After ten years of extremely expensive, slow, and politically messed up construction work–it is a long and sad story of government corruption and incompetence–Budapest, the Hungarian capital, got its fourth metro line today. Despite its ill-fated genesis and controversial usefulness, the Metro 4 is an amazing engineering, architectural, and artistic achievement, a mix of stunning concrete structures and trippy ornamentation. It looks stunning.
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Here in the U.S., the arrival of a new tunnel boring machine is huge news, warranting naming ceremonies
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Windows 8 die-hards waiting on Mozilla’s Metro Firefox update will have to wait a little longer: the company says it won’t be ready until next year. According to a recently published archive of meeting notes, the final public release of the Windows 8 interface won’t be available until January 21, 2014. The document is filled with meeting jargon and completion numerics, but the notes do pin the delay a “decrease in average team velocity” across previous iterations. A bummer, perhaps, for folks waiting for a stable build, but at least you can still get your fix through Firefox nighties, right?
Filed under: Internet
Via: Computer World
Source: Mozilla
Couple of updates to Evernote for Windows Touch users: for starters, the app’s hub page has been redesigned for a better fingers-on experience, bringing handy columns for notes, shortcuts created across different platforms and Notebooks. The Windows Touch app now includes support for Evernote Business, as well — Notebooks created for that side of things will appear in blue, so you can tell them apart from the personal notebooks sitting in your hub. Also new is two-step verification for added security. A full list of updates to the pachyderm-friendly note-taking platform can be found in the source link below.
Filed under: Software, Microsoft
Via: The Next Web
Source: Evernote Blog
Microsoft couldn’t help mentioning last week that the Windows Store was on the cusp of hitting 100,000 total apps, and now the firm’s announced on Twitter that the shop has officially reached the mark. Redmond may not best its competitors in the sheer number of applications available on their respective storefronts, but it did manage to rack up the apps much faster. While it took roughly a year and a half for Apple’s App Store to score the same badge, and approximately two trips around the sun for the Android Market, the Windows Store has arrived at the figure in just eight months. With a healthy app shop and Windows 8.1 on the horizon, Ballmer and Co. must be pleased with their eight-month-old OS.
Filed under: Microsoft
Via: The Verge
Source: Windows App Builders (Twitter)
We already knew that Windows RT tablets would be getting their very own Outlook app with Windows 8.1, but apparently Microsoft has even more plans up its sleeve. Here at Build, the company is teasing a Metro-style Office suite that will be available through the Windows Store, just like any other non-desktop Windows program. Unfortunately, this is a tease in the truest sense of the word: Redmond won’t say when the app will be available, and isn’t providing many official screenshots. However, a company spokesperson did tell reporters that PowerPoint will have “all of the same transitions, the same graphic power [and] file format capability” as the desktop version, so presumably the same is true of Word and Excel too. That’s all we have to share for now, though you can bet we’ll be back with a proper hands-on as soon as Microsoft is ready to show off a more final version of the app.
Update: ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley reports that the Metro-style Office applications (codenamed Gemini) will hit the Windows Store in 2014.
Gallery: Metro-style PowerPoint teaser
Companies love milestones nearly as much as bees love honey, so it doesn’t come as much of a surprise that Microsoft would take advantage of Build 2013 to announce as much positive news as it possibly can. This time, MS head Steve Ballmer has revealed to us that he expects the Windows Store to hit the 100,000 mark (in terms of total apps) sometime this month. Sounds about right if you monitor services like MetroStore Scanner to get a good feel for the OS’s progress: it lists over 95,000 apps, which certainly fits the bill.
Additionally, Microsoft also claimed that the very same Windows Store has witnessed app downloads in the vicinity of “hundreds of millions.” This vague indicator is not as impressive as it could certainly be if an actual number was attached, but we have a feeling that our friends in Redmond are trying to keep the specifics as hush-hush as possible.
Filed under: Cellphones, Wireless, Microsoft
Sometimes you just wanna close a window. Or resize it, or drag it so that it overlaps with something else. That’s how Windows works, and it’s more or less how you’d expect to interact with Windows 8 in particular. The problem is, those old-world rules don’t necessarily apply to newer Metro-style apps: yes, you can snap them in place next to traditional x86 programs, but you can’t resize those windows, nor can you arrange them so that they overlap with each other.
Fortunately for you multitaskers out there, Stardock’s new app ModernMix squeezes all your Metro programs into traditional desktop windows — ones you can resize, minimize, drag around and even close completely. The app also lets you pin Metro apps to the Taskbar on the desktop, as well as run them at full-screen when the mood strikes. It’s priced at $5, but Stardock is offering a 30-day free trial to folks who prefer to try before they buy. Just remember: you’ll need Windows 8, not RT. Not that you RT users are spending much time in the desktop anyway.
Filed under: Software
Source: Stardock
Mozilla has been promising a version of Firefox designed for the new Windows 8 UI for a year now, and has trickled out a few details and previews since then. It’s made a considerably bigger step this week though by releasing the browser into its Nightly channel, which lets anyone who’s willing to venture beyond stable releases take it for a spin. As Mozilla’s Asa Dotzler puts it, “there’s plenty of work still to do, but it’s stable enough that we’re ready for more and more regular testing.” It seems folks are indeed having some problems with it in its current state, but you can try it out for yourself at the source link.
Filed under: Internet, Software
Via: The Verge, The Next Web
Source: Firefox Nightly, Asa Dotzler
So you’re finally getting that Surface tablet (or a Windows 8 PC of choice) and have decided that a basic weather app just won’t do it justice. AccuWeather agrees with you — after months of supporting the Windows 8 preview editions, it’s formally launching a weather app that takes advantage of Microsoft’s completed Metro Windows 8 interface in all its widescreen glory. The title both provides near-obsessive detail about the climate as well as the requisite live tile for an at-a-glance check. You also won’t have to resort to the web to find out if it’s raining in your neighborhood: a Bing Maps radar overlay shows if it’s safe to leave the umbrella at home. The app is free to download, which makes it entirely too easy to check the weather through Windows instead of the window.
Continue reading AccuWeather launches for Windows 8, lets you know if it’s dry outside the Metro
Filed under: Software
AccuWeather launches for Windows 8, lets you know if it’s dry outside the Metro originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 26 Oct 2012 07:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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