OneDrive finally launched!

Now, check out the Automatic Camera Backup which basically uplaods the photos you have taken to the OneDrive. I don't know if this is similar to the Camera Uploads from Dropbox but I guess that it should be similar that way. It's just that you have to open the Camera section in the IOS version to allow the uploads to happen compared to other versions. Another feature is the video transcoding, which reduces the file footprint of a video that is being downloaded from Onedrive. I guess that there should be multiple video sizes for a video you want to download from.
However, since the launch of OneDrive today, it appears that they will add additional features in the future.

From Skydrive to OneDrive

Due to some branding infringement or whatever, they had decided to rename Skydrive to Onedrive. We don't know the new features for Onedrive at this moment but it seems that even Office 365 will have some improvements for their web apps known as Office Online. But having the name, Onedrive, is likely to make things worse. There are already cloud services with the word, one, such as Ubuntu One, One.com, etc. Calling that Micro-drive is not likely to make sense either like making the Microsoft cloud storage for users the tinyest looking storage of all containing 25GB-500GB. Like come on, this ain't the SSD or the SD-card inside the servers.
One.com already has their cloud drive service and it has been active for three years but I assume that the Skydrive service existed even ealier than One.com's cloud service. I don't know when did Dropbox first exist by the way but it may seem that Dropbox itself was a superior one than Skydrive back then before there was a desktop client for Skydrive two years ago.

Better encryption from Microsoft will be completed by the end of next year

Well, this is taking a long time for this super encryption to be completed and deployed against the evil cyber-spying agencies we already know of and news of such spying scandal has been everywhere around the globe and everyone already knows it. In fact, we already saw a recent news on what they have been up to against the internet users. The services that will be encrypted are, Outlook.com, Office 365, Skydrive and Windows Azure.

Using the highest key length so far which is 2KBit and we’re not joking about that, this is by far the best-in-class industry cryptography Microsoft has planned. Another encryption standard called Perfect Forward Secrecy will also be implemented as well.

Under Legal Protection Reinforcement, it seems that Microsoft had already taken lawful actions against the bad things the governments had attempted to do against the customers. We don’t know when did Microsoft do this to protect us but they said that they will continue to protect us in the future to preserve their ability to alert us when some idiots DARE to force them to hand over the customer data. Of course, the consequences for such refusal are complete BULLSHIT! If Microsoft can continue to protect us, then there may be a reason to use their products again. But until the day of super-encryption, our computers and servers running Apple or Microsoft OSes are nothing but malware-infected junks. Even our tablets and phones are the similar victims as well.

Office documents on Office 365 Final Version

As we already know, the preview versions of all the Office 365 products had already expired and it's going to be time to buy the final versions of Office 365 products like they were already available. So, when you install Office 365, you get to see the Welcome to Office video. I don't know if that video is updated or not for the final version but it should be to reflect the title.
Now, here came an irritating part. For some reason, the applications decided to jam/hang on me due to that STUPID CONNECTION TO Office 365 and Skydrive stuffs. WHAT WAS THAT TECHNICAL PROBLEM ALL ABOUT WHEN TRYING TO EDIT OR SAVE A DOCUMENT ONLINE? In that case, I had already decided to edit the Office documents stored in my Dropbox storage INSTEAD! Even worse was that the Office documents I've been using were not able to be synchronized properly. That freaking Office Upload feature, it wouldn't do any uploading feature let alone the Skydrive doing all the work.
At least, the new Skydrive doesn't give me whatever technical problems because it functions the same way as Dropbox does and especially for the new Skydrive site that allows you to browse the files online but if you try to work on the Office documents stored in your company's Office 365/Skydrive online as a team, I don't know if the technical problems will surely annoy you or some sort. Better still, use Skydrive for storage purposes while using Dropbox for synchronization and document editing purposes in business.
Another irritating problem when editing documents is that interface keeps animating when the window is not that large or wide enough and when you're editing certain parts of the documents.
I don't know if the bugs are fixed in the final version and I will be buying Office 365 Home Premium or not one day but that has been so much of beta testing for me that new bugs can continue to annoy the beta testers upon detecting them and the developers are being reported regarding them and asked to fix them.

Going paperless this year

As discovered from Engadget, we had decided to go paperless this year and that there will be no more plans and intentions for printing my stuffs in the future. Concepts, sketches, storyboards and other stuffs will be done digitally and stored on the digital storages.

One of the already familiar technologies is Google Drive from Google in which we can use that for storing whatever documents we can have there but I surely have other cloud storages such as Skydrive, Box, DropBox and even more. Sure, why do we want to write and draws on the paper like materials when we already have the digital documents and why do we need to buy even more printing papers for printing stuffs? Two years ago, I got my ID money wasted on printing my Ipad cover design which was already unnecessary in the first place. Thanks for that stupid waste of my time like that.

Online fax is another useful thing for business in the future as real faxes waste papers and the inks are really expensive for printing stuffs. You can use HelloFax to send 50 pages of fax per month but then, this is for business purposes anyway as there is no reason to use one outside of business and especially when you need to manage your bills online which may be useful when you want to buy stuffs online.

E-Signatures are what you use in the E-mail clients and I hope that you should take some time to come up with one such signature needed for both business and personal use.

Lastly, you can try to create the online expense report as well as to send online invoices and receive payment online. I have no idea what’s with the fifth and sixth features but very soon, we’ll get to use them in business industry to save the environment.

Skydrive for Xbox 360?

Yikes, what the fuck? This is a disastrous idea Microsoft has come up with and it is going to be a disastrous report/article you’re going to see from here and Neowin site. You see, having the cloud storage on Xbox 360 console is already fine for storing game saves perhaps but THIS is a disaster striking the company’s asses! Who thought this may be a good idea anyway? You can’t edit stuffs on the Skydrive directly on your console and I don’t know if you can view photos and videos on that console. It may be seriously flawed that it makes the network viewing of the content look like the USB media player connected to the console. THIS IS MORE LIKE A READ-ONLY CLOUD VIEWER than the fully functional cloud service on the device and such technology like this SHOULD NOT be implemented in USB media players as well.

When it comes to servers, what you’re gonna do about the data stored on them. Do you edit, create and remove stuffs directly on the servers? Who the hell at the data center may want that?

Well, I don’t know if the game saves can be stored in the Skydrive storage or not but a huge technical disaster may happen to your account that will affect all the services that power it if you happen to have violated some new rules or terms of usages or whatever like what already happened to someone’s Hotmail account.

Xperia and Box renew partnership through next year

Announced before the last year’s festive season and initially running for a year, the Xperia smartphone and Sony tablet users can now get the free 50GB Box cloud storage for life by signing up or accessing existing Box accounts from their devices before the end of next year.

Development Area Update

As Windows Live Mesh would be replaced with the new Skydrive, it seemed that I had decided to move my development data to my Box cloud storage but the Box Sync was annoyingly flawed that I decided to another migration again and this time, the Music Remix Area would be moved to my Skydrive account. Even worse was that the policy was changed that having abusive data in your Skydrive cloud storage can lead to the removal of your Microsoft account.

Over the next few weeks, there will be another news from Sony and Box as there will be a talk about the service and what they can expect from Box through next year. This is available for Xperia smartphones including the released after Xperia X10 but not for X10 Mini, X10 Mini Pro and devices with Android versions prior to 2.1

Rooms on Windows Phone and other phones

Well, at least people are able to use this feature due to the fact that this app is available on multiple platforms starting with Windows Phone, Iphone and Android. You can invite your friends to use this feature provided that they use the Hotmail account which is now the Microsoft account. Room app lets you share notes, calendar, photos and participate in a group chat with people you choose but Microsoft surely recommends that the whole group of yours should be having Windows Phone 8 as it has the best feature list.

I don’t know if this can work on Ipod Touch, IOS tablets, Android tablets and Windows 8 devices but here’s how for Calendar. If you’re using Windows Phone 7, IOS or Windows 8, add your Microsoft account as an email account on your device. Then, the room calendar will shop up alongside your other calendars with the same name as the room. But if you’re using Android, get the Hotmail app from Google Play and sign in to the app with your Microsoft account. Then go to the calendar app to turn on the room calendar. Once again, this feature works best with Windows Phone 8.

For photos and videos, get the SkyDrive app and sign in to it with your Microsoft account. The room photos and videos will show up as the shared folders with the same name as the room. This applies to Windows Phone 7, IOS, Android and Windows 8 users. Lastly for notes, get the OneNote app and do the same thing as you do for SkyDrive app. It also applies to four platforms as already mentioned.

I guess that Windows Phone 8 already has those apps as part of the operating system but it is a shame that you surely have to follow the instructions above if you’re using Windows 8 which sounds kind of bullshit in the first place.

Skydrive usage has doubled

Six months ago, they had released the first sync apps for Skydrive which make it easy to view and manage your personal Skydrive from Windows Explorer in Windows and Finder in Mac OSX. Now, the storage has been doubled. Other updates improve the app feature capabilities for smartphone devices that improve on how you access Skydrive across different devices.

With yesterday’s release of the update, you can select which folders from Skydrive are synced similar to other online storage services like DropBox where you can select which folder to synchronize. You can also share stuffs to various social networking sites.

Lastly, for Android users, they have added a few improvements such as uploading all types of files from SD cards, renaming folders and files and custom sort orders for every view.

Skydrive on Opera

If you’re an Opera user, you’ve got to be warned that Skydrive jams the entire Opera browser like crazy. This is due to like two million nonsense characters entered in the source code of the website and that’s not fast and fluid enough. Comparing to other web browsers which are unaffected by this bug, it seems that some guy, Hallword R. M. Steen, had discovered the proof of this bug and blogged about it as shown in the link: http://my.opera.com/hallvors/blog/2012/11/12/microsoft-sends-two-million-null-characters-hangs-opera.

Other technical explanation is that the source code Opera gets, viewed in SciTE Behind, a comparison of source sent to Opera and other web browser, the comparison tool ExamDiff as he used is loaded directly from the Fiddler HTTP debugger to prove that this is about bytes coming from the site rather the result of some strange browser-internal bug. Perhaps someone at Microsoft must be crazy like trying to make things extra fast and fluid or perhaps trying to restore the interface as many people disagree with. If the interface is bound to be reverted while trying to speed up stuffs, that should be what the future of Microsoft can have been in the first place. So, is the fast and fluid phase going crashing down the hill?

Even worse is that Opera gets way more confused by the unexpected NULL characters than other web browsers do, judging from the CPU usage but we don’t know which side of the developers should fix. It is good to compare Opera with other web browsers for perhaps mistakes over certain web sites you visit and that was a surprising discovery made by Hallword R. M. Steen. Official proof can be found at the link above.

Excel Surveys for Skydrive

Oh man, perhaps Microsoft Access can be better suited in storing the databases of the surveys you’ve made so far. Yesterday, they had launched the Excel survey feature on Skydrive. It is for collecting information from your friends and family to better organize and plan activities. So, if you’re planning to organize one activity, you can make use of this feature to do so judging from the best feedback written in your surveys.

How can this work with Microsoft Excel? First, you can plan out the questions and type of answers you want as well as to set the response type and determine whether the questions are answered to answer or not. Once you’re done, you can share the survey through the link which is a freaking joke to the future of the technology. Having to announce your plans by mail or links like that may be a no-no as you may end up annoying your friends like that. Once the response is complete from your friends you’ve invited to the survey, you can see the results in Excel and do neat things like embed the results in the webpage or make and share the chart of the results which may be useful for holiday party, vacation or perhaps some kind of research.

Office on Windows Phone 8

Can this one be extra fluid and fast since the whole Windows Phone 7 is done from scratch? Previously, it seems that Windows Phone 7 is supposed to fast and fluid but from what you can see from the start screen, you can notice that some of the apps are not fast and fluid enough as if there are some remaining traces of glassy stuffs which can spoil the performance of Windows Phone 7 devices. Now with Office for Windows Phone 8, it is basically based on Office 15 for Windows Phone 8 devices and that’s extra fluid and fast for sure.

Your office documents are on the cloud with Skydrive or Office 365 and you can use them from the computers, tablets and even smartphone devices. There’s also the Tap + Send feature in Windows Phone 8 that allows you to share documents to another NFC-capable device.

In PowerPoint for Windows Phone 8, it seamlessly renders all shapes and SmartArt Graphics and honors the transition effects and timing. There’s also the portrait mode with speaker notes, slide thumbnails make navigation between slides a lot easier.

In Excel, you’re able to zoom and to edit the workbooks but I don’t know if there will be the scrollbar in any case. I guess that when zoomed out, you can move anywhere you want but when zoomed in, you may end up selecting the cells to edit or enter in plus selecting multiple cells. Also, the View Cell Text feature is as useful as editing cells in the desktop version of Excel.

OneNote Mobile – Oh man, try not to treat this as the secondary Messenger for issuing tasks like that like we already saw in one of the Windows 7 commercials. You can use this to take notes, tasks and other stuffs you may want. Also, there’s even the Voice Notes which may be cool enough.

What’s more is that you can use Lync, Skype and Yammer for perhaps multiple ways of communication and collaboration effectively from your mobile devices, tablets and even the computers. Outlook provides the integrated email, contacts, calendar and tasks which may be the hallmark experience on Windows Phone. For Skype and Lync as we know of, you can use voice, video, IM, email, SMS, feeds and presence for communication. It’s easy to participate in meetings from your mobile device without typing in any access codes. Unfortunately, it seems that the developers will provide more details about their enterprise social experiences in the coming months perhaps once Windows Phone 8 is out.

Office 15 reached RTM

They might have signed off on the RTM build of Office 15 but what about the performance of PowerPoint when there are so many advanced stuffs on the slides? You know, I tried out working on Zigg-Zagg PDA PPT Animation with PowerPoint 15 Beta but the whole thing is unstable that I decided to stick back to Office 2k10 version of PowerPoint to do the work. Thankfully, Office 15 is not shameful a lot compared to Windows 8 which is going to be a development catastrophe. Everything in Office 15 is Metro-ized and that means it’s completely clean and fluid but the same cannot go to Windows 8 in which we still see some some glassy stuffs and that’s not fluid enough. It’s more like getting technically worse if not, even more unstable no matter how simple things can look. At least, Windows Phone 7.5 is even more fluid than the original Windows Phone 7 as it still contains some elements which are not even fluid yet. However, only mobile version of Office 2k10 is NOT considered fluid like this perfectly so hopefully Windows Phone 8 should have the next version of Office Mobile but still, this is what a fluid product should be like.

With cloud technology, it looks like we’re entering the future with Office 15 and it may be the same with Skydrive as both Windows 8 Metro app and desktop app although there will be no signs of easier synchronization for Cloud Storage apps if you’re using a tablet as using the desktop app of Skydrive on tablets may be difficult to interact. Who knows if you can synchronize the local photos stored on the tablet to Skydrive which may mean synchronizing the photos that can be open in Photos app to Skydrive just like Camera Upload folder for Dropbox for smartphones. Camera Upload folder for Dropbox is somewhat a special folder for storing synchronized photos you take and that’s pretty brave and if Skydrive can do the same with Office documents and photos in special ways, that will be a good thing.

Office 15 will be planned to be released in general in the first quarter of next year. Starting October 19, customers purchasing Office 2k10 from local retailers or resellers will receive the new Office for free upon availability and speaking of next year’s release of Office 15, it sounds kind of bullshit though that Windows RT users will end up getting the prototype version of Office 15 for Windows RT. We can still use Office 2k10 in the meantime but for Windows RT users, this is in-excusable.

For business users, there will be roll-out of new capabilities to Office 365 Enterprise Customers in the next service update starting in November through general availability. Sure, Office 15 had recently reached RTM so the release may be kind of safe but even then, this is one month too late as if Windows RT business users will have to wait until a month to get the final version of Office for Windows RT. Volume Licensing customers will get the product on December 1st while the IT professionals and developers will be able to download the final version via their TechNet or MSDN subscriptions by mid-November.

Overall, the business users of Windows RT may be patient enough to wait but the same cannot go for other users of Windows RT as waiting for next year is insane. Perhaps the future is still not fluid like this.

Apple IOS 6 Arrived

Finally, IOS 6 arrived yesterday and I forgot to blog about it as well as the new Itunes in which I will try to do that later. Here are the apps we’re going to talk here but more of these can be found in this link: http://www.apple.com/ios/whats-new/

• Facebook – As the social networking site is way too popular, it is now part of the IOS 6 so that there’s no reason for you to obtain that from the App Store but will the app become more improved? In IOS6, you can share photos, locations from Maps app, high score from Game Center app and other stuffs to Facebook easily. Also, the Facebook events and contacts are integrated into your Apple account similar to the integration done to your other existing email accounts. New to IOS6 includes the Facebook Like button on ITunes and App Store.
• Shared Photo streams – People using ICloud on IOS 6 device or Mac running Mountain Lion can get photos delivered immediately in the Photo app or Iphoto through Photo Streams. You can also view Shared Photo Streams on Apple TV since the latest generation of Apple TV is based on IOS that you can view the photos with the power of ICloud although we’re not sure if there will be IOS 6 for Apple TV. There’s also the web viewing of Photo Streams similar to viewing photos on Skydrive or other cloud storage services.
• Mail – There will be photo and video attachments on the messages but for videos, it is not an easy feat no matter what. There’s also the VIP list which is exclusive to IOS 6 to indicate which messages are important to you. It’s going to be freaking useful but THAT KIND OF PRIORITY should be released earlier in the first place like having the new special folder that contains important messages only. When they’re marked as important , there should be a new special folder like what IOS 6’s VIP folder has.
• Safari – New to IOS 6 includes the cloud bookmarks similar to other web browsers like Google Chrome in which you can synchronize the bookmarks. Also, you can even view webpages offline as well as in full-screen landscape.
• Find My Friends – There are lots of apps that share your location to social networking sites but this one is IOS 6 exclusive as I don’t think this can be in IOS 5 and below. Using the map, your friends can be located on where they are in this app which you may want to take some opportunity to go to the places your friends have gone to one day or perhaps ensure that your friends remain as safe as possible.
• App Store and ITunes Store – You can see what’s new in music, movies, TV shows, apps and other stuffs at the top of each store’s home page. Keep track of the ones you’ve previewed with the History button and when you’re ready to obtain, tap Buy to add something to your collection whether they are free or paid but be careful, you do not want to run into those things that are kind of stupid, not working or even plagued with other flaws. Like cloud bookmarks, the history for these stores is iCloud powered.

New Office and Skydrive for Windows

In Office 15, you can connect your account to various services like the social networking sites, other E-mail accounts and even the cloud services like Skydrive. From the Skydrive menu, you can choose various folders to retrieve documents from and save the documents to. But unfortunately, because Microsoft Office 15 is the desktop app, it may be unfortunate that you have to end up using the Skydrive desktop app or something when trying to retrieve documents like that for example. You may have a better bet in using the Skydrive Metro app to retrieve the documents on the document as the interactivity is easier that way.
There are now few ways to obtain the new Skydrive desktop app for windows. First, is the standalone way. Second, it you have Office 15 Home Premium Preview installed, Skydrive is already on your computer. Third, there's even the new Windows Essentials Wave 5 that has Skydrive app that replaces Windows Live Mesh entirely. Downside though, the programs still look like the Wave 4 version of Windows Live Essentials  and in fact, there's no major progress whatsoever like that. The glassy ribbon interface is still there and there are STILL NOT enough features for Windows Live Movie Maker or some sort compared to other third-party video editors. That is the most disappointing part of Windows Live Essentials of like all time.
In addition to saving your documents to the cloud on Skydrive, there are other Web Locations, other online storages on other Microsoft accounts and other computers on your network. Besides saving your documents on your network, there are other places for you to save your documents to. Due to having the Save As Sub-Menu like that in Office 15, you have to be careful on where do you want to save your documents to so it's a little bit challenging while the data synchronization with the use of Skydrive is already easy enough on the computer. However, since you're in the desktop mode, it may be unfortunate to interact like that on the dialog boxes on the tablet and it should be WHY the hell is Office 15 the desktop app. One of the reasons is that Office 15 can be fully-featured app which may be finer on the normal computers, not the tablets.
When you have the Office documents stored on your Skydrive, you can use any device to access your Skydrive documents where-ever you go, provided that you have internet access. You can also use the Office Web Apps that are also upgraded to the online version of Office 15. Other changes include the Microsoft Website and the Microsoft Account Login pages which are apparently metro-ized. When your Skydrive data is automatically synchronized between your cloud storage and your device, it is automatically up-to-date  just like using its rival cloud services.
There's also the Office Upload Center that connects with the Skydrive but even then, I don't happen to be using it to transfer the documents.

Office 15 Preview - Let's Get Started!

Well, I already had Office 15 Customer Preview installed on my computer provided that I have my Windows Live Account. From the Office 15 Customer Preview official website, you can click on Sign Up button to get directed to the Office 365 Home Premium Customer Preview. You're allowed to install Office 15 Home Premium edition on up to 5 devices. Furthermore, you can access the Office documents on the cloud via SkyDrive technology. Also, you can click on one of the products under 'Explore the Office applications' where I think that you're still directed to Home Premium edition.
Below Home Premium edition part is the 'Services for Business' part. There, you can select ProPlus, Small Business Premium or Enterprise. Professional Plus is for IT Pros, Enterprise is for large enterprise business and Small Business as it suggests, is for small business companies. ProPlus Preview lets you create up to 25 users with 5 installations per user. So this kind of volume licensing method is under 'Per User' so one user can install Office 15 Preview on up to five devices which leaves 24 users remaining. Small Business Premium Preview and Enterprise Preview editions take the benefits of Office 365 Pro Plus edition that allow professional email, shared documents, and HD video conferencing but the Enterprise Preview has extra features like Exchange Online, including archiving and legal hold to fully manage your company's email in the cloud. The Enterprise Preview edition also includes SharePoint Online to manage, share and edit business documents and Lync Online to allow you to conduct meetings and collaborate across remote teams on the network technologically and your team members.
In addition to the new Office 365 split up into new editions and existing editions, there are newer versions of individual products that are separate parts of Microsoft Office such as SharePoint, Exchange, Lync, Office Web Apps Server, Project and Visio. For IT Pros, you can get the new version of SharePoint Server, Exchange Server, Lync Server, Project Professional, Visio Pro for 365 Preview and lastly, the Web Apps Server Preview.
Surprisingly enough, the Apps for Office and SharePoint service is at Developer Preview stage which is similar to when Windows 8 was in Developer Preview stage but it is likely to be for developers.

Office in the Cloud

Finally, Office 15 was out this month and I had the opportunity to try it. There are more features than in Office 14 and some of the features are like using Adobe products on the Mac such as zooming in and out in PowerPoint 15. In slide show view, you can zoom in and out using the zooming feature in case people can't even see what was written on the slides which may be useful but during the presentation, it may be time consuming so you need to plan the presentation properly in order to save time. Other new features include the smooth transitions and animations everywhere in Office 15 software and I was like, wow, things are impressive like that. Since Office 15 is using Cloud Technology, there will be an opportunity to store your documents to Skydrive in addition to connecting your Microsoft account to various sites such as social networking sites like I already connected my Windows Live account to. Also, you can insert online stuffs in addition to inserting the stuff stored on your hard disk. When you install Office 15, you also get to see the video as shown on YouTube I already watched. Unfortunately, it displayed the prototype Office 15 logo at the video's end which is likely to be a flaw but Microsoft is still working all along. Other than using Skydrive, you can also use SharePoint to store your Office documents and thanks to Cloud Technology, you're also able to use your Office documents stored on your Skydrive on mobile devices as long as there's an internet connection as well as the Skydrive and Office apps installed. Best of all, you can share your documents to social networking websites but then there was already an app from Facebook called Docs in which you can store your Office documents there and start sharing. Man, what's the freaking point of that? Not all people take a shit on the newer prototype technology.
If you have your Office account which is also the Hotmail account, you can access your Office documents at the Office Preview website. It's similar to viewing your Office documents at Skydrive website but I guess this is much easier than using Skydrive to locate your documents.
Lastly, there's also the Office 365 Home Premium for home use. At least, I was excited for new technology like this and it seemed that Microsoft decided to expand the Office 365 into different editions. However, those new editions are under Customer Preview as well. Unfortunately, there's one bastard here. The preview product will expire after months after the product has reached the final stage that I have to stick on using Office 2k10.

Photos App for Windows 8

It is quite fortunate that Windows 8's Photo App has the ability to contain online photos such as the ones stored on social networking sites and Skydrive. Besides this app, we can use other Metro cloud apps that contain online data but the storage belongs to the cloud services and not the respective standard Metro apps in Windows 8. The ICloud service gets around the problem with the synchronization of the data stored in your IOS devices and you can also use the service and ITunes to synchronize your data in your computer as well.


Just like using your Windows Live account in which you can view social networking posts because you've connected it to various social networking sites, this is basically the same story in People App in Windows 8 in which your Windows Live account is the Microsoft account.


In addition, there will be an import feature for the app that allows you to import photos from external devices and other Windows 8 devices. Another addition is that you can apply any picture you want as the background for Photos App. Didn't the Android and IOS have such thing as applying a background on the Photos/Pictures App? Indeed, you can have customized wallpapers on IOS and Android when it comes to Home and Lock Screens but for Windows 8, the Start Screen's freedom is a joke!


Like other Metro apps, you can use the Share charm to share certain things you want and that includes using the Photos App to share photos to various social networking sites.


Hmm, what about the photo editing apps? Well, those will be under third-party apps where you have to get them from the Windows Store or the retail shops where you can use them to edit photos yourself but what's the point of doing this when editing photos and videos on the devices with retina display? 

Updates to Skydrive for Windows and OSX Lion

In April, they released preview versions of Skydrive for Windows and Mac OSX Lion, along with big updates for IOS and Windows Phone. There was also a new, more flexible approach to personal cloud storage that allows power users to get additional paid storage up to 100GB just like other cloud storage services have.

It has been an incredible month in May since! The goal is to build a cloud that seamlessly connects your data to the apps and devices you use everyday and that is a promising step with the power of Skydrive as a cloud computing power for Windows 8 which may be comparable to local storage on IOS and Android devices. Well, there should still be hard disk drive or perhaps the SSD drive to store local data in addition to cloud data. This can be what Windows 8 can be installed to as well as the apps. In just a few weeks, more people were using Skydrive than Mesh but I use both of them by the way. People using Skydrive for Windows or Mac are now the most engaged users, syncing files across several devices, sharing with SkyDrive.com and working together with Office Web Apps and Office Client Apps. What about Live Mesh like that?

There will be different updates to be pushed to all the above mentioned platforms. You do not need to do anything to the updates as they are background automatic updates.

Here are a few of the improvements the fixes in the updates:

• Skydrive for Windows desktop will power a cool new feature in the upcoming Windows 8 Release Preview, available in the first week of June which is already happening right this moment. From the Photos app in Windows 8, you can fetch photos stored on other PCs that have Skydrive installed.
• Your Skydrive folder now updates more quickly and reliably when changes are made on other devices, including SkyDrive.com which still leads you to skydrive.live.com.
• The limit on the number of total files in the Skydrive folder is raised from 150K to 10M. This should unblock some power users from easily adding lots of files to their Skydrive folder.

Well, that’s it for the updates but the Skydrive desktop app is still in Beta phase, lol.

Windows Live Reimagined

Looks like Windows Live brand is going to be discontinued in the future and Windows Live accounts are going to be migrated to Microsoft account which is overall at the top level just like Apple ID, Google account, etc. Microsoft Account is the new identity service for individuals who use Microsoft products and services. In Windows 8, you can choose to login locally or by your Windows Live/Hotmail account. From there, you can check your billing for services like Xbox Live, Zune and Windows store. In fact, our Microsoft account is connected to Xbox Live Gamertag so you can track high scores and games in various ways. First way will be the Xbox Companion app for smartphone and tablet devices including Windows 8. Second will be your console and third is the website. Regardless of which way to track high scores and games, certain games are for other Xbox Live platforms such as Windows 8 Metro games and Windows Phone 7 games. It may be the same for Games for Windows Live. In next several months across the Microsoft product line, your Windows Live ID will be migrated to Microsoft account. That also includes other Microsoft services you’ve used that will be merged in the migration process.

Accessing your Microsoft account is like accessing Hotmail account where you can manage your contacts, calendar, inbox and cloud storage. With Windows 8 and Windows Phone along with certain desktop apps for Windows, they connect to your mail account as well. With Microsoft account, your devices are shared across all Microsoft products and services.

When you logon to Windows 8 for the first time using the Microsoft account, it uses cloud services to roam settings across computers running Windows 8. Along with the account, you get the Skydrive where your cloud data is stored. Also, you can use the Camera app to take photos and videos and then store them to your Skydrive. For Office documents, they are accessed via Office Web Apps or Office client applications. Man, there should be Metro version of Office, not the desktop one. How the heck can that app be used properly on the tablets?

Speaking of Social Networking, you can get contacts from your respective Social Networking accounts in your Hotmail contact list which was already way before Windows 8 existed in prototype form. With your Hotmail account connected to your Social networking accounts, you can mail or instant message your contacts that way from your device.

As Windows 8 is designed to be cloud-powered and similar to smartphone devices, it comes with Metro style apps for communication, sharing, scheduling, photos, videos and other stuffs. They are powered by cloud services which is thankful so that when you log on to your Microsoft account on multiple devices, your stuff stored on those apps will be the same on multiple devices as they are stored on the cloud. It may be similar to using Windows Live Mail and Messenger where your mails, tasks, contacts and calendar are stored in the cloud. For Windows 7 users, you’ll still be using the Windows Live Essentials applications.

Note: Unfortunately, additional apps like Movie Maker and Photo Gallery are not available in the Consumer Preview but it may be useful for me to explore the Metro version of Movie Maker to see if I can use that a lot.