Farewell, IE7

I upgraded my home and office PCs to IE7 in late October. It’s a fine browser; I intend to keep it on my office PC. At about the same time, my wife and I bought a Dream’eo Enza Portable Media Center for our anniversary. My desktop at home runs Windows Media Center Edition, which communicates with a Linksys Media Center Extender in our living room. Unfortunately, that particular combination of devices does not play well with IE7.

You see, Windows Media Player won’t sync album art to the portable device unless the images are embedded in the individual files (or possibly if you let Windows Media Player automatically update all the album info, but I don’t trust it enough to try that). So I dutifully went through my music collection and embedded album art in all the tracks (using MediaMonkey, which I recommend highly). The portable device now displays the album art beautifully.

But now Windows MCE displays a black square where the currently-playing album’s cover should appear! This is apparently a well-known issue: MCE + IE7 displays album art just fine, unless it’s embedded in the music file.

So my choices were:

• Keep IE7 and embed the album art, so that it appears on the portable device but not in MCE;
• Keep IE7 and delete the embedded art, so that it appears in MCE but not on the portable device; or,
• Uninstall IE7, so that album art works correctly everywhere.

Sorry, IE7, you’re not that good. Farewell from my home PC until you work correctly with MCE and embedded album art.

UPDATE: Windows Media Player’s refusal to sync non-embedded album art to the Dream’eo Enza may be a problem with the device. If so, I apologize for impugning WMP. Nevertheless, my options remain the same.

Also, this comment claims that one can get IE7 to play well with Windows Media Player simply by allowing WMP as an add-on on IE7’s Manage Add-ons menu. Anyone with IE7 and MCE 2005 care to try this and let us know?

  9 Dec 06 10:14 PM · Comments (2) · Tags: Tech, Windows

My Calendar Wish List

Between the recent demise of Kiko and Scoble’s rants about Google Calendar, online calendars are a hot topic. I don’t use an online calendar because I have yet to find one that does what I want. Here’s my scenario:

• I use Outlook with Exchange with work
• I use Outlook without Exchange at home
• I carry a Palm PDA on which I want to see both work and personal items

I don’t know of any way to sync my Palm with Outlook on two different PCs, so I must currently enter appointments and tasks in Outlook and on my Palm.

I’d love an application that lets me enter all my appointments and tasks in one place, then syncs my work-related items with Outlook at work, my personal items with Outlook at home, and a combination of items with my Palm. Attention Web 2.0 companies: I would happily pay a monthly fee for such a service!

I had high hopes for AirSet, and it’s close. But I don’t see any way to sync personal items with Outlook and both personal and work items with my Palm.

Am I the only one who wants this? Do you know of an app that supports this scenario?

 21 Aug 06 11:43 PM · Comments (2) · Tags: Palm, Windows

LazyWeb Request: XP Themes Wonky

Take a look at the dialog to the right: See how the tabs across the top and the command buttons on the bottom are not rendered with the selected theme? Have you ever seen this before?

This past weekend, I uninstalled several unused applications from my desktop PC (an HP Pavilion running Windows Media Center Edition 2005 SP2), including HP ImageZone, HP Tunes, and several utilities included with my HP LaserJet 1320 printer. Shortly thereafter, I noticed that dropdown lists in IE6 were not themed; they looked like they had been transplanted from Windows 2000. I ran System File Checker and it seems to have fixed the dropdowns, but all system dialogs exhibit the behavior shown above, regardless of which theme I select. (Oddly, Task Manager’s tabbed dialog is correctly themed. It’s almost like a manifest file for explorer.exe has been deleted?)

I have since Googled extensively and even attempted a System Restore to a point before I uninstalled the software, but nothing will bring back my dialog themes. If you know how to fix this, please share!

Update: It seemed to me that IE, Explorer, etc. were not using the correct version of the Windows Common Controls library (ComCtl32.dll), so I Googled for "explorer.exe.manifest", which eventually led me to this article, which includes examples of manifests to tell an application to use version 6.0 of ComCtl32.dll. And sure enough, when I created manifests for IE, Explorer, and RunDll32.exe, my themed dialogs were back! I'm not sure what happened to cause these applications to stop using version 6, but I can live with this solution.

 28 Sep 05 10:55 PM · Comments (0) · Tags: Windows

Longhorn Killer App

Since the PDC last Fall, Microsoft has produced a series of concept apps to demonstrate how Longhorn's key technologies will enable the creation of groundbreaking new applications. The sample apps certainly look cool, with lots of 3D graphics and animation, but so far none of them have made me want to install Longhorn as soon as possible. Until now.

Check out this video of an app from Microsoft Research called Photo Triage. It (apparently) employs Avalon and WinFS to visually categorize collections of digital images. Some have questioned how Windows will obtain all the cool metadata WinFS needs in order to sort and search our data; this app nicely demonstrates one way it could work. I want it!

via John Lam

 30 Jun 04 11:10 AM · Comments (0) · Tags: Software, Windows