Andrew Tech Help

Over the last few days, there has been a big uproar over a blog post that Mozilla made regarding Firefox not being able to be developed for Windows RT. I feel that because the reasons behind why Microsoft made the decisions they did are complex (and often not communicated in the clearest way by Microsoft) that those reporting about this issue and the reactions that their audience have are automatically swayed against Microsoft, simply because they don't have the entire picture. This editorial hopefully will give the whole broader picture and demostrate why Firefox & Chrome can't and shouldn't be allowed to run on Windows RT. This blog post has been adapted from an email I wrote to Tech News Today (a fantastic tech show on the TWiT network @ www.twit.tv/tnt ) on the 11th of May 2012. I'm happy to take any feedback from readers who have any additional technical information about this issue (I'm not a Microsoft employee and so I can only report information that I have gathered from Microsoft's blog posts and from playing with the Windows 8 Consumer Preview on an x86 machine).

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On February 24th 2012, I was kindly invited to the Brisbane Nokia Lumia 800/710 launch because someone at Nokia had seen my Twitter account and this website. I was very keen to go, because I've been following Nokia since February 11th 2011 when Stephen Elop announced that Nokia would be adopting the Windows Phone platform (that I had been keenly watching since February 2010 when it was announced at Mobile World Congress) to replace the aging Symbian OS. This article is just going to detail some of the information that Nokia shared about these two new phones that will be available in Australia in March as well as some of my thoughts about these devices and Nokia in general.

As a Windows Phone user, I absolutely love the People Hub, especially the Facebook integration. However, due to the way that either Microsoft or Facebook have chosen to implement the Facebook integration into the phone, it can become a broken experience depending on choices that your friends have made. The answer to this problem actually lies in a much deeper and what I believe to be murkier feature of Facebook around how 3rd party app permissions work. To explain the whole situation, I'm going to bring out an old friend who I've used in a previous article about Facebook's privacy settings: Johnny Technophobe to help demonstrate what exactly is happening to cause this problem. This article will explain exactly how the Facebook 3rd party apps system accesses your data and then explain how Windows Phone works in relation to this and the problems that stem from that.

At 2am on Wednesday September 14th Australian Eastern Standard Time (9am, Tuesday September 13th United States Pacific Daylight Saving Time) Stephen Sinofsky stepped onto the stage to deliver the opening keynote at the BUILD conference, held in Anaheim, California. This keynote is probably the most important keynote that Microsoft has given in the 36 years of it's existence and was entirely devoted to revealing details of the next version of Windows, currently codenamed 'Windows 8'. Microsoft's CEO Steve Ballmer has described the next version of Windows as 'Microsoft's riskiest product bet' and with what was revealed during that keynote, his comments now make complete sense. Windows 8 is what Microsoft describes as "a re-imagining of Windows" and will include a major redesign of the user interface, developer platform, chipset support and tightly integrated cloud support. This article aims to detail some of the fundamental concepts that Microsoft is pushing in Windows 8 and explain why I think Microsoft's risky bet on the next version of Windows will pay off.

Windows 8 was publicly demoed for the first time about three weeks ago now at the D9 conference and it is still wowing people who see it and it's causing a divide throughout the tech community over whether the radical new UI is a good idea or not. I've now had that 3 weeks to think carefully about what this all means and how I would write about Windows 8 in a unique way (there's plenty of articles on the web showing demos of the new Start Screen). I had originally planned to write 2 articles, one about Windows 8 and the other one about user interface design (more specifically the Metro design), but I'm going to combine them into this one article, because I think that it's hard to talk about them separately anymore considering we know what Microsoft's plans are in the future regarding the UI for their products. It's an exciting time, but you really need to understand the key principles behind what's going on before you can truly appreciate what's going on. When I first saw what Microsoft planned to do in Windows 8, I was quite shocked, but after a while, it just clicked. I now have a good understanding of what Microsoft's strategy for the future is (and it revolves around Windows, Office, Skype & Xbox although this article will mainly focus on Windows) and I'm hoping after reading this, their strategy finally just clicks for you too.