The hangover from Patch Tuesday persists in some quarters, but today's big news is more forward-looking — and more in line with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella's "mobile first, cloud first" messaging. See what you need to know about Microsoft today.
WINDOWS 10 MOBILE PREVIEW
Windows Insiders got a preview build of Windows 10 Mobile today, and it's kind of a big deal for the following reasons:
— It now includes support for a non-Lumia Windows Phone, the HTC One.
— It now includes the Windows Store.
-- Including the Windows store means can users also download Microsoft's universal Office apps onto their Windows Phone.
— Enjoy using Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote, all of which are all available to install right away.
Speaking of enjoying apps, Windows 10 Mobile preview-users can also connect to Xbox One.
When can I get my Xbox and Excel-having versions of Windows 10 Mobile? you're asking. Before you load it on your phone, be sure to check out this list of warnings and bugs, including: having to uninstall and reinstall all SD apps, having to fix your cellular data settings and quite possibly not getting MMS messages.
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WINDOWS 10 ON SURFACE 3 OR ON MACS
Although Microsoft previously advised against installing the Windows 10 Insider Preview on the Surface 3, citing a lack of official drivers for the Intel x5/x7 Atom processors, things have changed since May 11. Microsoft's now rolled out pre-release drivers, per this support website note:
There is a pre-release Windows 10 driver set for Surface 3 published to Windows Update. If you have installed Windows 10 on your Surface 3, please visit Windows Update and install these drivers. Prior to 5/13/2015 the user experience was not optimum, but the pre-release drivers should greatly improve the experience (as now being reported in this thread and others by Surface 3 users).
For those of you on Mac computers who have been feeling a little left out of all the Windows 10 excitement, here's your chance to experience it via the magic of virtualization. TechNet's got a step-by-step blog post on how to set up and run A Windows 10 VM on Mac via Oracle VirtualBox.
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MEET HYPERLAPSE -- IT'S RELEVANT TO BOTH THE ENTERPRISE AND CONSUMERS
Shooting digital video isn't a challenge these days; the real trick is condensing hours of video footage into something usable, interesting, shareable and consumable.
Enter Hyperlapse for Azure Media Services. Part of the suite of Hyperlapse video smoothing tech tools that were unrolled today (you can get the 411 on Hyperlapse Pro Preview For Windows PCs here and see what the big deal is for Hyperlapse Mobile here), the enterprise tools are meant to help integrate the Hyperlapse software (which makes the condensing and editing appear seamless) with zippy back-end abilities.
Hyperlapse for Azure Media Services is the integration of Microsoft Hyperlapse technology into a media processor on Azure Media Services … With Azure Media Services, you can schedule scalable batch processing of your Hyperlapse tasks, parallelizing as many jobs as you need by virtually scaling up your hardware!
The company is currently offering Microsoft Hyperlapse to all Azure Media Services accounts for free.
PATCH TUESDAY HANGOVER
If you're having difficulty installing the latest updates that rolled out on Tuesday, you're not alone. InfoWorld's Woody Leonhard writes:
Reports are coming in from all corners of people who installed Microsoft's Tuesday round of patches, rebooted their PCs, then got stuck on "Stage 3 of 3. Preparing to configure Windows. Do not turn off your computer." The afflicted computers will sit like that for hours.
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AS GO THE DEVELOPERS ...
The ripple effects of Microsoft Build continue radiating out: this month's Tiobe Index of language popularity show that three languages that are big in the Microsoft development realm — C++, C# and Visual Basic — made big gains in popularity compared to their rankings a year ago.
"These three programming languages are also the key languages of Microsoft's Visual Studio," according to the introduction accompanying the index. "Is this a coincidence? Microsoft's Visual Studio is one of the few commercial programming environments that stood the test of time. Together with Eclipse it is one of the most frequently used IDEs in industry. So it is no wonder that C++, C#, and Visual Basic.Net are on the rise."
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BING GOES MOBILE
If you're Binging on your mobile phone, your search results are going to look different than if you were to run the same query on a Web browser on your desktop. Microsoft's tweaking its search engine to deliver mobile-friendly results to people who hit it via their smartphones or tablets, a move that mimics Google's similar ranking in April.
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FROM US/FROM OUR SISTER SITES
Eradicating EV stubs from Exchange mailboxes isn't easy
How to connect your servers and workstations directly to Operations Management Suite
How to connect the System Center Operations Manager to the Operations Management Suite
VENOM leaves some virtual environments open to attack — but not VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V
Microsoft Offers New Windows Cipher Suite for Testing, Official Rollout Later This Year
Microsoft Research releases Hyperlapse Pro
HTC Could See a Windows 10 Mobile Build Soon
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FUN STUFF
Windows 10 is the update that just keeps on giving — in this case, it'll give users an automatic update of Candy Crush Saga. Because Minesweeper and Solitaire are so pre-Windows 95.
