About John O'Brien
What do you do?
I’m a software developer here in Brisbane specialising in Windows Live services, which is the new suite of online services from Microsoft including gadgets, virtual earth, spaces, messenger, search and many more.
What is your technical passion?
I love working with new technology, especially cool technology, it’s great to be able to show off to someone else and for them to say wow. I think most software developers don’t get enough praise for their work.
How did you get into Microsoft technologies?
My first full time IT job was building touch screen interactive using VB6. The quality of tools like visual studio and the simplicity of deployment won me over. I haven’t looked back in 7 years of working with your technologies.
Where do you think the technology is heading, say in 5 years time?
Today we see WPF and an amazing amount of online services to utilise for your web apps. In five years time much of what I’m doing will be the norm, you won’t think about making your own images store, mapping, search or authentication. It’s all very much about integrating services together and adding your business intelligence to it. Everyone will simply expect applications to talk to each other in an always connected world. It won’t be about a single application but instead a service you can utilise in many ways.
Vista Sidebar Gadgets
What do you like about Vista Sidebar Gadgets?
Gadget are so simple, they solve a specific problem and look good while doing it.
What has Sidebar Gadgets enabled you to do that you would otherwise not been able to achieve.
The Traffic Cam gadget is a great example, I had all the cameras in Australia plotted on a Virtual Earth map this time last year, it was kind of cool but nowhere as useful as having just the images you want on your sidebar whenever you need it without having to launch a browser or app.
If technology, time and resources weren’t a barrier where would you like to see gadgets head and what types of solution could we see?
Anything that you want view immediately to get some up-to-date information is perfect, the most popular gadgets are by far the weather and CPU/memory graphs.
I’d love to have a gadget I could consult at lunchtime that would suggest lunch offers from my local food outlets. Or maybe a design a sandwich gadget so I can beat the queue!
From the API perspective and Vista we will need ways to organise them better, a recent blog mentioned a user that would love to have different gadget appear at different times of the day. That could be very useful.
John’s Vista Sidebar Gadget Entry
What gave you the inspiration to make the Queensland Traffic Gadget?
I saw the competition advertised on my local MSDN user group site, over a few beers with friends we talked about what would be cool and I recalled the traffic cameras I had used previously. It seemed like a great idea and simple to build. (In fact somebody else also had the idea)
What kind of skills and technologies did you need in order to make the gadget?
Basic HTML, CSS and JavaScript and some Photoshop skills. If you have visual studio you can attach to the sidebar process and step by step debug through code. Clearly you need Vista.
How long did it take you to build the gadget?
It was built in one Sunday afternoon. I plan to spend a few more hours cleaning up the code soon so others can use it. In fact I have already had one gadget from Ireland where they simply changed the array of cameras to their local ones. That gave me an idea to make something more generic and reusable.
Are you looking at entering more gadgets into the competition?
Yes, there are a few variations on this gadget that could be explored or else a bunch of good ideas on the competition site that no-one has yet built. I know recently we had good rain and a cool dam level gadget would have been awesome.