Thurrott Daily: June 27

Tech tidbits from around the web.

6/27/2016 4:53:19 PM

Microsoft pays woman $10,000 for unintended Windows 10 upgrade

Well, well. The Seattle Times is reporting that Microsoft settled with a woman who sued them because they forced Windows 10 onto her PC.

When outreach to Microsoft’s customer support didn’t fix the issue, Goldstein took the software giant to court, seeking compensation for lost wages and the cost of a new computer.

She won. Last month, Microsoft dropped an appeal and Goldstein collected a $10,000 judgment from the company.

The company denies wrongdoing, and a spokeswoman said Microsoft halted its appeal to avoid the expense of further litigation.

No wrongdoing? Hm.

A quick tour of Microsoft building 87

Microsoft’s Ben Rudolph and Panos Panay did a weird live video event from the home of Surface. Missed it? No worries: Rafael recorded it.

Why on earth did they do this now? I think it was to keep Surface top of mind with enthusiasts halfway through the longest time yet between releases. So let’s do some math. Surface Pro 4 and Surface Book were announced in October 2015. It’s June 2016, 8 months later. 8 months from now is February 2017. That’s when the next Surface products will be announced. 🙂

ISOs for Windows 10 Insider preview build 14366 are now available

Neowin notes that Microsoft is now making an older build of the Windows 10 Insider preview downloadable in ISO form. (I think these releases are tied to when builds hit the Slow ring.)

As with Insider Preview build 14342, Microsoft has made the ISOs available just two weeks after rolling out the build to Fast Ring users.

The ISOs are available in various languages, depending on the version you choose.

Download: Insider Preview build 14366 (Microsoft.com)

Google Project Bloks brings software development to the physical world

Today, Google announced an interesting new research collaboration that takes software development away from the PC screen and brings it into the physical world. It’s called Project Bloks and described as a system for tangible programming.

I’ve been thinking a lot about software development and new forms of learning recently.

As you may know, I use Duolingo every day to try and learn French, and I’ve been playing with the new Swift Playgrounds app on iPad—which is excellent, by the way—to see Apple’s approach to teaching development to kids and newcomers. But I’m also going through a Udacity nanodegree program for Android development, and have been thinking about how I might adapt the applications I build there to C# and Microsoft’s Universal Windows Platform (UWP). I’ve also been thinking about taking the code from my first, now 20-year-old book about Visual Basic, and adapting it to UWP. (Surprising, not that difficult.)

Anyway. That’s a lot of scattered thinking, I know. (And there’s more to it than that, of course: Apple has great iTunes U-based learning material for Swift and iOS, and I routinely watch developer-oriented videos of all kinds from Microsoft, Apple and Google.) But into this mix of things comes Project Bloks, which makes programming physical and more approachable, especially to kids and anyone who has never programmed before.

You should watch this video to get a great overview.

The short version is that Project Bloks lets kids socially collaborate on building things. This is very interesting.