Tag: Microsoft Launcher

618 – Listing

Posted on by ewand

clip_image002Lists form a big part of lots of peoples’ lives – whether it’s a to-do list for productivity afficionados, shopping lists for remembering the essentials or compiling top-five lists of favourite things, just, well, because.

A while back, Microsoft released a new app for Microsoft 365 users called Lists, which was essentially a front-end to SharePoint, itself a staple of the Office 365/Microsoft 365 offering since the beginning, and providing much more functionality than simply a place to stuff documents. The original SharePoint Portal Server 2001 (codenamed “Tahoe”) is nearly old enough to buy itself a beer in its homeland, and relatively advanced logic and custom data validation & handling has been a major part of its appeal for a lot of that time.

clip_image004Lists brings a lot of that functionality to the fore, while being extensible through Power Apps and integrated into Teams. There are mobile Lists apps available and in beta too.

Recently, the Lists experience was made available – in preview – for non-M365 users who could sign in with their Microsoft Account. A “lightweight” version of the app, it’s still pretty functional and pitched at individuals, families or small businesses who need to keep lists of things.

Taking a slightly different tack, the To Do application is a good way of making other sorts of lists – that could be Tasks or flagged emails as well as simple tick-lists to mark off what needs to be done. In something of an overlap with Lists, To Do can share its lists with other people – think of To Do as primarily for personal use that you might share, whereas Lists is for managing shared endeavours first and foremost.

clip_image008If you’re a user of both Amazon’s Alexa services and Microsoft To Do, you might want to integrate them together; using the Tasks In The Hand skill. Once enabled and correctly configured, you can use Alexa to manage that service’s built-in To-Do and Shopping lists, and these are then synchronized to the Microsoft To Do app.

clip_image010You can rename the lists which are subsequently created in To Do and which sync with Alexa, though you can’t yet manage additional ones. You could simply use the Alexa app to manage the lists rather than synching them with To Do, but setting up synch gives you more flexibility – To Do integrates with other software and services, like being able to show lists in the Microsoft Launcher app on an Android phone.

Tip o’ the Week 459 – Building a better phone UI

Posted on by ewand

clip_image002Microsoft fangrlz and fanbois, shed a tear for the Windows Phone platform, which relaunched with some fanfare just over 8 years ago as “Windows Phone 7 Series” (recalling the Microsoft redesigns the iPod packaging spoof?). The original idea with the new platform was that you didn’t need to jump in and out of apps all the time, since apps surfaced their info on the home screen and to a series of Hubs. Check out the original 2010 advert that painted the vision (fairly) clearly…

The hastily-renamed Windows Phone 7 showed up in November 2010, and came with a comparatively lavish marketing budget, bring some quite edgy and memorable adverts – like the Season of the Witch, or Really? (try not to boke at the scene where the guy drops his phone…)

A year later, and almost 7 years ago to this day, Canadian DJ and electro-music producer Deadmau5 played an amazing light show in London to celebrate the launch of the first Nokia Lumia phone; the fact that his track “Bad Selection” was the one that showcased what the phone looked like did raise a snigger at the time. He was back a year later with another event to celebrate the launch of the Lumia 820 with Windows Phone 8.

Now that Windows Phone has been in the ground for more than a year, it’s worth celebrating its somewhat spiritualclip_image004 successor – the Microsoft Launcher for Android (see ToWs passim, #345 and #438). One of the upsides of the Android platform is the fact you can effectively re-write the main UI, and most phone manufacturers ship their own variants of common apps (like Contacts, Phone, Messaging etc), so it’s ripe for customizing.

clip_image006The Launcher brings some of the design elements of Windows Phone to Android, while building in great new ideas – like the swipe right to the “Glance” screen, Bing visual search, Timeline integration with Windows PCs and more.

The Microsoft Launcher has had more than 10 million downloads and has a rating of 4.6 / 5, with over 750,000 reviews – and it’s recognised by many commentators as one of the best Android launchers, even in such a crowded market.

If you’re up for trying out a new release, sign up to be a tester for the Microsoft Launcher Beta – currently offering a major update (5.1) that includes better Cortana functionality, To-Do and Sticky Notes synch from PCs and more. See details here. Join the community here (Google+ is still a thing – who knew?)

The beta even has a new “Screen time” function that promises to tell you how often and how long you use the phone, and with which apps. Google has shipped a “Digital Wellbeing” feature for its latest Android release (v9 aka Android “Pie”), but many phones won’t get that release for ages, if at all. Microsoft Launcher works on Android 4.2 and later.