Ask Paul: September 6 (Premium)

Happy Friday! I got off to a bit of a late start, but hopefully this will still be a great way to start the weekend.

Note 10+ and Samsung apps

yoshi asks:

Paul, I was just curious what your approach with the Note 10+ will be when it comes to apps. Will you be giving the stock Samsung apps a try? Such as Messages. Or will you download Google, MS, etc. apps in place of the stock apps?

I’m going to try and use the Samsung apps and services as much as possible. Some of that won’t be too difficult, but the Bixby Home interface is pretty terrible compared to the Google feed, and I have put the Google app on a home screen so I can access the latter. We’ll see how it goes. In some cases, like Messages, I don’t think it will be problematic. For others …  I don’t know.

I will continue using things like Google Photos and OneDrive for photo backup, of course. And I noticed there was no news app on the device, unless you consider Bixby Home to fall into that category. (I installed Google News.) I will keep using Gmail and Outlook for mail.

I will say that I really like the Samsung shell. Going back to the Pixel 3a XL from time to time, it already seems a bit old-fashioned by comparison.

Sharing with a family in OneDrive

vernonlvincent asks:

I have an Office 365 Home subscription (the one that let me have 5 family members each with Office and OneDrive storage) and was wondering if there’s a way for me to access my children’s OneDrive folders online without having to log in as them? I find that there are times where I want to give them things (like MP3s for them to sync to their mobile devices) and I’d like to just upload them directly from my computer without having to (for example) log in on their machines as them, access a shared local folder with the files, and then upload them from their machine to their OneDrive storage. Alternately (or maybe separately) – is there a ‘family’ OneDrive folder (like the Family calendar and Family group in Outlook) for documents and files that I’d like to be available to the whole family?

There’s nothing like that that I’m aware of, but now that you mention it, it’s a good idea and given the point of Office 365 Home, perhaps necessary.

I generally share using the Share functionality in OneDrive. Assuming your kids are old enough, this should work: They’ll be notified about the content you’re sharing and will have to copy it to wherever they wish to keep it.

A better solution, assuming one exists, is to find a third party cloud storage utility that lets you sign-in to multiple OneDrive accounts. It’s been a long time since I’ve used such a thing, but I used ODrive back in the day and that (or something like it) might do it.

Has anyone else used a utility like this?

Third-party Surface Hub 2

jchampeau asks:

You got excited about Surface Hub 2 a while back.  Do you think there will ever be a set-top box of some sort that would allow companies who already have touch-enabled displays hanging on their walls to get similar functionality?

Sure. Surface Hub is semi-unique today because it’s designed to work with multiple users simultaneously, but it would be pretty easy for Microsoft to create a Windows 10 version that did this and make it available to third-parties. I would be surprised if this didn’t happen eventually.

Photo scanning

Anlong08 asks:

How’s the picture scanning coming along? Do you still recommend the bulk/batch scanner you ended up with?

I finished the actual scanning a long time ago: I burned through my entire photo collection very quickly. Yes, I very highly recommend the bulk scanner approach (and the particular scanner I did use).

The remaining issue, and this is not complete, is filing those photos away. I got all the obvious ones done, and backed up to my NAS, to OneDrive, and to Google Photos. But I still have many to try and sort through. That will take a while.

LiteOS and componentized vs. modular

AnOldAmigaUser asks:

If LiteOS is based on Windows, do you think it has any chance of being light enough? RT and S-Mode both suffered from the same maintenance requirements of regular Windows. If it is not as simple as ChromeOS, can it succeed?

Microsoft has been working to modularize—what some call “componentize”—Windows for many years. You can see the results in certain offshoots, from Windows CE (1996), which provided access to a subset of the Win32 API, to more recent efforts like Windows Phone/Mobile, Surface Hub, and HoloLens, where are/were more Store-based. (Technically, modularizing is the better term than componentizing, so I appreciate that Kevin Costa used that. But I use both terms interchangeably, as does Microsoft. Anyway…)

Making LiteOS thin/light enough isn’t the issue. It’s whether what’s left is of any value. A Chrome OS-like subset of Windows that could basically just run PWAs wouldn’t be of any use today, no matter how simple it was. One that could also run Store apps would be of more use. But this type of system failed in the past with Windows RT and S mode. They “worked,” but they weren’t popular enough and didn’t run a wide enough body of apps.

I’m not sure what Microsoft can do to land LiteOS correctly between thin/light and useful. If the Store and/or PWAs had ever taken off in a material way, such a system would make a lot of sense. But as with Windows Phone, they’re running into an apps problem. It’s all about the apps.

Best Buy

Kenneth_Burns asks:

Recently you posted about going to Best Buy to buy a keyboard. You wrote that buying one on Amazon would have meant waiting several days. That’s pretty much the only reason I visit Best Buy, to pick up an inexpensive component or peripheral that I don’t want to wait for. RadioShack used to serve the same function for me. My question is, what do you think of Best Buy these days? A couple weeks ago I went to one because I wanted a large-capacity micro SD card. I hadn’t been to Best Buy in a while, and I found the experience depressing. Not very busy on a weekend afternoon, shelves in disarray, employees who seemed both demoralized and resentful. Later that day I accidentally destroyed the micro SD card, so I went to another Best Buy the next day to replace it. The scene was similar. Did I just happen to hit two stores on two bad days, or is this typical? If it’s typical, can it be fixed? Does it matter?

I grew up in the Boston area, so our local version of Best Buy in the 1970s and 1980s was Lechmere, though I would also frequent Radio Shack, Child World, and Toys R’ Us, basically anywhere I could see and play with computers. Lechmere went out of business in the 1990s, I believe, but before that happened, I moved to Phoenix and experienced Best Buy for the first time. I loved it: It was a bigger, better Lechmere and it had almost everything I wanted, from PCs and software to audio CDs and electronics. It was the Amazon of its day.

Like many, I pretty much just use Amazon these days, and I’ve noted in the past how Best Buy seems to have fallen apart a bit. (I recall joking about a wolf dragging a child away in the PC section of a Best Buy on Windows Weekly years ago.) But since then, I’ve come to the conclusion that Best Buy is vital, that we need a place to look at and evaluate expensive large things (TVs, refrigerators) in person. And that, in many cases, including my keyboard/mouse set purchase, that we simply need something right away.

For whatever it’s worth, my couple of recent Best Buy experiences were great. The store was clean, well-lit, and the PC section, in particular, was nicely kept-up. The people were great, too, and I spoke with several between the security greeter, the pre-order area, the on-floor personnel, the customer service area, and the register. It was all good. So maybe this is a store-by-store thing.

19H2

madthinus asks:

Now that 19H2 is fully revealed, I have a simple question. Why? What is the point? Or could we make the h2 releases the service packs for the H1 releases and that be the signal for business to roll out for 24 months of support.

Right. I had the same reaction: Why? Why the A/B testing? Why the secrecy? Why the wait? Why even pretend that this is a feature update? (I do think it is about quieting support claims ahead of the Windows 7 EOL; they had to get this one right.)

It’s frustrating dealing with the Insider Program because they don’t communicate effectively. I try to remind myself they’re just marketing: It’s not like the Insider Program makes decisions about the product. They’re just trying to keep a community going and get them excited about something that is increasingly not very exciting. They’re failing.

On that note, it is very clear to me that Dona Sarkar’s claim about “16 million” Insiders is a gross exaggeration. The more I think about it, the more I am convinced that there are only about 1 million active Insiders, if not less; that number is based on Joe Belfiore’s slip about there being only 1 million downloads of the new Edge during the early preview. And that’s sad: I know that there were, at one time, several million active Insiders. Clearly, the Insider Program is losing people. It’s equally clear why.

Star Wars

StevenLayton asks:

Away from tech, did you see the latest Star Wars trailer? Any thoughts?

I’m a bit biased here: All Star Wars trailers are excellent, and Star Wars movies are likewise mostly excellent. I complained in the past about the new trilogy undermining the heroic nature of its main characters (Luke and Han) by making them run away from problems, which is something those characters would not do. But I disagree with most of the complaints about the previous movie (The Last Jedi), and it looks like the next one (The Rise of Skywalker) will continue in a similar vein. I am absolutely OK with that.

I do have some minor concerns with bringing back too many characters from the original trilogy, especially. But I’m of the mind that you can’t have too much Star Wars content. I can’t wait to see The Mandalorian either. This going to be an amazing year for Star Wars fans.