Windows Vista and Feeds

As noted pretty much everywhere on the web, Windows Vista launched (for businesses) last week.

Windows Vista includes IE7 and the Windows RSS Platform, and is therefore the first Windows operating system to ship with built-in support for RSS (and the first OS of any kind to have RSS support built-in as a native platform component).

Windows Vista is, in fact, the fulfilment of a promise we made over a year ago at Gnomedex 5.0: Longhorn loves RSS.

 

In addition to the reading experience in IE7, and the platform features, Windows Vista also include the new Windows Sidebar, which ships with a Feed Headlines gadget.

The team that built the gadget have written up a great post on how the gadget was built, and how they leveraged the RSS platform to make development much easier for themselves.

Read their post here: Building the Feed Headlines Gadget.

In case you haven't seen the gadget in action, the screenshot below shows the gadget after the user has clicked on a headline (I've configured it to show the headlines from the MSNBC News feed).

Many thanks to the folks on the Sidebar team that developed such a great gadget, as well as to Chrix Finne, who interned on the IE RSS team as a PM this past summer, and helped out the Sidebar team with feature design for this gadget.

- Sean

 Note: Apologies to readers who downloaded an earlier version of this post, which used a photograph taken by Niall Kennedy and posted on flickr.com. He did not appreciate the usage, and replaced it with a different image. I forgot to include an attribution, which I had fully intended to do, but for which I apologise to him.