The company’s Windows 10 chief has tweeted that developing new features and hardware for the Mobile version of the OS was no longer a "focus". Joe Belfiore added that he had also switched to Android himself. Windows 10 Mobile tried to attract users by letting them run the same "universal apps" on both their PCs and handsets, but the concept failed to catch on. The OS accounted for just 0.03% of the global market – based on smartphone shipments – between April and June, according to research company IDC. The…
Category: News
Hey Cortana, open Alexa: Microsoft and Amazon’s first-of-its-kind collaboration
I talk to Cortana every day — at home, work and on-the-go — to get information about my day, to set reminders so I don’t forget things, and to answer my questions. But I don’t just use one digital assistant. I also frequently talk to Alexa to listen to audio books or to add things to my shopping list. Because people use and interact with all kinds of products, we’re very excited to announce a first-of-its-kind collaboration with Amazon between Cortana and Alexa that will offer more choice, value and…
Microsoft says iOS and Android support doesn’t mean Windows Phone is dead
In an interview with Business Insider, Microsoft’s Joe Belfiore spoke briefly about Microsoft’s recent announcements made at Build such as the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update but also took the time to comfort those worried about the small presence of Windows phones at the event and Microsoft’s growing focus on iOS and Android devices. “We’re going to continue to support Windows phone,” Belfiore said before adding that, “Windows is a platform that drives the experience on a whole range of devices. We live in a highly diverse world.” With the…
WebAssembly is now ready for browsers to use
WebAssembly, a portable code format that could make for a faster web, has moved to minimum viable product (MVP) status, with browser vendors now able to switch WebAssembly on by default. A recent bulletin from Mozilla Senior Staff Engineer Luke Wagner said representatives of the four major browsers agreed that the design and binary format were complete to the extent that no further design work was doable without implementation experience and significant usage. Browsers represented included Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Mozilla Firefox, and WebKit, which is Apple’s browser engine for…
This is iPhone 8
The hardware that allows the iPhone 8‘s rumored facial recognition capability could consist of a "revolutionary" new camera system for its front-facing camera. The report follows related rumors of Apple augmenting or ditching its Touch ID fingerprint scanner in favor of iris or facial recognition technology, fueled by its acquisition of Israeli facial recognition startup RealFace. Samsung’s Galaxy Note 7 — yep, that Galaxy Note 7 — was among the first phones to come equipped with an iris scanner.
99.6 percent of new smartphones run Android or iOS
The latest smartphone figures from Gartner are out, and they paint an extremely familiar picture. Between them, Android and iOS accounted for 99.6 percent of all smartphone sales in the fourth quarter of 2016. This duopoly has been the norm for a while now (in the second quarter of 2015 this figure was 96.8 percent), but it’s always impressive — and slightly terrifying — to see how Google and Apple continue to wring the last decimal point drops of market share from global smartphone users. Of the 432 million smartphones…
Visual Studio 2017 is coming on March 7
Join us at 8:00 AM PST on March 7 for a two-day online event celebrating the launch of our latest version as well as 20 years of Visual Studio. Watch the live stream featuring Julia Liuson, Brian Harry, Miguel de Icaza, and Scott Hanselman as they share the newest innovations in Visual Studio, .NET, Xamarin, Azure, and more. After the keynote, Microsoft engineers will lead interactive technical demo sessions to help you get the most out of Visual Studio 2017 and the rest of our tools and platform. On March…
Microsoft’s new adaptive shell will help Windows 10 scale across PC, Mobile, and Xbox
The Windows Shell is essentially the Windows environment we all know and love. In layman’s terms, it gives us access to system elements and objects necessary for running applications, and houses features such as the Taskbar, Start Menu, Desktop and more. Currently, the Windows Shell is different depending on the version of Windows 10 you’re using. For example, Mobile is using a different Windows Shell than desktop; but Microsoft is working to change and streamline that. Microsoft is building an "adaptive shell" into Windows 10 that’ll work across PCs and…
Amazon just launched a cashier-free convenience store
Amazon just unveiled a grocery store without lines or checkout counters. Amazon Go, a 1800-square-foot retail space located in the company’s hometown of Seattle, lets shoppers just grab the items they want and leave; the order gets charged to their Amazon account afterwards. Amazon Go works by using computer vision and sensors to detect what items you’re taking out of the store. You start by scanning an app as you enter the Amazon Go shop. You do your normal shopping, and the sensors throughout the store identify the items in…
Microsoft is working on a new design language for Windows 10 codenamed Project NEON
Microsoft has made several adjustments to its design language over the last few years, starting with Windows 8 and evolving into what we now know as "Microsoft Design Language 2" or MDL2 in Windows 10. With MDL2 being the current design language used throughout Windows 10, Microsoft has plans to begin using a much more streamlined design language with Redstone 3, codenamed Project NEON. A Metro 2.0? Cassim Ketfi at Numerama.com confirms our information and has heard Project NEON called "basically Metro 2". That designation refers to the first Metro…
Satya Nadella: Microsoft building the ‘ultimate mobile device’
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has again reaffirmed the company’s commitment to developing smartphones. Unfazed by its market share dropping beneath 1 percent, Nadella said Microsoft is planning a revolutionary “ultimate mobile device.” Nadella made the comments during an interview with the Australian Financial Review. He visited Sydney last week to address a local developers conference about Microsoft’s cognitive computing systems and Azure cloud services. Nadella outlined his plans for Microsoft’s future involvement with smartphones. He suggested the company has stopped trying to rival the established leaders in the field. Instead,…
Microsoft delivers test builds of Visual Studio for Mac, Visual Studio 2017 for Windows
Visual Studio for Mac is not a port of Visual Studio for Windows; it’s a rebranded version of Xamarin Studio integrated development environment (IDE) that will work on the Mac. (Microsoft bought mobile-tool vendor Xamarin in February 2016.) Visual Studio for Mac is available as of today as a preview for download. Visual Studio 2017 is the official name of the product Microsoft has been calling "Visual Studio Next" and/or codename "VS ’15’." As of today, a near-final Release Candidate version of that product is available to testers. The RC…
Store and Ads to Deliver $189 Billion to Publishers in 2020
Apps are increasingly becoming the go-to resource for communication, entertainment, shopping, productivity and more. As a result, the time consumers spend in apps has exploded. Coupled with the growth of the global installed base of smartphones and tablets, this will set the stage for significant revenue growth. This expanding revenue opportunity will not be exclusive to the top apps and categories, but will be more widely spread across the app economy. In order to fully capitalize on the app economy’s exceptional growth, publishers need to anticipate future market opportunities when…
Windows switching to differential patching in the Creators Update
Major Windows 10 updates, including this summer’s Anniversary Update and next year’s Creators Update, are distributed as essentially full operating system installs. The downloads are around 4GB, and installing them performs a complete in-place upgrade to Windows. That is set to change as Microsoft rolls out what it calls its Unified Update Platform (UUP). Major upgrades will be shipped as differential updates, where only the differences between the currently installed version and the newly installed version need to be downloaded. The company estimates that this will result in major version…
Microsoft takes on Slack with its new Microsoft Teams app
Microsoft today announced a major new app at its Office event in New York City. The company’s new service, Microsoft Teams is its own take on the popular team communication tool, Slack. We reported about Microsoft Teams just 2 months ago, and Microsoft is officially launching it in a limited preview for Office 365 users today. Microsoft, however, is calling Teams a group chatting software which will be accessiblefrom the Web, Windows PC, Mac, iPhone, Android, and Windows Phone. Firstly, let’s get the basics covered: Microsoft Teams lets you share…
AWS public cloud is twice as big as Microsoft, Google, IBM combined
Amazon Web Services is utterly dominating the competition, taking 45 percent of worldwide revenues for public cloud services, according to a new analysis. Microsoft and Google might be increasing public cloud revenues faster than AWS, but they’ve also got a long way to go to come close to catching up, a new analysis from Synergy Research Group shows. The combined revenues from Microsoft, Google, and IBM amount to less than 20 percent of worldwide infrastructure-as-a-service, or IaaS, revenues in Q3 2016, compared with AWS’s 45 percent, the research firm reports.
Microsoft is building a quantum computer that may never work
Microsoft is working on a quantum computer that uses what are called “non-abelian anyons,” a quasiparticle that physicists aren’t sure even exist. Quantum computers promise to perform calculations at unfathomably faster rathes than today’s computers. Although other companies are using more realistic, proven materials in their work to create the machine, Microsoft is hopeful that its unique approach will pay dividends as the resultant machine should be less susceptible to external interference. The company has nearly 40 people working on the project, as quantum computing is seen as well worth…
Nadella: ‘Windows is the most open platform there is’
When Satya Nadella became CEO of Microsoft in 2014, he asked what the company’s place in the world is, and how it could make the biggest contribution. What he kept coming back to was that the company builds things that empower people to build their own things. When he looked at Microsoft, he saw software that could be a force to "democratize and empower people." Nadella articulated what that vision means for the future of Azure, Windows, Office, Cortana, Linkedin, and more during his keynote address – on a telepresence…
Microsoft research works on “touching” virtual reality objects
Microsoft Research has presented a new way to interact with virtual reality by touch. As haptic solutions for virtual reality, NormalTouch and TextureTouch 3D haptic shape controllers are able to explore the virtual space with just your finger. Currently, the controller only supports the index finger, but who knows what else could be developed with further innovations. The 3D objects are tracked in virtual reality with the Optitrack system and presented through the Oculus Rift headset. The NormalTouch renders the surface of virtual objects by using a flat platform that…
Microsoft warns iOS isn’t as secure as you think
Microsoft has warned customers that iOS is no more secure than Android, contradicting commonly held beliefs about the relative security of the two platforms. The company said that recent attacks targeting iOS prove it’s as vulnerable as Android. Brad Anderson, Microsoft’s corporate vice president for enterprise and client mobility, set out his views in a company blog post last week. He used the Pegasus iOS spyware, revealed last month, as an example of severe vulnerabilities present in iOS. Pegasus is capable of monitoring everything a user does on their device,…
Microsoft to launch new Surface PC at October 26th event
Microsoft is holding a special Windows 10 and Surface event in New York City later this month. The software giant has started emailing out invites to an event on October 26th, and Microsoft is expected to make some Xbox-related announcements at the event, alongside new Surface hardware and some details on the company’s next Windows 10 software update. Microsoft’s event isn’t expected to be as large, or involve as much hardware. Surface-branded keyboards and a mouse have started leaking ahead of Microsoft’s event, and the company is widely expected to…
Alan Turing’s computer-generated music gets restored after 65 years
Alan Turing is considered to be one of the fathers of computer science. He played a crucial role in World War II counter intelligence and worked for the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park. He was also responsible for breaking a large number of Nazi ciphers, including the German Enigma code. After the war, Turing continued his work as a pioneer computer engineer, and developed what’s considered to be one of the first designs for a stored-program computer. But it seems code breaking wasn’t Turing’s only talent. Now…
Google opens Chromebooks to Android store
Google’s Chromebook update will allow the inexpensive laptops to run apps from the Android store opening them up to apps from Microsoft Word to Quicken.
All Windows 10 PCs will get Windows Holographic access next year
Windows 10 users will be able to dive into mixed reality starting next year, with an update planned that can let any “mainstream” Windows 10 PC run the Windows Holographic shell the company first revealed in January 2015. The update will allow users to multi-task in mixed reality environments, which combine traditional 2D Windows 10 apps with immersive, 3D graphical environments. These will be enabled via a range of “6 degrees of freedom devices,” input devices that add positional tracking to other more traditional forms of input, like clicking and…
Microsoft REST API Design Guidelines
Microsoft is publishing its “REST API Design Guidelines” to the API community: https://www.GitHub.com/microsoft/api-guidelines/. These guidelines represent a multi-year, cross-company, collaborative process aggregating the collective experience of hundreds of engineers designing, operating, and running global scale cloud services from across Microsoft; and listening to feedback on our APIs from customers and partners. We have attempted to incorporate those learnings along with industry best practices in the API space to create guidelines that API teams across Microsoft use on a daily basis. Our hope in publishing these guidelines to the greater API…