Martin Heller
Contributing Writer

Windows Media Center: Another reason to like Windows 7

analysis
Jun 8, 20091 min

Martin was pleasantly surprised to find Arrested Development among the Internet TV offerings on the Windows 7 Release Candidate

The other day I was editing an album of photographs of our local Memorial Day parade using Picasa on the Windows 7 Release Candidate on my laptop at home. As Picasa’s slideshow is merely serviceable, I wondered what the slideshow would be like using Windows Media Center, so I fired it up. It wasn’t bad at all — kind of Mac-like, in fact.

[ Preparing for Windows 7? Get the overview you need in the Windows 7 PDF Report from InfoWorld’s J. Peter Bruzzese. ]

At some point, Media Center asked to set up Internet TV, and I said yes. I was pleasantly surprised to find Arrested Development Season 3 among the on-demand video content, as I had only seen Seasons 1 and 2, and one of my daughters had the DVD of Season 3 in New York. Score two points for Windows 7.

(Click on the reduced image below to see it full size.)

Arrested Development small.png
Martin Heller

Martin Heller is a contributing writer at InfoWorld. Formerly a web and Windows programming consultant, he developed databases, software, and websites from his office in Andover, Massachusetts, from 1986 to 2010. From 2010 to August of 2012, Martin was vice president of technology and education at Alpha Software. From March 2013 to January 2014, he was chairman of Tubifi, maker of a cloud-based video editor, having previously served as CEO.

Martin is the author or co-author of nearly a dozen PC software packages and half a dozen Web applications. He is also the author of several books on Windows programming. As a consultant, Martin has worked with companies of all sizes to design, develop, improve, and/or debug Windows, web, and database applications, and has performed strategic business consulting for high-tech corporations ranging from tiny to Fortune 100 and from local to multinational.

Martin’s specialties include programming languages C++, Python, C#, JavaScript, and SQL, and databases PostgreSQL, MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle Database, Google Cloud Spanner, CockroachDB, MongoDB, Cassandra, and Couchbase. He writes about software development, data management, analytics, AI, and machine learning, contributing technology analyses, explainers, how-to articles, and hands-on reviews of software development tools, data platforms, AI models, machine learning libraries, and much more.

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