The picture above was taken the day after Thanksgiving in November 2006. I had just bought a new camera, and wanted to try it out with some simple landscape pictures. I gave Brian a call to see if he may be interested.
Brian, as usual, was excited for my phone call. He insisted we go to a local pond that he knew rather well. Brian, myself, and my yellow lab Molson piled in the car and off we went.
Well, the pond really spoke to myself and Molson — Molson went for a nice swim, and I soaked up every last sight and smell that late fall day had to offer. Today, it’s one of my favorite spots to go to when I wish to connect with my spiritual self.
Brian shared so many great spots around town with me. Mountain biking in Mine Falls will always remind me of him.
Today, upon hearing the news, I struggled with every last bit of emotional energy to make it to that magical pond. The same pond Brian took me to. To embrace that connection with myself that Brian always reminded me about. I’m so glad I did.
Brian, I thank you for all your kind words, your great friendship, and your keen ability to recognize the things that really matter. I’m going to miss you so so much.
Financial breakdown of Microsoft’s cash cows. What happens in three years, when most folks buying new computers will be selecting ARM based mobile devices?
Microsoft just announced a Bing refresh for touch phones, including support for iPhone. According to the announcement, the new mobile bing brings some great new features including Movie listings, NFL player stats, and flight stats.
I didn’t try any of those: I tried the single most important thing a mobile search must provide: directions.
Home Page
The styling is a bit meh, but the brunt of the criticism is on the actual “touch” usability.
Mobile Bing home screen on iPhone
There are three things they really got wrong:
Can’t get location from iPhone GPS. Google’s mobile search, which is also a website running within Safari, can query my iPhone for it’s current location.
Bing logo doesn’t link to home page. Instead, you have text links at the bottom which are a bit too small to touch effectively. One starts to think this was really built for a stylus. The comical thing is that the logo is on every screen, is a nice, fat link target, and they never thought of using it.
Delete key. After filling in a search query, an X gets placed to the left of the search icon. Better tap carefully, otherwise all the text you just typed will be wiped out.
Directions
Since bing didn’t know my location, it prompted for a start. I applaud Microsoft for fighting the urge to put a Windows logo next to “start”, but at least they finally realize they need to build a fresh brand for Search.
I wanted to go from Faniuel Hall to Redbones in Somerville; two well known local locations. Notice the “X” adjacent to the Search. I can’t possibly figure out why someone didn’t insist on putting the search button beneath the text area.
After carefully pressing the search button, I was brought to the “end” screen to type in my ending location. Note that I misspelled Somerville. I didn’t bother to correct it, since search engines know I’m a bad typer.
And, here we see the results. 404.
Google Check
Here’s the same misspelled query in the iPhone’s Map client, which sends its queries straight to the Googleplex:
Instant results. In addition to the directions, I get realtime traffic.
Back to bing, and we type in the correct spelling. Still, no dice.
So, I went back to bing’s web search, and typed the same misspelled destination, and I get results:
What’s this mean?
Looks like their directions aren’t plugged into their search engine.
