I decided to wait a little while before I posted my thoughts on Microsoft’s announcement of Windows Phone 7 Series.  I wanted to give myself a little time to digest all the coverage.  I also wanted to gather my thoughts on what we know and what is still up in the air.

For those that haven’t seen the new interface yet (where have you been?), here’s a quick video intro:

I’m not going to go very in depth in this post because many other sites have covered what we know with extreme depth and clarity.  If you’re looking for an in depth article with very good analysis, see this Engadget article.  For my part, I’m simply going to cover things from my personal perspective, picking out the things that I really like or things that I think will really apply to my life.

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On 16 October 2009, the Mozilla Firefox team made a decision to issue a “block” for the Windows Presentation Foundation plugin and Microsoft .NET Framework Assistant extension for Firefox due to reports of a vulnerability in the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) hosting process.  This is not a vulnerability in the two add-ons in question, but rather in an underlying library from .NET that the add-ons rely upon, thus opening Firefox to the vulnerability.

Where the story gets interesting is that the patch for this vulnerability (MS09-054) was issued via Windows Update by Microsoft on 14 October 2009.  So, two days after the patch for this issue was delivered via automatic updates, Mozilla decided that it would be a good idea to disable these add-ons.  Unfortunately, the block list technology Mozilla has put into place in Firefox does not give the user any option to override a block other than turning off blocking completely.

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While this isn’t really a gadget, per se, I’m really loving Windows 7.  I now have it installed on 5 different machines, all serving different purposes, and it’s really shining in every role I can throw at it.

Main Desktop

My main desktop machine, where I do most of my gaming and just general personal computing, was the first machine that I migrated to the Windows 7 Beta.  I had some issues with video card drivers at first, but that was quickly resolved.  Other than occasional video weirdness, which I think may actually be hardware related, it performs wonderfully.  I haven’t had any problems with games that would’t play or performance or anything.

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First, let me say I’m disappointed in myself for not posting before now. Life’s been kind of crazy for the last couple of weeks and I just have not had the opportunity. I’ll be posting photos and some of my thoughts on CES in the next few days.

Right now, I’m in the middle of changing my media center PC over to Windows 7. It’s interesting, running into some compatibility issues here and there with some of the third party software I use, but so far pretty good! I already made the switch to Windows 7 on my desktop PC, and I’m loving it! I’ll write up a post about that and my new hardware goodie that I bought when I did the upgrade in the next few days as well.

I’ll be heading to CES on Wednesday and will be doing some coverage of the event here on Twist: on Tech. I’ll likely be both tweeting and writing articles here as well as taking photos and video. Let me know if you’d like me to check out anything in particular while I’m there and I’ll make every effort to do so.