- Microsoft Build 2018 is coming to a close today.
I'm going to go through all the big news
with Zac Bowden.
We'll tell you what's new, what's exciting.
Yes, there really is some exciting stuff.
Stay tuned.
Okay, news item number one, Your Phone.
So this was actually a kind of
a pretty big deal, I suppose.
OEM manufacturers have been putting these kind of apps
on their devices for years.
I actually got to talk to Microsoft a little bit about this,
but Zac, what do you think about this?
Well, actually, why don't you explain
what Your Phone is, or is supposed to be?
- [Zac] Yes, so Your Phone is essentially
bringing your phone to your PC.
So Microsoft's whole idea right now
is trying to make you use your phone less
because it's distracting.
And with Your Phone, it's an app that connects
to your Android or iOS device
and, on Android at least,
allows you to reply to text messages,
see entire text conversations,
notifications, and even photos.
So somebody can send you a photo via a text message,
or even photos you've taken on your phone
and use them on your PC, which is pretty cool.
- And a lot of people have been asking about phone calls,
which seems like an obvious thing, too,
and I can tell you today, kind of exclusively,
that phone calls is on their to-do list.
Yes, they are going to eventually do that,
specifically for Android, probably iOS, too.
Now iOS has some limitations.
You can't do iMessage through it because,
well, Apple famously locks down their stuff.
Now, there are workarounds that you can do
if you want to kind of hack around this app
and make it work,
but Microsoft's not interested in doing that, they tell me.
Instead, they do want to eventually meet with Apple,
and propose a partnership here
to something along with bringing iMessage to this service.
That'll take a little while to get there.
They do want to first get some feedback from users.
We can expect this though,
to start landing with Insider builds,
probably in the next few weeks, next few months.
There's already a placeholder app in the Store.
So insiders on RS5, Redstone 5,
will be getting this pretty soon.
Obviously, if you're on Android
you'll get the most benefits.
You'll get the notifications, text messages, and all that.
I should also point out
that you can create text messages with this.
- Yes, you can create conversations and stuff.
And also it's worth nothing
that this doesn't replace Skype SMS Relay,
which is something we learned today.
Which is very interesting because Skype SMS Relay
is still Windows Phone exclusive.
It's not on Android yet, which they said it was coming,
but we haven't heard of that in a while.
But we did get confirmed today
that that is not replacing Skype SMS Relay.
Your Phone is a separate sort of thing
which doesn't connect to the cloud,
or it doesn't store things in the cloud.
- And that's an important distinction here.
One final bit about the services.
This does not go through the cloud.
It does use some abilities for syncing with your MSA,
your Microsoft account,
but otherwise what it's doing is forming a direct connection
and it imports your information.
But once that connection is severed,
nothing is stored in the cloud
so there's no privacy violations or concerns here,
where SMS Relay is the opposite.
It does get stored in the cloud
and you do have to agree to that.
So they're going to avoid a lot of this new regulation stuff
that's going on in the industry with privacy and security,
and they're really at the forefront of that.
So if you're worried about your data, don't here.
It should be very interesting.
We'll have to see how this plays out in the coming weeks,
but it sounds like a long-term project for them.
I'm very excited to see it happening.
We'll just have to see how it goes.
Next up, we're talking about Timeline
coming to iOS and Android.
So if you're on Windows 10 Redstone 4,
also known as the April 2018 update, or build 1803,
you may have Timeline enabled.
And what that is is the ability to see
all your history across your devices,
your browsing history, the things you've been doing.
It also has Search, which I actually find very useful.
And what I really like about Timeline,
before we talk about the iOS and Android thing,
is when Microsoft gets on stage
and talks about edge computing,
and they talk about the intelligent cloud,
and it sounds like all this weird stuff,
Timeline is that.
The idea that it's taking all of your history,
putting it into the cloud
and then letting other devices see that,
access it, making it searchable.
Eventually, they also announced,
they're going to put Cortana into there,
so that it can surface information.
And this is important because
on my Tuesday I may have
140 instances of something in Timeline,
which is really not manageable.
But if Cortana goes,
"Here are the things that are important to you
"that you always tend to look at,"
instead of doing it chronological,
that's kind of a big deal.
So that's been announced at Build.
This feature, though, is coming to iOS and Android.
- [Zac] Right, the implementations are quite interesting.
On Android, it's coming to the Microsoft Launcher,
which is kind of where you would expect it to be.
You swipe in to get that sort of,
what's it called on the launcher
where you swipe in from the left to get all of your--
- [Daniel] The feed.
- [Zac] The feed, it'll be in there.
And there you can access things like
your Edge browsing history,
Word documents that you've opened in the past.
I don't think it'll work with third-party apps at first,
but over time I believe
they will be adding that functionality.
On iOS they're adding it into the Edge app,
which is where you'll be able to see your browsing history.
I'm not sure you'll be able to see
your Word documents and stuff,
but your browsing history is definitely a priority for them
because right now, although the browsing history
gets synced to the PC, it doesn't go both ways.
You can't resume activities on your phone,
but that is coming to iOS by the Edge app as well.
- And what's interesting I found out is
you will be able to distinguish on your history
where that came from.
So if it came from your phone or another PC,
you'll be able to tell that.
Now Microsoft has some challenges
and some things it needs to figure out here,
which is the Timeline system
is going to be smaller on Android
in the way that it's represented,
so they're figuring out about
what's called information density,
how much stuff they should put in there.
But I think this is actually a really big feature
because this, for me, using it on PCs has been a big deal.
Specifically, I operate two or three PCs at a time,
but I can go onto any one of them,
search my history for an article
I read three, four days ago
and it automatically brings it up.
It's super cool.
And then you have my phones,
which now we don't have Windows Phone anymore,
but Android or iOS being a part of that system as well.
This is part of their broader vision
of just making devices work seamlessly
across the entire ecosystem.
- Yeah, and I think a lot more people
are now finding Timeline quite interesting and useful
because not many people have multiple Windows 10 PCs,
which right now is sort of the only way
you can utilize Timeline in a usable manner.
But now it's coming to iOS and Android.
Everybody has a smartphone so now people can use that
and take advantage of it as well.
- And there are more people with iPhones and a PC
than an iPhone and a Mac, so.
Yeah, this should be very exciting to see
coming over the next few weeks.
Next up, Project Kinect for Azure.
So Kinect is back, kind of?
- [Zac] Yeah.
Surprise, it was dead but now it's not.
- So this is just another example of them
taking a technology that was for Xbox
and putting it out there for developers to do more with.
Now we've seen Kinect go to developers before.
There was even a ability to connect it to a Windows 10 PC,
but it was still a giant sensor
and now it's tiny, right?
- [Zac] Yeah, it's really small
and they even confirmed at Build
that they will be using this sensor in the next HoloLens,
so that sort of says in itself that this is a tiny sensor.
I think they've even released a picture of it.
It's very small.
- Yeah, and we kind of expect that with iOS.
Of course, the iPhone X has
basically what is the Kinect sensor in it,
so it goes to show you how far the technology's come along.
Now what can we expect for consumers in this regard?
I mean, we're not going to expect a new Kinect
you buy for your Xbox, although in theory
I imagine a third-party company
could now do something if they wanted to.
We don't know the full ramifications of the--
- Even then, the sensor's small enough now
that they could really put it in the console itself
if they really wanted to,
for the next Xbox or whatever.
- We may see other third-party IoT-type devices coming out.
My big thing I guess is smart cameras in the home.
Right now other than that, even smart cameras,
they're only smart in the sense that
they detect motion and they connect to the internet.
But what we need to see is facial recognition,
identification, and more of this kind of technology.
I think this is kind of the way in there.
It's a weird one.
We'll have to wait and see how this pans out, though.
But yes, Kinect is back, kind of.
All right, real quickly I just want to talk about
Microsoft Launcher for Enterprise.
So this kind of came out there,
and there's a lot of confusion about what it is.
And we found out more information, so this is
Microsoft Launcher for Enterprise.
No, what it is though, it's this idea that
when you go work for a company
and they give you a phone,
or they have very tight restrictions
about what that phone can do and access.
And this allows them to deploy across devices.
So if they have a fleet of devices,
using Intune management,
which is their system for remote management,
they could put this launcher in there,
pre-bundled with some apps, some configurations,
and they could send it out there for users.
Also restrict access to things.
So this is all super important to enterprise.
Not very exciting for consumers,
but it's a big deal for Microsoft
because if they can now
get their launcher onto devices for enterprise
to get that out there, and still ties into Office
and Microsoft 365 and to Skype and OneDrive
and all those services, well,
that's going to be good for them.
It's a pseudo-Windows Phone in some way,
and it's kind of an interesting play.
But we can expect that coming out
over the next few months as well.
But for the most part, it's basically
the same launcher we all know.
It just has Intune management built into it.
- And it's also worth noting as well
that the Microsoft Launcher is actually
rather popular on Android.
It's not like a side-project still for Microsoft.
It has over 10 million downloads on the Play Store,
and a 4.6 rating on the Play Store itself.
So people are enjoying and using the Microsoft Launcher.
It's not like a sort of small thing
that nobody's paying attention to.
People are using it.
- Yep.
Now another big announcement at Build was accessibility.
So this is a super important issue
to a lot of people at Microsoft.
It really is interesting to see
how the company has evolved on this.
For people with disabilities
who were essentially left out of technology
or were, rather, a footnote to technology, right?
The company had to, oh, okay,
for blind people we'll have to check a box,
make sure they can kind of use it.
Microsoft's doing something different,
which is building technology around the idea that
no, these people matter
and we should actually cater to them.
And why I think this is really interesting is because
normal people, normies, also benefit a lot
from this technology.
So if they work on things like improving vision for users
or improving audio or speech translation stuff,
eventually this works into regular consumer products, too.
For cameras and for face recognition and audio.
So all this research, it's AI and everything,
is I think a really big deal that for regular consumers
who might not see the importance of this
it's easy to dismiss.
But I think that's probably the wrong way
that we should look at this.
They are also allocating a lot of money,
at least $25 million towards companies
that research in this area.
And it's a big step in the right direction.
It not only looks good,
but it'll benefit all consumers as well.
- [Zac] Next up, let's talk about
some of my favorite stuff in Windows, Fluent Design.
So Fluent Design, as we already know, is an evolving system.
Microsoft announced it last year at Build 2017,
and this year they're adding to it
by evolving it and adding a few new things,
elements and designs.
They're also changing up a couple of things as well.
So for developers specifically,
things like the back button are changing.
Right now in apps, the back button is in the title bar.
That's changing.
No longer is that a thing.
Developers should no longer use that.
Instead, Microsoft is encouraging developers
to use a sort of unified design within the app.
And Microsoft is trying to promise
consistent back buttons across apps, which is very exciting,
at least for people who enjoy UI like me.
Also there's other things like
Fluent Design context menus that are in the work,
and all sorts of minor improvements to Fluent Design.
We've already seen a lot of that
implemented in the Redstone 4 April 2018 release,
and with Redstone 5 and beyond
they're going to continue adding Fluent Design.
So this isn't just a one-time thing.
They are going to continue investing in Fluent Design
across all of their products and hardware,
so that's very exciting.
- Yeah and this reminds me a lot in Twitter,
because Twitter you do see the double back button.
- Yeah, it has two back buttons.
- It's kind of an eyesore.
So that's definitely being addressed.
In fact, it's a ton of work
being done here with progressive web apps.
Now you learned, actually you're about to Twitter,
the original UWP, which is kind of interesting.
Why don't you tell us what you learned?
- So there was a session there
where they talked a little bit about
bringing their PWA to the Windows Store
and bringing it to Windows 10.
And that was very interesting.
They talked about how they are looking into
bringing things like Timeline support and dark mode
to the Twitter PWA, because it is possible to do that
via the Windows 10 APIs, which is very nice.
And they also mentioned things like
how they know that their users
don't really care if an app is native or UWP,
unless you're in the tech bubble.
They did actually mention the tech bubble
and how people who are listening to that session,
and people who are probably watching this video,
understand and realize that, hey,
a PWA may not be as good as a native,
but for most people it's fine.
They don't really care.
They just care about a good user experience.
And Twitter says they can
bring a good user experience to Windows 10 via PWA.
And that's very exciting.
They also mentioned that over 70% of people
who use Twitter on Windows use it on the desktop,
which is a pretty interesting stat.
And also not very surprising because
Windows Phone doesn't exist anymore.
- Should also mention that dark mode will be coming,
well, we don't know the exact ETA
but it is being worked on.
And it's going to be tied to the system element,
so if you set dark mode in the system, it too will be dark.
So it won't even be its own unique setting,
which should be really clever.
Lot of work to come to the Twitter PWA
but it sounds like they got it kind of all figured out.
- Yeah, I mean it's way better than the UWP.
And they actually did say as well
that they didn't actually have a developer team in house
when they were developing their UWP app,
but they do for the PWA,
which is why we're seeing so many updates.
We've seen more than,
I'm pretty sure there was more than the UWP got altogether,
and that's really impressive.
It's good to see Twitter
committed to their PWA on Windows 10.
- All right, some odds and ends.
So we had Jon Friedman there,
who is one of their head designers.
He gave a presentation that was very entertaining
but also informative.
He has the unfortunate distinction
of leading design on four out of five
failed products for Microsoft,
including KIN, Courier,
there was SPOT, the smart watch.
And oh, he was also involved
was it UMPC, the ultra-mobile PC?
- Yeah, and also, I didn't even know
those smart watches were a thing.
That totally went over my head.
- SPOT Watch, that's because you're younger than me.
I remember SPOT.
Anyway, he got on stage.
He actually showed a picture
of some of the concept of Courier.
That is the foldable device that was famously canceled,
or at least announced to be canceled 2010.
And ever since then we've been hearing, well,
rumors of foldable devices have only really come out
in the last seven months along with Project Andromeda.
Surprisingly, I don't think he has any part in
any Andromeda stuff as he now works on Office,
and working to make that a more interesting experience.
We didn't actually learn that much new about Courier,
but he did confirm what we already kind of expected,
which was specifically why it was canceled.
- Yeah, it was canceled basically because
Microsoft wanted to invest in Windows 8
and that development platform with Metro apps
and the Courier ran a modified version of Windows
that wasn't Windows 8.
And at the time Steven Sinofsky was very adamant that
all of their current OS efforts right now
were Windows 8 based, Windows 8, Windows Phone 8.
So Courier sort of didn't fit in that vision
and it didn't have a clear developer story for Microsoft.
So it sort of fell into an odd,
it was timing, pretty much timing was bad
as they were sort of moving to Metro in Windows 8.
So they just pulled the plug unfortunately.
- Yeah, it reminds me of KIN,
which he was also involved with.
That was canceled apparently the same week as Courier, too.
- [Zac] Yeah, that must have been a bad week for him.
- And so KIN had the same problem
where it existed in a world where Windows Mobile existed,
but there was no development platform for it.
What we mean specifically is if Courier had come out
there'd be no apps for it.
You couldn't just run Windows apps on it.
In fact, there was no mail client for Courier.
And don't forget, this wasn't a phone.
This was just a straight-up PC
so they would have had to do a lot of custom apps for it
and that is a big risk,
especially when you're trying to
put everything into a concerted effort with Windows.
And remember how the KIN started with Windows Phone.
It came out and KIN was cool, but it was also like,
but there was Windows Phone at the same time.
And that way people were like, why are you doing both?
And that problem existed with Courier as well.
Should also mention that they did point out
KIN is kind of the first example of cloud computing,
where a lot of this stuff was stored in the cloud,
you can log in with an account,
pull down all your information.
And that seems very common today,
but back then that was a very innovative thing.
No details about anything with Andromeda,
but it was sort of a sneak peek behind the scenes
in how they develop products.
Okay, that wraps it up for this video.
Now I know, not always the most exciting news for Microsoft
but still, lots of big stuff.
A lot more news we didn't cover,
including stuff for developers.
If you want that information, head to Windows Central.
I'd like to thank Zac Bowden for joining us
and giving us his insight.
If you like this video, give us a thumbs-up
and don't forget to subscribe.
As always, take care everybody.