard and potentially overtake Windows at its own game (pun intended!).

Mac OS and Linux both have a rare opportunity on the horizon – but for it to have any impact on the current PC gaming sector’s dynamics, they’ll have to put a bit more effort into the gaming scene than they’re currently doing. Something that requires this sort of centralized coordination is definitely not one of Linux’s strong suites, so the ball is now squarely in Apple’s playing field, and it’s up to them what they do with it.

Basically, Microsoft needs to watch its step. The incentives for PC gaming are at their lowest levels in years with even real-time strategy games – the PC’s long-standing forte – being developed first for the gaming consoles and then, possibly, for the PC (yes, we’re looking at you, Halo Wars!).

And then there’s Bungie – cross-platform game developers bought up by Microsoft years ago, authors of the internationally-acclaimed “Halo” series, and now released from Microsoft’s reigns with its sights set squarely on developing games for the Mac once more.

At the end of the day, Microsoft’s size is getting the better of itself once more; with its own divisions failing to compete with themselves they way they should. Microsoft needs to pick up on this slow degradation of PC gaming satisfaction and do something to buck the trend, or else they could suffer some serious consequences.

written by Easton Royce

InfoWorld has an article out today wherein Randall Kenney of the “Windows Sentinel” team (a program used to monitor system settings and performance to provide aggregate data for analysis) trashes end-user uptake of Windows Vista by revealing that 35% of surveyed PCs that ship with Vista have downgraded to Windows XP.

While that’s a stunning number of Vista-only OEM machines running Windows XP, Mr. Kenney seems to have forgotten about those of us that dual-boot. As champions of dual-booters everywhere, we’ve got to put our two cents in here.

If you keep in mind the type of people who would install the Windows Sentinel tool and take part in such a geeky program you’ll realize that it’s not too out there for a good number of these people to be the kind that run multiple operating systems on their machines.

Obviously not all of Windows Sentinel’s (only) three thousand subscribers are included in the numbers above (it’s highly unlikely that even 80% of the 3000 subscribers are using hardware that only comes from the OEM with Windows Vista installed). And of the percentage that are using late-model hardware, a hefty percentage dual-boot.

We don’t have any numbers as far as the number of dual-booters out there, but they’re certainly not few enough to be discounted. Keeping that in mind, it’s rather unprofessional of InfoWorld to claim that 35% of all Vista users will downgrade to Windows XP. Obviously big numbers make for better headlines, but this is the kind of stuff that can damage stocks and ruin jobs – you don’t want that on your conscious, at least, not without good reason.

Not that we’re suffering from any delusions or hallucinations with regards to Windows Vista’s relatively shoddy performance and stability, but you’ll agree that it’s a rather far cry to go from “a lot of people have reservations about upgrading to Windows Vista” to “a lot of people will take the time and effort to remove Vista from a PC and put Windows XP in its stead;” especially keeping in mind that Vista’s been out for two years now and there’s an (unfortunately) increasingly-large number of Vista-only products out there on the market.

More data from InfoWorld and the Windows Sentinel service would certainly be most-welcome in giving a clearer picture of what the actual numbers are and where end-users stand in this OS mess.

written by Easton Royce