Did we launch something yesterday? Oh yes… that was it… the IE9 beta. It’s been an interesting time playing with the platform previews since IE9 was announced at MIX and it was great to get access to the browser chrome and development capabilities. You can grab it from here.

Of course the team have been busy looking at it from their point of view and if you haven’t seen this stuff then take a look.

• Martin talks about new features for developers on the all-new MSDN UK blog highlighting some of the work on the Gorillaz site which is well worth a look once you’ve downloaded the beta. He has a little more detail on his own blog.
• On the similarly new TechNet UK blog, Simon talks about things from an IT Pro perspective.
• Simon’s also built 9 1-minute videos (see what he did there?) which you can get to here. They’re all linked so you can bounce through them all over a coffee.
• The Ubelly back channel also cover the launch though they' are more interested in the HTML5 bits and you can see some of that discussion here.

I also really enjoyed Scott Hanselman’s developer-focussed post- definitely worth a read. If you really want to get right behind the detail of IE9 then as always I’d drink from the firehose that is the IE blog.

The Beauty of the Web launch site contains a load of great demos focussed on the various aspects of IE9 capabilities such as HTML5 and GPU-acceleration and also just some great examples of what the future holds for the web. I highly recommend a look at:

• The aforementioned Gorillaz site.
• The TopGear Cool Wall site.
• This BMW site.
• The Rough Guides site.

All of which are a bit of a showcase for HTML5 and CSS3. Enjoy and onward!

Simon continues to be impressed by Windows Intune (our cloud based desktop management service) - as do the people he talks to about it. He's produced a nice video showing the install process:

Our man @odedran points us to a Windows Phone 7 advert that was shown at #SecretCinema.

Great partnership from Bing and Wowhead.com to create a visual search of the hottest loot available in the game. Not that I play WoW all that much. My own real avatar needs around 30 hours a day at the moment, so I'm destined never to ding higher than a level 20. After that it all gets a bit too complicated, so I'll be forever destined to wield the "somewhat less than rare" Sword of the Mangy Donkey (I'm not sure that's a real weapon by the way fact fans).

On an RPG/Gaming tip though: like @mikeormond I'm enjoying getting my head around XNA a tiny bit (I've flirted with it in the past) and I've just wading through RPG Programming Using XNA Game Studio 3.0 which (as the title hints at) is based on XNA Studio 3.0, but should provide a lot of inspiration for a Windows Phone 7 RPG architecture, and - looking at the code - a lot of it is likely to be conceptually transferable to Silverlight too (just minus all the pipelines and so on that XNA uses).

Oh, and have a look at these gaming rigs.

As we inch closer to the release of Windows Phone 7 then it’s worth recapping on some bits and pieces. Firstly, in the UK both @MikeOrmond and @PaulFo are out and about looking to help you with application testing and deployment. Take a look at this post for details of the drop in clinics. Mike’s blog is also the place to be this year for information on Phone development.

Mike also points at this post by Brandon Watson on the Windows Phone Developer blog.The main thrust of the post is to announce the final release of the developer tools (16th September). There are some other useful resource links in there too.

If you’re one of the people representing the 300,000 downloads of the developer tools so far and thinking about releasing your application into the wild (well, the Marketplace) then the following points from the post will  be highly relevant:

1. Register at the marketplace today

2. Finish you application or game using the Beta tools

3. Download the final Windows Phone Developer Tools when they are released on September 16^th

4. Recompile your app or game using the final tools

5. Have your XAP ready for ingestion into the marketplace in early October when it opens

The @Microsoft twitter account pointed me at this short post on some editorially placed tags in the September issue of Architectural Digest. The tags themselves are branded with the logo of the magazine, which (see Why Has The Barcode Never Changed? on a similar subject)

In itself, this is an interesting way of linking physical media to virtual media in a continuous way.

The tags themselves can be read by a variety of devices (even the iPhone). There’s more info and download mechanisms at the Tag site.

If you’re interested in Tag, then it’s ridiculously easy to use:

• Go to http://tag.microsoft.com
• Sign in with a Live ID
• Create a tag which might contain a URL, plain text or a phone number to call
• Print/Distribute the resulting tag
• Monitor the success of the tag from the dashboard

Meantime if you want to see a cool video of a very smart kid building a tag with Rubik’s Cubes then look no further (thanks to Mel)

If you’re a student you can take advantage of the DreamSpark offer to submit and deploy apps for free on the Windows Phone Marketplace (alongside getting access to the professional development tools in the first place).

This video is worth a look in which they say “We’ve been working on our android app for two weeks, been working on this one [wp7 app] since 3pm [3 hours] and we’re at about the same stage.”

Mixest XAP #gdgtseattle from Anand Iyer on Vimeo.

(download)

Click here to download:

zombies-or-aliens-a-lap-around-the-archivist-DgvsixnqldzhnqnttHym.zip (903 KB)

The Archivist has been around for a little while, but if you haven’t used it yet, then here’s a quick example of how it works. The Archivist is, essentially, a tool to provide rapid analysis of Twitter activity against a given search term. For example, against the hash tag #zombies.

It overcomes a little of the drawbacks of Twitter search in that it maintains an archive (naturally) of the search term beyond the 7-day-ish horizon of Twitter search.

Kicking it off is as simple as bashing in the search term to the box shown above and clicking start analysis. Then you sit back and wait for the analysis to occur. The service is ‘elastic’ which means it needs a fangled explanation of how it works, but essentially the service will begin building up an archive from this point on.

If you log in with Twitter credentials then you can save the archive and return to it later. Logging back in, you’ll probably see something like this.

Here we can see two different archives I kicked off in mid-July. I became slightly concerned after hearing Jer Thorp’s talk at Thinking Digital that he used an Arduino kit connected to Twitter to warn him about impending alien invasion that I thought I’d set up a similar intelligence system.

Oddly, there are a lot of people tweeting about Aliens and Zombies, though from the volumes it seems like a zombie attack is more likely. We can then drill into a given archive, which gives a lot of simple information such as: top words in the search term, top users, and top urls.

Which we can then further drill into. Here we can have a look at the top #zombies tweeters.

Where we could explore a little more if we wanted to.

Finally, you can download the archive as a Zip, or view in Excel so you can take the data away and perform your own analysis. You can also compare two different archives. Here we can see #aliens compared to #zombies and frankly that spike at the end of July is a bit of a worry.

So it’s a useful tool as a bit of fun, or more likely as a simple way to analyze and retain tweets for an event or ongoing hash tag meme. Just don’t forget to set up the archive BEFORE the event starts!