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Expression round the clock, a conference conducted by Microsoft for promoting the newly released Microsoft Expression Studio, a

Microsoft has finally released a private SP1 beta build for Vista. It is yet to be made to the general beat tester community. As of now it is only an invitation-only testing.

As usual lot of tweaks and refinements have gone into the build. The system is made to work faster than before and the list of Vista certifier softwares has increased 10 fold.

Some key benefits are:

• The standalone service pack will include all languages. It can update all PCs running Windows Vista, regardless of language.
• Componentization brings benefits such as the ability to uninstall updates in any order more reliably.
• Windows Vista contains a significant amount of files shared with Windows Server 2008 and therefore benefits from the continual improvements made during the Windows Server 2008 development cycle.

For more information visit The Windows Vista Blog

“All that looks boring and simple would be shredded” seems to be Microsoft’s motto. Finally Microsoft is coming up with eye-candy design for all of their major products. Be it Vista or Office2007, the new interfaces are really superb. Then how could their search engine stay behind.

What is tafiti?

Tafiti, meaning “research” in swahili(an African origin), is a new search experience bought in by Microsoft. it combines the power of Microsoft’s Sliverlight and is backed by the Live Search engine. Still in beta we have yet to see a lot of it.

It has got a very attractive yet simple interface, most important for a search site. I guess this “google” idea of a simple design has finally caught fire. Consider the previous yahoo and msn’s search page to present day ones.

What is special in tafiti?

• tafiti is powered by silverlight, which directly means a wonderful display and also that you need to have silverlight installed on your system(and it doesn’t support safari beta 3)
• Once you enter a search keyword, you can see the nice animation followed by a categorized search result page(check image below).

1. As you could see, the search result is displayed in the middle pane.
2. On the left you have two gadgets, the top one stores different search pages and the other categorizes them into either a web-page, or an Rss feed or as an image.
3. This is my favorite - On the right you can see blocks called as shelfs, where you can store your search results by simply dragging them. You can store multiple results in one shelf and when activated it could show all in one search result.

• One not-so-new feature that is added is the “search tree“. You can click the “tree icon” on the centre-top of the page to view it.

This page actually shows the power of sliverlight. It does light up the web and is also light on the browser and eventually on the system. Microsoft has really done a good job on this one.

UP(s):

• Good interface..
• Adding the feed search was what i always wanted.
• Very sleek yet fast.

DOWN(s):

• A major flaw exists in the beta - “you can’t scroll through the results in the result window using the scroll mouse, you need to manually drag the scrollbar down”

Rating : 3/5

Apart from the frills, Microsoft still needs to do a lot if they wanna set a major breakthrough in search engine technology. Seeing the developments taking place the future looks promising.

Technorati Tags: tafiti, Microsoft, silverlight, Live Search, search engine, beta