Overall, the experience I have been having with Windows 7 has been great.

Here are the current list of issues I am having that are stopping me from going “all in” on my tablet.

(FYI I am running an Asus R1F, Core 2 Duo T7200, 2GB RAM, 13.3 WXGA screen)

1. A cool technology from Microsoft that is presently in CTP is not running properly – that is essential for the switch
2. My ATT Fuze (HTC Diamond Pro) is not being recognized when I plug it in
3. That hardware button and the screen hinge which change the screen orientation are not working – you really need that for a convertible form factor tablet.

If I can get those issues sorted, I am going to dive in.

OK – so I just set up my Asus R1F which had Vista Biz Premium on it is now a dual boot machine running Windows 7 Ultimate Beta 1. The install was quick and simple. So far, the experience has been great. I will be adding more as the exploration continues. My next steps are to get Visual Studio 2008 and Live Mesh set up and do some Mesh/Silverlight/Azure prototyping.

So, I have been under a rock it seems. When you start doing things automagically – as it seems the Photo Gallery app in Vista did from day one, I tend to miss the boat. I’m the kinda guy who’s first move in using a new app is to look at the configuration/option tab in the UI. When it looks deceptively simple, I just don’t know what to think. This seems to have been the case with the Revert functionality.

Earlier today I mentioned that a function of Live Photo Gallery was that is just saved your edits and your original is well – I didn’t know – seemed like it was gone, forever. Well it seems that I am wrong. There is the little Revert functionality that will always let you get back to the original version of the image. No, you can’t step back one edit at a time, but you can get past the heinous error you just made. Or help you whip out a quick cleaned up version of the shot for that email to your Aunt Minnie – then quickly revert it back to all of its original bacchanal glory.

Here is a ripe old post from July 2006 – for the Vista version – from John Thornton
http://blogs.msdn.com/pix/archive/2006/07/26/679369.aspx 

Ian Tien has a more up to date post that covers the how’s and why’s of using Revert and w whole lot of other features. http://windowslivewire.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!2F7EB29B42641D59!29715.entry 

John’s post says that back in 2006 the originals were stored here
c:UsersyourusernameAppDataLocalMicrosoftWindowsOriginal Images

now it seems they are stored here
C:UsersyourusernameAppDataLocalMicrosoftWindows Photo GalleryOriginal Images

Seems that the images are tagged with a GUID of some sort – so you can feel free to reorganize your files into different directories – but when you switch machine – well that’s another matter – this has Synch/Mesh written all over it.

for the second time tonight – thanks team! And if you have any insight to share – best practices – things that my mom should do – pass them on…

-NK

When I was searching all over for where to post issues a few months ago, I came up empty. Seems to me that the collection point for comments should be blatantly obvious – perhaps this was too obvious. I was searching

So, if you have comments about any Live service check out https://feedback.live.com/default.aspx 

however, as a developer, this is not exactly what I was looking for. I am more interested in an issue tracking system like the one set up on connect.microsoft.com or codeplex – I realize these products are used by a huge number of people, but a more transparent, traceable systems would really help. At the very least it would help if you were given an Issue ID so you can continue to submit information on an issue and know that it can all be collated.

Live Team – If you have a better means of getting information to you – particularly from folks who can get technical and are willing to invest time in solving problems, please let us know.

OK that is an overstatement, but I am thankful for this new feature.

I really like Live Photo Gallery – I have had some beefs before about how hard it seemed to get beta feedback to the team and that it was crashing on Nikon RAW files (.NEF). I have a few other things that I would like to see changed – like if I fix a Photo – I want it to be done to a duplicate of the original… by default.

But my biggest complaint was unused tags! You see I checked out a free Corbis Library of images – which where all dutifully tagged a million ways to Sunday. Before I knew it, the photos and all their tags had polluted my personal library of photos (that was user error – unzipped it in the wrong place). Imoved the photos out, but have been saddled with over 900 useless tags. Until now, you had to delete them one by one. It was a real drag.

Happily, in Wave 3 (Windows Live Gallery 2009 – build 14.0.8051.1204 is what I am running) you can now simply do the following:

File | Options | Tags then select Delete unused tags

Thanks So Live Gallery Team!