Windows Live Local, with its isometric, Sim City, “bird’s eye” view, is quite nice.
However, what gets me is — do MS do this deliberately? I’m referring, of course, to the way it’s broken on Firefox 1.5, requiring you to drag twice to get it scrolling around the viewport, and the jumpy, clunky UI on that browser.
Pretty lame — and lazy, too. By now, it’s essential for a new fancy website to work under Firefox; even if only 20% of your users will be using it, a good proportion of those are the bleeding-edge, ‘taste-maker’ types who’ll be blogging about it, writing reviews for newspapers and news sites, and generally generating buzz for you, and thereby attracting the other 80%.
I’m told it works great in IE, but there’s no way I’m starting Windows and opening up that app. If I want to be infected by 700 different malwares within seconds, I’ll ask. ;)
On top of that, coverage seems spotty — Ireland is AWOL, of course.
As a result, my one line summary would have to be: idea = cool, dataset = probably cool, execution = half-assed and crappy. I’m looking forward to Google doing a much better job with their implementation of the Sim City viewpoint.