Surface Surprise

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One thing that I’ve been looking for in the Windows Store was a good news app- like Flipboard on the iPad. Sure, there’s the built in News app in Windows 8 and I’ve been using it a little here and there during the multiple customer previews but it never really connected with me.

That changed earlier this morning when I was reading a news item using this app and I swiped down from the top of the screen. It was when I did this I noticed the buttons you’ll see below. Sources? Featured? What is this?

Clicking the sources, I found something quite unexpected and pleasant. There are A LOT of news sources here at my fingertips among several categories including “National & World News”, “Business”, “Technology”, “Entertainment” and more. I remember reading a few months ago when the Microsoft/NBC news joint venture split was made official that Microsoft was going to bring their own news business in-house – this is the obvious and impressive result of that decision. They even hired one of the news directors from the Houston Chronicle to work on this.

Each category has multiple sources – some I usually visit on my own or through an RSS reader but others I almost never read. Now that I’ve discovered them, I’m going to take advantage of them.

There’s even a category for regional news sources and I’m lucky enough to see the aforementioned Chronicle, my local paper, in the list of choices.

So there you have it, Windows 8 users. You can stop searching in the Store for that app. You’ve already got a great one pre-loaded. I’m sure we’ll have a great developer come out with a comparable one in the future but this app is the high water mark in my book.

BONUS: Okay, as I’m typing this blog post (in Word 2013 on my Surface) and switched from the news app into Word and ended up actually docking the two side-by-side. This is how multitasking really rocks on the Surface. When you dock this news app to the side it nicely resizes and arranges each of the news sources into a nice usable pane.

And the side pane is fully clickable making this app fully usable off to the side of a larger app.

Explore and enjoy this News app. The same is true for the Finance and Sports app. (Actually, I think they’re just stubs for this main app. I would be interesting to see if you could spawn off a Technology news icon on the Start menu.)

If you’re a new owner of a Surface or recently upgraded to Windows 8, I’d love to hear your opinions of this app of any other new feature you’ve discovered.

 

Play

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I liked this photo and wanted to try out different sharing options. I don’t really like Facebook’s photo resolutions they share it as so I want more options.



Word 2010 Blog Post

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I just wanted to test something out. I’m reading a couple of blog posts about the inevitable demise of Windows Live Writer, which is a great blog app that Microsoft gives away for free, and the eventual replacement with Word (probably when 2013 is released).

I just installed Word 2013 at home on my Windows slate. I’ll repeat this test on it later so I can compare the versions.

My anti-SOPA Post

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I just spent a bit of effort and time to post this on Facebook but want to go ahead and share it with the internet via their search engine of choice.  It’s easy and won’t take much time to email your Representative and Senator and voice your opposition to the Stop Online Piracy Act (“SOPA”).  So here is a repost of my Facebook activity from earlier today:

Reject SOPA, the “Stop Online Piracy Act”. It’s a heavy handed attempt which gives the government wide powers to shut down websites and over-burden site owners. It will have wide and dramatic impact on the sites you visit day after day. …Just like most reactionary things Congress seems to do, this will have little to NO IMPACT against true criminals who are pirating movies and music. Visit this site to quickly find contact info for your Representatives and Senators. It will give you a quick message you can use to call or, as I choose to do, email them from their website.
  1. Go to the Electronic Frontier Foundation website and input your Zip Code.  This will return your Representative’s name and phone/fax number.  If you like talking on the phone, you’re almost done.  But I like to email them.
  2. Open up a new browser tab and search for your representative’s names.
    12-30-2011 10-14-40 AM
    Bing actually gave me a few helper shortcuts to get right to the “Email” section of my representative’s website so I clicked right on that.  Your mileage may vary.
    12-30-2011 10-21-29 AM
  3. Fill out the forms required to show your constituency proof and then you’ll get the form where you can type your message.  Go back to the EFF tab and you can copy the Subject line and Message body they provided. 
  4. Go back to your tab with the Congressman’s Email Form and paste that into the respective fields.
  5. Hit Submit and you’re done!  Thanks for your time. 

If you’re reading this at work and it’s really quiet because it’s the last day of the year and there’s nothing going on – why not take a break from Facebook and YouTube and let your Congressmen and women know that you have an opinion and it matters. 

Here are link links for my Texas visitors.

  • Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchinson
  • Sen. John Cornyn

    •  

    Thanks for reading.

    How To Force Office Documents to Open in their Client Applications

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    Users started reporting an error this morning when they attempted to open an Excel spreadsheet or other office file in their personal document libraries on their My Site.  The error basically says that the operation failed and to try again later.

    What’s happening is that Office Web Applications (“OWA”) have been enabled on their site collections (each users’ My Site is their own personal site collection). 

    UPDATE: Close – the Office Web viewers are the default viewer for Office files in a SharePoint 2010 installation.  In discussing this with a former coworker and our 2010 upgrade procedure document I was reminded that one of the steps we took during our upgrade was to go into our main Site Collections and make the change below for each one.  Well, not each one – we didn’t make the change on the 4600 My Site Site Collections. 

    The easiest way to fix this is to activate the feature “Open Documents in Client Applications by Default”.   This is easily done by clicking on the Site Collection Administration > Features link here:

    http://www.stewartpoint.com/personal/username/_layouts/ManageFeatures.aspx?Scope=Site

    To get there manually, go to the user’s My Site (or your own) and click “Site Actions”

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    Then scroll down and select “Site Settings”.  Click “Site collection features” which is located in the right hand column under the “Site Collection Administration” heading.

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    A list of features will appear- each with a corresponding “Activate” or “Deactivate” button.  Don’t get too click happy here but scroll down to the “Open Documents in Client Applications by Default” and click “Activate”.

    image

    You’ll know it worked when the Activate button changes to Deactivate and the blue “Active” label is added.

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    Now test opening your Office document and it should work as desired. 

    UPDATE: I’m now looking for a way to automate this change on everyone’s My Sites.  Your feedback is welcome.  I will update this post with that information when I find it.