Tip o’ the Week 443 – Starting modern apps

Posted on August 10, 2018 (Updated November 5, 2021) by ewand

Power Users often like to start applications quickly, without recourse to grubbing around with a mouse or a trackpad. Super Users might even want to write scripts that automate all sorts of things that mere mortals with less time on their hands are happy to do manually. Regardless of your penchant for automation, here are a few short cuts you can take to quickly start apps that you use often.

Apps pinned to taskbar

The taskbar in Windows obviously shows you what’s currently running, but can also be used to pin frequently accessed apps or – by default at least – those that Windows thinks should be frequent (Edge, Store, etc – right-click on them to unpin if you disagree). You’ll see a highlight line under the apps that are running, so those without the line are simply pinned there.

If you start typing the name of a favourite app at the Start menu, then right-click on it in the list, you can choose to pin it. So far, so good.

If you drag the pinned apps around, they’ll stay in that position relative to each other, and new apps will always start to the right (or underneath, if you use a vertical taskbar, as you really should). Now, if you press WindowsKey+number, you’ll jump to the app that is n along the line, and if that app isn’t running, then Windows will start it. So in the picture above, pressing WindowsKey+2 would start Edge, or WindowsKey+3 would bring Outlook to the fore.

Shortcut to desktop

You could try an old-skool method, by creating a desktop shortcut to apps that are already on your Start menu – press WindowsKey+D to show the bare desktop itself, then press Start to show the actual Start menu.

Assuming your Start menu isn’t full screen then you’ll be able to drag icons or tiles from the menu to the Desktop, and if you right-click the shortcut and look at Properties, you’ll see a Shortcut key: option… just press some key sequence that makes sense to you and press OK to save.

This method differs from the taskbar one above, because each press of the shortcut you set might start a new instance of the app (if it supports that) – which may or may not be desirable. If you end up with several windows of OneNote, for example, you could cycle through them by repeatedly pressing the appropriate WindowsKey+n as above.

Keep on Running

There’s no better mark of being a real PC deity than by launching your apps through running the executable name… you know the drill? WindowsKey+R to get the Run dialog (it’s so much faster than pressing Start), then enter the app’s real name and you’re off to the races. winword, excel, calc, notepad… they’re for novices. The genuine hardcases might even dive into the (old fashioned, obvs) Control Panel applets like ncpa.cpl rather than navigating umpteen clicks.

Looking at the shortcut to OneNote’s modern app above, though, it’s clear there isn’t a simple executable to run – onenote will launch the on-life-support OneNote 2016 version.

Many modern apps do, however, let you launch them from the Run dialog by entering a name with “:” at the end…

Examples include:

onenote:	Modern OneNote (annoyingly, you may get prompted to open in OneNote 2016 – just hit cancel and it goes away)
ms-settings:	The new-fangled control panel. You can tag on other commands like ms-settings:display or ms-settings:windowsupdate but you might be quicker clicking the icon than typing all of that.
bingmaps:	A good bit quicker than launching the browser and navigating to the maps URL, even if you do press ALT-D to set focus to the address bar, and type bingmaps <CTRL-ENTER> to auto-fill the www. and the .com
outlookmail:	Even though it’s not real Outlook, this launches the Mail part of the Mail & Calendar store app. outlookcal: does the other bit.
ms-windows-store:	For when you can’t wait to check out all the great new apps in the Microsoft Store.
fb:	If you feel the need to do a personality test or look at other people’s holiday photos.

Tip o’ the Week 442 – Whose phone? Your phone…

Posted on August 10, 2018 by ewand

Back at the May 2018 Build conference, an app for Windows was previewed, which would allow you to manage content from your phone, on your PC – “Your Phone”.

If you’re an Android user, and a Windows Insider, then you can get a preview version of the Your Phone app for the PC; after starting the app on the PC, it will ask for your mobile number and text you a link to download an updated version of the Microsoft Apps app (ya falla?). Download the update, sign in as appropriate, and suddenly your photos on the phone will start appearing in near real-time on your PC.

The Your Phone app actually uses a Wi-Fi connection on the phone to sync content with the PC – they don’t need to be on the same network but they do need to be able to talk to the back end service that coordinates things. For now, it just does photos (and only on Android), but in time, more services will be added. See more details here. And here.

The photo sharing capability is pretty cool – if you ever find yourself taking a photo on your phone and then immediately wanting to use it on your PC, then your alternatives are either to wait for OneDrive to sync your new pic from phone to cloud (and then back down to your PC)… or plug the phone in on a USB cable and root about in its file system to find the photo. Or the worst, but probably most used: you email the photo from your phone, to yourself…

Some features of Your Phone will be tied to particular preview versions of Windows 10 – such as the recent latest build, 17228.

Tip o’ the Week 441 – OneNote updates again

Posted on July 27, 2018 by ewand

As everyone knows…

Tips talking about OneNote include coverage of the Modern App version, on ToW’s

#320, #386, #427 among others. The tl;dr version is that OneNote 2016 = great desktop app, OneNote metro/store/modern/whatev = not so functional but simpler and getting better, with a consistent UI across Windows, Mac, mobile & web. The OneNote team has basically said the desktop version is on life support and all new function development effort is going into the Store app version. Here’s a summary of their differences.

There have been a variety of updates recently – they should make their way to you automagically, or if you want to give your machine a poke to hurry it along, go to the Store app, click the Ellipsis menu in the top right and choose Downloads and updates.

You might see that the Microsoft Store app itself has had a bit of an overhaul, too…

The OneNote Store version (sometimes officially referred to as “OneNote for Windows 10”) is a new codebase, which misses some of the more power-user features of OneNote 2016 but at the same time has added some new functionality that doesn’t exist in the desktop version, like ink to shape conversion. While many of the new feature adds are filling in gaps to the desktop release, some are adding new functions altogether.

The latest update delivers a mixture of new and old – officially, there are no new features (according to the status page, at least at time of writing) but that’s not what is being reported widely (here, here), and by OneNote program manager @William Devereux, who summarised it nicely on Twitter.

If you’re a OneNote 2016 desktop user, why not set yourself a challenge and try switching to the OneNote for Windows 10 version for a week? Both versions can happily coexist and access the same data files, so you won’t lose any data and can easily switch back and forth between them, even running them both at the same time and perhaps with different notebooks open. To change the default version of OneNote, see here.

Tip o’ the Week 439 – Go! Go! Go!

Posted on July 23, 2018 by ewand

The legendary Merry Talker made a big thing about his “Go” (quite apart from his Colemanballs). Public Service Broadcasting celebrated the iconic Gene Kranz (nearly 49 years ago) calling round all the flight controllers to get them to agree whether the Eagle should “Stay” or “Go”. And, of course, there’s an ancient board game.

But if you haven’t been hiding under a rock for a few weeks, you may have seen news about the Microsoft Surface Go being announced.

Is it an “iPad Killer”? No. The tablet market is pretty saturated, and even if potential buyers of one device flock to the Go, it’s not likely to be kryptonite to the other. It’s probably more likely that the Go exists to appeal to potentially erstwhile Chromebook buyers, in sectors like education, or as companion device to existing Windows fans in the same way that some people use a tablet as a PC alternative when they travel.

Given its performance, the Surface Go is likely to be a useful 2^nd machine for many PC users, rather than an alternative primary device – though some early reviews seem to make it sound pretty good. MJF reckons many variants (LTE, 8GB RAM/256GB SSD) will be forthcoming, so maybe the mix will change in time.

So, Brits: like pretty much every “low-cost” device, the entry level £379 machine – now available for pre-order – isn’t the full story. It’s fairly low-spec and doesn’t come with a keyboard or stylus/pen, so ordering the one most people would want will be nearer double the headline price…

Oh well, start saving up now – or wait until late August and decide (after playing with it in the flesh – in store, maybe?) if it’s the right thing for you.

Tip o’ the Week 433 – You can have the power

Posted on June 2, 2018 by ewand

With modern hardware and Windows 10, there is a great deal of flexibility in the way power (in the sense of AC/DC as opposed to Power Users) is managed.

As PC systems evolved over time, and Windows got reliable to the extent that you don’t need to reboot every day or even every week (Windows 7, realistically), the needs of power management also changed as the shift from mains-powered desktop to Lithium-Ion battery laptops gathered pace.

Sleep states defined what goes on under the covers in as a PC goes into a different power mode – whether that’s automatic (because of timing, or because the battery level gets to a particular point) or if the user chooses to sleep/hibernate, hits the power button, closes the laptop lid etc.

Most PCs could go into a low-power (S3) standby state, where the CPU was shut down but the contents of memory were preserved (still consuming power, but a lot less of it), so the machine can be woken up quickly and carry on as before. After some period in standby or at a point where the battery was about to run out, the PC might even wake up and dump the memory contents to a file on disk, then shut down completely (called hibernating), meaning a subsequent wake-up would take a few seconds longer as it would need to resume from hibernate, since the contents of that huge memory file will be read back in before continuing.

Windows 8 introduced the idea of “Connected Standby”, meaning that even when a machine was in a low-power state – to all intents, asleep, but with the CPU still able to run in a restricted manner – the system can maintain a wireless connection that means apps could remain up to date. This was a feature that only applied to modern/Store apps, allowing for synchronising contents in the background while the PC was asleep, so that when it wakes up, the app data and live tiles on the Start screen would be up to date.

As both hardware and software platforms have improved, the connected standby idea morphed into Windows 10’s “modern standby”. ToW 335 talked about managing battery states in Windows 10, and briefly discussed using a powerful tool to tweak the way your PC handles standby states.

Powercfg is a command line tool, run from an elevated command prompt (ie one with admin privileges – press WindowsKey+R, type cmd, then crucially, press CTRL+SHIFT+ENTER to ensure the command line is entered with the right level of privilege). If you don’t see “Administrator” in the title bar of your resulting command windows, you ain’t an admin, buster.

To check and see what power modes your PC can handle, try running powercfg /a; a more traditional, ACPI desktop will probably support S3 and Hibernate modes, but a modern laptop will likely be able to operate in Standby (S0 low power idle) – that’s “modern standby”.

You can get some detailed reporting on how your PC is behaving, by using powercfg with one of the following command line arguments: /energy, /batteryreport, /sleepstudy, /srumutil, /systemsleepdiagnostics or /systempowerreport.

SKYPE FOR SIGN OUT, OUTLOOK FOR DISCONNECT

Now, one side-effect of this S0 low power mode is that Windows 10 PCs will likely enter that mode shortly after the screen is locked (via timeout or by WindowsKey+L). Non-modern apps (ie Win32/x64 apps like Outlook, Skype for Business etc) won’t know how to deal with this effectively disconnected state, and will drop their connection.

This means that when you unlock a plugged-in laptop after being away for a while, you’ll see that Skype for Business is signed out, and Outlook might tell you it’s lost the connection to the server (and then immediately re-connects). If you find this annoying and would rather lengthen the time that elapses when your machine is plugged in, before it goes to connected standby mode, then powercfg to the rescue!

From an elevated command prompt, run:

Powercfg /setacvalueindex scheme_current sub_video videoconlock 3600
Powercfg /setactive scheme_current

Using the flag /setdcvalueindex instead will tweak the behaviour when on battery only. The value in the first command is the number of seconds before the screen will timeout when locked, so substitute 3600 seconds (ie 60 minutes) for a value of your choice. For further details of what Powercfg can do, see here.

Tip o’ the Week 431 – Hiding your name

Posted on May 18, 2018 by ewand

If you use your laptop on a train or in other public spaces, there’s always the concern that someone might be looking over your shoulder and reading what’s on your screen. With the GDPR bogeyman about to be unleashed, there’s never been more concern and focus on not leaking information.

You could invest in a screen filter to stop snooping, but a simple step to make you immediately more comfortable, is to not show your own name – have you ever felt self-conscious that random people in the wild can see your name, and maybe even recognise you?

Paranoid Microsoftie Andrew Brook-Holmes went digging to see how to stop this behaviour, and thus inspired this tip.

To switch off the display of your name on the login or lock screen, first go into the Local policy of your machine – the quickest way is to press WindowsKey+R then enter gpedit.msc, then expand out the local policy to Security Options as shown on the right.

In the right-hand pane, you’ll see a long list of policy items, many of which won’t be configured but could conceivably be; there are options to hide or show elements on the login screen, but in this case we’re going to try not showing the last named user at all.

Double-clock on the Interactive logon: Don’t display last signed-in, and you’ll have a simple Enable/Disable choice – in this case, we want to use a double negative – enable the fact that we’re not displaying. If you’d like a more detailed explanation of what it does, there’s another tab on the dialog showing exactly that.

Now if you lock your screen (WindowsKey+L), you’ll see that it’s already in effect. It might be annoying depending on how you’ve got the machine set up, as you’ll probably need to enter your username as well as PIN/password etc every time.

If you use Windows Hello to sign in with your face, then you won’t need to do anything except present your boat race to the camera. If you decide you’d rather go back to normal for easier sign-in, just reverse the process you’ve done above.

If you can’t find Local Computer Policy (as home edition doesn’t have that capability, for example), you may need to use the Registry instead…

Press WindowsKey+R – enter regedit – navigate to…

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System

…and set the value of dontdisplaylastusername to 1. Log out to apply the change.

Tip o’ the Week 430 – developers, developers, developers

Posted on May 11, 2018 by ewand

This week has seen the Microsoft developer conference, called //build/ in its current guise, take place in “Cloud City”, Seattle (not so-called because it rains all the time – in fact, it rains less than in Miami. Yeah, right). Every major tech company has a developer conference, usually a sold-out nerdfest where the (mostly) faithful gather to hear what’s coming down the line, so they know what to go and build themselves.

Apple has its WWDC in California every year (for a long time, in San Francisco), and at its peak was a quasi-religious experience for the faithful. Other similar keynotes sometimes caused deep soul searching and gnashing of teeth.

The Microsoft one used to be the PDC, until the upcoming launch of Windows 8 meant it was time to try to win the hearts & minds of app developers, so //build/ became rooted in California in the hope that the groovy kids would build their apps on Windows and Windows Phone. Now that ship has largely sailed, it’s gone back up to the Pacific North West, with the focus more on other areas.

Moving on from the device-and-app-centric view that prevailed a few years back (whilst announcing a new way of bridging the user experience between multiple platforms of devices), Build has embraced the cloud & intelligent edge vision which cleverly repositions a lot of enabling technologies behind services like Cortana (speech recognition, cognitive/natural language understanding etc) and vision-based products such as Kinect, HoloLens and the mixed reality investments in Windows. AI took centre stage; for a summary of the main event, see here.

The cloud platform in Azure can take data from devices on the edge and process it on their behalf, or using smarter devices, do some of the processing locally, perhaps using machine learning models that have been trained in the cloud but executed at the edge.

With Azure Sphere, there’s a way for developers to build secure and highly functional ways to process data on-board and communicate with devices, so they can concentrate more on what their apps do, and on the data, less on managing the “things” which generate it.

For all of the breakouts at Build and the keynotes on-demand, see here.

Back in the non-cloud city, Google has adopted a similar developer ra-ra method, with its Google I/O conference also taking place in and around San Francisco, also (like WWDC and Build) formerly at Moscone. It happened this past week, too.

Like everyone else, some major announcements and some knock-em dead demos are reserved for the attendees to get buzzed on, generating plenty of external coverage and crafting an image around how innovative and forward thinking the company is.

Google Duplex, shown this week to gasps from the crowd, looks like a great way of avoiding dealing with ordinary people any more, a point picked up by one writer who called it “selfish”.

Does a reliance on barking orders at robot assistants and the increasing sophistication of AI in bots and so on, mean the beginning of the end for politeness and to the service industry? A topic for further consideration, surely.

Tip o’ the Week 429 – Windows 10 April 2018 Update

Posted on May 10, 2018 by ewand

Somewhat predictably, this week’s tip concerns the slightly-delayed but at least now officially-named, Windows 10 April 2018 Update. April gave way to May before the update began rolling out widely: if you haven’t seen it show up in Windows Update, check here.

As an alternative, get the Media Creation Tool and use it to download an appropriate ISO disc image; useful if you fancy doing a clean install of Windows and all it contains, by wiping your current PC and starting from scratch.
Proceed down this road with caution, however – back away if you’re not sure.

Windows watchers have been talking about this April update for months, as there are many notable updates within, some covered only recently in ToW (425 and 428).

As well as Timeline, the Nearby Sharing feature is pretty cool – use it to send a link from within Edge browser by clicking the Share icon on the toolbar, and as long as your nearby PCs have Nearby Sharing enabled within Settings. To check, press WindowsKey and type nearby then click on Change shared experience settings.

You can also right-click on files in Windows Explorer to Share them the same way, and it’s likely to appear in the Share experience of other apps too.

The next-to-useless Windows 10 option previously known as Quiet Hours (as per ToW 414), has been given a revamp and a rename, now known as Focus Assist.

The intent is not only to silence your machine at times when you don’t need to know stuff (who’s ever been woken at 6am to be reminded that it’s some random LinkedIn person’s birthday, or that there’s an all-day event in your calendar?), but also to control the blizzard of “toast” notifications that modern apps may otherwise throw at you.

Note – traditional apps, like Outlook, can still throw up notifications, but if your machine is in a Focus assist mode, at least the notifications can be silenced. To check the current status, or to switch on Priority only or Alarms only manually, look in the Action Center on the taskbar, or press WindowsKey+A to show.

For a full breakdown of everything else that’s new in the April update, see here.

Tip o’ the Week 428 – Spring, April or the Edge of Summer

Posted on May 3, 2018 by ewand

The intent was to release the latest update (“Redstone 4” or “RS4”) to Windows 10 during early April, though a late “blocking bug” delayed the release. The name of the update was late to be officially confirmed, too – it was rumoured to be “Spring Creators Update” (since the Fall Creators Update happened last year, though the “Creators Update” appeared around a year ago, in April 2017)… but was also thought to be simply, “Windows 10 April Update”. The Reg forecast a wait of weeks to be sure.

There are lots of small improvements in the update, as well as some biggies like Timeline (which is showing up in other apps, too – like Photos, as seen to the left), and the Edge browser is getting a slug of new functionality – take a sneak peek at some of the Edge goodness, here.

Developers also got a new preview of Edge DevTools, which opens the door to such excitement as remote debugging of another Edge instance. If you’re a hoopy frood, check it out here.

It seems that Edge, even though it’s the default browser in Windows 10, doesn’t appear to be everyone’s favourite, with many users installing Chrome as one of their first tasks on a new machine. Both browsers and the respective web services from their creators seem insistent on nagging their end users to switch…

Still, there are times when the two cooperate behind the scenes. The Edge for Android app, for example, uses the rendering engine from the Chromium project, so is effectively running the same browser capabilities in a different shell which takes care of synchronising your favourites, passwords etc, between the Edge browser on your PC(s) and the one on your phone. Edge for iOS uses the native WebKit engine to achieve the same thing.

There are updates on the way for the mobile versions of Edge, supporting Timeline too – so you could resume activities from your desktop on your phone and vice versa.

Microsoft also recently launched a Defender Extension for Chrome, to provide similar protection to defectors that Edge users get natively from the SmartScreen filter technology (NSS Labs tested Edge, Chrome & Firefox, concluding that Edge blocks more bad stuff than either of the others). Even some surprised Chrome users recommend it.

Tip o’ the Week 426 – You’ve been PWAned

Posted on April 13, 2018 by ewand

Both the Windows/Microsoft Store app marketplace and the kinds of apps it contains have had a number of generations, from phone apps (designed for Windows Phone), through Windows 8’s so-called “Metro” apps, to the later Universal Windows Platform apps ushered in by the Windows 10 platform. The goal of UWPs is to allow a single code-base to run on multiple Windows 10 based environments, such as tablet/PC, phone, HoloLens and Xbox One.

The inconvenient truth with the UWP model is that, for most people, apps are used primarily on their phone and on smaller tablet devices. With the demise of Windows Phone, and the tablet market consisting largely of cheap Android tabs, expensive iPads, and Windows “2 in 1” detachables rather than straight-up Windows 10 tablets, there are arguably few compelling reasons for app developers to support UWPs, unless they feel a particular need to also target relatively niche devices like HoloLens, Surface Hub and Xbox.

Devs could turn to an app framework like Xamarin, which would let them support multiple device types and OSes, generating UWP apps alongside their Android and iOS counterparts.

When the vast majority of their addressable market is someone sitting in front of a PC, not a phone, if you’re an app developer who already supports Windows, then it might be easier to wrap your existing PC app using the Desktop Bridge, allowing for distribution through the Store but without needing to completely rewrite the app as a UWP one, as both Spotify and Amazon Music have shown.

One tell-tale of an app that’s probably been packaged with the Desktop Bridge, is that if you look at it in the Store, you’ll see that it’s available on PC only.

The latest chapter in the Store story, though, is that of PWAs, or Progressive Web Apps.

In a nutshell, PWAs are web sites built to behave more like dedicated mobile apps, with features like caching, notifications & more, so a mobile version of an existing web site could obviate the need for building an app as well. Developers could build a specific app for the remaining mobile platforms (natively, or with frameworks like Xamarin or – check out this excellent intro – Google’s Flutter), alternatively they just put their efforts into a PWA, which can run on any modern browser, mobile or otherwise. There’s a lot of love for PWAs in some quarters of the mobile developer world.

It’s still a relatively new frontier, but there are already various collections of PWA apps that can be quickly sampled.

As highlighted by Windows Central, PWAs are now appearing in the Microsoft Store, potentially giving top tier app developers a way of supporting Windows, even if they haven’t decided to specifically build a dedicated Windows app.

To quickly find the list of all Microsoft-published apps, start with Skyscanner, and you’ll see the publisher is “Microsoft Store” itself – scroll down to the Additional information, click on that link and you’ll find the others that have been published at the same time. Or search the web.

Of course, publishers may well choose to proactively put their own apps into the Store, or if they publish PWAs elsewhere, then the best of them may get hoovered up and added to the Microsoft Store on their behalf.