Tag: Windows 8

You may want to show pictures from a laptop to a big TV screen

You have ended up with a collection of photos on your computer that you want to show using the video projector or large-screen TV. This may be like having that carousel of slides ready to show on the old slide projector – here you had this collection of slides ready after you came back from that trip or event.

This situation can apply to a range of use cases such as:

• A person who is previewing pictures they have taken on a large screen so you can assess them in a better manner
• Returning travellers who want to show their relatives or friends pictures they have taken during their travels
• Businesses showing pictures of their latest products or pictures from a trade show
• Churches who are showing their congregations the photos taken during outreach or missionary events

You may think that your presentation, AV-playout, worship-lyrics-projection or similar software may do the job for you but this will typically involve copying or importing each and every photo to a presentation and creating a presentation file which can be very inefficient. This is more so if you have had the images properly edited and sequenced so they are in a ready-to-show manner on another computer, then transferred them to the computer you are showing them with using some form of removeable media.

Similarly, you may be going through the pictures that you just took with your digital camera then imported to your computer and want to use the large screen such as your home or hotel-room TV so you can assess them more critically.

What do you need to be sure of

Pictures in numerical sequence in known folder

The pictures, which are of a bitmap format that your computer’s  operating system can handle directly like JPEG or PNG, need to be kept in a known folder anywhere on your computer’s file system. This means that they can exist on your computer’s hard disk, on an optical disc that you or someone else “burned”, on a USB memory stick or an SD card such as what you took out of your camera. In some cases, it can also extend to online storage services if they are in sync and you are using native software to integrate them as part of the file system. As well, this may apply to your camera or smartphone if you have “tethered” it to the computer using a USB cable and it works to PTP requirements.

Pictures on your digital camera’s memory card or downloaded from your camera will be numbered in this order

The pictures will also be in a known numerical sequence. If they came off a digital camera or mobile phone, they will have a file name with a number that increases with every shutter-click. If you have edited them or had images from other sources, you will most likely make sure they are numbered to reflect the order in which they are shown as highlighted in the illustration.

What I refer to as the “large screen” in these instructions is a projector or a large-screen TV/monitor connected to your computer as a secondary display and what you want your pictures to be shown on. This display has to be configured to “extend” your computer’s main operating screen which I refer to as the “computer screen”.

Windows 7, 8.1 and 10 with Windows Photo Viewer

Here, you use Windows Photo Viewer which comes standard with Windows from version 7 onwards. This program can run a slide show based on image files without taking up too much computer resources/

1. Open the folder where the pictures that you want to show are located
2. Open the first picture in the folder or the first picture you want to show in the case of a large collection with Windows Photo Viewer 
   

   First image of the collection opened in Windows Photo Viewer

3. Click Play or press F11 to have the picture full screen on the computer’s screen. This will also start the pictures automatically advancing
4. Pause this slide-show by right-clicking the currently-showing image and selecting Pause
5. Press “Windows”-“Shift”-“Right Arrow” together to throw the image to the projector or large screen. This step is important or you won’t have it on that big screen.
6. To manually advance the pictures, press the right arrow key to go forward or the left arrow key to go back. This option is useful when you are showing the pictures to accompany a presentation in order to avoid them being “out of sync” with the presenter, or if you are going through a collection of images like what you just took.
   When you have finished, press ESC on the keyboard to close the program
7. To automatically advance the pictures, right-click the picture on the large screen and click Play or press F11 (auto advance). This is the option best used for images to be shown in the background.
   

   One of the pictures now up on the screen after you follow this procedure

   You have the ability to vary the slide show will appear by clicking on “Shuffle” to have the slides shown in random order (useful when showing as background “wallpaper”) or to vary how long they stay on the screen by clicking the “Slow”, “Medium” or “Fast” options.
   Press “Windows” to regain control if you want to use the computer during an automatic slide-show. You will also see a square “picture” icon in the Taskbar on your computer screen, which is an indicator that Windows Photo Viewer is running.
   To stop, click on that “picture” icon that represents Windows Photo Viewer and press ESC on the keyboard

Once you know how to quickly run a slide show with a pre-edited collection of images and using software that doesn’t require you to “prepare” them for showing, you can make use of the large screen more easily to show those photos.

This article will be updated as I gain more knowledge on how to use other cost-effective or supplied software in other platforms to quickly show a bunch of image files on the large screen without having to prepare a presentation.

Article

WhatsApp to work natively on your Windows 10 tablet

WhatsApp Has A New Desktop App For Windows And OS X | Engadget

From the horse’s mouth

WhatsApp

Blog Post

Download link

My Comments

I have provided some previous coverage about the issue of native client apps that run on desktop operating systems for messaging platforms. As I have highlighted in the article, I underscored the performance issue which will benefit heavy multitaskers and gamers, the ability to work tightly with the operating system’s functions and abilities and the existence of 2-in-1s and ultraportable computers as a viable alternative to mobile-platform tablets.

.. or your Apple Macintosh computer

The regular computer was the class of compute that benefited from the instant-messaging app but mobile-platform smartphones and tablets took over the role of personal-communications devices with the different messaging platform vendors focusing on these devices as their terminal of choice. Skype and Viber have kept the desktop (regular-computer) usage case alive and now Facebook offered a Windows 10 desktop native client for their Messenger platform.

for secure online communications so you don’t have to rely on your smartphone or tablet

Now WhatsApp have answered this call for their secure communications platform by offering native clients for the Windows (8+) and MacOS X (10.9 Mavericks + ). Like with Viber, these desktop native clients are pitched to be a secondary user interface for your WhatsApp account that is set up on your smartphone. This means that once you install WhatsApp on your Windows PC or Mac, you then have to bind the desktop app to your WhatsApp account by using your smartphone’s WhatsApp client to scan a QR code shown on your regular computer by the desktop WhatsApp client.

For WhatsApp users, using these native clients rather than the WhatsApp Web application means that you have the benefits of this platform on your regular computer without the unnecessary overhead that the typical desktop Web browser can impose on your session. Nor do you need to keep a Web-browser tab or session open for desktop-based WhatsApp communication.

This is a sign that regular desktop and laptop computer users, including multitaskers and gamers, are not being forgotten about when it comes to mobile messaging networks.

Notification area space where hidden icons exist – click on Customize to determine how they will appear

You may want to be sure you are doing the right thing when it comes to properly and safely removing that USB flash drive, external hard disk or SD card but it may be hard to find the “Safely Remove Hardware” icon in the Notification bar at the bottom right of your screen.

What tends to happen if you haven’t been doing anything regarding removable storage is that icon becomes sidelined and available behind the up-arrow on the Taskbar. This is more so if other applications have claimed space on the Notification Bar and seldom-used icons exist behind that up-arrow.

Notification Area Icons customisation screen – when you click on Customize

There is a way to work around this problem by customising the Notification Bar icons to make sure that certain icons appear always.

To do this, click on the up-arrow at the left of the Notification Bar to pop up all of the icons. These will appear in a white square and you will also see the word “Customize”. Click “Customize” to see a list of the icons with each icon having its own drop-down box that determines how and when it will appear.

Options available for each icon

The different modes are:

• Show icon and Notifications. This will have the icon appear at all times and “pop up” any notification messages. Here, you may want to have the icon always visible and accessible especially if you instigate tasks from that icon.
• Hide icon and Notifications: The icon won’t appear at all in the Notification Bar even if there is a relevant notification or it changes state. This may be useful where you find an icon always popping up messages
• Only show notifications. The icon pops up when there is a relevant notification and will show that notification. In some cases, this icon may appear if it changes state. It may apply to “sentinel” icons that appear to crowd out the Notification Bar even though they seldom yield a notification or change state.

Preferred seting for Safely Remove Hardware And Eject Media icon

Here, having the “Safely Remove Hardware” icon set to “Show icon and Notifications” means that while there is a USB storage device connected to the computer or an SD card inserted in the computer, this icon will appear. This will make it easy for you to know what to click when you need to remove the USB hard disk USB memory key or memory card.

You may also find this of us with other Notification Bar icons where you are always instigating tasks from or needing to keep an eye on incase they change state like the Skype icon.

This is the first of a series of posts to celebrate the last five years of the connected lifestyle which has been covered on this Website.

Laptops

Lenovo Yoga 2 Pro convertible Ultrabook

Over the last five years, the 15”-17” clamshell-style laptop computer has overtaken the traditional “tower-style” desktop computer as become the preferred computer style for most households.

There are even users, some of whom I know, who will operate these computers in conjunction with an external screen, keyboard and mouse for their primary office-based computing locations while being able to use just its built-in screen, keyboard and mouse for computing while “on-the-road”. In other cases, the laptop bas brought with it the appeal of the dining table or kitchen bench rather than a home office or a desk in the corner of the family room as a workspace due to the ability to stow it away when you are using that space for other activities like meals.

Dell Precision M2800 – an example of a mobile workstation

With this class of computer, there has been the rise of “workstation-grade” and “gamer-grade” laptops that are tuned for increased performance, especially with graphics-intensive tasks or even “full-on” games. This has also displaced the desktop workstation computer or “gaming-rig” for these applications and allowed for increased portability when dealing with CAD, multimedia or games.

Windows 8 with its tile-based “Modern” user interface has legitimised the touchscreen as a control surface for the computer and has opened up a plethora of touchscreen-enabled laptop designs. For example, the Sony VAIO Fit 15a that I reviewed last year underscored the concept of adding touch abilities to a 15” mainstream laptop even as I let a friend who works in enterprise IT play with this machine when I had visited him.

This has also led to the arrival of convertible and detachable computer designs that switch between a traditional laptop design and a tablet design. There are even these convertibles that have 13” or, in some cases, 15” screens which may be considered too large for tablet use by one person but are the right size for creating content. In some cases, this size can appeal to those of us who want to let another person have a look at the same content.

The trend has led to a fusion of regular desktop-style computing and mobile computing with some laptops running Android whether standalone or on a dual-boot method. As well, some small tablets are being sold with Windows 8.1 as an operating system and it is being harder to differentiate between mobile and regular-grade computing capabilities.

Mobile computing

One main trend over the past five years has been the arrival of platform-based mobile computing, which was commercialised by Apple with their iPhone platform.

Samsung Galaxy Note 4 – an up-and-coming Android smartphone

It is where devices like mobile phones and tablets are built around an operating system which has many third-party programmers writing software for these devices. Typically the software is supplied through “app-stores” operated by the company who develops the mobile-computing platform and these “app-stores” are typically one-touch away from the user. The software, which is referred to as “apps”, typically ranges from productivity software like email clients or note-taking software, through utility programs like calculators or unit converters, and mobile front-ends for online services to games for whiling away those train journeys.

Google Play Android app store

If the programmer wants to monetise their creation, they have the ability to sell it through that app-store which has an integrated e-commerce setup, sell modules for that software through “in-app purchasing” where the user can buy the option within the app’s user interface but via the app-store’s storefront or make use of an in-app display advertising setup.

Some of these app-stores or the apps available in them provide access to content-retail services where you could buy music, audiobooks, e-books and videos to enjoy through your device. For example, the e-book has appealed mainly to women who like to read romance fiction without that “tut-tut-tut” from other people about what they are reading.

The performance calbre of these mobile-computing devices is approaching that of the regular computing devices, especially when it comes to playing hardcore games or watching multimedia content. Here, we are seeing mobile devices being equipped with 64-bit ARM-microarchitecture RISC processor units or some Android devices being equipped with IA-64 microarchitecture chips similar to what most laptops are equipped with.

Smartphones

These devices have changed since the arrival of the iPhone with customers being spoilt for choice in device capabilities, operating systems and even screen sizes.

Firstly, you can purchase smartphones with a screen size of up to 6 inches and these are the same size as an advanced-function pocket calculator such as a scientific or financial type. As well, some of the premium smartphones, especially those from the Samsung stable, even implement the OLED display which is a different self-illuminating display technology to the LCD display which requires LED backlighting to illuminate it.

As well, there are smartphones that run Android or Windows Phone operating systems available from many different manufactures. For that matter, the smartphones that are considered “cream of the crop” nowadays are most of the newer Android phones made by Samsung, Sony or HTC.

Tablets

Toshiba AT1S0 7″ Android tablet

The mobile tablet has been made commercially viable thanks to Apple with their iPad lineup. Here, we are now seeing tablets at various different price ranges and screen sizes courtesy if intense competition. Some of these units, when paired with a Bluetooth or USB keyboard have been able to become a viable alternative to “netbook-size” small laptops.

Firstly, I had seen the arrival of the 7”-8” mini-tablet that could be stuffed in to one’s coat pocket. These have appealed as units that can be useful for reference-type applications when you are out and about and have effectively displaced the e-reader as a device.

Secondly, the 10” tablet has become more of a household content-consumption device especially with video but also has served some basic computing tasks like checking email or Web browsing. Apple and Samsung have raised the bar for this product class by improving the display calibre with the former using a high-resolution “Retina” display on their 3rd-generation iPad lineup and the latter offering an AMOLED display on a 10″ mobile tablet.

Samsung Galaxy Tab S 10″ tablet

But, as I said earlier, the tablet and laptop are bridging together as a portable computing solution. This has been brought about with the convertible and detachable computers that can be a tablet one moment or a laptop another moment. Similarly, Intel and Microsoft have pushed the classic desktop microarchitecture and Windows 8 in to the field of the small-sized tablets with chipsets optimised for portable computing and the availability of Windows 8.1 for free with small-screen tablets.

Moble-Platform apps

The mobile platforms have seen a cottage industry of developers write programs or “apps” for these devices that can fit in with our lifestyle. Some of these apps have become mobile “on-ramps” to various online content services like social networks. As well, the e-reader has been displaced by the “e-bookstore” apps written for the mobile platforms so one can use a tablet or smartphone for reading whatever they want to read without worrying.

Recent controversies have arisen regarding how these apps are sold such as the issue of “in-app” sales of downloadable content or virtual currency for games that appeal to children or ad-funded apps that may host advertising that “commercialises” childhood like the sale of toys or junk food. As well there have been issues raised about the quality of apps sold through the app stores with computing “old-timers” relating them to the download sites, bulletin boards and magazine-attached disks of yore.

Wi-Fi an important part of the home network

For that matter, the most important feature of any network, including a home network, is a Wi-Fi wireless-network segment. This has enabled us to do more around the house with laptops, tablets and smartphones yet use cost-effective fixed broadband Internet.

These networks have increased in speed and security courtesy of newer technologies like 802.11n, 802.11ac and use of both the 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands. The setup procedure has been simplified for these networks courtesy of WPS-PBC “push-to-connect” setup and the upcoming NFC “touch-to-connect” setup technologies.

Increasingly more networked devices are being designed to work primarily or solely with the Wi-Fi network segment because of the “no new wires” concept that this technology provides. This technology also appeals to the mass-market retailer as an easily-saleable “backbone” for the home network even though there are issues with the radio-network performance.

Mi-Fi devices and the portable Wi-Fi network

Another class of device that is becoming popular is the “Mi-Fi” router which is a portable battery-operated Wi-Fi router for a mobile broadband service. These have appealed to those of us who use temporary network setups with Wi-Fi-only tablets and laptops or simply want to run a mobile-only communications setup.

This has also extended to the arrival of portable NAS units that work as extra storage for smartphones, tablets and laptop computers but work as their own access points for these devices. Manufacturers are even pitching them as a way to store video content on the mobile NAS unit and having people like children view the content on their tablets via the small network that is created by these devices.

The next part of this 5th-anniversary series will liook at the concept of “connected” communications and entertainment and how the home network is playing a strong part in these activities.

Article

Microsoft Purges 1500 Fake Apps From The Windows Store | Gizmodo

My Comments

As I have previously covered concerning software quality in app stores, the issue of app stores filling up with poor-quality software is being addressed. This time Microsoft has taken decisive action to remove the fake apps that were littering the Windows Store and reshaping the developers’ agreement to stop the creation of paid clone apps of established software.

But this kind of problem can beset any platform that creates a download site or electronic storefront for software and there needs to be an upper hand on the quality of the software that appear in these markets. Personally, I would still encourage people to rely on “word of mouth” or spotlighted apps as a way to gain value out of the app store. As well, people using feedback and reporting mechanisms can help with rebuilding quality in to an app store or download site.

Anyone who is building up an app-store for a product, whether it be a regular-computer or mobile-computer operating system or a “smart device” like a printer, NAS or smart TV should work out how to manage the app stores and download sites that they intend to run. They would need to:

• provide a human-driven software curating arrangement especially to draw out well-written software that does the job properly
• define policies concerning the software that exists such as intellectual property, software behaviour, taste and decency, end-user privacy and security, amongst similar issue
• establish a feedback and reporting mechanism to allow customers to highlight good and bad software
• define and maintain consumer-protection policies according to what is expected by any decent person to avoid end-users being ripped off. 

Once this is done, it could engender more respect in platform app stores and the ability for users to shape their experience as they see fit.

After upgrading to Windows 8 on my main computer and utilising Windows 8 on review-sample laptop computers, I had a good chance to use the classic Desktop user interface along with the newer Modern user interface for a lot of computing needs.

Windows 8 Modern UI has some benefits for some tasks

What I had found was that each of the “views” appealed to different tasks and working conditions. For example, I could use the Desktop View for applications that required detailed work and were more mouse / keyboard focused. This is although I had used the touchscreen with this interface for coarse navigation tasks like selecting functions on a toolbar or hyperlinks on a Webpage.

The Modern view, previously known as the Metro view, came in handy when I wanted a simpler user experience for the task like viewing a PDF or photograph. Even using Skype or Facebook with the Modern View gave that “dashboard” look which has everything at a glance, This worked well with the mouse on my main computer and with touchscreen setups on suitably-equipped laptops but was a bit of a pain when using just the trackpad on laptops that didn’t come with a touchscreen.

Windows 8.1 Update 1 has integrated Modern UI apps and Desktop apps into the Desktop user interface by allowing users to pin the Modern UI apps to the Desktop UI’s taskbar. This is augmented with the Modern UI apps also having a control strip that can be brought up to minimise or close these apps.

The current problem

Skype with uncluttered Modern user interface

The current problem with the way applications are written for Windows 8 is that two different programs need to be delivered by different channels if you want to perform the same function on both interfaces. Firstly, I would have to install one application through the traditional paths for a regular computer i.e. install it from a CD or other removeable medium or download it from the developer’s site and install that download file. Then, if I want to have the “full” Modern user experience, I would have to visit the Windows Store to download a separate app that exploits that interface.

How could we improve on this?

One direction that Microsoft could offer for this is to allow developers to deliver a Desktop and Modern UI package as part of a single Windows 8.1 application install package. Here, the user just installs this one package as one action and finds both a Desktop-view application and Modern-view application for the same task on their machine.

This could come in the form of separate apps for each of the user experiences or a monolith app that presents in one way for the simplified Modern user interface and another way for the detailed Desktop user interface. This could also cater for a “live tile” option to show always-updating data. The user then has the choice of seeing a simplified user interface that works well with the touchscreen or mouse-based operation or a detailed user interface.

There also has to be the ability to be assured of data continuity between both the Desktop view and the Modern view, which is important for a lot of tasks. Some tasks like VoIP or working on a document can play a difficult hand if you switch between views whereas other “read-only” tasks which relate to a common data source can play properly with a user-interface switch.

The only problem about this ideal is having the ability for a user to determine the view they want to run because it is possible for a Desktop-view app launched from the (Modern-view) Start Screen. Similarly, from Windows 8.1 Update 1, it is possible to put a Modern-view Windows Store app on the Taskbar and launch it from there.

Conclusion

If Microsoft could provide a single-install single-update experience for those of us who run Windows 8 and newer operating systems, this could encourage software developers to work the Modern UI as a clean “dashboard” user experience while the regular Desktop view serves as a “detailed” user experience for those of us who want more control.

Modern User Interface – Device Charm menu when print job is in progress

Those of you who have moved to Windows 8 and 8.1 may have found it difficult to know what’s printing when you send out a print job to your printer. Here, you may be used to the “Devices And Printers” window since Windows Vista where you could click on the printer icon to check what print jobs are being printed at a given time.

Here this routine has been simplified in Windows 8 and is available in both the Desktop and the Modern UI views as a consolidated list. This is easier for those of you who have two or more printers like a laser printer that you run as a “printing press” alongside a baseline inkjet printer for ordinary document printing.

Modern User Interface (Metro User Interface)

1. Bring forward Charms (hidden task-specific option buttons) on right side.
   Touchscreen users simply swipe from the top right-hand corner while mouse users move the pointer in to the top right-hand corner.
2. Click or touch Devices.
   The “Check Printing Status” text lights up when a print job is pending or in progress
3. Click “Check Printing Status” to view the jobs list

Right click on Printer icon in Desktop notification area to bring up these options when a print job is in progress

Traditional Desktop User Interface

1. Right click Printer icon in Notifications area in Taskbar
2. Click on Printer icon
3. Click on Open All Active Printers for all jobs sent to all printers
4. Click “name of printer” to show this printer
5. Desktop UI users can also follow the Modern UI steps as another way to bring up the pending print jobs.

Microsoft could improve on this by having the Devices Charm change colour when a print job is in progress or change to a different colour when something needs attention.