(For the record, I love how uncluttered the SPV is… one of the design principles for the release that we really took to heart was “content, not chrome” and we spent a lot of time working through how to provide functionality to the user without cluttering up the UI with buttons, which is how we ultimately landed on the “…” menu expansion but the menu is transparent until you tap on it so that as you scroll through images you can focus on viewing the image (the “content” of this particular experience), not the chrome. It may seem like an obvious solution now, but it wasn’t when we started )

You can of course swipe one-by-one to get to the next or previous photo, but to quickly scroll through multiple photos, pinch out (aka the opposite of what you’d do to zoom in to the photo) and you’ll go into what we call “filmstrip view”:

Note that filmstrip view only works on photos on your phone, not online albums or cached versions of online photos– we originally tried to make that work but it required so much back-and-forth on the network that it used up data which costs $$, and also didn’t provide a great experience (you would frequently see gray boxes as the images rendered in).

Another interesting tip: If you start from the camera viewfinder, swipe back and then pinch out and look at filmstrip view, the viewfinder’s still “in” the view – so you can quickly get back to your camera.

If you’re a visual person, you may enjoy using emoticons – in this example I used (B) and (C):

See a list of possible ones here and here.

At some point I need to put together a movie script told entirely in emoticons… I’ll put that on my bucket list.

<insert obligatory “I haven’t blogged in so long, so sorry! I’ll try to be better! etc etc>

Today I ran across this awesome set of superhero wallpapers, which reminded me of a great “lifehack” for windows phone that I’ve been using for the last year that I wanted to share.

I like to change my wallpaper frequently – sometimes multiple times a day, like I might choose a cute one of the kids for a weekend day but if I’m going out that evening, choose a beautiful Bing image of the day. One of the features I use the heck out of in WP7.5 is that any time you’re viewing an online photo (such as through the What’s New feed, or when browsing a friend’s photos) or a photo attached to an email, you can directly set it as your wallpaper when viewing the photo. It’s a simple thing but it’s a huge timesaver for me.

Every time I find a great wallpaper, I upload it to a “Wallpapers” album in Skydrive (if you find it on your phone you can use the Skydrive app to do this, or just use the web interface on your PC/Mac). For example here’s what it looks like with just these superhero wallpapers in it:

On my phone, I have the “Wallpapers” skydrive album pinned to my start:

That way, when I next want to change my wallpaper, I just go to Start, open that album, tap on the photo I want to make my wallpaper (I’m kind of in a Captain America mood right now) and set it as my wallpaper directly:

And there you go:

I made a Shutterfly photo book of photos I’ve taken with WP7 phones running Mango in the last few months and made a photo book with some of my favorites. Some of them are artsy, some funny, some family, etc. Several of them were edited with apps (I like Pictures Lab and Bubblegum, myself).

http://www.engadget.com/2010/02/10/microsofts-mwc-digs-come-together-ready-set-is-the-theme/

The crush was when I first used SmartDJ in the zune client. Now, I have known about SmartDJ for a while (it creates automatic playlists based on ‘seed’ content), but never gotten around to using it myself (I am a very average user in that there is a high barrier to getting me to explore a new piece of software for more than about two minutes).

I had just installed the newest version of the zune client on a new PC, and when I started it it asked me to name three of my favorite artists and said it would create SmartDJ playlists from them. It was a great reminder to me that I should try the feature out – and plus, there’s something just kind of cool about software asking you what you love, you know? I mean, IE just assumes I want a bunch of random crap in my favorites and puts it there for me… but zune asked me what *I* liked -- OK that’s totally not fair to IE but hopefully you get my point. :-)

So then I entered three of my favorite artists and it created the SmartDJ playlists… and oh man, it helped me re-discover songs in my existing collection that I haven’t listened to in years! It wouldn’t have occurred to me that The Ting Ting’s “That’s Not My Name” would be such a perfect complement to Jason Mraz, but it was. I have been getting so tired of the same-old content on my running playlist for a while, but it’s a huge effort to scour my library to create new playlists.

So now, I’m totally hooked. I have a huge crush on SmartDJ. Kudos to the zune team, nice job!

And onto my slow-burning love affair… after I installed the zune client, I immediately went to find it under the start menu and add it to the new Win7 taskbar. The first time I used Win7 and saw the taskbar, I thought to myself “Oh – another way to launch programs. OK, seems a little nicer than quicklaunch, I’ll go for it.” In the months since then, I have gotten totally hooked on it, and have stopped pinning apps to the start menu.

When I first started using it, it was just because of the convenience of not having to click that one extra time on the start menu – which when you look at it, seems a little silly… but wow that one click has a huge mental burden for me.

Over time though, the feature started growing on me as I discovered more and more of its functionality (classic progressive disclosure) and also discovered how the existing functionality I knew about helped me in new ways I hadn’t imagined beforehand.

For an example of the latter, its ever-present visibility has ended up with me using it as a way to remind me to use certain applications, like a log parser I need to run periodically, or having Live Writer on it to remind me to blog:

Next, I discovered the live preview of each window on hover – emphasis on the ‘live’ which really comes to life when you have an application like WoW that’s doing something in the background, and the live preview lets you quickly peek and see what’s going on (aka “Have I landed in Dalaran yet? Man this is a long flight path…” for all you wow aficionados :-). Pretend for example that this thumbnail was live:

It’s not just live preview that’s handy, but certain Win7-aware applications provide access to quick tasks on hover, like the zune client that provides basic transport controls:

Eventually I also stumbled across the little “minimize all windows” shortcut in the lower-right corner (and I also like that it shows the full time and date – I could never get my XP machines to reliably show both for some reason):

And later still came the discovery of the right-click functionality – at first I just used it for closing all of the windows at once, a minor handiness. But then I found that certain applications that were Win7 aware, such as IE, had specific tasks available in that menu, another nice and easy shortcut:

Or of course my zune client again:

Or photoshop:

At any rate, it was an interesting day for me, software-wise… and it was a nice reminder how important the role of emotions are in software design & engineering.

Aghhh.

Here’s what I saw – can you figure out why I thought something was wrong?

The text on the “Send Money” button is gray! I instantly assumed it was grayed out because some required field or another was missing, or I’d skipped a step… but finally I decided to just try clicking on it and, yep, it worked fine.