ITWorx Prayer Times Gadget wins first place in the Microsoft MDC 2007 Gadget Cup!

Wednesday 7th February 2007, Cairo. The ITWorx Prayer Times Gadget which took part in the Windows Vista Gadget Cup organized as part of the proceedings of the Microsoft Middle East Developers Conference 2007 won first place amongst all participating gadgets.

The Gadget was competing alongside several industry heavyweights. ITWorx won first place with resounding cheers from the crowd!

The Gadget was built upon years of effort and dedication that several individuals in ITWorx had contributed to in order to build the original Prayer Times calculation engine and Outlook plug-in. The Vista Gadget itself was developed by the Technical Architecture Team.

The Gadget’s compelling elegance was due to its modern design devised by Karim Saady & the ingeniously clever features crammed into very compact screen real-estate by Ahmed Fathalla & Youssef Shahin. It featured a second-by-second count down timer to the next prayer; constantly keeping the user alert in an incredibly exciting, visually stunning and time conscious way.

Mahmoud El-Zayet speaking on behalf of Youssef Shahin and other members of the TA Team, addressed the crowd, amidst raucous cheering, saying that ITWorx chose this gadget idea to help Vista users be mindful of prayer times in an increasingly busy schedule and lifestyle that is getting more relentlessly demanding every day. As soon as he finished, the audience went wild with emphatic applause!

The Gadget itself will be made available for public download right here on this blog very soon - so please stay tuned!

Update: If you missed the URL in the comment below - here it is again: http://gallery.live.com/liveItemDetail.aspx?li=83712aef-5008-4bfc-b6f7-aa495828bb44&l=1

IE7 released!

IE7 is finally here. 

Check out the IE7 team blog.

There are a number of issues you have to check concerning this new browser, I highly recommend going to the link in this post to make sure your web applications are ready.

I personally tested IE7 on my PC and it is working great, and I so far the issues I’ve seen are relatively minor. I think the major issue will be layout support, but I am sure the IE7 team is hard at work on this issue.

Google Office

In Googles latest attempt to produce a free office (in other words to outdo Microsoft), they have created a new link for people to use their office bundle (a wordprocessor and spreadsheet app) on the internet.

Lets see if people will like the idea of editing documents with an application on the Internet, and if Google will actually keep our data safe. I guess only time will tell.

MS faces some VS 2005 compatiblity issues with vista

As you will read in the blog posting below, MS is facing some compatibility issues between VS 2005 and Windows Vista, apparently, they have already release SP1 beta which is supposed to fix the problem. But from the post below, I’d weigh my options well before I develop an application for Windows Vista  on VS 2005, at least increase the risk factor in the project plan.

Check it out

Microsoft releases final test version of Vista

Just in from reuters, MS has finally release Windows Vista RC2.

This will be the final interim release from MS before they ship the fully released version.

This is all according to the following reuters posting:

http://ca.today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=technologyNews&storyID=2006-10-06T224006Z_01_N06349489_RTRIDST_0_TECH-MICROSOFT-VISTA-COL.XML&archived=False