Month: September 2022

Enlarge / The new Outlook client for Windows is creeping nearer to release, though it still doesn't support some important features. (credit: Microsoft)

Earlier this year, Microsoft released a preview of a totally redesigned Outlook for Windows client. It was a step closer to something Microsoft has been working toward for a while—a unified Outlook client across all of its platforms, based on the design of the web version. Today, Microsoft is taking another step toward that goal, with an updated preview for the new Outlook client that will be available to all Office Insiders in the Beta and Current channels.

Outlook for Windows users signed up for the Office Insider program will be able to try the new app by hitting a "try the new Outlook" toggle in the upper-right corner of the app window; hit the toggle again to return to the old Outlook app. Microsoft says toggling between the two will result in "no data or email loss."

The Outlook app will also eventually be replacing the free built-in Mail and Calendar apps preinstalled in Windows. Microsoft will make a similar toggle available to Windows Insiders "in the coming weeks."

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty Images)

The moment everyone saw coming is finally happening. Google officially confirmed that it's killing Stadia, the company's troubled game-streaming service. Phil Harrison announced today in a blog post that Stadia "hasn't gained the traction with users that we expected so we’ve made the difficult decision to begin winding down our Stadia streaming service." Stadia will be laid to rest on January 18, 2023.

The good news is that the true Armageddon situation for Stadia customers is not happening. Google is issuing refunds, which will save dedicated Stadia players from potentially losing hundreds of dollars in unplayable games. The post says: "We will be refunding all Stadia hardware purchases made through the Google Store, and all game and add-on content purchases made through the Stadia store." That notably excludes payments to the "Stadia Pro" subscription service, and you won't get hardware refunds from non-Google Store purchases, but that's a pretty good deal. Existing Pro users will be able to play, free of charge, from now until the shutdown date. The controllers are still useful as wired USB controllers, and a campaign is already starting to get Google to unlock the Bluetooth connection.

Stadia's technology will live on as a Google Cloud product called "Immersive Stream for Games." Google has made some headway pitching the feature as a way to run games on underpowered devices, like Peloton fitness equipment.

Enlarge / You're limited to eight files and a word processor, but you can put them anywhere you want in NESOS' rich (for 1985) desktop environment. (credit: Inkbox)

When you played the Nintendo Entertainment System, you were close to the hardware. It's why you can pull off remarkable glitch hacks, like playing Tennis to hot-boot into broken Super Mario Bros. worlds. The chips, the memory, the board—everything was designed to service the little board inside your cartridge (that and prevent unauthorized games). There wasn't much room for anything else in the early- to mid-1980s.

Room enough, however, for a custom-built operating system built in 2022, if just barely. NESOS 1.0 from Inkbox Software, a 48K OS, features "two core applications, the word processor, and the settings," according to Inkbox. The settings app gives you seven cursors, 53 background colors, and the ability to delete the eight files that can fit inside a maximum 2K of NVRAM (i.e., onboard memory that doesn't lose data when the system loses power). That's 832 bytes each, or about one full screen's worth of memory. You can drag those eight files anywhere you want on the desktop, however.

NESOS (pronounced "nee-sohs," according to its creator) is entirely graphical. Inbox notes that there's already a command-line system, Family Basic, for the NES and its Japanese progenitor, the Family Computer/Famicom. "I want NESOS to feel like an actual operating system that Nintendo might have made back in the day for the NES. What would it have looked and felt like?" the creator says in his video overview.

Enlarge / Still image from an AI-generated video of a teddy bear painting a portrait. (credit: Meta)

Today, Meta announced Make-A-Video, an AI-powered video generator that can create novel video content from text or image prompts, similar to existing image synthesis tools like DALL-E and Stable Diffusion. It can also make variations of existing videos, though it's not yet available for public use.

On Make-A-Video's announcement page, Meta shows example videos generated from text, including "a young couple walking in heavy rain" and "a teddy bear painting a portrait." It also showcases Make-A-Video's ability to take a static source image and animate it. For example, a still photo of a sea turtle, once processed through the AI model, can appear to be swimming.

The key technology behind Make-A-Video—and why it has arrived sooner than some experts anticipated—is that it builds off existing work with text-to-image synthesis used with image generators like OpenAI's DALL-E. In July, Meta announced its own text-to-image AI model called Make-A-Scene.

Enlarge / Microsoft's SwiftKey keyboard for iOS is fading away next month. (credit: Microsoft)

Microsoft will discontinue its SwiftKey software keyboard for iOS and delist it from the App Store, according to a statement made to ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley when asked about the future of the software.

"As of October 5, support for SwiftKey iOS will end and it will be delisted from the Apple App Store," said Chris Wolfe, SwiftKey's director of product management. "Microsoft will continue support for SwiftKey Android as well as the underlying technology that powers the Windows touch keyboard. For those customers who have SwiftKey installed on iOS, it will continue to work until it is manually uninstalled or a user gets a new device."

The iOS version of SwiftKey was last updated in August of 2021. Most updates in the year leading up to that were of the nondescript "bug fixes and performance improvements" variety. Microsoft purchased SwiftKey in 2016 for a reported $250 million, both for its iOS and Android software keyboards and their underlying technology.