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p class=”blip_description”>Here’s a 17 minute video I shot today showing off Deepfish, a new mobile web browser from Microsoft’s “Live Labs”. The video shows how Deepfish doesn’t try to squash normal-sized web pages onto your mobile device’s screen, but instead lets you scroll and pan smoothly, and zoom in to the parts of the page you want to read.

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I also compare Deepfish to the default Pocket IE browser that comes with all Windows Mobile devices, so you can see what really makes it different.

This is a beta/tech preview of Deepfish, so there are some rough edges, but it’s a very cool technology – similar to the mobile Safari browser that Steve Jobs showed off on the iPhone.

You can find out more about Deepfish, and sign up to be a tester at labs.live.com/Deepfish/. There’s also another video overview on Microsoft’s Channel 10.

This video was shot with my Canon XH A1 HDV camcorder at 1080i, then edited in Apple iMovie 6 HD and exported as a 320×240 Quicktime video file. It weighs in at 312 MB, and was cropped from 16:9 widescreen to standard 4:3 aspect ratio (and I chopped off the sides of some of the titles/credits in the process – oops!). Here’s a direct download link to the movie file.

Let me know what you think, or if you have any questions! I don’t have any affiliation with Microsoft, but I’ll be happy to help if I can.

Crossposted on the Intel Software Network blog.

As promised, here’s a 30 minute video of Windows Vista (the final RTM version, Ultimate flavor) running on my Asus R2H Ultra Mobile PC. The file is about 180MB, formatted for iPod in iMovie (but it should work just fine anywhere).

Hmm. Not sure why the video disappeared. You can access it directly at blip.tv at this URL:

http://blip.tv/file/110303/

Or you can download the video file directly at this link:

http://blip.tv/file/get/JoshBancroft-VideoRunningWindowsVistaOnTheAsusR2HUltraMobilePC355.m4v

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I shot the video on the day after Thanksgiving, at my wife’s parents’ house. I cover the installation process (went smooth), what worked right out of the gate (surprisingly, almost everything), what required some extra tweaking and driver installation (WiFi, etc.). Lots of general usage, including some appearances by OneNote 2007 and using Word 2007 to post to my blog.

I’ve since gone back to Windows XP – I talk about the reasons in depth on the video. Nothing major, but a combination of small quirks that I’m confident will be fixed down the line with driver and software updates from Asus.

Hope you find the video useful and informative (and maybe even fun, in a ubergeeky sort of way ). Post a comment or drop me an email if you have any questions about Windows Vista on the Asus R2H UMPC!

Having been lovingly introduced to the world of the Ultra Mobile PCs (hereafter UMPCs) by getting to play with a Samsung Q1 for a week, courtesy of the guys at Intel Software Network, I was hooked, and had to make arrangements to get a UMPC for myself. I do IT support for my brother’s moving company, Wright-Way Moving & Storage, in Seattle (give them a call if you need a professional mover!), and he’s interested in trying UMPCs out for his sales staff. So we ordered a couple to try out.

I chose the Asus R2H over the Samsung Q1 and others, because is has more RAM, a bigger hard drive, an SD slot, a camera, and GPS, for the same price.

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Here is the Unboxing Ceremony video of the R2H – from very beginning, to getting everything plugged in and up and running. I cover all of the in-box accessories (which vary from country to country), and try to get as in-detail as possible. Lots of closeups, and some personality thrown in courtesy of my 3 year old daughter Emma, and my lovely wife Rachel manning the camera for the first half. I did my homework on this device, and felt like I knew it inside and out before I even cracked the box. You can probably see how excited I was in the video.

I ordered the two UMPCs from ProPortable, and their service was excellent. Not only were they practically the only ones to have these relatively new devices in stock, Sean in sales was very responsive to my emails, and the founder, Justin, is active in various Tablet PC and laptop forum communities. And you’ll see how well they packed the UMPCs for shipping in the video. I highly recommend them for your UMPC and laptop needs. If you do order anything from them, tell them that Josh Bancroft from TinyScreenfuls.com sent you. I have a feeling I’ll be doing business with them again.

The video is about 34 minutes long, and weighs in at about 200 MB. You can download it using the “download” link, or get this and other audio and video podcasts delivered to you automatically by subscribing to the TinyScreenfuls feed in your favorite podcast aggregator, like iTunes. Brian Enigma informed me that my last couple of videos weren’t compatible with the iPod, so I made sure to use the “iPod” encoding option when exporting this one from iMovie. Of course, it’s still very viewable on a computer. Let me know if you have any problems.

Enjoy, and let me know if there’s something you want to know about the R2H! You can bet that I’ll be doing a more in-depth review, and sharing my impressions after living with the device for a while. Expect more podcasts and videos, too!

Charles Congdon is a software architect at Intel, and in this 1 hour 22 minute (186 MB) video, he gives the best, most in-depth explanation I’ve ever heard about what the coming age of multi-core in general, and in particular, what it means to you as a developer.

The time when your app got a free performance boost when a faster processor came along is going away. Now, with the advent of two, four, and many-core systems, there are some pretty fundamental changes that have to happen in your applications in order for them to keep up. Parallelism, mutli-threading, being threadsafe, and more. It could be that one of your competitors “gets” multicore more than you do, and therefore his apps perform better on multicore systems. Or, worst case scenario, your app could be just plain broken on multicore.

But fear not! There’s hope and help out there for you. Intel Software Network has a vested interest in helping you make your code ready for the multicore era. There are lots of tools, resources, and people available to help you. And watching this video is a great place to start. Charles gives a very easy to understand explanation of everything from the basics on up to debugging tips, etc. I’m not a real developer, but even I could follow his explanations.

So grab this video file, set aside an hour and twenty minutes or so (or break it up into smaller sessions – there are logical stopping points in the video), and go deep with Charles, to get up to date on developing in a multicore world.

I’ve posted the video/screen capture of the Blogging Academy session on Photoblogging I did last week. The audio is the same as the previously-released podcast on the topic, but this adds a full video capture of my screen that shows everything I was doing as I talked about how I use Flickr for easy photoblogging. I think the video adds quite a bit to this topic, for someone looking for how to do “Photoblogging 101″.

The video is in WMV format, 1024×768 pixels, because I used the free Windows Media Encoder to record it. If someone knows of a free way to capture the screen to video in MPEG4, H.264, DivX, or some other more palatable codec, I’m all ears. I also posted a transcoded MPEG4 320×240 iPod-friendly version, just so I could put it on my iPod with video and show it to people. However, it’s a lot harder to make out what’s on my screen at that lower resolution.

If you’re interested, or know someone who is (come on, we’ve all got a friend or family member that asks “so what’s this blogging thing I keep hearing about?”), head on over to BloggingAcademy.com for 101-type discussions about blogging, podcasting, wikis, and all the cool new stuff that you can do these days on the web.