Thurrott Daily: October 21

What else is happening today?

10/21/2015 11:40:34 AM

Microsoft Improves Inking in OneNote

Microsoft announced this week that it has improved inking—what some call “digital handwriting”—in a few interesting ways:

OneNote on iPad now supports writing with the Pencil by FiftyThree stylus. You can find out more about this interesting peripheral here.

A new feature called Ink Shape Recognition is coming to OneNote this November for iPad, iPad Pro and Windows 10 (the mobile app, not OneNote 2016). “Ink Shape Recognition is a new mode that will automatically convert your hand-drawn shapes into perfect-looking shapes while inking,” Microsoft notes. “It recognizes over a dozen shapes including basics like circles, triangles and squares, but also more complex shapes like quadrilaterals, pentagons and hexagons.” Nice.

And OneNote still supports Pencil for iPad Pro. Not sure why they even mentioned that, really. Or that OneNote supports the new Surface Pen and its pen tip collection. Of course it does.

Speaking of which….

Microsoft releases Parchi for Android, a “small, quick and non-complicated” note-taking app

Looks like OneNote may be too complex for some people. From the MicrosoftGarage web site:

When building Parchi we had three main goals – the app had to be quick, it had to be super easy to use and it had to adapt to the user. And so started the 5 month journey! We’ve learnt a lot from our early users – what we got right in the first try (taking notes from a lock-screen) and what needed improvements (adding structure to the unstructured notes).

Windows 10 Mobile’s Calendar app finally gets Week and Work Week views

Windows Central reports that the Calendar app in the recently-updated Windows 10 Mobile preview finally gets Week and Work View views. Very nice.

TriPlay to Acquire eMusic

Yep. Words. That mean nothing.

Apple: It is impossible to unlock new iPhones

As Reuters reports, Apple recently had to explain to a federal court how encryption works.

Apple told a U.S. judge that accessing data stored on a locked iPhone would be “impossible” with devices using its latest operating system, but the company has the “technical ability” to help law enforcement unlock older phones.

Apple said that for the 90 percent of its devices running iOS 8 or higher, granting the Justice Department’s request “would be impossible to perform” after it strengthened encryption methods.

It sort of boggles the mind that this needs to be explained.

Speaking of which….

Google will require all Android 6-based handsets to enable full-disk encryption by default

Computerworld writes that, with the release of Android 6.0, the Android Compatibility Definition Document (CDD), which sets guidelines for manufacturers, has also been updated. The document now lists full-disk encryption as a requirement instead of a recommendation.

Google had to abandon a plan to make default full-disk encryption mandatory for phone manufacturers with Android 5.0 because of performance issues on some devices.

With the release of Android 6.0, the Android Compatibility Definition Document (CDD) now lists full-disk encryption as a requirement instead of a recommendation … Furthermore, if the device has an Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) cryptographic operation performance above 50MB/s, the full-disk encryption feature must be enabled by default during the initial set-up.

Weird pop-up in Windows 10 build 10568

Yes, I’m running a leaked build. Still, I find that this window popping up fairly regularly is a bit odd.