Paul Thurrott finishes his 2-part series of interviews of Hillel Cooperman and Tjeerd Hoek, Longhorn User Experience mavens. The interview covers just how hard it is to make an entire OS usable and just how much work MS does to get it right.

However, one thing that Hillel said struck me particularly as someone fairly new to working at MS:

“Actually, that was the shocking thing about coming here: The problems weren’t simple. The number of people that I met who were humble, that cared deeply and passionately about making the user experience better for customers and weren’t just saying, ‘Hey, here’s a new API’–not that I don’t love a new API–was surprising. These people were really deeply concerned about how they could make customers’ lives better and had thought a lot about this, way more than I had. I was blown away. I just couldn’t believe it.”

That’s exactly how I felt coming to MS. We have a PR problem, but we definately do not have a care-about-the-customer problem.

Paul Thurrott is more of a user guy then a developer guy, but you have to be a user before you can be a developer, and his stuff is often interesting. Now he’s created a spot on his site to gather his Longhorn content. My only question: where’s the dang RSS feed?!?

If you read Ian’s article on Avalon Graphics Composition before the fireworks, you missed a wonderful discussion of how Avalon compares with Apple’s Quartz and Quartz Extreme. Not only does Ian respond to the ever popular “Doesn’t Mac OS X already do today what Longhorn will do tomorrow?” with a resounding “No!” but he does it in such a thorough manner, that you can’t help be admire it.

You go, Ian! : )

This time, Ryan digs into the RTC stack in Longhorn to build an IM app to enable synchronized browsing and chatting. Includes source code and a meaty write-up, including Ryan's complaints about the current RTC stack.

I'm really getting to like Benjamin’s Mitchell’s blog as a Reader's Digest of various issues that he's following. This time, he summarizes advise from across three MS architects providing guidance on where to draw boundaries between services.

Jesus Rodriguez provides an overview of the WinFS data model, including using it for searching and notifications.

Mobiform is one of two 3rd party vendors that have been building a XAML parser that runs under the current version of .NET. Today, Mobiform went one better by releasing a working preview of an interactive XAML Editor that runs under the current version of .NET. Plus, the XAML that I created in the editor works on the PDC Longhorn bits.

Now there’s something other than the 101-Key Text Wizard to use when designing XAML for Longhorn. Mind you, what Mobiform has put together isn’t Illustrator or even Paint Brush yet, but it’s an amazing start.

Normally I like to consume something before I recommend it, but his stuff is always so good that I’m going to point out Ian’s new piece on graphical composition in Avalon before I’ve even read it. Here’s the conclusion to whet your appetite:

“The new composition model in Avalon removes many of the visual design constraints that applied to most Win32 applications. It also improves performance by making more effective use of modern graphics cards, reducing the frequency with which the OS has to call the application back to keep the display up to date, and enabling a much higher quality of user interface.”

Enjoy.