Ask Paul: June 2 (Premium)

Happy Friday! It was a long short week, if that makes sense, but here’s a great set of reader questions to kick off the weekend a bit early.

Cross-browser bookmark sync

harmjr asks:

How do you keep up with your bookmarks/favorites between browsers? 0Any Program to sync favorites/bookmarks between all of the browsers and keep them up-to-date. I use Chrome/Edge/Firefox/Brave (in that order) all the time going back in forth and I am manually keeping this up but its annoying.

The short answer is that I don’t.

For two reasons: I don’t use bookmarks/favorites anymore and I don’t really go back and forth between different browsers in daily use. I’ve been using Brave full-time since mid-2022, with the brief exception of October/November when I used Edge so I could write that part of the book. (I’m actually updating that part of the book now since Edge has changed so much, but I’ve only made it my go-to on one laptop.)

That said, I do have bookmarks in there that I never use. And way I handle this, as with other browser data, is to just do that one time import whenever I do switch browsers.

I have to think there is a solution for this, however. Perhaps someone else knows a good choice.

OneDrive inconsistencies

MartinusV2 asks:

Any reason why I still cannot configure OneDrive to backup my Music and Video folders? I thought by the time that feature would be available to everyone.

I’ve been wondering about this myself. There are three possible OneDrive user interfaces in Windows 11: the original UI, the new UI with just Desktop, Documents, and Pictures sync, and then the new UI but also with Music and Videos sync. The legacy UI is there when I first bring up a new PC or reinstall Windows 11, even today, and it’s silently replaced by the new UI over time. But what you can sync varies from PC to PC. Sometimes I see the three original folders and sometimes I see five. There is no rhyme or reason to this.

Microsoft started talking about Controlled Feature Rollouts (CFRs) a few months ago, but it’s clear that they’ve been using this method to roll out new features in Windows 11 since the arrival of 22H2 in September 2022. And based on my experiences, I can pinpoint two of those features with certainty because they match the key attribute of CFRs, in that they are literally rolled out randomly: the Search “pill” from last November/December (since replaced by a more complete Search experience in Moment 2) and this new OneDrive UI.

This type of deployment is ridiculous. But for people like me who use multiple PCs, it’s weird to see a feature on one PC but not another. That this is still happening 6 months after its initial rollout is unexplainable and inexcusable. I wish I had a better answer.

Lightning round

helix2301 asks:

I have been reading Paul Allen book and one things he said was that while Microsoft has and will always be known as the Windows and Office company he pointed out that Microsoft original business was creating programming languages then they got into operating systems when dos and IBM happened. He pointed out as well that Microsoft became a big company after he left but much of what the company became was based on his work creating programming languages. Which I am not sure I totally agree with that its like the company that makes a hammer taking credit for building the house lol.

Paul Allen passed away five years ago, but this book dates back to 2011, and Allen’s leadership role at Microsoft came to a close way back in 1983, when he was first diagnosed with Hodgkin’s disease. So it’s important to put his thoughts in perspective: even in 2011, Windows was still the key product at Microsoft and the coming failures of Windows 8 and Windows Phone were in the future. So from his perspective, actively at the company from 1975 to 1983, and less so through 2000, Microsoft was a different company than the one we know today.

I wrote a bit about this early history in the beginning articles/chapters of my Programming Windows series and the resulting Windows Everywhere book. But Allen cofounded Microsoft with Bill Gates to provide programming languages for the MITS Altair and other early home and personal computers, and that was its first level of success. Microsoft expanded into software applications and operating systems at roughly the same time—coincidentally around the same time Allen left, in 1983—thanks to the arrival of the IBM PC and the Mac. Those stories are well known, but they resulted in Microsoft’s next level of success, which was quite explosive and became even more so with the release of Windows 3.0 in 1990.

I think what Allen was trying to say is that today’s Microsoft could never have happened without the work that he and Gates did on BASIC and other programming languages because that success provided the foundation and the experience they needed to take the next steps. And that’s totally fair: I would liken Allen’s contributions to Microsoft in the early days to those of Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak. Both were deeply technical and key to the early successes of their companies, but both were likewise left behind when their firms went in different directions. (Coincidentally, both had unexpected medical issues, Woz’s being a 1981 plane crash that caused memory loss.)

It’s also worth pointing out that because both Gates and Allen were highly technical and literally created programming languages, their engineering focus deeply influenced Microsoft culturally, and that influence continues to this day. Efforts like .NET and the C#, F#, and TypeScript languages in recent years speak to this.

I have always kind felt that way about Steve Jobs while I agree Apple needed him and he is a visionary leader and team leader he not one who actually wrote any code or did computer engineering he just guided the ship.

Steve Jobs is unique, of course, but in this specific context, he was a visionary like Bill Gates but lacked the technical acumen. This was somewhat disastrous for Apple in the early days, but after failing at NeXT and maturing, it was the key reason for Apple’s more recent successes. Gates just never had the raw charisma that Jobs possessed.

There’s been a lot of history rewriting because of that success, but Jobs’s early history at Apple is mixed at best. The Macintosh only became successful after he left and many of his poor product design demands were reversed, for example. But I don’t see any parallel between Jobs and Allen. They were both cofounders and pivotal to the early days of the industry, but they were nothing alike. Unlike Jobs, Allen never wanted to come back to a leadership role at the company he cofounded later in life.

My other question is on Thurrott or BWW. I remember the site and podcast getting kicked off at a Microsoft event do you think you will ever do anymore of those events or now that Brad is gone is that not a thing anymore.

I honestly don’t know.

I had expected that Build 2023 would be my first big post-pandemic work trip, but Microsoft did not invite the press or provide any onsite facilities, so we would have had to pay for the conference, which is expensive, and then wouldn’t have had access to any executives or employees. So that was a non-starter. It’s hard to speculate what we might have done had that not been the case, but we’d been doing event-based podcasts at Build and Ignite, and if that starts up again, I suspect I would still do so. Involving Brad is an open question because he works for another company and footing his travel would be expensive with no real payoff on our end. But you never know.

The more likely outcome here is that we get to go to Ignite this fall and I do a live Windows Weekly with Richard.

My last question is on the day of build after the keynote you had everything written up do you get stuff preshow? My other question is does Apple do this? Not saying you would get it but I noticed many journalist that work for large publications scrambling after keynote to get stuff written up why does Apple not prebrief?

Pre-briefings are similar between companies: there’s some news coming up, and they reach out and ask if you’re interested in getting it early, which requires agreeing to an embargo, which is a specific day and time when we can publish. Depending on the event, they might send us the materials via email or a Dropbox-type site, and/or have a live or remote briefing. In the case of Build, Microsoft creates a microsite in SharePoint that has lots of press releases, a big “Book of News” overview, a video presentation, and tons of images and product videos.

With regard to the keynote, we don’t know exactly how those will unfold. We just know who and when.

Hardware embargoes are a bit different because there’s some physical thing involved. This can be a live reviewer’s workshop at some place (New York, perhaps) where you meet with representatives of the company, are shown the product(s), and often walk away with them. These days, however, most are virtual, so they ship you the product and then hold a live virtual event which you can rewatch later if you miss it. And then they send you a reviewer’s guide document (usually).

I used to be on Apple’s list, but I haven’t been for many years. (They sent me the first iPod back in 2001, which they let me keep, and then a series of Macs, including a Titanium PowerBook and that table lamp-like iMac, back in the day too.) I’m a bit too honest for Apple’s tastes: like many companies and PR firms, the prefer people who repeat the marketing and/or work for large publications they cannot afford to ignore.

Thank you sorry post got a little long winded.

Not at all. That’s why I’m here. 🙂

Daily driver

andrew b. asks:

What’s the longest any one computer has been your “daily driver?” Do you find it as impossible as I do not to rotate through the pile of computers?

This is a weird one because of the nature of what I do. I receive roughly a dozen (more?) PCs each year and I have to spend enough time with each so that I can write a review based on experience and not just eyeball and declare it good or bad. So I am constantly moving between PCs, and I rotate between 2 and 4 PCs at any given time.

Also, my habits have changed a bit over the years, and I sometimes have to deal with work-related requirements, like having a clean PC I can use for the screen recordings for Hands-on Windows.

And, I travel. And so each time I go away, I typically bring two laptops, ideally two review laptops. We’re in Boston for a wedding as I write this, and I brought the two I’m reviewing now, the HP ZBook Firefly G10 16-Inch and the Lenovo Yoga Book 9i. I’m writing this on the ZBook because that one came in first.

But … yeah. Every once in a while a PC really lands for me. And in those cases, when it makes sense, I’ll buy one to keep using it. The HP Dragonfly Pro I just reviewed is an obvious recent example, but the HP ZBook Firefly 14 G8 that saved my bacon after a water-based disaster in 2021 is another one I remember fondly because I still have a slightly older version of that same laptop that I still use. (In fact, it’s my primary screenshot PC for the Windows 11 Field Guide.) I have purchased at least three HP Spectre x360s over the years because they’ve always been among my favorites.

The Dragonfly Pro was particularly interesting as I kept going back to it, and I never reset it or whatever. But I usually move between machines frequently, and so I don’t really have a single PC that is my only PC or my go-to.

Loop first impressions

ggolcher asks:

Have you used Loop much yet? Any impressions you wish to share?

Yes to both.

I’ll probably write about this separately at some point, but I think I noted elsewhere that I would likely be moving from Notion to Loop at some point this year, not because of any serious issues with Notion but because keeping this stuff alongside my other work-related items in Microsoft 365/OneDrive makes sense. All Loop has to do is be as good as Notion and, hopefully, address some of the minor issues I do have with Notion.

And Loop already does that: for the most part, Loop looks and works almost identically to Notion (diabolically so, one might say) on both desktop (via the web app) and on mobile. But it also supports Word-style keyboard shortcuts for formatting, which I love, and unlike with Notion, you can zoom in and out while viewing text.

But the other big part of what will or will not make Loop viable to me is the collaboration bits. I share the Windows Weekly notes with Richard, for example, and we can co-edit in real-time with no issues. And my wife and I share various Notion-based pages for our Eternal Spring work, Thurrott.com business stuff, and things related to our recent move (and what will surely be another move later this year). So it can’t just work for me, it has to work for everyone else too. And that should be fine: Richard and my wife are Microsoft 365 users too.

I don’t want to move too quickly, however. Loop is still in preview, and there are some issues. The mobile app is buggy and throws up red error messages sometimes, for example. So I wil wait for it to improve.

And I know my Notion “issues” may seem minor, and they are. But it’s been interesting to see how Loop addresses them. For example, I keep a Gym notebook/page/whatever where I store the weights I use on each machine at the gym, and because the Notion mobile app doesn’t let you increase the text size in any way, it’s a bit small for me. Likewise, my wife and I create notes in Notion for videos, but she complained that the font size was too small, the same issue. So I convert all the text into a Heading 3 to make it easier to read for her, and that’s a silly thing to have to do. While writing, just being able to type CTRL + ALT + 1 to make the text a Heading 1 (or whatever) makes Loop better for me. It all kinds of adds up.

Anyway, Notion is fine. It does work well. I will be replacing it with Loop. It’s just a matter of time.