Color, a Microsoft design team discovered with the aid of a focus group, is quintessential to a positive user experience. In advising developers to add delight to their apps, a team leader made a revelation about Windows 7's mission.

LOS ANGELES - During a mid-day session on best practices for designing applications to take advantage of Windows 7, Microsoft's principal design manager Samuel Moreau told attendees that his team was charged with the task of building new visual elements into the new user interface specifically to make users feel better about the operating system.

Finally following through on a partnership that was announced over four years ago, Netflix subscribers will soon be able to stream movies directly to their TiVo DVR.

A limited beta test has begun where TiVo users can browse more than 12,000 movies and TV episodes available through Netflix's "Instant Watching" service, where it streams video over the Web instead of mailing a DVD. The companies expect to expand the capability to all TiVo users by early December.

Will users feel better about Windows 7 when they have the option of turning off one of Vista's least understood features? Or will they instead make the attempt to understand it? That's the problem which Microsoft's Mike Nash is now facing.

LOS ANGELES - Since the original RTM version of Windows Vista, a Registry-based switch has existed for changing the running state of User Account Control -- the feature that stops processes from performing tasks that haven't been launched by human users. So even today, it's feasible, albeit not easy, to turn up the volume and have UAC prompt for passwords (as was originally planned in the early betas), or turn it off.

It's six days until the American elections. Do you know whether your electronic voting machines are behaving?

The overwhelming majority of voters on Tuesday will encounter machines from Premier Election Systems, Hart InterCivic, Sequoia Voting Systems, or Election Systems and Software (ES&S). For your consideration, we present a roundup of problems currently known to be manifesting or to have recently manifested in testing and early voting, sorted by vendor.

Yesterday we asked you to tell us what you wanted to know about Windows 7. We posed many of these questions to Mike Nash, corporate vice president of Windows Product Management. Read on for the answers.

Note: Not all of the questions were answered, so we will post a follow-up later this week with more details on icons, SSD drives, security, file copy speed, Aero and more.

Although much better known in the US for its Eee MID device and its motherboards, Asus also builds phones, including the first dedicated Skype device. Now the Taiwanese manufacturer reportedly plans to follow the footsteps of G1-maker HTC.

Asus plans to launch its Android phone during the first half of next year, possibly selling it under its own brand in the Taiwan first before rolling out custom editions for overseas customers, says an account today in the English-language Taiwan industry publication DigiTimes, which cites unnamed sources at Asus.

At PDC 2008, Microsoft took the wraps off Windows 7 and showcased its new dock-like Taskbar. But the revamped Taskbar isn't in the pre-beta build distributed to attendees, so we went hunting for more details on Windows 7's most prominent new feature.

First up, Quick Launch is officially dead. Microsoft will be leaving the Quick Launch folder in Windows 7 for backwards compatibility, but any shortcuts stored there will never show up. Deskbands (like an address bar in the Taskbar) still exist in Windows 7, but must also support rendering on the transparent Glass UI.

A discount-priced G1 phone, slated for availability today in Wal-Mart stores, has now been pushed back to about November 3 by a shipping delay, BetaNews has learned.

Wal-Mart does plan to sell T-Mobile's Android-enabled G1 at a discounted price -- but starting on about November 3, instead of October 29, as originally expected, a spokesperson for the retailer told BetaNews today.

A Facebook worm wending its way through the address books of unwary users is gaining trust by pointing to two equally trusted sites, researchers warned on Wednesday.

The worm aims to trick the unwary into installing malware on their own systems. That malware is disguised as a new ActiveX video codec.

After winning the HD "format war" and enjoying brisk sales of the Blu-ray-enabled PlayStation 3, Sony this week saw its profits for the past few months effectively canceled out by a surge in the relative strength of the Japanese yen.

Sony sold 2.43 million PS3 consoles from July to September of this year, an increase of 85 percent over the same time frame in 2007, according to quarterly results announced today. The company also racked up particularly strong sales in the categories of flat panel TVs and Vaio PCs.

A highly-anticipated aspect of the "New Xbox Experience" dashboard upgrade for Microsoft's Xbox 360 is the addition of streaming Netflix content. Today, it has been revealed that the content will include some 300 high-definition titles as well.

Though Xbox Live Primetime has been delayed until next spring, the November 19 upgrade to the Xbox 360 dashboard includes a beau geste from Netflix: exclusive access to the service's streaming HD content.

Acting on concerns that OpenID's a great idea but a miserable user experience, Google on Wednesday announced an API based on usability research for OpenID identity providers.

OpenID-accepting sites (aka "relying parties") using the new API can allow visitors to log in using only their Google account, with no need to figure out a new username and password. In the example given on Google Code Blog, if a visitor to an OpenID-accepting has a gmail.com address, they'd be temporarily taken back to Google and asked if she or he wished to sign into the new site using that address.

Linkedin, the social network for professionals, has taken a cue from Facebook and MySpace and has included its own applications platform. In keeping with the site's ethic, the launch applications are largely productivity-based.

Unlike the other popular social networks with applications platforms, Linkedin's do not include time-wasters and other such frivolities. Amazon, Google, Tripit, WordPress, Box.net, SixApart, and Huddle.net all have provided apps for Linkedin that help move the Site from personal data and resume sharing into a more project-oriented collaboration tool.

Driven by its FiOS HDTV and Internet broadband services and Verizon Wireless, a joint venture with Vodane, Verizon's business boomed big time from July through September, even as the economy began to slow.

With the world economy starting to unravel, Verizon Communications added 233,000 FiOS TV subcribers and 225,000 FiOS Internet subscribers from July to September of this year, while its Verizon Wireless joint venture added 1.5 million new subscribers, according to third-quarter financial results released this week.

Day three of PDC 2008 kicks off with a morning keynote from Rick Rashid, Senior Vice President for Microsoft Research. The company's robotics efforts are expected to be a prime topic of discussion for developers here.

We will be live-blogging the keynote as it takes place. Refresh this page for updates.