It always seemed a little strange to me that the new Expression Web and Blend tools would not be available under a MSDN Subscription ... after all, they are still development tools at heart.

Well Microsoft is, from now, adding these two tools to the MSDN Premium subscribtion, which was apparently inspired by customer feedback!

As announced on Somasegar's WebLog:

"Expression Blend and Expression Web are intended to help creative professionals collaborate with developers to create rich user experiences for the Web, Windows Vista applications and beyond, which means we need to make sure both tools are readily available to our developer community."

The offer excludes Expression Design and Expression Media as they "... are not directly intended for application development, we feel they fall outside the current scope of MSDN Subscriptions". Fair enough.

I discovered today Microsoft's version of online mapping, Live Local, which competes directly with Google Maps and here in NZ SMaps (aka Zoomin). They all use the same AJAX whizzy UI components, but there are a few things which set it apart from the rest of the crowd.

Here in NZ, we often end up at the bottom of the list for updating country specific features. Take Google Maps for example, which does not have the geocoding facilities to find anything but the main centres. This is where SMaps (Zoomin) have done a great job in taking the same mapping style, but adding the street level geocoding we need.

What I like about Local Live is that it now not only has the geocoding for NZ, but the driving directions too, which are not possible in any of the other products. It works great too and from what I've seen so far, it's pretty accurate. Of course it works slightly better in IE than in other browsers, but really (be honest!) is that really a problem for anyone? I also like how on the first page load, it knows roughly where you are in the world, so it can centre the map. Give it your IP address or use a plugin, it can locate your computer too.

I saw a video of Photosynth, from Microsoft Research, a while ago but couldn't for the life of me remember the product name! So when I was talking to some people about how Photosynth will crawl the web and find photo's similar to yours so that it can create a 3D space out of them, I was lacking in credibility as I couldn't back myself up!

Anyway, you can watch a demonstration here ... the mind boggles!

Just got chance to look at a link I was sent a week or so ago … Microsoft UK commissioned Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant of “The Office” to do a spoof training video. The film is viewable on the page via Google Videos … very funny!! Hopefully the link sticks around for a long while!