Trevin Chow

Windows 7 pre-order – available now on Microsoft Store!

Trevin — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 06:44:15 +0000

Windows 7 is now available on Microsoft Store for pre-order!

As mentioned earlier today, we have both Windows 7 Home Premium Upgrade and Windows 7 Professional Upgrade heavily discounted at $49 and $99 respectively. This discounted pre-order is available in limited quantities and for a limited time.

Other information

When placing you’re pre-order on Microsoft Store, you’ll have 3 options for getting the product on October 22, 2009:

Download – the quickest and easiest way. We even store your product key so you don’t have to keep those pesky software boxes in your closet or silly stickers taped to your monitors.
Download + Backup Disc – for those that want convenience of downloading, but also a physical disc to use later.
Ship the package product – we’ll ship you the fully packaged product on or about October 22, 2009. Arrival time will vary depending on actual shipping time.

All editions of Windows 7 available on Microsoft Store include both 32-bit and 64-bit editions. If you choose to buy Windows 7 for download, you will get access to both downloads.
Discounted pre-orders are available starting June 26, 2009 and will continue while supplies last, or until July 11, 2009 whichever comes first.

Windows 7: Be first. Save half.

Trevin — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 19:02:48 +0000

Starting Friday, June 26, 2009 you will be able to pre-order Windows 7 on Microsoft Store! By being first to pre-order, you’ll get it for at least half off and be one of the first to get it. Quantities will be limited.*

How?

Windows 7 is coming on October 22, 2009 and it’s easy to get it fast and save a bundle on upgrades to Windows 7 Home Premium and Windows 7 Professional.

Pre-order either product at Microsoft Store starting tomorrow, and you’ll snag it for at least 50% off with Windows 7 Home Premium Upgrade for $49.99 and Windows 7 Professional Upgrade for $99.99!

You’ll have 3 options for getting the product on October 22, 2009:

Download – the quickest and easiest way.
Download + Backup Disc – for those that want convenience of downloading, but also a physical disc to use later.
Ship the package product – we’ll ship you the fully packaged product on or about October 22, 2009.

All Windows 7 editions include both 32-bit and 64-bit regardless of whether you choose to download or the packaged product. So techies, don’t worry, we have you covered

Want more info?

Go to the Windows team blog and find out all the details.

* The offer begins on June 26, 2009 and will continue while supplies last, or until July 11, 2009, whichever comes first.

Windows 7 Upgrade Option and Microsoft Store

Trevin — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 17:26:43 +0000

Today, we announced the Windows 7 Upgrade Option and Windows 7 pricing. Microsoft Store is also participating in this program and offering a free* copy of Windows 7 to qualifying purchases on Microsoft Store of Windows Vista from starting June 26th, 2009.

The Windows 7 team blog summarizes this program as it relates to buying a new PC with Windows Vista:

…you don’t have to wait until GA to get a new Windows PC. In fact, we know many people need that new PC sooner – for back to school specifically. And we have the answer for people who need a new PC now but still want to get Windows 7 and that’s the Windows 7 Upgrade Option Program, which kicks off tomorrow, June 26th! Anyone who buys a PC from a participating OEM or retailer with Windows Vista Home Premium, Business or Ultimate on it will all receive an upgrade to the corresponding version of Windows 7 at little or no cost to customers.

On Microsoft Store, we are offering the Windows 7 Upgrade Option for any purchases of Windows Vista Home Premium, Business and Ultimate starting on June 26, 2009. On or about October 22, 2009, we will send qualifying customers an email with a promotion code and instructions to get your free copy of Windows 7. You will have the option to download it for free, or choose to have a packaged copy shipped to you.

If you have any questions, hit me up in the comments or on Twitter.

*Shipping charges and any applicable taxes may apply

Microsoft Bing launches

Trevin — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 07:40:01 +0000

Microsoft Bing launched today publicly, and color me impressed. I was always a fan of portions of Live Search, but the improvement they’ve made across the board with Bing is impressive. It’s nowhere near a Google knock-out punch, but it has marked improvement in key areas, that it’s going to be hard for people to ignore how well Bing performs. Perhaps John Battelle’s 2009 prediction of “at least a five point gain in [Microsoft] search share” will come true after all?

Searches to try to see some of the new functionality:

“Up” – will give you movie showtimes in your city
“Up” video search will give thumbnails of videos, but the best part is when you hover over each with your mouse pointer. Instant preview!
“flights from sea to nyc” shows you airfare predictions based on Farecast technology with one click access to 30-day outlook on fare prices.
Medical searches like “swine flu” – see the left hand side for categories to help refine your search (Articles, symptoms, causes,…), related searches (who knew there was a “1976 swine flu scare”?) and also returns credible results at the top from the Mayo Clinic.
Using Bing Maps, simple food searches like “pizza” will auto detect your location and show you all matching nearby restaurants .

This obviously isn’t an exhaustive list, but are neat improvements I’ve noticed in my usage over the past couple of hours. Anything cool I’m missing?

Fix for Wordpress “Allowed memory size exhausted” fatal error

Trevin — Sun, 10 May 2009 00:10:41 +0000

While trying to upgrade a few Wordpress plugins, I got this error message:

Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 33554432 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 7680 bytes)

After struggling with trying to fix this, I found a really easy solution – increase the Wordpress memory allocation size from 32 MB to 64 MB. To do this, edit your wp-settings.php and change line 13 from:

define('WP_MEMORY_LIMIT', '32M');

define('WP_MEMORY_LIMIT', '64M');

Simple, easy and delicious. No more memory issues for any plugin upgrades!

My 5 favorite Greasemonkey scripts

Trevin — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 01:15:03 +0000

Here is a list of 5 Greasemonkey scripts that drastically improves my experience on the web almost every day:

Folder4Gmail: Hands down my favorite script for Gmail since it solves my biggest grip – lack of folders. It allows you to create labels in a specific format, that will nest and create the appearance of folders.
Google Account Multi-Login: Replaces “sign out” link on most Google pages (including Reader, webmaster tools, mail and iGoogle)
Linkify Ting: It turns text that it thinks are links include clickable hyperlinks. So instead of seeing trevinchow.com, it will turn it into a hyperlink. Saves me time from copying and pasting needlessly.
Flickr multi-group sender: Flickr’s UI limits you to sending a photo to one group at at time. This overrides the “Send to Group” button and allows you to send to multiple groups.
Google Reader + Twitter: Allows you to easily share blog posts on Twitter directly from Google Reader.

Here are other scripts that I find useful, but aren’t in the must-have category:

Twitter Search Results in Google: Include search results from Twitter within Google search results.
Helvetireader: Cleans up Google Reader into a much easier to read by applying a very minimalistic theme. It opts for not removing a lot of UI elements and assumes you know shortcut keys.
Auto add to Google Reader: Add directly to Google Reader instead of asking whether you want to add to Google Homepage or Google Reader.
Wikipedia Animate: Allows you to see Wikipedia entries as a timeline of changes on the page. Pretty sweet.

Microsoft Store changes to checkout

Trevin — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 00:52:00 +0000

Since launching Microsoft Store US last November, our team has been hard at work bringing new products to the site, updating the content and planning what our next release would cover. After a mere 7 weeks of development, the team has done an incredible job at updating some fundamental parts of the site, both customer facing as well as on our back-end for tools and optimizations.

In terms of customer facing features, we’ve done a considerable amount of work to re-design our checkout flow based on usability studies, customer feedback and instrumentation data.

I wanted to take this opportunity to share 3 of the many changes we’ve made in this release, which helps make the shopping experience easier for our customers.

Easier shipping cost and tax calculation

Our first change was enabling customers to calculate shipping costs and tax from the summary page, after a customer added a product to the shopping cart. Previously, customers only saw tax and shipping costs on our “confirmation” page, right before they agreed to commit the purchase.

Customers now have the option of calculating shipping costs and tax without leaving the page, and before continuing down the checkout path. If a customer is buying an ESD product, they will only have the option to calculate tax since shipping charges don’t apply.

Before	After

Simplifying Windows Live ID

Another big change we made is how we handle Windows Live ID during checkout. Despite having a Windows Live ID from another Microsoft online service (e.g. Messenger, Xbox Live, Hotmail), many of our customers don’t realize they have one. When asked to either “Sign in” or “Sign up” with Windows Live ID, many of our customers were left scratching their heads.

To help this, we try to do a better job steering customers in the right direction from the start of the checkout process.

If customers think they need to sign up for a new account, we just ask them to provide their email address. If it is not an existing Windows Live ID, we proceed to the next step of checkout, and allow them to create an account by providing a password alongside their address and payment information.

If, however, a customer tries to sign up for a Windows Live ID with an email adddress that is already registered, we do the best job we can to steer them to sign in instead.

Here is a screenshot of our sign in page:

If a user enters a email address that is already a Windows Live ID, we show them this:

Easier media type selection

When we shipped our initial release, we didn’t anticipate that customers would want to change the media type (download vs. shipping it) within the shopping cart and checkout process. Since it turns out that many customers want to do this, we now enable easier switching, and avoid the step of removing the product from the cart, and re-adding the alternative media.

Before	After

Let us know what you think!

On top of all these changes, we also had significant work on our back-end infrastructure as well as our tools we use for content and product management in our catalog. However, those are much less glamorous and broadly interesting, so I’ll spare you the details

If you have any feedback on any of the changes from this new release, please feel free to hit me up in comments, in email or on Twitter.

Visualization of the Credit Crisis

Trevin — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 03:20:19 +0000

This one has been floating around for a little while, but it’s so good, it’s worth sharing:

The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.

Outlook 2007 and Managing Automatic Meeting Responses

Trevin — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 08:07:00 +0000

If you spend any amount of time in Outlook and manage meetings, you’ll quickly find almost overwhelmed by responses to meeting requests you setup with other people.

As soon as they hit Accept, Tentative or Decline, it will fire off an email to the meeting organizer (you). At Microsoft, this typically means that for every meeting request I send out, I get at least 6 responses back due to the average size of meetings I run on my team. Before I hit on the responses, I always scan them in case the sender included a comment in their reply. For instance, someone might Accept a meeting request but say “I’m going to be 15 mins late, but start without me”. If I just delete that right away or use an an Outlook Rule to blanket filter responses, I’d have missed it.

So for years, I’ve been just getting these meeting request responses, and deleting them like an automaton.

Recently, Mike sent me this great tip the other day he found a great post on the Outlook team blog which sets up an Outlook Rule to not only reduce the inbox noise from responses to meeting requests, but also bubbles up the responses that I should read.

Their problem summary is exactly the problem many of us face:

If you’re anything like me, then you send and receive lots of meeting requests in Outlook. In a typical week I’ll schedule around 10 new meetings with different people – if a typical meeting has approximately five attendees that could be 50 responses that come back to my Inbox. I realized a few things about meeting responses:

I only care when people Decline a meeting. I’m assuming most people will attend.

Regardless of your response, if you type a comment in the body I want to see it.

Outlook retains all of the response information on each meeting automatically in the “Tracking” tab.

Their solution is to create a rule to automate this:

If an item comes in that is a Tentative or Accept meeting response, it moves it to my “Automatic Replies” folder and keeps it out of my Inbox.

If it is a Decline it will remain in the Inbox.

If the body has any content in it, regardless of the response type, it will remain in the Inbox.

I didn’t even know you could create a rule that could target only specific Outlook application message types (like Meeting responses). Cool! My only tweak to their solution is that instead of moving the responses to a separate folder, I just delete them. Email search is so good in Outlook that “Deleted Items” has become my “Archive” folder and removes another process when triaging my emails – I no longer have to think about archiving vs. deleting.

Check out their full post for the complete details on how to create the rule.

HTML Email creation for Microsoft Store

Trevin — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 14:50:52 +0000

For Microsoft Store, we have quite a few different email templates that we used to send customers emails for things like order receipts and shipping confirmations. When we were creating these HTML email templates, it was eye opening (read: shocking) to learn how support for HTML & CSS element varied great among different webmail and email clients. One tag that worked in Hotmail wouldn’t work in Gmail, then when we found one that worked in both, it wouldn’t be compatible with Outlook or Yahoo webmail. It was frustratingly to say the least, and underscored why projects like the Email Standards are so important.

Some examples of differences: