Midweek Download, May 16: Bing Updates Begin Rolling out, New Apps/SDKs for Windows Phone and Deep Dives on Windows 8 Features
In this edition of The Midweek Download, we’ve got stories on big updates for Bing, some new apps for Windows Phone and some previews of what you’ll see from Windows 8 and IE10.
Bing Updates Available for Test Drive. You may have heard last week about some big updates coming to Bing that we think will provide you a new and exciting way to search. The new features began to roll-out Tuesday here in the U.S. You can check out some of the new features at http://www.bing.com/new.
You can also learn more about the updates from the video below, which provides a nice overview of what you’ll find in the new Bing some and background on the new features. With a refreshed design, the new snapshot feature for instant access to action-oriented information, or get advice and recommendations from friends and experts with the new social sidebar, it’s a big release for the Bing team, and we hope you like it.
<div> <img alt=”DCSIMG” id=”DCSIMG” width=”1″ height=”1″ src=”http://m.webtrends.com/dcsygm2gb10000kf9xm7kfvub_9p1t/njs.gif?dcsuri=/nojavascript&WT.js=No” /> </div>
Aviary SDK available for Windows Phone … Steve Clayton reported some interesting news for developers, as the folks from Aviary have issued an SDK for Windows Phone, making it easy for a developer to integrate Aviary’s impressive photo editing tools into mobile apps.The editor itself can be integrated into a web site or app with a few lines of code, so well worth checking out.
… and LinkedIn too… Another exciting piece of news for Windows Phone customers. LinkedIn has released a really nice new app for Windows 7 phones. It’s one a lot of us have been looking forward to, and early reviews of the design and functionality are positive.
You can read more about the app from the LinkedIn blog, or download it today.
Security Advantages Emerge in Cloud Computing. While at first blush, many companies may see a move to cloud-based systems as creating potential security issues, a new study commissioned by Microsoft shows that many companies are finding the opposite to be true. For many small and mid-sized companies, cloud services can offer a great deal of security benefits and expetise that can be difficult and costly to achieve otherwise. Survey respondents report spending nearly one-third less time managing security issues than those not using cloud services.
Windows 8 Utilities and Disk Health. In a recent post on the Building Windows 8 Blog, Kiran Bangalore, a program manager on the Windows team, reviews in detail some of the changes being made to the chkdsk utility, used for detecting and repairing issues of disk corruption. While such issues occur rarely, the time it takes to run can be a source of frustration to Windows users. The changes are designed to make this process more transparent and less intrusive. It’s one of the many behind-the-scenes improvements the Windows team is making that promises to save Windows users and IT Administrators a good deal of time and trouble when issues come up.
Windows 8: Sharing Works like a Charm. One more from Windows 8 – and IE10 – but on the features side. The IE blog has a nice post explaining how the team has made sharing links faster and easier. Today, sharing a link from a Web site you like involves copying the link, opening or toggling over to another app, and then pasting it in to share or email that link.
With the share charm, you can share links to Web sites in a much more useful and visually-appealing way. Rather than use cryptic URLs, Windows 8 and IE10 create a rich link preview, using Web page titles, descriptions and thumbnail images to display and share, much as you share items with many social media sites. And Windows 8 and IE10 both support the OpenGraph protocol, so site owners can control how their web sites and pages show up in Windows 8 as well.
That’s all for this week … thanks for stopping by!
