You know, I have been happily wedded to Android for a while now. I’m typing this on my old Nexus 7, and it’s still a great device. It’s not as hardy under the hood as my Note 3, on which I do most of the art for this site. But even this Nexus 7 is a powerhouse next to my first smartphone from as few years ago, the HTC Surround. I charged it up for a lark recently and realized that as much as I enjoy Android, there’s a lot still…
Good morning folks! The plan for this morning was to sleep in, but there was one three-year-old and one five-year-old who had other plans entirely. Thus, instead of sleeping in there was laundry and cleaning and blogging and very soon a workout. Let’s round up the week together. Microsoft Surface Pro Review – David Pierce, The Verge Oh man oh man oh man. I’m psyched about the Surface. You’ll remember how much I love Windows Phone and how I was pretty thrilled to experiment with Windows 8 on my old…
Windows Phone’s greatest detractor isn’t its lack of ecosystem. It’s that nobody knows why it’s worth using. Remember when Microsoft started advertising Windows Phone? The message was “You won’t obsessively love it, but don’t worry, you won’t hardly be using it anyway.” Compare that to the recent Internet Explorer videos, which directly take aim at the misconceptions surrounding the product and showcase its utility. There’s some savvy at work here, some style and personality. It’s inducing smiles in a way that none of the Windows Phone ads do, and it’s colourful and…
Well, folks, the Starfleet Corps of Tiny Engineers are fed and watered and are raring to go, but I should probably give you something to read with your second cup of coffee (or third, or fifth, if you’re anything like me) before the three of us vanish into the workshop for a couple of hours. Here are some fantastic, optimistic reads from around the web this week. It’s Time We Put the Bald Space Marine Away. It’s Time to Make Games for More People. – Patricia Hernandez, Kotaku I…
It’s the last day of the Great Metro App Roundup, and we’ve got two of the biggest new apps to go! Reader This… this is not one of the biggest two apps today. This document and PDF viewer is, like many of the preview apps, totally functional. But I’m not sold. It’ll very obviously work better in touch mode, and it’s much peppier than Acrobat for loading and viewing PDFs, but the granular control over printing isn’t in place yet; it’s even missing things like being able to print single pages.…
Apps, day the second! Check yesterday’s for Calendar, Mail, and Messaging. Carry on for dumb beauty, region code errors, drama, and cloudy skies! Maps Another gorgeous Metro app. I love Bing maps’ look; the aesthetic is clean and bright, easy on the eyes and extremely readable. It launches quickly and finds your location without much effort. And then you start to use it. Rendering the map isn’t fast on old hardware. It chugs, and refreshes at odd times. Also, its contextual awareness is atrocious, as is its parsing of Bing search results.…
The OS is only half the story of what makes Windows 8 interesting. There are plenty of new apps that come baked in, replacing things like the Windows Live suite, Outlook, widgets, and web apps. Some are fantastic, some show potential, and some just raise questions. Let’s take a look. Remember, these are all still preview builds, so I’m going to try to be fair. But I’m not going to pander. Microsoft is going to need to hustle to fix some of these apps before launch so they’re an everyday…
I’ve been using Windows 8 now for a few days since the surprisingly easy install, and I’ve quickly gotten a feel for how it works. Let’s take a tour of some of the new stuff and see how it stacks up to what we all know and love (or hate, as the case may be). Lappy is not a new computer, so I was pretty concerned about performance when I installed Windows 8. Take a look: Yup, Lappy is a crappy old HP Pavilion dv2700t, without even the max available…
Last night, I braced myself for a painful goodbye. I have been watching a dear old friend become increasingly frail, seeing function lost almost daily. And together, we were going to do something insane. It might spell the end of our long relationship. But it could also be rejuvenating—one final adventure to go out on. My friend’s name—the name I gave him almost five years ago—is Lappy486. He saw me through my undergrad and teacher’s college. He’s been dying by inches. And last night, I installed the preview build of…
