Google blocks Windows Phone YouTube app (again), for “manufactured” reasons

The good YouTube app for Windows Phone is once again causing problems. Microsoft pulled the app in May after Google complained that it didn't include ads. After working with Google, Redmond re-released the app a couple of days ago with ads this time. But Google still isn't happy, and the company has revoked the API key the app uses, thereby disabling it.

In response, Microsoft has published a lengthy blog post about the disagreements between the two companies. Entitled "The limits of Google's openness," the post calls into question Google's 2009 commitment to openness. Google claimed, in 2009, that its "future depends on the Internet staying an open system, and [Google's] advocacy of open will grow the Web for everyone—including Google."

Microsoft says that in creating the YouTube app for Windows Phone, it assumed that the same commitment to openness applied to YouTube. It has complied with Google's demands to show ads and to block access to videos where the creators have restricted distribution. These are changes that, Microsoft argues, should "bring Google new users and additional revenue."

However, Google remains unhappy. Microsoft describes five complaints made by Google. First, the advertising giant is demanding specifically that Microsoft rewrite the application to use HTML5. Microsoft doesn't elaborate on why Google has made this demand but points out that Google's own apps on iOS and Android do not use HTML5. The software company claims that this is a "manufactured" reason, invented only to ensure that the YouTube experience on Windows Phone is inferior to that on iOS and Android.

Second, Google claims that sometimes the Windows Phone app does not show the right ads. Content creators can specify various conditions on the ads that get shown, and Windows Phone apparently does not honor those conditions. Microsoft says that it honors them as best it can, but the app is subject to the constraints imposed by Google's own API.

Third, Google claims that Microsoft is not abiding by the API's terms and conditions. Microsoft says that this too is a reference to the decision not to use HTML5.

Fourth, Google is objecting to the decision to brand the application "YouTube." Although the application states clearly that it is not developed by Google, and although the old, bad YouTube app was also branded "YouTube" without complaint from Google, Google is now unhappy about the use of its name on the new app.

Finally, Google complains that the app offers a degraded experience. This is rather a peculiar claim. It offers a superior experience to the mobile website, and it offers a superior experience to the old, bad YouTube app that Google apparently didn't mind.

Until and unless a court decrees otherwise, Google is essentially free to do what it likes with YouTube. That includes making arbitrary demands (such as using HTML5, even though Google's own engineers have implicitly deemed HTML5 to be not good enough by not using it themselves) and imposing various restrictions (such as not documenting the advertising API so that third parties can comply with all the rules surrounding YouTube ads). Google is also under no obligation to honor those same demands itself.

Nonetheless, Google's behavior appears to be more than a little capricious. Other unofficial YouTube clients exist, and thus far Google appears not to have killed them off with the same vigor it has demonstrated while going after Microsoft's client.

If Microsoft's description is accurate, Google's implication that it is somehow protecting users from an inferior experience with this move is also absurd. The new application provides a YouTube experience that's meaningfully superior to any solution that Google has thus far blessed (aside from "using a different operating system entirely").

Microsoft's post closes with a statement that Redmond is happy to work with Google to address any "legitimate" concerns.

View the original article here

This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.

Leaked Windows 8.1 build gives Windows 8 the tutorials it always needed

Windows 8 required users to learn a handful of concepts to get around and perform basic tasks. When you know what those concepts are—swiping from the edges, clicking in the corners, and a few others—the operating system actually works pretty well. The problem is that it does so very little to teach those concepts. New users are often left high and dry.

Back in the days of Windows 3, Microsoft included Windows tutorials to teach basic concepts like using the mouse, double clicking, and drag-and-drop. Leaked Windows 8.1 builds show that Redmond is returning to those days: Windows 8.1 will include a range of tutorials that explain how to get around the new operating system.

As well as the new tutorials, reports state there are some additional visual cues to indicate which parts of the operating system are interactive. Windows Phone uses an ellipsis mark on its toolbars to denote that they can be tapped and expanded; some of the built-in applications in Windows 8.1 are using the same cue for the same purpose.

Whether the new tutorials will help is, of course, another matter entirely. It has been claimed that the reason Windows 8 didn't have a more thorough tutorial is simple: people don't pay attention and don't learn what is being taught, making long, detailed tutorials ineffective. The Windows 8 tutorial therefore keeps things very basic: swiping from the edge and clicking in the corner are how most actions in Windows 8 are initiated, but from that starting point, new users have to experiment on their own.

The Windows 8.1 tutorials might fare better as they're placed inside a new application, "Help + Tips," which is visible on the Start screen by default. Placing them in an app both allows the tutorials to be revisited—Windows 8's tutorial is only shown on the first log in and can't readily be replayed—and experienced at the user's own pace.

Windows 8.1 is due to be released to manufacturing some time this month. It will be a free update for Windows 8 users, installed through the Windows Store app. One might have expected this low cost and electronic delivery to mean that it would be made widely available soon after the RTM date.

Alas, Mary Jo Foley is reporting that this won't be the case, and that nobody will be able to get their hands on the update until mid October or so. This is in contrast to Windows 8's release, where MSDN subscribers and volume licensees (among others) could download the software within weeks of its RTM date rather than having to wait for its October launch.

View the original article here

This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.

Microsoft continues courting Web devs with IE 11 for Windows 7, Parallels discount

Sign up for the Ars Technica Dispatch, which delivers links to the most popular articles, journals, and multimedia features via e-mail to your inbox every week.

I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its User Agreement and Privacy Policy.

View the original article here

This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.

Microsoft/Google bring back the good YouTube Windows Phone app

Back in May, Microsoft and Google had a spat about the YouTube app for Windows Phone that Microsoft developed. The app was a fairly fully featured YouTube client, but it didn't show ads, and in its initial iteration, it allowed videos to be downloaded for viewing offline.

Microsoft updated the app to remove the download capability, but Google still wasn't happy with the lack of ads. Eventually Microsoft pulled the app entirely, replacing it with an older, simpler (mostly ad-free) client.

Recently, the two companies must have worked out their differences—the app is back.

From a cursory examination, the app seems to be almost identical to the version that was pulled—except now, it shows pre-roll ads on monetized videos, thereby making Google happy.

However, it goes one step further. Unlike the old app, the new app supports video uploads. Videos you record on the phone can be posted directly to YouTube.

Unfortunately, this comes with a big provision. Due to certain design decisions that Microsoft has made in Windows Phone, only very short videos (no more than 5MB) can be uploaded over cellular networks. Anything larger will require Wi-Fi. Worse, any video over 20MB in size will require both Wi-Fi and external power. Any video larger than 100MB won't upload at all.

This is because Microsoft is doing the upload as a background transfer. The upside to this is that it means your video will finish uploading even if you switch away from YouTube, and the upload can't quietly gobble all your data quota or run down your battery. The downside is these rather onerous size restrictions. 1080p video that I shot on a Lumia 1020 came in at about 3MB per second, so even 100MB isn't very much video.

I can understand what Microsoft is trying to achieve here—no point making you wait for an upload to complete when you could be checking Twitter instead—but in practice, this restriction severely curtails the utility of the upload feature. I hope they either revisit the platform constraints and allow more liberal background transfers or alter the YouTube app to simply not use background transfers at all. There needs to be a way to upload even long videos without using either Wi-Fi or charging the phone. It would also be good if the app could recompress videos to make them smaller, as iOS does for its built-in YouTube video sharing.

Sure, such changes might be "bad" for battery life, but the alternative leaves Windows Phone deficient relative to the competition.

The limitations weirdly leave me more frustrated with the app than I would be if it couldn't upload at all. As a YouTube watching app, it's perfectly good. It supports subscriptions and commenting and sharing videos; it integrates with the Music + Video hub. It does all the things that I expect. But the barely useful upload feature taunts me, as if it were saying, "I could let you upload this video. But I won't."

View the original article here

This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.

Review: First 8-inch Windows tablet is a device that shouldn’t exist

Enlarge / Photographs don't do justice to how bad this screen is.

My dissatisfaction with PC OEMs is something I have documented in the past. They offer a confusing array of products and tend to cut corners in the worst ways imaginable. The OEM response to Windows 8 has been to produce a wide range of machines sporting novel form factors to fit all sorts of niches, both real and imagined.

One niche that the OEMs haven't tried to fill, however, has been sub-10-inch tablets. That's not altogether surprising. Microsoft designed Windows 8 for screens of 10 inches or more, and initially the operating system's hardware requirements had a similar constraint.

That decision looked a little short-sighted after the success of tablets such as the Google Nexus 7 and the iPad mini. Accordingly, Microsoft changed the rules in March, opening the door to a range of smaller Windows tablets.

Specs at a glance: Acer Iconia W3OSWindows 8 Small Screen Touch with Office 2013 Home & StudentGPUIntel Graphics Media AcceleratorNetworking2.4GHz 802.11b/g/n, Bluetooth 4.0Battery6800 mAh, 2-cell Lithium PolymerPriceStarting at $379, $429 as reviewedOther perksFront and rear cameras, volume rocker

The Acer Iconia W3 is the first—and currently the only—8-inch Windows tablet. That attribute alone makes it in some sense noteworthy. Sadly, it's about the only thing that does.

Spec-wise, this is another Intel Clover Trail tablet, and its internals are basically the same as the devices that launched last year (such as its bigger brother, the Acer Iconia W510). This means 1.8 GHz, dual core, four thread Intel Atom Z2760 CPU, 2 GB RAM, 64 GB flash storage (which with Acer's default partitioning leaves a little over 29 GB usable), front and rear cameras, Bluetooth 4.0, and 802.11b/g/n (no 5 GHz support). There's a micro-HDMI and micro-USB port for external connectivity (a separate cable converts the micro USB port into a full-size one), along with an SD card slot. The tablet has a speaker adequate for notification sounds but little more.

Enlarge / Side view, including the annoying micro-USB port.

As a result, performance and battery life are similar to what we've seen before. The Iconia W3 comes equipped with full-blown Windows 8, unlike ARM tablets, so it can run any 32-bit Windows application—should you really want to. Clover Trail's GPU performance is such that games and other graphics-intensive programs won't run well, however.

Enlarge / Top view, showing the SD slot.

The new bits on this tablet are really the screen and the size.

Screens are important. We spend essentially all our time interacting with devices looking at screens. Cost-cutting on screens is unforgivable, as a bad screen will damage every single interaction you have with the device. This goes doubly so for tablets, where the screen works not only as an output device but also as the primary input device.

The Acer Iconia W3's screen is a standout—because it is worst-in-class. I hated every moment I used the Iconia W3, and I hated it because I hated the screen. Its color accuracy and viewing angles are both miserable (whites aren't white—they're weirdly colorful and speckled). The screen has a peculiar grainy appearance that makes it look permanently greasy. You can polish as much as you like; it will never go away. The whole effect is reminiscent in some ways of old resistive screens.

It's hard to overstate just how poor this screen is. At any reasonable tablet viewing distance, the color of the screen is uneven. The viewing angle is so narrow that at typical hand-held distances, the colors change across the width of the screen. At full arm's length the screen does finally look even, but the device is obviously unusable that way.

Acer has clearly skimped on the screen. I'm sure the panel in the W3 was quite cheap, and that may be somewhat reflected in the unit's retail price ($379 for a 32GB unit, $429 for this 64GB one—putting it at the same price as the 32GB iPad mini, which has a comparable amount of available disk space), but who cares? It doesn't matter how cheap something is if you don't want to use it at all.

This poor screen quality isn't a question of resolution, either. 1280×800 is not a tremendously high resolution, but text looks crisp enough. At 186 pixels per inch, 1280×800 feels more or less OK for this size of device.

The low resolution does, however, have one significant drawback: it disables Windows 8's side-by-side Metro multitasking, which requires a resolution of at least 1366×768. The W3's screen is 86 pixels too narrow, so the Metro environment is strictly one application at a time.

This is an unfortunate decision. The side-by-side multitasking is one of the Metro environment's most compelling features. Keeping Twitter or Messenger snapped to the side makes a lot of sense and works well. I've never used Windows 8 on a device that didn't support side-by-side Metro multitasking before, and I don't ever want to again.

Size-wise, the W3 may be small for a Windows tablet, but it's not exactly small. It's fat. The W3 is 11.4 mm thick. The iPad mini, in comparison, is 7.2 mm thick. The Iconia W3 is also heavy at 500 g; the iPad mini, in comparison, is 308 g. That makes the W3 more than 50 percent thicker and more than 50 percent heavier.

The thickness makes the lack of a full-sized USB port on the device more than a little confusing. There's certainly room for a full USB port, and a full port would be more convenient than the dongle. But for whatever reason, Acer didn't give us one.

The device itself feels solid enough, albeit plasticky. It doesn't exude quality, but it's a step or two up from the bargain basement.

The W3 also has a keyboard accessory. As is common for this kind of thing, the keyboard has no electrical connection to the tablet. It's a Bluetooth keyboard powered by a pair of AAA batteries. It has a groove along the top that can hold the tablet in both landscape and portrait orientations and a clip on the back that lets you use the keyboard as a kind of screen protector.

Enlarge / The keyboard has a basically sensible layout and a so-so feel.

The keyboard has to be manually paired to the tablet. It's more or less full-size, with a reasonable key layout. It's a typical mediocre keyboard. The feel is a little on the squishy side, lacking the crispness of, for example Microsoft's Type Cover for its Surface tablets. It's better than any on-screen keyboard, and to that extent it does its job. But it's a long way from being an actually good keyboard.

Enlarge / If this looks ungainly, it's because it is. The keyboard doesn't hold the tablet upright enough for portrait orientation to be worthwhile.

The groove does hold the tablet up, and on a level surface the unit doesn't topple over, but it's not as satisfactory as some of the hinged keyboard/docks we've seen on other devices. Tilt the base while carrying it or using it on your lap and the tablet is liable to fall out.

Enlarge / Docking the tablet into the keyboard. It protects the screen, sure, but I worry I would lose keys.

View the original article here

This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.

Rumored bright red Nokia Windows RT tablet pictured

Sign up for the Ars Technica Dispatch, which delivers links to the most popular articles, journals, and multimedia features via e-mail to your inbox every week.

I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its User Agreement and Privacy Policy.

View the original article here

This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.

Windows 8 passes Vista at last, as IE10 growth slows

Sign up for the Ars Technica Dispatch, which delivers links to the most popular articles, journals, and multimedia features via e-mail to your inbox every week.

I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its User Agreement and Privacy Policy.

View the original article here

This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.

Windows 8.1 shipping, online and physically, on October 18th

Sign up for the Ars Technica Dispatch, which delivers links to the most popular articles, journals, and multimedia features via e-mail to your inbox every week.

I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its User Agreement and Privacy Policy.

View the original article here

This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.