Dooba.net

Anyone out there heard about the new Zune HD? You might hear about it a lot more soon. I wrote about this a while back when there was less info, just an announcement really. But now we have videos and reviews. I have to say it looks impressive so far. And finally something that LOOKS just as good as an Apple product too.

The screen looks great, and this has the new nvidia tegra chipset, so the graphics should be excellent.

Sure it plays music, has an HD radio tuner, video, and all that… but I secretly hope this is just the beginning of the Zune take over of the world. I’m serious. What if they added a UMTS modem? Instant cell phone…. And the Zune OS looks a whole heck of a lot better than the upcoming release of WinMobile…

Ok, and here is the other killer things for Zune (phone or otherwise). Apps. Lets look at programming on Apple vs Microsoft platforms. (For the sake of this exercise, I’m ignoring shell scripts or C++ command line app, etc). For GUI programming and GUI apps you have XCode vs .NET.. and then you have Java on both sides. But Java GUIs are worse than other of the other options, so we can ignore that too. I’ve coded on both sides and I have to say .NET is the easiest development system I’ve ever used, by far. VisualStudio is epic for debugging and development.

So.. Zune goes all app store on us… and you get to use .NET mobile to develop the apps. This would explode overnight. EVERYONE knows C# or VB… but to break into the Apple app store you have to figure out XCode’s development methodology and Obj-C. That sucks. No one uses Obj-C except Apple and I really just don’t like it.

This would be better than Android as well. I’m a big fan of Google and what they are doing with Android, but the SDK is still a bit rough, and the GUI design is no were near as good as what a Microsoft tool would bring.

And the HD has an nvidia chip set. What if we got some mobile version of DirectX? Think about the gaming potential of that too?

So that is my wild dream.. a Zune Phone with a .NET dev tool and an app store… Do it MS… DO IT.

Like many people I use Outlook at work for mail and calendaring. However Android doesn’t yet have a free solution for checking mail, and other non-smart phones may not either. I can use the webmail interface, but its not convenient to check that all the time. Also, I have a pager at work for times and places that I can’t have my phone with me, it would be nice to get notifications and email alerts on my pager. Luckily Outlook has some nice macro features to solve this. I setup a macro to send a page with the From and Subject lines from the mail on receipt. This can also be extended to send a txt message to your phone with the same info, or hook the meeting reminders and forward those as well.

Simply go to Tools -> Macro -> Visual Basic Editor and click on “TheOutlookSession” in the project pane. Add this code:

Sub PageMe(MyMail as MailItem)
    Dim strID as String
    Dim olNS as Outlook.NameSpace
    Dim msg as Outlook.MailItem
    Dim rply as Outlook.MailItem

    strID = MyMail.EntryID
    Set olNS = Application.GetNamespace("MAPI")
    Set msg = olNS.GetItemFromID(strID)

    Set rply = Application.CreateItem(olMailItem)
    rply.Body = "New mail from: " + msg.SenderName + " Subj: " + msg.Subject
    rply.To = "youremail@here.com"
    rply.Send
    Set msg = Nothing
    Set rply = Nothing
    Set olNS = Nothing
End Sub