F*&@#$^% Microsoft

FractalAudio said:
Now Photos won't open any file types. What a masterpiece of software engineering. It's almost as clunky as "Groove Music".
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I will never understand what Groove Music is/was supposed to be. The Windows Media Player is still there and it's way more useful.
 
hippietim said:
I will never understand what Groove Music is/was supposed to be. The Windows Media Player is still there and it's way more useful.
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Oh, I can see what it is/was supposed to be. Sataya's vision is/was "One OS to Rule Them All". He believes that rather than having separate OSes for mobile and desktop a single OS can be used for everything. All these "Apps" are designed to be able to run on a small phone display as well as a large desktop monitor. You can see this as you resize the apps and the display changes. Also the lack of a title bar and menus is another giveaway.

Problem with that philosophy is when you try to make something that is a jack-of-all-trades it then ends up being a master-of-none.

My approach would be different. I can see the allure of a single OS. But I would simply have different default apps depending on the target device. Groove Music would be adequate for a cell phone but a desktop should have something more sophisticated.
 
deathbyguitar said:
I'm assuming you've already tried telling Default Apps to associate JPEG format with a given program?
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yes, this would be the solution, if i had administrative access. but then i’d also be able to turn off the screensaver that tells me i’m a hero and not to touch my face :)
 
FractalAudio said:
Oh, I can see what it is/was supposed to be. Sataya's vision is/was "One OS to Rule Them All". He believes that rather than having separate OSes for mobile and desktop a single OS can be used for everything. All these "Apps" are designed to be able to run on a small phone display as well as a large desktop monitor. You can see this as you resize the apps and the display changes. Also the lack of a title bar and menus is another giveaway.

Problem with that philosophy is when you try to make something that is a jack-of-all-trades it then ends up being a master-of-none.

My approach would be different. I can see the allure of a single OS. But I would simply have different default apps depending on the target device. Groove Music would be adequate for a cell phone but a desktop should have something more sophisticated.
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What doesn't make sense is MS did away with their Windows Phone, so there's no reason for them to keep trying to make Windows 10 look like a phone app. I like Windows 10 for my personal use but I work in IT Support and it's been a nightmare because MS can't decide if they want you to use Control Panel or the Settings App and every new version changes which one you go to manage things and changes the look and location of things in the Settings App. I used to be able to quickly change my Sound settings by right clicking on the systray speaker icon. Now it brings me to the System > Sound in the Settings app.

Also what's the point of having a high resolution screen on the MS Surface when if set to 100% scaling is way too small to see, so you have to set the scaling to 150% or higher, which isn't as clear, and some apps can't adjust to scaling and look all messed up.
 
GotMetalBoy said:
What doesn't make sense is MS did away with their Windows Phone, so there's no reason for them to keep trying to make Windows 10 look like a phone app. I like Windows 10 for my personal use but I work in IT Support and it's been a nightmare because MS can't decide if they want you to use Control Panel or the Settings App and every new version changes which one you go to manage things and changes the look and location of things in the Settings App. I used to be able to quickly change my Sound settings by right clicking on the systray speaker icon. Now it brings me to the System > Sound in the Settings app.

Also what's the point of having a high resolution screen on the MS Surface when if set to 100% scaling is way too small to see, so you have to set the scaling to 150% or higher, which isn't as clear, and some apps can't adjust to scaling and look all messed up.
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That's my biggest pet peeve. Trying to find where you're supposed to configure things is frustrating at best.
 
I liked the "one OS to rule them all" idea, and wish MS phones would've been successful. I dunno why they didn't just make the app display correspond with device type or screen resolution, making it correspond with the size of app is... why? Just because I shrink an app on desktop doesn't mean I'm suddenly on a phone.

And yeah, hate the new settings stuff. It's a cluttered monochrome oversized borderless mess, slow too.
 
Unpopular opinion, but IMO Windows Phone was way better than Android in terms of speed, smoothness of navigation, and user experience. It just was way, way too late to the party, and then Google put a stake through its heart by refusing to release YouTube for it (or indeed even allow Microsoft's own app to be released). I hope this comes up when antitrust regulators start breaking them up.
 
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hippietim said:
I will never understand what Groove Music is/was supposed to be. The Windows Media Player is still there and it's way more useful.
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That's a long story that makes me sad.

In the early-mid 2000s, it became obvious to everyone that digital distribution of music was the future and the way to go. Yet the business model was unclear. For labels, it meant a problem because they were losing control of how music was getting into the hands of listeners. And there was piracy. Tech companies and manufacturers of various devices saw an opportunity and tried to enter the market. But labels didn't want to give provide this opportunity - they wanted control for themselves, without sharing any profits with those pesky bastards wearing jeans and t-shirts. And they worried about piracy, so there had to be some kind of DRM to protect the files. Various attempts were made to come up with a solution, and everybody wanted something that would give them control. Microsoft's first attempt was a cross-industry-wide DRM standard (I forgot what it was called), which was supposed to make sure that when you buy a song, it will play everywhere, and would be trusted by labels. That attempt failed miserably because neither OEMs nor labels wanted you to purchase a song a play it everywhere. OEMs wanted their own standards, and labels wanted to charge everyone differently through dozens or hundreds of small shady deals because that's how they like to operate, and because they hated tech industry.

So the whole thing was going nowhere, piracy was growing, everybody was losing, and then Apple came with this iTunes/iPod thingie. There was already a lot of demand for something like that and no supply. They obviously didn't have the OEM problem. How did they convince labels to cooperate? When Steve Jobs was asked the question, he said it was possible solely because they saw him as "one of them" because of his work at Disney. Yeah, it's that easy and stupid.

So Microsoft was frustrated but didn't give up, and came up with Zune. It bypassed the OEM problem and the door with labels was opened by Apple already. If you ask people who remember the name, they'll say Zune was a player. And herein lies the problem. It was a player AND a service, which everybody ignored. And it was an awesome service, let me tell you, I was one of the 12 people who used it. Microsoft couldn't compete with Apple in hardware and design really, so they decided to make something different in software, and they did. It was miles better than iTunes in three aspects. First, it had usable likes and dislikes, so it adapted gradually to your tastes in suggesting new music. Second, you could click an artist and were presented with a sort of tree view where you could follow who influenced this artist and who was influenced by this artist, thus going very far, crossing genre boundaries, which allowed finding some unexpected and interesting music. Third, monthly subscription gave you 10 DRM-free mp3s per month to download and keep forever. But, while the service was cool, it was more expensive than alternatives and you could only "get it" after using for a while, which of course meant that tech journalists didn't get it, and there was no single review that would show any hint of understanding of what the thing is about.

And that wasn't the only problem. In typical Microsoft fashion, it was developed by a separate team, and was competing with WMP as such. So it wasn't preinstalled, Zune player for PC didn't play videos, so you kind of had to have both anyway. It wasn't promoted by Windows in any way.

And that's how Groove came to be. Microsoft didn't want to leave the idea yet, so they decided to fix Zune's problems. Marketing folks said the brand was dead, so they renamed it. Somebody said the service was expensive, so they made it cheaper, but with the price drop they dropped features, too (the 10 downloadable mp3s were gone). Somebody said multiple players were confusing, so they decided to make one, and Groove Music came to be, but it didn't replace WMP completely (power user complaints), and the "influence tree" was gone, too. So it became a service indistinguishable from any other service. And then they decided that they can't keep losing money on it forever, so cost cutting started, and some label deals disappeared, selection deteriorated. At the end they just sold their user base to Spotify and closed the service, but the player remained.
 
ccroyalsenders said:
Went to Gmail for business almost a decade ago at this point. Never looked back.
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We use Gmail at work, and I find it works pretty well for me.

Chrome on the other hand has become quite problematic. It's not really able to keep its act together when I'm sometimes work me, or a second work account I'm delegated to, and sometimes personal me. This morning I opened my usual bookmark for one of the work accounts, and it showed a personal account instead. Also, all my bookmarks, which were a mix of personal and work, were gone. I manually switched accounts, bookmarks came back, saw the right email, but the URLs have switched.

Again. This happens all the time. I'm going to try Edge for personal stuff (ironic I know, given this thread). I've already found out the Keep doesn't work in Edge, which sucks, but ya gotta pick from the choices that exist.
 
Dave Merrill said:
We use Gmail at work, and I find it works pretty well for me.

Chrome on the other hand has become quite problematic. It's not really able to keep its act together when I'm sometimes work me, or a second work account I'm delegated to, and sometimes personal me. This morning I opened my usual bookmark for one of the work accounts, and it showed a personal account instead. Also, all my bookmarks, which were a mix of personal and work, were gone. I manually switched accounts, bookmarks came back, saw the right email, but the URLs have switched.

Again. This happens all the time. I'm going to try Edge for personal stuff (ironic I know, given this thread). I've already found out the Keep doesn't work in Edge, which sucks, but ya gotta pick from the choices that exist.
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https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/
 
Dave Merrill said:
I use Firefox when I need to log into work stuff as another user. You're right though, I could try using it for personal stuff too, see how that goes.. Chrome is what most of our users use (the ones who aren't stuck on IE because of their organization, God help them), so I want to use it for work.
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Pair it with https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/containers and you'll be able to keep everything sorted nicely. I have containers for all sorts of things (including browsing forums) so information stays isolated. Add in https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/cookie-autodelete/ and you'll get super clean containers that really help curb tracking and data leaks.

Does the Keep extension exist for Firefox?
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Yes: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/google-keep-notes/ -- all the Google stuff works just fine in Firefox.

Chrome is a pig. Put a bullet in it.
 
iaresee said:
Pair it with https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/containers and you'll be able to keep everything sorted nicely. I have containers for all sorts of things (including browsing forums) so information stays isolated. Add in https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/cookie-autodelete/ and you'll get super clean containers that really help curb tracking and data leaks.


Yes: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/google-keep-notes/ -- all the Google stuff works just fine in Firefox.

Chrome is a pig. Put a bullet in it.
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Hmm, containers look like a perfect solution to all this nonsense, thanks for the steer, hadn't heard of them. I used to use Firefox, but moved to Chromea while ago for no real reason, will check this out.

If I use two different Gmail accounts for work, and several for personal stuff, do they each need their own container? Or could I have Work and Personal containers, each of which has more than one Gmail account?

Seems like separate is the way to go, even though it's kind of awkward. Part of the problem is probably Gmail itself getting confused with multiple accounts. If containers let Gmail think there's only one account, by isolating each one in is own container, that sounds healthy.
 
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