The Ultimate Escape

So Roger Lawrence over at the Microsoft DPE team has posted a link to The Ultimate Escape web-site which has been put up by i-mate. Basically they are going to get a bunch of folks together in Byron Bay, equip them with phones from the new i-mate Ultimate range and set them at the task of working remotely.

Yours’ truly has been lucky enough to score a ticket to this little shindig which is cool since I’ve been experiencing some serious geek lust for the Ultimate devices since last year. The models have changed but the 9502 is pretty much the device to die for.

So basically I am counting down the days until I jump on the plane to Byron Bay, I’ll be working while I am up there so it won’t be all fun and games, but I think it will be great being around other people that get the whole mobile worker thing.

I just implemented IE8 WebSlices in an internal application - three minutes.

Last week myself and some co-workers launched a new internal business intelligence application to help us better identify issues out in the field - basically it is a worm (ala television debates) which takes the pulse of people across the Readify business.

Please note this isn’t the live data, we are just doing something to our test SQL server at the moment so I can’t show the real stuff right now (I would if I could - honest).

Anyway, after a few minor tweaks to the HTML in the page (basically adding a container div, a header and content div with special class values) I got the desired effect.

For the observant I am using the Google Charts API exposed to ASP.NET through this neat control written by Chris Pietschmann (when is Microsoft going to ship a charts API so that I don’t have to use Google?). Anyway, once this is done, the magic happens and hey presto, I’ve got WebSlices!

Which means that I can add it to the top of my IE8 window, like this.

I think the Internet Explorer team has done a really great job of making this particular feature brain dead simple which should help drive adoption. I’m always checking this page during the day at the moment so this will allow me to take a quick peak.

If you want to implement WebSlices in your own applications check out these resources.

• http://visitmix.com/blogs/Joshua/IE8-Activities-With-Jane-Kim/
• http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/ie/default.aspx
• http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ProjectName=ie8whitepapers&ReleaseId=567

Got any questions - post a comment!