It doesn’t happen very often that we actually take a step back and take a look at the way we go about doing our business on the move in the modern computing age compared to not so long ago. The emergence of powerful smartphones like the iPhone or Galaxy S III, as well as mobile tablets like the iPad or the poor old HP TouchPad have dramatically increased productivity by allowing us to be connected to our information no matter where we are. The hardware which we use on a daily basis is all well and good, but on some occasions, it is actually the available software that really push us forward.
Fans of Microsoft's Windows 8 have something to celebrate today with the news that the company has completed development of the upcoming operating system. With the software set to make its way to OEMs soon, another milestone has been reached inside Redmond - the company is now accepting paid app submissions for the Windows Store.
When Microsoft announced its Surface last month, the tech world was largely impressed by its potential, and by essentially killing off the wholly awful netbook market as well as having a real stab at the iPad-manned tablet field, it appeared to kill two birds with the one proverbial stone.
In anticipation of the final public release of their new all-singing all-dancing Windows 8 operating system, Microsoft has been hard at work behind the scenes deploying their engineering teams into projects that have resulted in the announcement and launch of a range of new mice and keyboards that have been designed to make using Windows 8 a lot easier. The Redmond company have called on all of their thirty plus years experience to create hardware which they hope will allow users to get the most out of their new OS and take advantage of everything it provides.
OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion was released on the Mac App Store yesterday for a mindboggling price of just $19.99. It includes 200+ new features, most of which are taken – in one way or another - from iOS. It includes apps such as Notes, Reminders and Calendar, services like iMessage and Game Center and features like Twitter Integration, AirPlay Mirroring and easy sharing from system apps. The OS is getting excellent reviews from critics and, to be honest, it’s making some of us Windows users considering the thought of getting a Mac.
Microsoft next big developer conference, BUILD, will take place at the company's Redmond campus this year, with the fun set to kick off on October 30th. Developers from around the globe will be invited to take part in Microsoft's big annual developer conference, and this time it will be held at Microsoft's own office complex. It's not quite Apple's spaceship campus, but we can't have everything in life now, can we? I guess not.
If you heard some murmurings earlier this month about the future release of yet another mobile operating system and wondered if you had been living in some kind of Total Recall fantasy then don't worry, you can rest assured that reality is firmly in your grips. Mozilla announced that they are planning on entering the mobile market next year with their Firefox OS, with the intention being to allow Alcatel and ZTE to ship some bottom of the market type devices powered by the operating system.
Many of us here at Redmond Pie use Windows on a Mac. There are two reasons behind this controversial use of a Mac. The first is that because productivity takes a huge hit when you can’t find certain things in OS X that you’ve been sub-consciously using in Windows for so many years; we’re not saying these features aren't there, it’s just that it takes extra time and effort to find them. Secondly, there are a few programs that are either not available on OS X (Windows Live Writer and Visual Studio is a prime example) or doesn’t work as well (Google Chrome, for instance!).
Following yesterday's official debut of Office 2013 (and the Customer Preview, which is now available for download as we reported yesterday), Microsoft has today followed up with a post that shares more information about Office 2013's role in the cloud as well as its future on the Windows Phone platform.
Mozilla's Firefox has been around for quite a while now, and despite Google continually pushing updates of its fast-growing Chrome browser, Firefox has continued to remain resilient, altering its own release schedule in a bid to stay relevant. Hence, here we are at Firefox 14, and just six weeks after Firefox 13 was seeded on Mozilla's servers, and the fourteenth iteration still manages to offer a bunch of useful changes.
