Windows Live Gallery: Interview with Chris Butler

 

Windows Live Gallery is the "one stop shop" for gadgets and add-ins for Windows and Windows Live. The site has recently upgraded with a new look and some new content, and we talked to Lead Program Manager Chris Butler about Gallery, about the changes, and about some new features coming for Gallery.

 

00:00 Chris describes Windows Live Gallery
01:22 Messenger content is now on Gallery
02:40 Partner tiers
04:44 What to do now to get into the Silver tier
06:00 The Nielson numbers
09:07 Lowering the bar so anyone can create Gallery items
11:00 How to get developer information on Gallery

While all the details of the new partner tiers have not been completed, Chris says there are four basic tiers:

Gold - for premium partners - for those with some kind of business arrangement with Microsoft

Silver - for those who are making a great contribution to the community, providing great content

Regular - for occasional contributors

Microsoft - a special category for Microsoft content - so that MS content is easily identifiable.

In addition to visual differentiation, the partner tiers will allow for special programmatic access to add, edit, and update content.

We should be hearing more about partner tiers in the "next weeks and months"

Windows Live Gallery

Windows Live Gallery DevCenter

LiveSide with Chris Butler - Windows Live Gallery 11 minutes, 10mb .mp3

Zune Vista Sidebar Gadget

 

If you’re one of the millions of people with a Zune (or even if you’re not) then you’re going to love this… Essentially this gadget works as a media player in the sidebar, but it’s different to all the others in that it looks and behaves just like the Zune.

Just like the Zune you can browse through songs and albums, all the buttons on the gadget work as they would on the real thing. It will also utilise any album art you have already set up in Windows Media Player, which is rather smart.

The gadget offers a decent set of options too. You can change the background of the gadget, the colour of the Zune (restricted to three colours at the moment - and no pink for the ladies). You can also change the reaction time for the hover-over scroll wheels, and list all the keybord shortcuts too.

I think this is a fantastic release personally! Even if you don’t have a Zune, this gadget offers a comprehensive and solid media playback option for the Vista sidebar - so go and grab it now!

Guess that song

Version: 1.0
This new gadget was purely intended to be a bit of fun, similar to the game on ipods, it takes a song at random from your music library and you have to then guess which song is playing by clicking on one of the three options.

I thought this was quite a popular game on the ipod (well I enjoyed it) but it seems to be getting some pretty poor feedback on the gallery so maybe you guys could advise me on how to improve?

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