Tip o’ the Week #222 – Windows 8.1 Update 1 is here

Posted on by ewand

clip_image001

Another in the occasionally out-of-sequence Tips: since this is quite topical, it’s jumping the queue (as will next week’s tip) before we settle back to ToW #215.

It doesn’t seem all that long ago that Windows 8.1 arrived, promising universal salvation from the blight of the empty Task Bar by reinstating the Start button. Huzzah! And lots of other good stuff too, of course.

Now, we march onward with the widely acclaimed Windows 8.1 Update 1, itself a pretty big series of changes to Windows. The Update 1 was unveiled at the Build conference at the beginning of April, though there may have been a little confusion over what was coming imminently and which demos were showing functionality due in “a future” update.

Terry Myerson clarified that the revisited Start Menu is something to look forward to, rather than expect in the imminent release. Terry also commented on developing a “Windows for the Internet of Things” running on Intel Quark chips, CPUs the size of a pencil eraser yet promising to run full x86 Windows.

Anyway, to see what’s new in Update 1, check out this great blog post for a nice overview. clip_image003In short – if you primarily use a keyboard and mouse to interact with Windows, then 8.1 Update 1 will have a lot that’s good for you.

Some highlights:

  • If you have a PC with no touch screen, you will boot straight to the desktop, bypassing the Start screen – which is still there, just not shown by default unless you have a touch laptop or a fondleslab
  • The Power and Search icons now appear on the Start screen, so it’s easier to sleep/shutdown and find stuff
  • You can right-click on Start-screen tiles with a mouse to get a context-menu, rather than having to select them and then bring up the menu at the bottom of the screen like before.
  • The Store icon is now docked to the Task Bar so you can find new apps even more easily. clip_image005This also means you can pin Modern Apps to the Task Bar too. In this example, my Task Bar is pinned to the left of the screen rather than the bottom – if you have a widescreen laptop panel or monitor (as most of us do), try dragging the Task Bar to the side – it makes better use of the screen real estate.
  • clip_image007Modern App IE gets useful tabs for mouse toters. It arguably makes the Modern IE app better than Desktop IE for most sites unless compatibility determines that you need the old desktop mode.
  • clip_image009Move the mouse to the top of a Modern App, and you’ll get a window title bar with minimise and close buttons on the top right, and an app icon on the left – click on that, and you can snap (or “split”) the app to the left or right as well as minimise or close it. Note that Maximise is greyed out – see the screenshot here, observe the Mail app running in a window, and you’ll see why it’s greyed, for now…

OK, OK, How do I get it?

To install the update, you can get it from Windows Update now – just type Windows Update on your start screen, check for what’s new and you’ll see the biggie show up, possibly hidden amongst a bunch of other Office updates or more minor Windows ones. Depending on whether you prefer the Modern Windows Update app or the trad. Desktop one (which is busier but gives you more info), you’ll see the update show up, possibly unchecked…

image

Watch out, however – on a not-so-recently updated desktop with Office 2013, all of the cumulative Office SP1 and Windows 8.1 Update 1 came to 2.5Gb. Just make sure you allow plenty of time for the whole thing to complete.

If you’d like to download all the Windows 8.1 updates offline (if you have wet-string broadband at home, and want to shuttle the binaries home from work), see here for full intructions.

Tip o’ the Week #214 – Trouble connecting Outlook at home?

Posted on by ewand

clip_image002

If you see Outlook behaving strangely while working at home, there are a few things you might want to try. Symptoms include steadfastly refusing to connect to the server, even though everything else appears to work fine. Or connecting fine for email but hanging when you need to do something “real time” – like look up a meeting room schedule etc.

Regular ToW reader/contributor, Paul “Woody” Woodman, suggests that a series of bizarre connectivity issues are caused by some routers and having UPnP – Universal Plug and Play, a technology intended to make life easier when devices want to talk to each other through a network – enabled.

WoodysGems blog has some more details, and Phil Cross recommends the UPnP toggle as a solution to unreliable Lync and Outlook connectivity. You can always switch it back on again if the problem doesn’t go away…

The way in which Outlook connects to the Exchange Server (where your mailbox lives), is a well-known nest of vipers. clip_image004In the Good Old Days, Outlook and Exchange maintained a direct connection with each other where everything you did on the client was fed up and down the pipe, and all the data resided on the server. Sounds great, but if anything got in the way – like a rubbish network connection, or a somewhat overloaded server – then the whole experience bogged down and got basically pretty unusable.

If you want to see how Outlook connects to the server, find the Outlook icon in your system tray, hold the CTRL key and then right-click on it. This combo displays the hitherto-hidden Connection Status… option. If you’re seeing particularly poor Outlook performance, it’s worth checking this and seeing that everything is connecting OK – try scrolling to the right and look at some of the stats to see if they look out of the ordinary…

Cached Mode salvation

In Outlook 2003, the default behaviour was changed so that Outlook operated in cached mode – in other words, everything you see in your inbox etc, has already been downloaded by Outlook, and is sitting on your PC. So you click on an attachment and it opens immediately, you sort the Inbox with 20,000 items in it, and it’s done in a jiffy.

Cached mode was a Good Thing, and it even helped isolate the user from those slow network links or servers, such that they might never notice – in fact, cached mode was the catalyst for Microsoft IT reducing the number of places where it had Exchange servers deployed internally, from nearly 100 to less than 10. If the server was further away, end users didn’t notice that the network linking Outlook and the server was slow and had a high degree of latency.

Synchronous vs Asynchronous

Synchronous means that both ends are talking to each other as part of the same, real-time conversation – like a phone call. Generally, when on the phone, you’re either listening or talking, and unless you’re one of the many clackety-clack, clickety-click typists and mouseists who inhabit Lync conference calls, you pretty much don’t do anything else whilst you’re deeply engaged. The old way of Outlook <-> Exchange comms was entirely  synchronous. Asynchronous, on the other hand, is more like a text message – you fire it off, and assume that at some stage (whilst you get on with other stuff in the meantime), you’ll get a response.

Well, the Outlook cached mode is an odd mix of both of these – the majority is async, as Outlook is talking to the Exchange Server in the background, bringing down new emails and attachments and the like, but you don’t necessarily know – since most of your interaction is with a local copy of the data, the email won’t plop into your inbox until it’s been downloaded already, meaning it could’ve taken 5 minutes to download and you wouldn’t have noticed.

Where things get interesting is when Outlook has to do synchronous things – such as displaying parts of the address book. If you open the GAL and look at a person’s details, most of the content is coming from a cached copy of the common attributes, however there are a few that are not cached and will only be shown when Outlook has had a chance to have a good ol’ fashioned synchronous chat with the server. Such activities could be looking up someone’s org structure, or what DLs they’re a member of – things you don’t really think twice about when on a fast network but if you’re at home, might be a lot more noticeable.

When you embark on certain synchronous operations in Outlook, the whole application is wont to freeze (with dire Not Responding warnings in the window title) should the network start to go south, or just if the person in question is on the other side of the world and you might be communicating clip_image005with a very remote server.  If you get this far (Not Responding, all Outlook windows go a milky white colour, your cursor changes to the Circle of Hope etc) and start to panic as you haven’t saved that email you’ve been writing for the last half hour, then help may be at hand.  A cure can be to right-click on the Outlook icon in the task bar, and choose Cancel Server Request from the pop up menu. You may need to do several of these in order to truly make Outlook back down, but it often resumes ordinary connectivity to the application, even if the task you asked it to do (which caused the flat spin/heading out to sea moment) didn’t complete.

Tip o’ the Week #213 – London travel with Windows Phone

Posted on by ewand

clip_image002

There are plenty apps that help travellers to and from the city of London, some of which I’ve mentioned previously in Tips gone by. Apologies somewhat to international readers as many of these will be of little use to you, unless you choose to visit the cradle of parliamentary democracy, in which case you should install them all before your trip.

Commuters in London have had to deal with industrial action on the Tube in recent months, and may face some more to come unless BoJo and BoCrow can kiss and make up. Install these apps now, so that next time you’re stuck in a queue or wedged on a train studiously not making eye contact with your fellow passengers, then you’ll have something to occupy yourself with. You could try singing the Amateur Transplants’ “London Underground” song to yourself: Warning – NSFW. Seriously, very sweary NSFW. About as sweary as you can get NSFW.

If you find yourself trying to traverse the capital on unfamiliar modes of transport (with other strange songs ringing in your mind), you could do worse than check out Bing Get Me There – it’s a multi-modal travel app which will plot routes on Tube, bus, overground rail & DLR, as well as link up the walking bits at either end too. The London Travel app is also very good – it shows you when the bus is due at your stop, among many other useful functions.

clip_image003Some other mainstream apps also feature great functionality for navigating the city – everyone should have Here Maps installed and benefit from being able to plan your journey on Shanks’s Pony even if you are stuck in a crawling underground train with no signal, since the maps are all stored offline.

Tap on a train or Tube station and the maps even show the real over-ground and underground layout (ie. where the tube lines lie under the streets – a revelation to new visitors to London is when they realise that sometimes it’s just a lot quicker to walk than to change lines on the underground, as the famous Tube Map isn’t anything like to-scale). Select a bus stop, and it’ll show you the numbered bus routes which that stop serves, and where they go to. Here Maps also gives you great turn-by-turn walking sat-nav so you can figure out exactly where to go when you get off the transit.

Ceri Morriss helpfully points out that as well as using the Bus Checker app, many routes – including the TVP courtesy bus – are also in Nokia’s excellent & free Here Transit phone app, which lets you plan a route by public transport not only in London, but other cities too. 740 of them around the world, apparently. Yes, other cities are available. Even the BBC knows this now.

Finally, there is a slew of similar train-opco-supplied apps, many off the same code base. For travellers going Reading-London, the most obvious is the clip_image005FGW app, which lets you see plan journeys, buy tickets, see the status of current trains (so you can see how late they are running), view departures from your favourite station (and as you can see how late the trains are running, you can give yourself another few minutes before rushing out of the house).

The coup-de-grâce though, is the ability to see which platform a given train is going to depart from; often, it’s displayed in the app before it shows on the board in the station, so you can be smugly luxuriating in your double seat before the hordes start descending from the main concourse.

“Latent Data” – the secret sauce of the Internet of Things

Posted on by ewand

This is part 2 of a series of articles exploring the Internet of Things, starting with the first post, What is this “Internet of Things” thing, anyway?

clip_image002The secret sauce, the Holy Grail, the raison d’être for Internet of Things is data. That much is pretty obvious to anyone with more than a passing interest in the field – why would you go to the bother of deploying a load of sensing devices and the infrastructure to manage and communicate with them, unless the data they provide is particularly interesting?

At Microsoft, we work with lots of partner companies who use our technology to build their own products and solutions. This often puts us into contact with people and organisations who are doing things we’d never expected or even imagined they’d do, and that is one of the reasons why it’s such a great place to work and an amazing ecosystem to be part of.

As part of this working with companies that are beginning to inhabit this growing Internet of Things niche, a special interest group sitting in Microsoft UK has drawn a few interesting, and sometime controversial, observations:

  • No one technology or technology provider will own the IoT, and a lot of systems will use a smorgasbord of standards and components
  • Scaling a system that manages a few hundred gadgets to one dealing with hundreds of thousands of sensors is very hard, as is managing and analysing a massive quantity of data
  • There are “stacks” within IoT
    • Sensors: the “things” in the IoT, massive in number but small in compute power
    • Hubs: the concentrators which harvest data from sensors, provide some degree of control, logic and processing and ultimately pass the information up the chain
    • Comms: many incompatible but functionally similar wireless standards will connect sensors to hubs, and hubs to the…
    • Cloud: the place where the data is brought back to, where analysis can take place on it and where insights can be passed on to other systems or even back to the devices
  • The real value will come from “latent data”

What is “latent data”?

To a large degree, the IoT is an emerging set of technologies, protocols and patterns for the collection, aggregation, analysis and actioning of intrinsic, latent data, and the management of this process.

Data is ubiquitous and inherent is all environments, be it an outside space, an ecosystem, a manufacturing complex, a supply chain or a city. This data can be regarded as “latent data” or “potential data” in the physical world – the data exists but is not accessible, or if it is accessible then it is of limited use since it is not combined with other, relevant data (such as historical readings, or data from complementary systems). Maybe the data is being accessed by some silo’ed system which uses that data for its own purposes but was never designed to provide any wider access to it.

Every physical thing has properties and attributes which may be discernable but are probably not being measured. A mechanical thermostat has intrinsic data on the temperature of a room and its own state, but this data remains in the physical world. A light bulb could be measured to see if it’s on or off, but this only becomes truly interesting when we could measure all the bulbs in a building, or a facility, or a city. If we can sense when all the bulbs need replacing, or alter their individual brightness depending on other conditions, that’s even more interesting.

For the avoidance of doubt, “Latent Data” is also a legal term applied to deleted files that need special forensic tools to extract… we’re talking about a more ethereal concept here, that there is data all around us in everything, but it’s untapped – and therefore, latent – unless we specifically decide to measure it and do something with it.

We believe that IoT is fundamentally about bringing this latent intrinsic data into the digital world in a way that allows the creation of value. This value is due to the aggregation of collected data, its analysis, and the use of that insight to drive decision-making and actions. The Cloud is the place where this data will be collected, where the data is likely to be stored in the long term, and where data aggregation and analysis will (mostly) occur.

image

The IoT patterns, the technologies and protocols that allow for this aggregation of latent data, are similar in a way to the OSI 7-layer networking model – the stacks which encompass devices, communications and Cloud. There are differing degrees of abstraction between these stacks and their constituent layers which means the IoT is inherently (and to the benefit of everyone within it and using it) a heterogeneous world.

Microsoft’s role in the Internet of Things

Microsoft has developed embedded systems that run in billions of devices already, and some of these could be considered part of an “intelligent system” that forms part of the IoT. Microsoft also has a hugely scalable and low cost cloud computing system in the Microsoft Azure cloud platform, where IoT applications can be quickly deployed and where the data that results from them can be securely kept and worked on.

Almost all IoT applications are likely to generate large volumes – petabytes, even more – of data, which will only become valuable when it is cost effective to keep it for a period of time and to perform large-scale computational analysis, both of which are difficult to do or economically unviable without the availability of public cloud computing.

If you’re an IoT developer building devices with Arduino or using systems like Raspberry Pi, and you’re writing your code in Python or Java and storing your data in some form of NoSQL database… that’s just fine by us. We think we have just the cloud service you need to let you concentrate on doing the stuff you started in this business for in the first place – writing your applications, building your devices and consuming your data.

With Microsoft Azure providing the backplane for these billions of devices to communicate – whether they are running Microsoft software or not – and to store and analyse their data, there is an opportunity for us and our partners to enable and monetize far-reaching change.

Some further reading:

  • If you’ve not seen much around Azure before, see an overview here.
  • For developer resources, including Node.JS, PHP, Python, Java and iOS & Android resources, see here.
  • For the more technically minded – The Microsoft Azure Service Bus and the Internet of Things (part 1 and part 2).

Tip o’ the Week #212 – Filing and piling of email

Posted on by ewand

clip_image002The topic of filing vs piling of email has been had on ToWs passim (here & here), but this week’s gem comes courtesy of a recommendation by productivity guru Tim Pash.

Tim says he couldn’t live without a cracking utility which plugs into Outlook, called SimplyFile. The premise is very simple – it helps you file your emails in tidy little folders. Whoever has time to manually file all their email, eh? Using keywords it can derive from a message you have selected (combined with previous behaviour), it suggests a folder (or a number of folders) that you might want to file the mail into with a single click.

clip_image004

There are a couple of ways to actually invoke the filing addin – you could select a message and then look to the Outlook toolbar, where the most likely folder is displayed in super-size, you can do some pretty funky filing of entire threads or even all messages within a given folder, where it will prompt you for each one. The tools for selecting folders etc are brilliant, and a model for speedy efficiency.

clip_image006Another option is to just right-click on a mail in a list and use the File In > pop out menu. The software promises to learn as you do more and more filing, but even on the first run it seems to have a fairly decent stab at the right place to put stuff. There are no rules to configure, no wizards to run – remarkably, it seems to just work. You might want to switch off the default filing of everything you send, though – that could be a little annoying.

There are a couple of gotchas – one being that if you have an Archive PST (or a 2nd mailbox into which archive content is dumped) then you might well have multiple folders with the same name (such as the name of a particular client or partner), which could make things a little trickier: SimplyFile might well identify the archive as the place to dump current content instead of the fresh and mostly empty folder that’s still in your Inbox. If you grow to reply on the software, it could be worth coming up with a naming convention for your archive folders to avoid confusion.

clip_image008

Most of us probably have a strategy for arranging folders in Outlook’s hierarchy and giving them names anyway – in fact the two are sometimes linked, with names like zz-Archive that would historically have forced a folder to the bottom of the sorted list, or _ Important that would force it to the top. Did you know that in Outlook 2013, you can manually drag and drop folders around in the tree hierarchy to arrange them in ways other than alphabetically. Quite handy, really…

Oh, the second SimplyFile gotcha – it costs $50 of hard currency but like all the best addictive experiences, it’s available for free for a 30 day trial. Have a go, what’s the worst that can happen?

What is this “Internet of Things” thing, anyway?

Posted on by ewand

I’m going to start the odd bit of blogging aside from the weekly Tips that will carry on making their way onto this blog. Here is the first in a short series looking at the Internet of Things.

The term “Internet of Things” (or IoT) has achieved buzzword fever pitch in 2014, thanks in part to a slew of product announcements at the Consumer Electronics Show in January. Combined with high-profile acquisitions (such as Google’s purchase of smart home technology company, Nest), there have been many news stories which associated the subject of the piece with the Internet of Things.

imageEven people who work in the IoT world sometime struggle to articulate what it actually is. There are several ways of looking at IoT, however, and some of the scenarios are only being developed now and will become both significant and disruptive in ways that we probably don’t yet understand. There are, in fact, numerous types of “Internet of Things” application.

The consumer market provides plenty of examples of devices measuring and reporting data back to some kind of service that allows users to use that data for some purpose that would otherwise be difficult or impossible without this technology. “Wearable technology” is a category that typifies this approach.

Industrial Internet of Things applications have often existed for years, just under different names – M2M, SCADA, telemetry of numerous sorts – though are being combined in new ways and with new variants of technology, to open up new scenarios such as telematics. Industrial uses could mean using IoT technology to control a manufacturing process, to monitor complex machines in the field, extending even to remotely monitoring cars for the purposes of insurance, road tolling, safety and performance improvements.

Finally, companies will find a way to use IoT technology inside their own environments, offering up data that is consolidated from other systems and collected using sensors, to be combined with customer relationship management systems, building control systems and a host of other uses.

The interesting thing is, the majority of these examples won’t connect the many things to the Internet at all – maybe the devices and sensors at the very edge of the system will be individually addressable, but they almost certainly won’t be directly connected to the internet. Other groups have tried to establish alternative definitions – some talk or a “Sensor mesh” or a “Network of sensors", and Cisco, for example, talks about the “Internet of Everything” (and has some other, intriguing ideas such as Fog Computing… it’s like Cloud Computing but nearer the ground). It looks like the term IoT has stuck, at least until we stop talking about it as if it’s something special or something different, rather than just the normal way that these things work.

The definitive definition of the Internet of Things

The term “Internet of Things” was coined in 1999 by Kevin Ashton, from Proctor & Gamble, then at MIT. He later wrote, in 2009:

“Nearly all of the data available on the Internet were first captured and created by human beings—by typing, pressing a record button, taking a digital picture or scanning a bar code. The problem is, people have limited time, attention and accuracy—all of which means they are not very good at capturing data about things in the real world. If we had computers that knew everything there was to know about things—using data they gathered without any help from us—we would be able to track and count everything, and greatly reduce waste, loss and cost. We would know when things needed replacing, repairing or recalling, and whether they were fresh or past their best.

The Internet of Things has the potential to change the world, just as the Internet did. Maybe even more so.”

Analysts express differing views as to the exact scale (IDC reckons 212 billion devices with a market value of nearly $9trillion in only 6 years), but all estimates of the future size of the Internet of Things business are extraordinarily large. If even the lower end forecasts are out by a factor of 10, there will still be billions of connected devices within a few years, and the reason those devices are connected is because they have something to communicate.

What’s Microsoft got to say about this Internet of Things? Well, there are lots of things out there which read data and send it for further processing, and those things are probably not going to be running anything like a Windows OS. There are going to be devices which these sensors talk to, which collect the information and process it to some degree (validating it, packaging it for onward delivery, maybe issuing commands back to the sensors on the basis of what the data says). These devices may well be running a more functional OS, something akin to Windows Embedded and forming part of what we could call an Intelligent System. Then there’s the cloud platform that will tie everything together – boy do we have one of those… called Windows Azure. 

Next time, I’ll explore a few thoughts developed by some Microsoft experts and collected by talking with partner companies active in this area.

For further reading in the meantime, check out a couple of articles on the MSDN Magazine site (here and here), which shows some practical examples of how to use the Azure Service Bus to build an IoT application.

Tip o’ the Week #211 – Manage your battery on WP8

Posted on by ewand

clip_image002

The world – at least if you listen to ex-PayPal squillionaire Elon Musk – is destined to move from fossil-fuel-fired transport to electric vehicles that might be charged by the power grid rather than carrying around their own means of energy conversion. Some say that centralised generation (in the form of power stations) is more efficient than hydrogen fuel cells or petrol/hybrid,  and even coal-fired power stations are ~60% efficient, says the Hyperloop space cadet. We’ll see.

Hyperloop: Near-supersonic travel in a driverless capsule fired along a vacuum tube suspended monorail style, over-ground along the San Andreas fault. What could possibly go wrong?

Whatever, the current generation of plug-in electric cars – some of which are expensive and impractical hairshirt statements, some (like Musk’s Tesla S) a genuine move forward to a new world – brings a new phrase into the lexicon, which is also recognisable to many other technology users – range anxiety. In other words, the fear that there just isn’t enough power left to get you home.

Users of any smartphone will be familiar with the idea that you’re only a few steps away from running out of power, particularly the times when you are using it – and maybe need it – the most. Like when you’re travelling on trains, hanging around at airports etc. You have time on your hands, you’re reading and writing emails, maybe you’re listening to music or using your phone’s navigation, ergo the phone gets drained more quickly.

clip_image004Laptops have nice big batteries, at least in comparison to phones. Laptops need bigger batteries, but if the laptop is in your bag, did you realise you might be able to use it to recharge your phone, even if the laptop is asleep or even powered off? Look on the back of your machine and you may find a small electric flash symbol next to the port – which signifies you can charge devices using this port when the PC is not running.

USB ports will one day be able to drive up to 100W of power supply to other devices, but you might find the ports on your laptop today aren’t labelled yet one of them can power USB devices when switched off – trial and error may prove useful…

Another option is to control what’s happening on your phone itself – you could check that the background tasks section in settings / applications / background tasks and disable and apps you don’t want to run in the background (which inevitably drains battery life). A great tip (if slightly more drastic) comes from ToW regular Simon Boreham:

If one is more interested in battery life than Facebook & Twitter updates, etc. you can go into the Data Sense app, and under settings set restrict background data to always.  The results are amazing  ~70 % battery still left at the end of the day!  Incidentally I found out about this whilst traveling, there is an option to set it when roaming and clearly there are data volume advantages to setting it as well as battery life.  Obviously this restricts live tile updates etc, but it is a trade-off.

Whatever, keep a micro-USB cable on your person all the time. You never know when you’ll need it.

Tip o’ the Week #210 – Beam me up!

Posted on by ewand

In the last few weeks, Nokia has shipped the Lumia Black update and it’s widely available. There are some cool additions that the Finns have made to the Phone platform, some new and synched with Black. Nokia now publishes loads of addons (some available for other phones, many only application on Nokia handsets), under both the Nokia and Here brands.

Beamer

This is an evolution of the PhotoBeamer app that came out a while back, except the Beamer app lets you share your screen, the map of where you are, or the output of your phone camera, to many internet connected devices simply by visiting http://beam.nokia.com and scanning the displayed barcode on your phone. Hello Computer?!
(Great typing skills, btw, Scotty)

Focus, Focus, I think he’s trying to Focus

Many a gadget fan and itinerant story teller couldn’t wait to sample the Lytro camera, which promised to capture enough of a digital photograph that it would banish the problem of focus being in the wrong place.

Now, Nokia has launched the Refocus app (as usual, if you’ve a Nokia handset…) and a website to allow non-Nokia users to have a play. Here’s one I made earlier – all in the interests of research, y’understand.

clip_image001

clip_image002

Very nice. Now there’s at least half a dozen different camera apps on my phone.

Tip o’ the Week #209 – Shhhhhhhh!

Posted on by ewand

clip_image002

How many times have you been awoken by your phone, tablet or PC blaring an alert first thing in the morning, telling you it’s someone’s birthday (worse, someone you hardly even know)? Or reminding you it’s time to go to an optional conference call in the middle of the night (your time), that was sitting unnoticed in your diary?

As mobile platforms have evolved, sometimes favoured functionality in old versions gets sacrificed in the name of quick progress, and may be eventually added back in future. The Windows Phone 7 journey is a great example – compared to Windows Mobile 6.5, there were lots of features which didn’t exist yet most people either didn’t notice, or they did notice but quickly stopped whining, dried their eyes and got on with the rest of their lives.

Windows Phone 8 misses one feature that was present in many old mobile phones, (including that first “Stinger” phone, the Orange SPV, which showed up more than 11 years ago), namely the idea of sound profiles – you could set up several named settings (Meeting, Silent, Outdoor, Normal, etc), and easily switch between them, maybe even automatically. Later versions of Pocket PC-based phones had an array of 3rd party software that could not only create & manage profiles – a feature that didn’t exist on the PPC platform – but could even switch profiles on a schedule, so when you went to bed, the phone went to quiet mode but came back to life in the morning so the alarm still worked.

Windows 8.1 and Quiet hours

clip_image004Here’s a handy added-feature to Windows 8.1 which could be particularly relevant to hypnagogic tablet users, namely the ability to shut the machine up for specified periods of time. It’s even enabled by default.

To set up your preferred Quiet hours, either navigate through settings (Settings charm | clip_image006Change PC Settings | Search and apps | Notifications) or save yourself a lot of clicking or poking, by typing quiet hours at the Start screen, and select from the search results.

Maybe we’ll see the same Quiet Hours functionality built into the next generation of Windows Phone…? In the meantime, at least you can quickly switch between ring mode and silence by just pressing one of the volume controls on the side of the phone, then tapping the sound icon on the top right of the screen.

Tip o’ the Week #204 – Mirror, mirror, on the big screen

Posted on by ewand

clip_image002

Many people who’ve had a new laptop in the last year will have experienced the frustration of showing up in a meeting room, only to find that you have no means of projecting onto the screen – there are at least 5 different types of connector that could go into the laptop, and 2 or 3 that might be supported by the screen in the room.

clip_image003Wireless projection has been promised for years, with a series of proprietary and clunky technologies that never really took off. All this is set to change, using a technology which started as a consumer function on high-end TVs, yet is filtering down to £200 tellies and will be mainstream on projection systems going forward. Maybe. For now, we have to live with a profusion of dongles while projecting at work, but what about in the home? Ever fancied delivering a PPT presentation to the gathered family?

“Miracast” is a standard which allows devices – PCs and Android tablets, mainly (Apple does not support Miracast, preferring their own proprietary technology) – to replicate their display and sounds onto a remote device. Windows 8.1 now supports Miracast, and if your home TV is new, then you might well find it enables the screen mirroring technology too.

There are third-party Miracast devices which can bring wireless access to your “legacy” TV and sound system, potentially – EZCast HDMI WiFi adapters or the Netgear PTV3000. Maybe it’s worth treating your living room to some remote projection goodness?

A few things to check:

  • You can only use Miracast over WiFi – it’s not applicable using wired connections, and some WiFi networks won’t support it either.
  • Even if you’ve got an appropriate telly and a Windows 8.1 machine with the right kind of WiFi adapter, you may still need to get an updated display driver (either from your PC manufacturer or from Intel directly).
  • clip_image004Surface RT currently does not support Miracast even though the Nvidia Tegra 3 SoC that powers the original Surface, does. Surface Pro and 2 should be OK.
  • You’ll need to add the TV to your PC, akin to pairing a Bluetooth device – a one-off process that is pretty self-explanatory, though if it doesn’t go smoothly, return to the “update your driver” section.
  • As you may see, this is still not exactly Plug & Play…

Having said that, when it works – it works well. Think of Miracast as like HDMI over WiFi, so could be a way of streaming music to a TV connected to a sound system. Hello Xbox Music Pass, bye-bye Sonos?

To find out more, here’s a step-by-step guide on how to project and some more details on how it works, here.