There’s an advert for Microsoft on currently that shows a kid taking some photos and with a few clicks stitching them together into a panorama. All thanks to the ease of use of Vista. So when I was in Baltimore this week I took some photographs to attempt to do the same thing. After all, if some kid can do it, I’m sure I should be able to. But when I fired up Windows Photo Gallery I was unable to find any options to make a panorama. So I fired up Windows Live Photo Gallery instead and that did have the option. In fact it was pretty damn simple to create a panorama, as you can see above.
But two things bother me. Why are Microsoft advertising Windows by showing the capabilities of an application that doesn’t ship with the operating system? And why are there two different photo gallery applications which seemingly do the same thing but are subtly different?
2 comments:
It is annoying that they are two separate applications. But, Microsoft had to do it this way. Replacing the Photo Gallery in Vista would have required the developers of the new Photo Gallery to call into undocumented parts of the Windows code. This, according the US v. Microsoft 2002, is illegal.
Hmm, interesting theory, couldn't they just start documenting the bits of Windows they had to call? I thought it might have something to do with them having bigger hurdles to jump to update a part of the operating system rather than releases a separate program (translations for X languages, better docs etc)
Post a Comment