Ask Paul: October 25 (Premium)

Happy Friday! And Happy (early) Halloween, since this will be the last Ask Paul of October.

Ambient computing

Simard57 asks:

Is your vision of Ambiant Computing evolving as you expect?

Yes and no. Like so much else I think is obvious, it’s happening more slowly than I’d imagined it would.

Will the different ecosystems (Alexa, Google, Apple?, others…) become compatible with each other or will the walls separating them be in place for a long time?

I feel like the combination of actual interoperability (Cortana and Alexa working together, for example) and the need for universal compatibility on the part of third-party devices and services (at least with the most popular assistants) is already solving this problem. But only for the top players: Microsoft and Samsung (and whomever else) will need to be proactive on the both fronts to ensure they’re not just left in the dust.

lastly – who will win? if you were a betting man would it be Google, Amazon or the field? I am betting on the field.

If you had asked me this a year ago—maybe even a month or two ago—I would have said that Google is the obvious winner in the long term but that it would never be totally dominant because Alexa and Siri will always command large audiences. Today, however, I’m increasingly thinking that this market is Amazon’s to lose, and that Amazon and Google will either be neck-and-neck for the foreseeable future or Alexa will be number one. Amazon is so serious about this market, it’s rather incredible how many products and services they release. Google just seems curiously inactive by comparison.

Pixelbook Go

christianwilson asks:

Do you have any plans to review the Pixelbook Go?

No, sorry. I don’t feel this device differentiates itself from third-party Chromebooks enough to even consider it. And with Chromebook, there isn’t as much need to get a clean version of the OS from Google, since all Chromebooks are crapware free. You can just shop on specs, quality, and price.

I am considering a Chromebook for around the home and have looked at several options. The Lenovo Chromebook S340 is one that has my attention but I really like the look, size, and hardware specs of the Pixelbook Go. The pricetag is a bit higher than I want to spend on a Chromebook but if it is a quality computer that performs significantly better than the “budget” Chromebooks out there, I don’t mind spending the money.

My favorite Chromebook is the Acer Chromebook Spin. It’s a year old, but it has a 3:2 display and a 2-in-1 form factor, which I like. It’s about $725 on Amazon. The two Chromebooks I’m seriously evaluating right now, the Acer Chromebook 714 (high-end model is about $600 on Amazon) and HP Chromebook x360 14 (Core i3 is about $450 on Amazon), are both quite good as well. The former has a fingerprint reader, which is fantastic (I find Chromebook sign-in to be a bit tedious) and the latter in a 2-in-1 convertible. Both are excellent business-class machines. Those are the only recent Chromebooks I have a lot of experience with.

Favorite computers

ErichK asks:

Hi Paul, I’m curious. We as a community seem to be in agreement that when Microsoft interfered in the PC business with beautiful designs like Surface, other manufacturers got their rears in gear and also started producing much better laptops. But I’m wondering — years ago when this wasn’t the case, which type of portable computers did you like the most, and what brands? I just have a hard time picturing you in the late 1990s or early 2000s with one of those old-school super-thick laptops!

Oh I certainly did. My very first laptop was a Dell, and I chose extra RAM (maybe 8 MB vs. 4) over storage so I could run Windows NT 4.0 on it. I was a big fan of a huge 15-inch Dell Latitude during the Longhorn beta; you could swap out its optical drive for a second battery (which I did) or a second hard drive.

My favorites laptops over time are certainly the IBM/Lenovo ThinkPads, most recently the X1 Carbon and X1 Yoga lines. I had a fantastic X300 when Windows 7 first came out.

I’m also a big fan of most of HP’s recent Spectre (prosumer) and EliteBook (business-class) laptops and convertibles.

But yeah. There is something special about most Surface portables, that great combination of display, keyboard, and touchpad.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare

madthinus asks:

So, how excited are you for Modern Warfare? Any first impressions / Hot takes?

Not as excited as I was when my son was younger, lived at home, and we could run out to Best Buy at midnight on launch night to buy two copies of the new game and then stay up for a few hours playing it. But I did preorder and preload the game, and I’ve played several Team Deathmatch games so far, and it looks great, with stunning graphics and great-looking levels. I’ll need some time this weekend to level up and figure out my way around, but so far it looks great.

By the way, I did text my son this morning with a photo of the game and wrote “Thinking of you…” 🙂

Microsoft webcams

gregsedwards asks:

Whatever happened to those Microsoft webcams you and Andrew were talking about late last year? You guys seemed pretty sure there would be one for PC and another for Xbox (as a replacement for the aging Kinect). Microsoft did announce the Azure Kinect DK back at MWC, but at $399 and with packed with AI sensors, that thing seemed like less of a consumer play and more of a developer kit. Are you still hearing anything about a new consumer webcam family from Microsoft?

I can only speculate, as I’ve not heard anything since we first discussed it. It seems like this past month’s hardware event would have been the right time to announce something. And I’m curious why there was no Xbox-specific hardware (especially headphones) at that event as well.

Finishing the job

AnOldAmigaUser asks:

Do you think that Microsoft will ever just go through and clean up all the inconsistencies in the Windows interface?

I am positive that they will never do that. The culture at Microsoft rewards big new things over refining legacy products, and as I’ve written in the past, joining Windows just isn’t a choice the best and the brightest would make these days. This is no one’s fault: In many ways, Windows is just too old, with too many generations of code and UI, to ever be truly consistent.

If they did, would it be the largest update ever shipped?

Realistically speaking, it would almost have to be a completely new product. It’s just too bad that Microsoft let it get this bad for so long.

Pixel 4 and RCS

kshsystems Alpha Member #443 – 5 hours ago

I have heard in the news lately Verizon and T-Mobile saying that the Pixel 4 will not support RCS messaging. This sounds fishy to me. the Pixel 4 supports RCS messaging with Sprint apparently. What else is required? Do you have any insights on this topic?

What I heard is that the Pixel 4 doesn’t support RCS messaging on certain carriers now, but that it will in time. (RCS does work on Sprint, so I suspect the issue is the carriers, not the Pixel. And I thought that Verizon did support RCS on Pixel 3 previously.)

Notepad in Windows Forms

WP7Mango Alpha Member #2513 – 4 hours ago

It’s great to read your latest programming articles and your creation of the NotePad type application. How much are you enjoying this whole process of software development?

I’m enjoying it quite a bit. I’ve been dabbling in software development for several years, and I was only one or two projects away from completing a paid Udacity nanodegree program for Android development a few years back. But with the Programming Windows series, I’ve found myself writing code more and more to better understand what was happening with various languages, frameworks, and APIs over the years. And while all of the early writing was about the pre-.NET era, I was particularly interested in the .NET era coding stuff, maybe because I never really experienced it much first-hand when it was happening. So I was dabbling in Windows Forms and WPF before even while I was writing about the earlier topics.

Do you intend to use other available technologies, such as UWP, to further enhance this desktop application with features like Share?

I’m not 100 percent sure where this goes after I “finish” the Windows Forms version of Notepad. (I assume I will finish it, in the sense that it will be a reasonable approximation of the real thing.) I do intend to do projects in both Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and UWP, and to use C# instead of Visual Basic. Future projects might be different applications. But I may want to recreate Notepad, or try to, in a different framework later too. What might a UWP version of Notepad look like? We’ll see. It’s interesting to me already how complicated even a simple app like Notepad can be, even when using an environment that is largely visual (WinForms) and a simple language like VB. There are probably going to be some features I can’t figure out.

Do you intend to publish it to the Windows Store?

No, probably not this one. I don’t know that I’ll ever create anything that’s worthy of being distributed in the Store.

Outlook.com and custom domains

RobotRaccoon asks:

Time for my annual question: Will Outlook ever allow us to use custom domain names registered at places other than GoDaddy?

Not that I’m aware of. GoDaddy is still the only choice for the majority of people who weren’t grandfathered in from Outlook.com Premium. I can ask Microsoft, but they won’t tell me if something may happen in the future, only that it’s not possible now.

Why a high-end Chromebook?

scj123 asks:

I am curious with your recent use of Chromebooks if you see any need for some of the high-end Chrome Books that are available, I have noticed they are available up to a Core i7, 16gb Ram and 512Gb storage. I have purchased a cheap chrome book to find out what they were like. Whilst I know paying more would have got me an amazing looking Chromebook, I just don’t understand what I would use all that power and storage for, or am I missing something?

If all you’re going to do is use web apps, a basic Chromebook is fine. But if you’re going to run lots of Android apps, you’ll want a beefier machine. As for a truly high-end Chromebooks, that’s where Linux compatibility comes into play: You can use such a Chromebook to run heavy developer environments like Android Studio and create your own Android apps. A basic Chromebook just wouldn’t be powerful enough.