Category: Windows

#40: Product Roadmaps – over/under promise/deliver?

Posted on by ewand

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Since the early days of personal computing, products were always defined and sold to their eager customers on the basis of what features they had, or were going to have. ACME Computers would produce a feature matrix showed its widget program was better than XYZSoft’s similar one because it could start quicker or store more pages or print nicer fonts or whatever seemed important at the time.

Talking about features – or, even better, showing them – would be enough to convince users to open their chequebooks, so before RoI, business value, personas or use cases showed up, the product feature sheet and product demo were all important.

The brilliant Bob Cringely wrote in his seminal tome Accidental Empires of many significant bits of the history of the PC, Mac et al (or Accidental Empires: How the Boys of Silicon Valley Make Their Millions, Battle Foreign Competition, and Still Can’t Get a Date to give its full title). One tale was of a young Bill Gates demonstrating Word for Mac 3.0 somehow navigating a demo of a product so buggy that any number of clicks in the wrong place could have blown the whole thing up.

As well as selling what you have – or are going to have, real soon now – to prospective customers, there’s also a need to show that more stuff is coming down the line. The Product Roadmap shows long-term commitment and vision but also ties you into doing things that people bought your product for, even if they prove harder than you thought or less important because other things have changed.

Does saying you’re going to deliver this feature or that function tie one hand behind your back, but without it, customers could go elsewhere? In the old days, a roadmap or a demo of something that wasn’t really finished was as much a reason to stop people buying a competitor’s product, causing them to wait to see how yours turns out, as it was to get them to commit to buying something today – especially when the thing you’re showing isn’t yet available.

In the 1980s and perhaps later, Microsoft was a well-established peddler of “vaporware” – BillG even received a “Golden Vaporware” award for the years-late arrival of Windows 1.0, though the practice of promising much a long time before delivery had been going on for more than a century before.

When it all goes wrong

Sometimes a company will have scored such a momentous own-goal that its roadmap is more a plan for recovery and survival, than a yellow brick road to a brighter future. One such example is maker of homey WiFi HiFi gear Sonos, who rushed out a whole new software stack so they could launch some new products.

Sadly, the new app was missing a lot of features from the old one, was slow and unreliable and in forcing it out, they shot themselves in both feet and greatly annoyed many of their loyal fans.

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Sonos’ CEO later had to apologize and promised to make things better over coming months, surely made harder by recently announcing a 6% staff layoff. Added to the 7% cuts made the year before, whatever the future holds for them might be that bit harder to reach.

Microsoft Roadmap update

Sometimes, a roadmap leads to a cul-de-sac – the product is killed, dies of natural causes or similar. But when it supposedly gets many users, the majority won’t really care what features and functions are being added day-to-day.

Over in Redmond, the roadmap of specific products and features might seem less important (unless they’re selling the products, or others selling products to them), yet quite some effort goes into maintaining roadmaps for the Microsoft 365 offerings. Presumably it’s to keep existing customers informed and happy enough, reminding them what they’re getting for their continued subscription. Or sometimes to provide early signal that certain things are going away, even if only so they can later point to that notice when someone moans about their favourite thing being wiped out.

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The Roadmap site has been growing its coverage outside of core M365 products, and there are other sources of roadmap info – Azure, Windows (and info for Insiders), Dynamics & Power Platform and probably more.

In other parts of Microsoft, the moderately-loved Paint 3D – the supposed successor to the venerable MSPaint – has now been given it’s marching orders. Back when the future was in 3D – from the TV in your living room, to the massive goggles on your face, it’s was all about that 3rd dimension until it wasn’t.

#39: OneNote Shortcuts, Favourites and Pins

Posted on by ewand

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Regular ToW readers may share in a collective for OneNote – and there have been plenty Tips over the years to celebrate. There are other note-taking apps out there, of course, but if you have invested time and years of notes in one, it’s hard to shift.

OneNote comes in a variety of versions spanning web, mobile, Mac & PC, and you have the ability to organise pages of notes in sections, groups and whole separate Notebooks, should you wish. Notebooks can be shared with other people and could be used to contain stuff that’s specifically for one particular project or role.

Personal vs Work

If using OneNote on the web (which needs you to be online to access it), you could have different browser profiles for work and home, and therefore all your work notebooks would be in one and your home-related ones in another. The PC version of OneNote lets you mix notebooks from different accounts, so you could have them all open in one app – handy for some, though it can lead to lots of notebooks being open and searching right across them can be bothersome (see Classic ToW #646 for help with that).

If you keep going back to a few pages for shopping lists or the likes, it’s quite easy to grab a link directly so you can find it again quickly. Go to a section or page in the web version and you can right-click to copy a link to it, forming a simple https:// URL to wherever the source is stored (on OneDrive if you’re using a personal Microsoft Account or in SharePoint if using a M365 login).

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Save that URL to wherever makes sense for you and it will launch directly to that page in a new browser upon activation.

Desktop vs Web

If you’re using the PC OneNote app, however, you’d want to have the page open in that app rather than in the browser. In the old days, you could drag a OneNote page to your desktop or some other Explorer folder, and it would create a shortcut to it – but not any more.

If you repeat the above process of right clicking / copying a link when in the app, then paste the resulting link into Notepad or similar, you’ll see there are actually two links – firstly, a https:// formatted URL and a second beginning onenote:https:// and finishing &end.

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Select and copy the line(s) beginning onenote: to the end, then you can create a shortcut elsewhere – it’s a bit of a palaver, but…

· right-click on desktop or in your chosen folder,

· choose New > Shortcut and paste the onenote: link in there… hit Next,

· give it a meaningful name and save it

· now you could launch OneNote directly to your chosen page, with a simple tap or double click on that icon.

OneTastic to the rescue

A simpler way is to use the Pin to Favorites (sic) feature in the most excellent addon, OneTastic; this lets you create and pin links to a variety of locations, perhaps most usefully within the “Favorites” section of that menu itself – and to recall a Fav in future, just go to that menu to quickly navigate to several pinned OneNote pages and sections.

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The “Favorites” location can be accessed in the file system if you like, too – just press WindowsKey+R to get the Run command up, then enter %appdata%\OneTastic and you’ll find the folder in there.

Pin it on the move

Mobile users have a simpler way, at least Android users do. Within OneNote, select the 3-dot menu on the top right of a page, and you can Add to Home screen; this will try to pin a shortcut to whatever kind of homescreen / launcher you have.

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iOS users might need to rely on a Widgety solution instead.

#38: Get ahead: get a proper monitor

Posted on (Updated by ewand

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As WFH became normalised during the pandemic, a lot of people went from having access to a reasonable working environment in an office, to sitting on the sofa or camping on a kitchen table. A trend of working from a laptop in coffee shops had already been underway and got additional legitimacy when things opened up again.

For the lucky ones with space at home, the increasing trend for WF there sometimes means they have a better environment than in the office – no desk sharing, putting up with co-workers’ smelly/noisy/annoying habits, perhaps even a faster internet connection. This doubtless contributes to the reported reluctance to return to the rat-race in the office.

Make the most of your screen

One huge downside of working off a laptop is that the screen – even for the biggest ones – is small.

There’s little doubt that productivity gains can be had by having larger monitors or more of them. Carnegie Mellon Professor Randy Pausch from gave a seminal talk on time management in 2007 – prescient, since he was dying of pancreatic cancer at the time and had only months left to live (his Last Lecture is also worth watching). In that session, he advised that maximizing screen real estate is one of the best things you can do.

The simplest way to improve screen area for a home office desk is to buy a decent monitor. Find one with adjustable height (so you can be looking straight at it, not down at a laptop screen) and position the laptop in front of you, below the monitor.

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Extend the desktop to the big screen and make that your main display (so new windows, the task bar, Start menu etc will appear there rather than on your laptop).

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Side-to-side

It’d be even better if you can use a proper keyboard and mouse, maybe with a suitable docking station, then park the laptop to the side. Ideally you should prop it up so that its display and your monitor are similar in height – there are plenty laptops stands available, or you could even just put it on a pile of books…

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Big screen x little screens

If you’ve had a home office setup for a while, it’s possible you’ll have one or two old monitors that won’t be worth much at resale so you could always bring them into action in a true “multi-monitor” setup (without delving into additional hardware to allow more, Windows 11 supports up to 6 displays).

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Then again, a single large monitor might be a bit more feng shui, and there are plenty of good displays out there. A single, widescreen, curved monitor could give you the same kind of functionality as having two side-by regular widescreen ones, with less cabling and fuss.

Modern displays often have USB hubs and lots of other features such as display modes where two inputs are shown side-by-side (so you have two different PCs on display, or a PC on one side and an Xbox on the other half, or take two inputs from one PC into one physical screen – the computer would see it as two side-by-side monitors, which might have benefits when it comes to app layouts).

Managing the placement of windows is a lot easier with the groovy window snapping stuff introduced in Windows 11 (hover over the maximize icon on the top right of your window, and you’ll see options for where to snap it onto the screen… it’s more than just left/right since if you have a mahoosive screen, you’ll likely have several windows side-by-side). If you need more control, or you’re running Windows 10, try the Fancy Zones utility as part of PowerToys.

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Dell Ultrasharp and Display Manager

Dell have long made some of the best PC monitors; particularly their more expensive Ultrasharp range. If you’re shopping for a new screen, there are various ways to save money too – they have a Dell Advantage program where you can get specific vouchers (eg Microsoft employees can get theirs by entering their work email here), and they have an Outlet store for refurbished goods.

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If you have a Dell monitor already, there’s an app for Windows and Mac which could make your life a little better, especially if you routinely switch between inputs / PiP modes etc – the Dell Display Manager. Connect your PC and the monitor with a USB cable, and you can use the software on the PC to control how the monitor works, rather than monkeying around trying to press tiny buttons to drive the On-Screen Display menu. You can even set up shortcut keys to make it easier to dive in.

Tidy.

#36: Navigating Windows by keyboard

Posted on by ewand

Designer (19)Now and again, it’s useful to be able to use Windows without mouse or touch, especially should the unexpected happen. Accessibility needs aside, it’s been possible to move around and control Windows since the very early days, just by using combinations of keystrokes.

ALT+F4 is maybe the most memorable (for closing a window), apart from CTRL+ALT+DEL.

A few other window management keystrokes worthy of mention:

WindowsKey+up/down/right/left arrows – maximize the current window to fullscreen (up), back from fullscreen to previous size or minimizes it (down), and snaps the window to one side of the screen or back (left/right).

ALT+TAB / SHIFT+ALT+TAB – cycles through the current open windows (and add SHIFT to go backwards). Releasing the ALT+TAB combo then jumps to whichever window is highlighted; press CTRL+ALT+TAB to just display the open windows, let you move between them and jump to one by clicking on it or pressing ENTER.

ALT+left/right arrow – moves back and forward, as in clicking the back/forward arrow icons in a browser

WindowsKey + number – jumps to the nth application on your taskbar; if you pin an app/window to the taskbar and it stays in the same place so you could use WindowsKey+1 to jump to Explorer, Win+2 to go to the browser etc.

See more here. Many more.

Powered Up

As previous ToWs have mentioned (here, here, here etc), the collection of utilities called PowerToys is well worth installing; one of its default apps is a shortcut guide showing some key WindowsKey + nnn options. (Press WindowsKey+SHIFT+/ to display temporarily).

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On the topic of PowerToys, one of the utilities is a special “Run” app which does a good bit more than the standard WindowsKey+R command which displays the old fashioned Run dialog;

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PowerToys Run has a load of special characters to make special searches; enter ?? something will search the web using your default, or (optionally) put o: something searches your OneNote notebooks for that term.

Somewhat controversially, the default activation keystroke for PowerToys Run is ALT+Space, which has been a Windows shortcut to display the context menu of the current window. Pressing that combo followed by M or R would be used to move / resize (using the arrow keys) or N and X would minimize / maximize that window.

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In a curmudgeonly article, El Reg complained that old school keyboard warriors would be most upset. The also suggest that the pre-Win95 icon for that corner of the window was a Spacebar, supposedly to illustrate that you press ALT+SPACE to open it.

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Never fear, keyboard fans – you can simply remap the activation key to something else (like WindowsKey+Space) and the ALT+SPACE combo will continue to work like it’s 1987.

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#30: Snipping Smarter

Posted on (Updated by ewand

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Wclip_image004indows’ Snipping Tool, used to capture an area of the screen, has been around for a long time in various guises, even threatened with cancellation at least once. Invoking the tool by pressing SHIFT+WindowsKey+S or just hitting the PrtScn button (if you have one) now displays a small dialog at the top of a dimmed screen.

You can choose to capture a static image (of a part of the screen, or the whole thing) or a record a video of a marked section of the screen, optionally with your own commentary – useful for sharing a quick “how to” video.

Another way of capturing the entire screen is to press WindowsKey+PrtScn, which can be useful when trying to grab menus and things that might disappear if you tried to interact with them – like the first image above, since the screen grab menu itself will disappear as soon as you click the mouse button.

As well as copying the snipped area to the clipboard, an updated Snipping Tool from about 18 months ago also saved them to a Screenshots folder, so it’s easy to go back and fish them out later. See 665 – Mind your screenshots for more details; it’s worth keeping an eye on that Screenshots folder so it doesn’t get overly large and/or contain stuff that you might not want to keep.

REDACT THE gggg TEXT

Some further updates to Snipping Tool have been happening of late; there’s some nice functionality which lets you extract text from the grabbed area to the clipboard (as paste-able text rather than an image), or to redact certain bits of the screen so as to preserve potentially confidential info.

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The Quick redact feature tries to identify some data types, but to manually scratch it out, just select the text you want to hide, right-click and choose Redact.

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When you’re happy, click the Copy button on the top right

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And that will put the fully redacted version into the clipboard, either replacing what was there before or adding it to the list if you have Clipboard History turned on.

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Another newish addition is the quick ability to feed your screen grabbed image to the Visual Search in Bing, effectively doing a reverse image lookup – just look in the … menu on the top right.

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#29: The power of CTRL

Posted on by ewand

Designer (7)The familiar computer keyboard has evolved over decades, even though some languages have obstinately different layouts; Germans have QWERTZ and French users have AZERTY, while Brits used to their usual keyboard might struggle to find the backslash on an American machine, and accidentally hit Enter when looking for the hash key.

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Most keyboards feature control keys on the bottom corners; designed as a “modifier” to be used in conjunction with other keys to activate certain commands, there are some well-known combos like CTRL+C and CTRL+V for copy and paste. There are outliers – German keyboards have Strg instead of Ctrl, and even an obsolete ISO standard says the key could be marked “⎈”.

There are some occasions when the Control key is not just a straightforward modifier; aside from using Sticky Keys to keep it pressed, one somewhat hidden feature in the Edge browser turns Ctrl to good effect, for opening an image in a zoomable overlay window.

Many images embedded in web pages are much bigger than you might think; the source picture could be something like 2000×1500 pixels in size, but when displayed on the site, it’s reduced to 640×480. In such cases, you can use the CTRL key to magnify the original image without having to navigate away from the current page.

If the Edge window is in focus, move your mouse cursor over an image and try tapping CTRL twice; if the site can support it, you’ll see the image displayed in a pop-up window that lets you zoom in out (with the mouse scroll wheel or by stroking your laptop touchpad).

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If you have the PowerToys addon pack installed, you may also have Find My Mouse enabled, and that too uses one of the Control keys as its activator. Happily, if a little confusingly perhaps, both can co-exist so you’ll expand the highlighted image while temporarily spotlighting where your pointer is.

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#28: Recalling history

Posted on by ewand

tl;dr – press WindowsKey+V on your Windows 10 or 11 PC. If you don’t have Clipboard history turned on, enable it. You’re welcome.

Microsoft unveiled a new range of Surface laptops recently; the foghorn headline is they’re not just PCs, they’re Copilot+ PCs with lots of AI goodness. There was also a lot of news from the Microsoft Build conference this week – Copilot might have mentioned once or twice, but I think they got away with it.

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The really big news for PC watchers is concerning the most recent attempt by Microsoft to move away from Intel to ARM processors; tried before with the Windows RT and Surface RT cul-de-sac, then later the Windows 10X project and the Surface Pro X which was ultimately superseded by an Intel-powered replacement.

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Apple showed that it was not only possible but desirable to move from power-hungry Intel to lightning fast ARM chips, delivering huge improvements in battery life at minimal expense of application compatibility. The new Surface Laptop 7 purports to deliver power and performance that will finally take the fight to Apple in-house ARM silicon.

As well as flashing the new hardware, Microsoft also announced a bunch of new capabilities coming to Windows, delivered by snazzy new hardware and the Copilot Runtime which will allow advanced AI computation to take place locally on the device, without having to round-trip to the cloud.

One such AI-powered feature is “Recall”, which captures what the user is doing on the PC over time and will use a local AI model to analyse the data, so you can ask it to bring back whichever document, web page or app you might have been using when you were doing or thinking about something.

So far, the use cases being discussed are a little basic (like “I saw a recipe for a goat’s cheese pizza but can’t remember where it was”) but it could prove really useful when in the wild.

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Remembering history

There are plenty of other places where history is recorded as you do your thang on a PC. Office apps remember documents you’ve been using in the past either by presenting the Most-Recently Used (MRU) list or letting you search across common document areas.

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Outlook will cache the email addresses you’ve sent to before, browsers like Edge have an extensive and searchable history of pages you’ve been to, and even Windows Explorer’s Home tab shows you all the documents you’ve opened recently alongside ones you might have pinned as favourites.

One history feature which is presumably switched off by default due to some sort of privacy worry, is one where when you start using it, you wonder how you’ve lived your life to date without it: Clipboard history. In a nutshell, CTRL+C and CTRL+V have been widely-used shortcut keys for copy & paste since before Windows was an apple in its creators’ eyes. Using WindowsKey+V to initiate a Paste, will present you a list of the last few things you put on the clipboard.

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It was covered in Old Testament ToW #670.

Remember Windows Timeline? It was a feature which recorded what the user was doing across many apps, browser sessions and different devices (even on mobile), synched to the cloud and presented in a logical, searchable timeline view. While it still exists in Windows 10, it wasn’t part of Windows 11 and since it relied on Cortana (RIP), the feature which remains has very much had its wings clipped.

“Recall” Chicken Licken

The old fairy tale of the chicken thinking the sky is falling (originally an Indian story about a hare, not a hen, and known by a variety of names around the world) was revisited in relation to Microsoft’s “Recall” feature which is part of this new range of Copilot+ PCs, enabled by the additional NPU chips (and not to be confused the Outlook’s “Recall” feature which purports to un-send a message but rarely works as expected, especially if sending to a lot of people).

The story behind the new Recall is that the PC will keep a history of everything the user does by screen-grabbing every few seconds, so that the user can later ask Copilot for help in remembering what they’ve done previously.

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Cue, heavy breathing from all sorts of commentators who’ve never even laid eyes on this thing being used. The UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office – the Gov data watchdog – issued a short statement and was widely reported as “looking into” the potential privacy concerns, however Microsoft was clear to point out that:

  • Recall will (initially) only work on these new (ARM) Copilot+ PCs and is in preview. Other PCs with Intel CPUs and Neural Processing Units (NPU) hardware will get the feature in time.
  • Recall will be enabled on initial PC or user setup, but can be switched off using the Settings menu and sys admins can centrally disable through policy; ditto, the length of time Recall will store data for can be tuned (and the amount of storage it uses).
  • Specific apps (and InPrivate browser windows) can be excluded from the screen-grabbery
  • It holds all the data in an encrypted store on the local PC and is only accessible by the user (i.e. not synced to the cloud, not readable by Microsoft or by any company administrator).

#22: A Moment in time

Posted on by ewand

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As the sun momentarily disappeared for many, strange things happened – like 50 year-old album-closing songs from moon-related LPs making into the iTunes charts, alongside that 80s power ballad about dove throwing.

You might think days like these don’t happen very often, but they’re probably more regular than you think, though often the path of totality is not over such a populous area as the latest eclipse. Book your Airbnb in Cornwall ready for the next total eclipse in only 66 years, or hang out in London for the one after that? Still, this time at least, we survived the Rapture.

For more moon-related shenanigans, do go and see The Moonwalkers in London before October 2024, and check out the ever-engaging The Rest is History duo interviewing Tom Hanks and shooting the breeze about the fascination with the Apollo lunar missions.

Back on terra firma, this past week saw Microsoft push out the latest stack of updates to Windows 11 which provide fixes to known issues as well as tweaks to the operating system, including the previously-discussed ability to remove the click-bait “news” stories from the Widgets board that may be visible on the lower left of the task bar or by pressing WindowsKey+W.

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Windows 11 “Moment 5” (remember the days when Service Packs didn’t need to be all Saturday Night TV with their names?) has been available for a while if you sought it out. You should see it – masquerading as the less exciting KB5036893 – in Windows Update; if your PC says you’re up to date, you should see it under Update history…

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As well enabling the switching off the stupid ads and AI-selected stories on the widgets board…

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… you’ll get undreamt of delights like tabs in Notepad, snap layout suggestions, accessibility improvements and more reliable nearby sharing, as well as new AI powered stuff in Copilot for Windows and in the Photos app (with Generative Erase to cut things out of photos).

#20: Choosing Characters

Posted on by ewand

clip_image002Windows still has lots of really old bits that can trace their lineage back to Windows 95 or even before. One such app is “Character Map” – used for picking a specific letter or symbol from the many fonts available, the idea being that you can then paste it into the document you’re working on.

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Selecting some of the characters, you’ll see a “Keystroke” comment on the lower right; if you hold the ALT key down and type those numbers on your numeric keypad (only), it’ll insert that character in your document, email or whatever. Or just Select it, click Copy then paste as normal.

clip_image006There are other ways to choose characters, of course – press WindowsKey + . (ie Win+full-stop) and you’ll get the dialog introduced to make it easy to pick emojis, but which also presents myriad symbols.

Office Apps typically have a “Symbols” item on the Insert menu, which lets you pick the more commonly used ones too. There’s a somewhat obscure Office feature, too, where if you type the corresponding hex number (like 00F1 as in the screenshot above) then press ALT+X, it will convert that code to the requisite symbol. Insert a special symbol through another means, and if you put the cursor after it and press ALT+X, it will replace the symbol to show the code you could use – press ALT+X again and it’ll be back to symbol as before. How obscure.

21st Century Charmap

If you fancy a modern looking character chooser which also gives you lots of info about the fonts as well, check out the free 3rd-party Character Map UWP from the Microsoft Store.

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There are lots of other functions, like an easy visual comparison of different fonts – even if the default phrase has a quick brown dog and a lazy fox…

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See more on its history on GitHub.