The UsefulTechnology Blog

I’m a big fan of Swiss design and SwissMiss today posted links an iPhone app and Mac OS X widget so you can add a distinctive Swiss Railway Clock to your Apple devices. Thankfully those of us with Microsoft powered devices needn’t miss out: there’s a gorgeous Windows taskbar add-on and a desktop gadget available for free download from cnet. The download also includes a screensaver, but the desktop gadget gets my vote. You can’t beat the unique feel of that sweeping second hand that pauses for 1.5 seconds when it reaches the top of the minute. How precisely delightful!

And, for even more Swiss Railway clock screensaver options for both Mac OS X or Windows, check out this page off of www.swissworld.org.

This has just made my day. No, make that my week, or maybe even my month! The PowerPoint Team Blog has announced that custom shapes can now be created in PowerPoint 2010 (get the free beta here) with the new ‘Combine Shapes’ feature hidden deep within the application. If you’ve ever struggled to recreate a diagram or complex shape in PowerPoint, or have reluctantly had to turn to a more advanced illustration program to get the results you need, this will make you very happy!

Custom shapes can be created by combining simple shapes to create the effect you need. There are four commands you can apply to your shapes as shown below:

Before long you’ll be creating masterpiece custom shapes like this, simply by using the Union command. Try doing this in PowerPoint 2007 or older!:

OK, not my finest creative hour, but I was in a hurry to tell you about this feature!

Here’s the tricky bit though: these combine shape commands don’t appear in the ribbon automatically, you need to add them yourself. The basic steps to do this are as follows:

1. PowerPoint Options
2. Customize Ribbon
3. Select Commands Not in the Ribbon in the left hand drop down box then scroll down in the box below to click on Shape Combine
4. Select Tool Tabs in the right hand drop down box then locate Format in the Drawing tools section in the box below
5. Click New Group then Rename… and select a pretty icon and name your group Combine Shapes (or whatever you like!)
6. With your new Combine Shapes group still highlighted on the right, click Add four times. This will add the Shape Combine, Shape Intersect, Shape Subtract, and Shape Union to your group.
7. Hit OK at the bottom and start adding shapes as normal to your slide. When you’re ready to combine, go to the Format tab and you’ll see your new Combine Shapes commands on the ribbon. Enjoy!

The commands don’t work on grouped objects so be sure to ungroup any shapes before trying to apply any combine shapes commands.

Have fun creating custom shapes. The world is yours to create!

Bing Maps just get better and better! Larry Larsen of Channel 10 has reminded me of the new Map Apps feature that allows you to add customised overlays onto Bing maps. Head over to http://www.bing.com/maps/explore/ to discover a handy map overlay. I love the ‘What’s Nearby’ app that helps you find useful places like restaurants, theatres, doctors etc. It’s fabulous for helping you find your bearings when visiting a new town and has just told me where I’ll be having dinner tonight!

Note: some overlays only work for the USA currently. Expect maps apps for other countries soon.

If you run a 64-bit version of Windows and find that you are unable to preview Adobe Acrobat files you’ll be relieved to learn there’s now a fix available from pretentiousname.com. The tool also works for 64-bit versions of Microsoft Office 2010 and fixes some erroneous registry entries.

So, stop waiting for Adobe to fix their own software, and restore your Acrobat previews to their former glory! Get the fix here.

Huge thanks to Leo Davidson for his fine work!

This is a nice bit of fun from the Windows Live team. Check out the brand new Experience Pack that allows you to customise Windows 7 and Windows Live Messenger with some quirky (or should that be creepy?!) personalised avatar images based on a photo you upload or take on your webcam. Installation is a breeze and before you know it you too could look a proper Charlie!

Every so often something appears leaving you wondering “why didn’t I think of that?” Or, in this case, why didn’t Nikon, Canon, or any other camera manufacturer think of this, it’s so blindingly obvious!

If you own an SLR camera and have ever had to colour correct a load of photos because you either forgot to set the white balance or couldn’t find something white to set the balance with, you’ll want one of these: the White Balance Lens Cap.

Before you start taking pictures, put your camera into ‘set white balance mode’, take a photo with the lens cap on (something I routinely do!) and your white balance is set! Done! No more dodgy hues, no more forgetting, no more lost hours post-correcting the colour balance.

Available for lens thread sizes from 52mm to 77mm from Photojojo.

Thanks to SwissMiss for sharing this.

With a hat tip to The Next Web, I enjoyed reading about a new survey by Lewis PR that graphically demonstrates Britain’s digital divide. Amongst the 1,000 survey respondents 20% have no idea that Steve Jobs is the CEO of Apple, with one in 20 thinking he’s a second division footballer. Five per cent thought Tim Berners-Lee, the founder of the Internet, was the first astronaut in space, while 10% thought a dongle was a sex toy!

Findings like these come as no surprise to me. Working in the tech industry we often take technical terms for granted and forget that out there in the real world, many people have little time to figure out what a VHD is (10% thinks it’s a sexually transmitted disease) or to get to grips with social networking (11% still don’t know what it is). The responsibility lies with everyone in the industry, including me, to explain the fast-moving world of technology in simple and interesting ways so as many people as possible can enjoy the extraordinary benefits useful technology can bring.

For a taster of some of the survey responses – interestingly filmed outside Microsoft’s main London office – watch the video below:

Fed up with all those Post-it notes cluttering your desk? Wondering why you’re spending more at the stationery store than ever before? Maybe you’ll be pleased to discover the Sticky Notes magic in Windows 7!

To get started, just type Sticky Notes in the program launch bar under the Start button. A blank sticky note will appear on your desktop and from here your job is as simple as typing in whatever it is you need to remember.

You can also customise your Sticky Notes quite a lot. To change the colour right-click on the note and select a different colour. To add another note, hit the + symbol in the top left. To change the formatting of the note (although, unfortunately, not the typeface) try these handy shortcuts:

• CTRL+B = bold
• CTRL+U = underlining
• CTRL+T = strikethrough (useful for crossing items off your list)
• CTRL+I = italics
• CTRL+SHIFT+> = increase font size
• CTRL + SHIFT+< = reduce font size

By the way, all those keyboard shortcuts work elsewhere in Microsoft applications like Microsoft Office Word and Microsoft Office Outlook and once you’ve memorised them you’ll be using them all over the place before long!

If you’ve seen the TV ad you’ll no doubt already know about the invaluable ‘Snap’ feature in Windows 7 that helps you arrange windows by simply dragging them to the edge of the screen. Once you’ve used this feature, you never want to go back. I accidentally discovered a new twist on Windows Snap today: if you double click on the top or bottom border of a floating window, Windows 7 will instantly stretch that windows to the top and bottom of the screen without changing its horizontal position. Neat!

There are plenty more ways to use Windows Snap in a, er, snap, including these keyboard shortcuts:

Windows Key + Up: Maximise Current Window
Windows Key + Down: Restore Down / Minimise Current Window
Windows Key + Left: Tile Current Window to the Left
Windows Key + Right: Tile Current Windows to the Right (and continue pressing the Left and Right keys to rotate the window’s position around your screen)

The other impossible-to-live-without feature of Windows Snap is the new ability to ‘tear’ a maximised window from its locked position and drag it anywhere you like. No more faffing about having to ‘restore down’ a windows then drag it; just grab the top bar of a maximised windows and rip it away!

Oh, and I can’t ignore Snap’s little sister, Shake, the Windows 7 feature that everyone loves but few people remember to use. Give it a wiggle!

I thoroughly enjoyed scrolling through this interesting article on Tech Radar which catalogues the many faces of the Microsoft Windows brand over the last 24 years. The packaging and indeed the whole computing experience have gone on quite a journey.

I never owned a copy of Windows 1.0 but I fondly recall traipsing half the way across a snowy London to buy a 5.25” floppy disk drive for my Amstrad computer (running at a dizzying 12MHz and sporting a massive 20MB hard dick) so I could make use of those rubbish programs that came taped on the covers of early computing magazines:

And thankfully I somehow managed to skip the design (and software) abomination that was Windows ME:

But I’m very pleased to be a contented owner of the new slimmed down (both packaging and software) Windows 7 operating system. I take mine black, like my coffee.

Take a read through the Tech Radar article. It’s revealing to see how much computer-related graphic design has changed over such a short period of time. I wonder, what will our lives look like in 2034?

I enjoyed this excellent article which first appeared in last week’s Marketing magazine in the UK. With social media channels changing the way we search for and interact with information of all types, it’s clear that marketers like me must now figure out how they’ll manage and segregate their personal and professional brands within online channels.

I’m new school so am convinced that all senior marketers will be active users of social media channels in the future, maybe five to ten years from now. Marketers can no longer hide in their ivory towers and rely on the ‘shout-once and listen for echo’ marketing techniques of old. Not everyone agrees that this social media thing is here to stay, but I remember long-forgotten colleagues saying the same about the Internet not so very long ago. For now, I’m willing to bet my career that to survive in a world irrevocably changed by the empowerment that social media brings, marketers have a responsibility and a duty to leading the way by becoming visible, active contributors to social media channels. Without participating in the conversation you cannot properly understand its effect, and you could be left behind wondering why the echo has disappeared.

Hat tip to the ever so talented Scott C.

How many of these crimes will you commit today?

We don’t do political commentary on the UsefulTechnology blog, but we’re always happy to share tips to help you save money. And, with a general election on the UK horizon any time soon, our advice today would be “never donate money to a political party”. They’ll only wizzle your money up the wall doing moronic X Factor themed marketing like this:

Labour: 14 November 2009

Conservative response: 23 November 2009

Political advertising: a puerile waste of money. If only we could vote off the politicians…

With thanks to BrandRepublic

Working in Marketing at Microsoft I’m contacted by more than my fair share of experts telling me they have the answer to my business challenges. In fact, since the economic downturn began my phone’s never tring-a-linged so often with calls from consultants hunting for new business. Sadly, my budgets are under pressure as much as the next man and I have to prove that every penny I spend brings real returns for Microsoft.

This SlideShare presentation tickled me. I despair when self-invented SMEs (Social Media Experts) tell me they have the recipe for business success. Click through the slides below and, if you’re an SME thinking of calling me, please don’t if anything here reminds you of you.

I guess it was only a matter of time. Yes, the oh-so-predictable fusion of “must-have gadgets” and “sex sells” has finally happened with the arrival of Swaxy.com. So now you can lust after that gorgeous new gadget with tiny buttons, while also admiring a fake-tanned dolly with enormous…

Health and Safety Warning: Never store darts in your bikini as suggested here.

Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What it Says About Us)

If you’ve ever wondered why other people are always such bad drivers, this book could help. And perhaps it’s you who’s the problem, not them. Having read this book I have a much better appreciation of why we drive the way we do, and am now much more forgiving of the bad drivers I see around me. And I also get to where I want to go faster because I’m a late-merger, and an unrepentant one at that! A good read for anyone who, like me, spends too much time on the road. Enjoy!

Just launched by my chums in the Microsoft online team, a new site to showcase some of the interesting things that Microsoft gets up to. And no, we’re not trying to sell you anything here; we just thought it would be neat to package up some of our more funky stuff into one place.

See the Microsoft Wave at www.microsoft.com/uk/wave.

I took the Microsoft MPG Challenge at work today. The basic idea was to learn how to drive a car more fuel efficiently and see how much of an improvement I could make to my MPG (miles per gallon) score. On my first drive around the residential mile-long course in a tinny little Seat car I managed just 24 MPG. After the instructor told me when to accelerate, change gear, and brake I managed 35 MPG, a 46% improvement! Not bad for simply accelerating more gently, allowing the car to decelerate more steadily, jumping from 3rd to 5th gear, and paying more attention to the road conditions ahead.

I had impressed myself, if not the driving instructor, so decided to put the theory to the test on my homeward commute in my Skoda Octavia around the M25. My car’s an automatic so some of the gear-changing theory was redundant. I also drive much of my commute on motorways so dropping to a lower constant speed was pretty much all I could think of changing.

Dicing with death amidst the lorries on the inside lane I activated cruise control at around 60mph, switched off non-essential comforts like air conditioning and sat nav, and put my feet up for the long crawl home. I even emptied my pipe before setting off (to reduce weight) and tuned the wireless to BBC Radio 3 for that authentic octogenarian driving experience. I was strict too. At one point I could have sworn I was lapped by a convoy of knackered army vehicles on their ways to the scrap yard.

Here, after much fevered calculation, are the results:

MY NORMAL AFTERNOON COMMUTE
57 miles @ 60mph average speed at 43.6MPG taking 57 minutes
This consumes 1.307 gallons (5.943 litres) of diesel at a cost of £5.88 (@98.9p per litre)

MY FUEL-EFFICIENT COMMUTE
57 miles @ 48mph average speed at 56.6MPG taking 71 minutes
This consumes 1.007 gallons (4.578 litres) of diesel at a cost of £4.53 (@98.9p per litre)

Quite a difference. So, here’s the good bit:

• In one trip I’ve saved 1.365 litres of diesel worth £1.35, reducing my CO2 output by 3.7kg
• Over the course of a year (based on 135 return trips) I could save £364.50 and reduce my carbon footprint by 999kg, just under 1 tonne
• This would save me having to plant an acre of trees to help clear my eco-conscience

But, here’s the bad bit:

• Each journey now lasts 14 minutes longer, that’s a 25% increase
• Over the course of a year (based on 135 return trips) this would mean I spend 63 more hours commuting, that’s an additional 2 days and 15 hours
• I would almost certainly be crushed to death within weeks by a weaving foreign lorry sideswiping me out of its blind spot, or suffer a massive cardiac arrest brought on by my blood pressure rising with every vehicle that passes me by

Due to a quirk of fate my home and workplace are in very different locations meaning I already spend more than 10.5 days of my life commuting to and from work in my car each year. The thought of passing even more time behind the wheel has very little appeal. Looking at it another way, if someone offered me £364.50 right now to go and sit in my car for the next 63 hours I’d tell them where to stick their gearstick.

So, with regret, much as one tonne of CO2 sounds like a worthy reduction to aim for, I can’t see me adjusting my driving habits any time soon. Life’s just too hectic and, selfishly, I value my time more highly than my exhaust fumes.

Thanks, Microsoft, for the lesson today. You reminded me how to anticipate road conditions ahead and to think about the environmental impact of my driving. But my busy job doesn’t afford me the luxury of driving so slowly and I value time with my family more highly than time inside my car. It’s so true what they say; it’s not easy being green.

If you’ve installed an add-in to Outlook 2007 that you now suspect to be causing Outlook to misbehave, you can disable it quite simply using the Trust Center. However, if you’re also using Windows Vista, or some another OS, you may encounter a curious error message telling you “The connected state of Office Add-Ins registered in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE cannot be changed.”

Thankfully the workaround is simple. To disable your bogus add-in you must start Outlook with administrator privileges:

Windows 7
CTRL+SHIFT click on the Outlook icon on your taskbar to instantly launch the program with administrator privileges. Or create a new instance of the Outlook program icon on your desktop, then right click on it and select Properties. Under the compatibility tab set the Privilege Level to ‘Run this program as an administrator’. Once Outlook opens in administrator mode, disable the add-in in the Trust Center.

Windows Vista
Right click on the Outlook shortcut and choose “Run as administrator”. Once you’ve disabled the add-in, restart Outlook to run it under the standard user credentials once again.

Windows XP/2000
Log off your user account and log back in to the computer as an administrator. After disabling the dodgy add-in, logon once again with your normal user account.