Microsoft's Kodu Game Creation Tool Now Available as PC Beta
Microsoft Research project Kodu (formerly Boku), an Xbox game designed to help children learn the basics of programming, has been released as a PC beta.
The game was created by Microsoft Research and debuted over a year ago at PDC 2008. It was released to Xbox LIVE community games in Spring 2009 and since then has been downloaded more than 200,000 times. According to Microsoft, Kodu is used in more than 60 educational institutions across the globe to introduce children to programming.
Matthew MacLaurin, director of the Redmond FUSE (Future Social Experiences) Lab and the game's creator, based the game off watching his daughter's experiences with computers. "Today, it seems like the simple magic of programming has been completely lost in the shuffle," MacLaurin said. "We need to show kids how exciting and creative it can be."
Microsoft claims anyone from seven to 70 can create a game in minutes. The Kodu team claims it will provide Kodu update releases on a roughly two-week cycle. According to Matthew MacLaurin, Principal Program Manager in the creative Systems Group at Microsoft Research: "It's our goal to be very transparent about what we're working on in the hopes that this next phase will be an active collaboration with energetic Kodu users around the world. These next few months will be filled with activity."
Download: Kodu PC Beta
Microsoft extends Xbox 360 warranty to 1 year
Just in time for last-minute holiday shoppers, Microsoft has extended the Xbox 360’s warranty from 90 days to one year, bringing it in line with the warranty lengths of rival game consoles from Sony and Nintendo. The extension is retroactive, meaning that someone who bought an Xbox 360 in the United States or Canada and paid for repairs within the last year is eligible for reimbursement. In many other countries, a one-year warranty already is standard. “Customer satisfaction is a central focus and priority for the Xbox 360 system,” Jeff Bell, a marketing vice president at Microsoft, said in a statement Friday.
Microsoft also said reimbursement checks for repairs done in the last 12 months will be sent out automatically in about 10 weeks. Contact information for warranty questions is available on the Xbox support site. Nintendo’s Wii comes with a standard one-year warranty, with a free 90-day extension if customers register their consoles on the company’s Web site. Sony’s PlayStation 3 comes with a one-year warranty. Some credit cards, including American Express and Visa, extend the manufacturer’s warranty if a product is bought using that card.
Microsoft Patches IE 7 Phishing Filter To Boost Speed
Microsoft has released a fix for Internet Explorer 7 that should stop the browser’s built-in phishing filter from slowing Web surfing. According to the Redmond, Wash., developer, IE 7 users may see their PCs bog down as the filter evaluates multi-frame pages for fraud indicators. On pages with a large number of frames, or when the user browses several frames in a short time, IE 7’s processor appetite spikes.
“When you use Windows Internet Explorer 7 to visit a Web page, the computer may respond very slowly as the Phishing Filter evaluates Web page contents,” Microsoft said in a support document it posted Tuesday. IE 7’s anti-phishing filter was touted by Microsoft as one of several security enhancements to the new browser. The filter checks each site against a list of known or likely fraudulent pages kept on a Microsoft-run server. Mozilla Corp.’s Firefox 2.0, on the other hand, checks visited sites against a list of potentially dangerous sites kept on the PC. Microsoft and Mozilla have made conflicting claims that their anti-phishing tool is the best in the business. The patch, which was not automatically pushed to IE 7 users running Windows XP SP2 or Windows Server 2003, or posted on the list of possible fixes on Microsoft Update, can be downloaded from the Microsoft site. Users must be running a legitimate copy of Windows to grab the patch.