Latest Windows 10 preview spruces up Cortana, Edge browser
New features and enhancements and no significant bugs in the new build are good signs ahead of the official July 29 release of Windows 10.
Microsoft has released a new preview build of Windows 10 with just one month left before the operating system's official launch.
Released on Monday, Build 10158 offers updates to the Cortana voice assistant and the Edge Web browser. It also stirs in a few refinements to the Start menu and other areas of the interface. But perhaps most promising is that there are no "significant known issues," aka no major bugs in this latest build -- a good thing if Microsoft is to meet its July 29 launch deadline.
Since October 2014, Microsoft has been releasing preview builds of Windows 10 on a fairly regular basis. Aimed at testers who join the Windows Insider program, the builds have been designed to elicit feedback on each new one so Microsoft can continue to refine the OS and resolve any problems. Most of the previous builds have introduced various bugs. But at some point, any major bugs have to stop popping up so the version of Windows 10 released in another month is stable and reliable. Microsoft is counting heavily on Windows 10 to erase the stigma of Windows 8, so the new OS has to kick off without a hitch.
So what's new and improved in the latest build? Gabe Aul, the head of the Windows Insider Program, revealed the details in a blog posted Monday.
In April, Microsoft introduced the new Edge browser, formerly known as Project Spartan, as a sleeker, faster alternative to the aging Internet Explorer. The new build refines Edge with a new home button, the ability to import your favorites from other browsers, new options to change the Start page and Tab pages and support for managing your website passwords.
The Cortana voice assistant also sports a few enhancements. The Cortana Notebook, which stores key settings and options, is in its final stage, according to Aul. Cortana can now track your air flights by alerting you when you receive emails with flight information. Alerts for going to work, coming home and heading to the airport also are available. And you can tell Cortana to send an email in one simple command by speaking the name of your recipient, the subject and the body of your message one after the other.
Organizations that use Microsoft's Office 365 can now test out Cortana integration with the Office suite. After connecting with Office 365, the voice assistant can alert you to meetings, learn about your fellow co-workers and remind you of your schedule.
You'll also find some fine-tuning to the Start menu and other sections of the Windows 10 interface. Aul says the build includes a lot of bug fixes for Continuum, the feature that can detect whether you're using a PC, tablet or hybrid device and automatically change the layout accordingly. On the Start menu, you can now swipe up on the left side to access All Apps. You can also click on a specific letter to see all apps that start with the letter. And the Taskbar will now flash in orange if some app pinned on it needs your attention.
And as for any bugs?
"We don't have any significant known issues for this build worth noting in the blog post but we are servicing several issues so make sure you check Windows Update for those," Aul said.
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Why Apple Music's most playful feature may be its most crucial one
"Siri, play the top song from 1982." Apple Music's silliest element sets the new $10 subscription service apart from the pack -- but will it get you to pay?
Apple is late to the subscription music party, but it is bringing Siri along to have a little fun.
On Tuesday, the electronics giant will launch Apple Music, its long-anticipated foray into the burgeoning world of tunes available to stream for a $10-a-month subscription. Similar to rivals such as Spotify, Tidal, Rdio and Rhapsody, the service will offer tens of millions of tracks to play on demand and collections of tunes tailored to your personal tastes.
Unlike those other services, Apple adds the element of voice commands with its Siri virtual assistant. Voice commands like "play the top 10 alternative songs now" and "play the top song from 1982" will automatically retrieve those tracks.
Listeners who experiment with Siri's chops as their personal music helper may find it to be the most playful part of Apple Music. Asking it to play the No. 1 song on the day you were born or the most popular song on the soundtrack to your favorite movie can be a fun rabbit hole to tumble down. But it's more important than just party tricks: Most subscription music services offer the same fundamental proposition, and a unique element like Siri may help Apple Music stand apart. But will it be enough to get people to switch from Spotify or realize that music is something worth $120 a year?
It's important for Apple to get consumers to answer yes. The popularity of the subscription format is new but growing quickly. Worldwide revenue from digital subscriptions jumped 39 percent last year while physical sales and downloads both dropped about 8 percent, and in the last four years the number of paying subscribers has increased more than fivefold to 41 million, according to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, a global trade group for the music business.
The same core service
As much as subscription music services like to play up what they do differently than their rivals, there is little variation between them.
"Services are fairly similar along a lot of the core dimensions," said Andrew Lipsman, vice president of marketing and insights at researcher ComScore.
The music catalog doesn't really matter. Subscription music services including Spotify, Rdio, Rhapsody and Apple Music all tout catalogs of tens of millions of songs. Though some, like Jay Z's Tidal, like to highlight their access to exclusive tracks from hot artists, the presence or absence of certain artists or songs doesn't appear to matter much to consumers.
Take the example of Spotify and Taylor Swift. The pop star pulled her catalog off the Sweden-based music service in November in protest over payment standards. The period without the catalog of last year's biggest-selling artist was also when Spotify had its biggest growth spurt: it doubled its paying members to 20 million in about a year, and the majority of those additional 10 million subscribers joined after Swift's music went missing.
Curation doesn't really matter -- or rather, its something that every other service already offers in its own way. Apple Music was built upon a philosophy of human oversight to music recommendation that was a core tenet of Beats Music, and Beats Music had only 250,000 members by the time Apple agreed to buy it. Virtually all subscription music services make tailored music recommendations based on your past song choices, and many -- such as Google Play Music and Rhapsody -- have playlists finessed by music experts in some way.
And price doesn't really matter -- or rather, it has been taken out of the equation. The recording industry has held all services to the same $10 a month price for an all-you-can-eat, play-just-what-you-want subscription, and Apple Music is no different.
However, product features may start to matter more.
"Until relatively recently, there had not been a lot of marquee innovation in the subscription music space, in the features of the product," said Dan Cryan, analyst with IHS. With Spotify's introduction of an element that matches the beats per minute in the song to the cadence of your running, and with Apple integrating Siri, "we are starting to see more difference and some innovation on the user experience," he said.
What Apple is doing differently
Apple Music has three main features that set it apart from rival services.
One is Beats 1, a 24-hour live radio station. The other major streaming music services stick with what's known as asynchronous, tailored radio -- that is, the hip-hop station you play on Pandora will be different than the hip-hop station I'm listening to at the same time. Beats 1 will play the same music, with the same DJ commentary and curation, at the same time for everyone worldwide.
The second is Connect. The section lets artists share lyrics, backstage photos, songs and videos directly with fans and get their feedback. Musicians and fans can interact -- listeners can comment and artists can respond, plus anything posted is shareable on Messages, Facebook, Twitter and email. Though other subscription services let artists use the platforms to reach fans, Connect is the most elaborate and dedicated platform so far.
The last is Siri integration. It's more consumer-focused than Connect, which holds the most appeal for artists as a way to reach fans, and it's more engaging than Beats 1, which is designed to be something you can play and just lean back to hear for a while.
Music voice commands aren't unique to Apple Music. Google Now, the voice recognition element to Google's Android mobile operating system, allows users to perform simple commands like playing the specific song or pausing a track, but won't respond to more conversational requests like "play the song from the movie 'Boyhood.'"
Amazon introduced its voice-activated, Internet-connected wireless speaker Echo last year, and it is shipping the device to consumers widely starting next month. It can play specific songs from the Prime Music service that is part of Amazon's $99-a-year membership program, and it will spin up stations you've created on Pandora or iHeart Radio if you link an account.
But Siri's range of commands appear to be more sophisticated. And Echo stays in your home, while Siri follows you on your smartphone. That's a key point since streaming music services routinely report that most of their listening is on mobile devices.
Getting better use out of Siri
"Inertia can be a powerful force," said Lipsman. An element like voice command may not be sufficient to convince people who already subscribe elsewhere to switch or persuade people who don't see value in a $10-a-month membership that it's a good deal. "Even if something [like Siri] presents a new utility, is it a great enough utility to overcome inertia? It might just take some time to make that habit."
In that respect, a three-month free trial works in Apple's -- and Siri's -- favor. Letting people experiment with the service, and Siri integration may give them the opportunity to make it part of their routine. Also working in Apple's favor: iPhone owners already use Siri for other simple tasks. About 42 percent of iPhone owners turn to Siri at least once a month, according to ComScore.
"People are already using Siri, people have already used Apple for music," said Lipsman. "That may reduce the friction of making that move" to subscribe.
However, the voice command element of Apple Music isn't promoted consistently in the app itself. Unless an iPhone owner watched the demonstration of Apple Music earlier this month at the company's keynote presentation at a developers' conference, and unless the company's tutorials for the service remind listeners how Siri can help, the voice commands could be overlooked.
"Seamless integration is something that Apple is very good at," said Dan Cryan, analyst with IHS. "Once people realize they can do something with Siri, like set a timer, it becomes pretty intuitive pretty fast."
While the first challenge is to ensure that consumers use Siri in Apple Music, the bigger challenge is that Siri does what it should.
"Like everything else, user experience will determine the ultimate fate of this feature. If the voice commands are not recognized, it could lead to frustration," Current Analysis senior analyst Deepa Karthikeyan said, adding she doubted someone will switch from an existing music service provider just for the voice feature.
Apple's demo of the service experienced a gaffe of this kind. During the presentation at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference, Apple executive Eddy Cue asked Siri to "play the song from 'Selma,'" aiming for the popular tune on the soundtrack to the film about civil rights marches in the 1960s. Instead, Siri thought Cue wanted to hear "Selene" by Imagine Dragons. (On its second try, Siri correctly retrieved "Glory" by Common and John Legend.)
Generally, virtual assistant and voice recognition capabilities have dramatically improved in the last few years, said Van Baker, a Gartner analyst. "That is going to be much more important going forward, as we move closer to conversational interactions with devices rather than having to pull them out and touch a button."
Music services with a head start on voice commands may have an advantage as consumer interaction with devices gravitates more toward conversation, he said.
And Apple has other advantages besides Siri -- its stockpile of more than 800 million iTunes accounts makes it easier for people to subscribe because the company already has payment details that consumers won't need to enter anew. Apple Music will be an automatic part of the Music app on iPhones and iPads, which have a massive base of users.
Will those factors help Apple Music make some noise, or will voice commands? It's a good question to ask Siri: "Play something that will convince me to pay Apple $10 a month?"
We'll have to see tomorrow what she has to say.
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Marvel's Contest of Champions leaps from video game to comic book
The venerable comic book maker has inspired movies, television shows and video games. Now, for the first time, the trend is working in reverse.
When Marvel Comics was founded in 1939, the very idea of a video game was so foreign that even its futuristic thinkers couldn't imagine such a thing.
Now 76 years later, the company will launch its first comic inspired by one.
Marvel, owned by Walt Disney, is launching a comic series this October built around Contest of Champions, a video game co-created with San Francisco-based Kabam. The comic will follow the story line of popular superheroes, like the military superhero Captain America and the web-slinging Spider-Man, who are kidnapped and forced to fight by a mysterious figure known as the Collector.
This is a first for Disney's Marvel division, whose comic books have become the driving force behind some of the most popular movies and TV shows ever made, including "The Avengers," "Spider-Man" and "X-Men."
That inspiration has been a one-way street: the comics have always led to stories for other media, and never ceded control of their story lines -- until now.
"On the comic book side, this book has to be as good and bar-shattering as the game," said Bill Rosemann, creative director at Marvel's games group. "We have to define what a comic is based on a game."
The move not only recognizes the video game industry's story-telling prowess and growing influence, it could lead to a shift in the way comics are written. While Marvel will still rely on comic writers for its Contest of Champions, video game makers could offer up new story lines, drawn with a potentially different artistic perspective. Perhaps most important, the effort will give readers and gamers a deeper connection with the stories' characters, participating in the game's side-plots while reading their favorite characters' thoughts and motivations in the comic.
"Video games have really become an important storytelling medium for us," said Peter Phillips, head of Marvel's interactive and digital media group, who added the company has rallied its television, movies, comics and games groups together for this and other initiatives. "We've gotten smarter as an organization."
The dreaded Street Fighter
You wouldn't be the first to think a video game could translate to stories told in other media. Unfortunately, it's rarely worked.
The film industry, for example, has a long history of failure -- the plots were too shallow, too hokey or too weird.
Take the "Super Mario Bros." movie, released in 1993, which bore only a passing semblance to the game. The adventures of the two plumbers to rescue a princess helped turn Nintendo into one of the world's largest video game makers and created characters so popular that kids often recognized them before they did Mickey Mouse. But the movie was a flop, pulling in only half its projected budget in box office receipts, according to Box Office Mojo. And no wonder: The film revolved around a weird plot entirely different from the games, featuring dinosaurs evolved into human-looking animals in an alternate dimension.
"This movie wasn't imagined correctly at the outset," said famed movie reviewer Roger Ebert at the time. "What this movie shows is that it's a lot harder to make a high-tech movie than you would think."He gave it a "thumbs down," and put it on his and Gene Siskel's list of "worst movies of 1993."
"Street Fighter," released a year later, didn't do much better. That film was based on a popular fighting game of the same name that was often played in arcades. The New York Times called the movie "a dreary, overstuffed hodgepodge of poorly edited martial arts sequences and often unintelligible dialogue."
While there have been exceptions (notably "Lara Croft," based on the Tomb Raider adventure games) most comics, movies and TV shows based on video games have been largely forgettable.
That's changing, thanks in part to games' increasingly intricate plots. Nearly every major video game inspires a one-off comic book now. And Ubisoft, Activision Blizzard and other game makers are working with Hollywood to bring their stories to the silver screen.
Books have also sold well. Novels based on Microsoft's Halo space-age shooting games have helped solidify the series as one of the most successful ever made. The franchise has inspired more than a dozen books and comic book series spanning an epic and still-expanding story line.
Others, including Ubisoft's epic Assassin's Creed good-vs-evil games, for example, have also been popular with fans. They tell additional stories of the game's central battles between the Assassins and the Templars, two groups whose generations of soldiers seek out alien technology that has the potential to control the planet.
"Lots of people are creating long and meaningful relationships with the characters and environments in these games," said Laurent Detoc, president of Ubisoft's North American business. Ubisoft this month said Titan Comics will publish books based on Assassin's Creed.
Even DC Comics, creator of characters such as Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman, is getting in on the trend. It now offers a comic series for the fighting game, Injustice: Gods Among Us. The story line includes a battle between Batman and Superman after the Man of Steel is tricked into killing his love interest Lois Lane and destroying the city of Metropolis.
Marvel's strategy with the "Contest of Champions" comics is to tell stories that include what's happening to heroes when they aren't fighting in the game. The original idea for "Contest of Champions" began as a three-issue comic in 1982. Two teams of super heroes fought as pawns in a competition between two godlike characters. Marvel and Kabam reimagined the competition 33 years later; the heroes held hostage and forced to fight one another.
Coming up with the comic
So how do you translate a fighting game into a real story, with characters and a plot? That challenge highlights the creativity that can go into these new efforts.
"Where are the trapped heroes stored when they aren't fighting?" wondered Al Ewing, lead writer for the comic. And if they're in a prison, do they try to escape?
Such intricate story lines will create fertile storytelling ground for the comic, said Ewing. "As long as you go in thinking I 'want to make the best comic I can make,' you can't go wrong."
New comic book characters -- who will also be added gradually to the game -- will enhance the story. One such character is Guillotine, a superhero whose powers draw from a magic sword handed down in her family since the French Revolution.
Kabam helped Marvel conceive of the character, creating sketches and offering ideas for different traits, like a skull affixed to Guillotine's magic sword that talks to her.
The artists at Kabam and Marvel were able to collaborate in part because they rely on similar tools. Paco Medina, the artist drawing the comic, has been creating characters with 3D models for the past few years as his characters move into other types of media. Working with video game makers felt natural as a result, he said.
That sort of transition is intentional. Marvel has been pushing its teams to create stories that interlock across games, movies, TV and comics in a way that lets fans experience an epic yet detailed set of stories, said Marvel's Phillips. "We do everything we can to make it authentic and real," he said.
The signs point to a successful translation across media, but there are no guarantees. Marvel has never before based a comic on a video game -- even though that video game was itself inspired by a comic published three decades ago.
The comic will be released in October.
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