Time to move on from Windows XP

Just a reminder that we're now inside 500 days until the end of support for Windows XP. I'm sure I don't need to go into the reasons why your organisation doesn't want to be running an OS that Microsoft doesn't support anymore. If you aren't ready to jump to Windows 8, then Windows 7 is a perfectly good step up from XP.

Whatever you decide to upgrade to, just make sure you do it before 8th April 2014.

Win8/RT Tip: Make your Picture Password harder to guess

One of the nice things that Microsoft have done in Windows 8 and RT for people using a touchscreen, like on the Surface, is provide a new way of signing in with a Picture Password. They expain in a comprehensive post how secure it is, but in practice I believe that many users will reduce the level of security by too closely following Microsoft's examples.

What are the chances that a large percentage of Picture Password users select an image of family members or pets, or similar and then create their three gestures by circling heads and drawing dots on, or lines between, noses? With no scientific basis other than the experience I've had of seeing how bad most people are at selecting passwords, I'm going to say it's going to be a significant number.

My solution is actually pretty simple and effective from both an aesthetic and security perspective.

Don't use a single photograph, but instead select 6-10 images of your chosen subjects and then use Microsoft's free Photo Gallery software to create a collage with far more points of interest and more potential points to use in your gestures.

In this case, I'm selecting a few pictures of my son: 

You then go to the Create menu and select Auto Collage (I choose Large Landscape in case I also want to use it as desktop or lockscreen wallpaper).

At this point you'll be asked to name the file that's going to be produced. Now, because it's an auto collage, you don't get any say over the positioning or order of the images so you might not like the result first time round. I removed one of the images from the selection and then created a second collage:

Now, just think of the different number of things that I could circle, or draw points or lines on, in that image. Yet it's still personal to me and it'll be easy for me to remember my own gestures.

I think the images produced by this method make for a really nice looking and more complex picture to use for Picture Password. You could obviously use a different method to produce your own collage where you take more control of it, but I was going for free and easy here.

That said, if you're set on a less complex single image for some reason, please consider how easy your gestures might be to guess. If they were easy for you to think up, they could be pretty easy for someone else to guess in five attempts if they manage to get hold of your device, so put at least one of your gestures in an area of the image that lacks an obvious point of interest.

HTC Windows Phone 8X - Early Impressions

Last week I upgraded from a Nokia Lumia 800 running Windows Phone 7.5 to the HTC Windows Phone 8X running Windows Phone 8. I'm not going to write a full review of the hardware or the OS, but I am going to brain-dump some initial thoughts on them both. 

The Pros:

• Great screen - increased resolution really helps.
• Very responsive. Much better performance than Windows Phone 7. Could be the hardware or the OS, probably both.
• Changes to the home screen are good - I'm very happy with the increased data density.
• Camera is very decent (I don't need it to be a DSLR replacement).
• Audio is great. The speaker is loud and clear; Beats Audio makes my (Bose) headphones sound better than ever!
• The phone looks and feels much slimmer than it actually is. It's also light enough that it practically disappears in a jean pocket.
• Screenshots! This is a big deal for those of us who want to document and write about Windows Phone.
• You can move content between WP8 and a Windows RT tablet. That might not help many people, but you can't transfer content directly to an iPhone from an iPad.
• Kid's Corner works very well (although I did experience a bug which made it still ask for my PIN to unlock the phone the first time I set it up).

The Cons are mostly to do with Windows Phone 8, rather than the 8X hardware, so I'll get my one gripe with that out of the way first:

• The case isn't tight enough around the screen - there's a thin gap at the top of the screen big enough to get dust and lint trapped. That's going to constantly annoy me (although not a lot - it's very much a 1st world problem).
• Podcast support is a disaster. It might be fine in the USA, but given that there aren't regional licensing issues with podcasts, it's totally unacceptable to leave it so completely broken for everyone else!
• Not all Windows Phone 7 apps are compatible (TuneIn Radio, for example). I don't think that has been made clear.
• Auto-updating of the lockscreen with Bing images doesn't seem to be working for me (it does work with the HTC option of displaying the weather). UPDATE: It does work, but it's around 12 hours later than updates from the Bing My Lockscreen app on my desktop and Surface.
• I'd like even more live tile sizes (2x1, for example).
• Data Sense was much-touted, but isn't there yet, and maybe it never will be on your carrier.

So basically the one thing that annoys me the most about Windows Phone 8 is the totally abysmal podcast support.  It wasn't wonderful in Windows Phone 7 outside the USA, where you had to sync via Zune before you could subscribe to over-the-air updates on the device, and you could only browse the podcast directory in Zune if you used a registry hack. That said, even if the only thing we could do was enter the address of an RSS feed, that would be better than what we have today in WP8.

I'm sure there are lots of people who will buy one of these phones and never care about podcasts, but for me they're really important - they're how I stay current with tech and where I get new music. I usually listen to upwards for four a week while I'm commuting.

On Windows Phone 8, if you open up "music + videos" and then "podcasts", you get a helpful message suggesting that you add some from the Store, except that there aren't any podcasts in my Store!

Now, I fully understand why there are regional differences in marketplaces for music, video, books, even some apps. There are content distribution agreements that need to be signed with different regional organisations. That's fine. It absolutely doesn't apply to podcasts!

The podcast directory that Microsoft maintains for its US customers is just as valid for customers in the UK, India, Guatemala and everywhere else. I'm sure they'd say that they want to localise the experience so that it highlights podcasts in the right language or of greater local interest (football vs football, etc). Nobody wants to wait for that, especially since they could've done it in the last two years if they were going to. If the option is the US podcast store or nothing, then guess what - the most popular podcasts in the world are from the US and are consumed worldwide, so we'd rather have the ability to subscribe to them.

Maybe it's just that on-demand digital media isn't the future. Oh… hang on a minute…!

PowerShell Help Update

When PowerShell version 3 arrived, the news that there wouldn't be any built-in help was initially met by a load of groans, since it had been one of the first things that anyone would tell you to look at when you're trying to learn PowerShell. Since then, Microsoft has explained the problems with in-the-box help, and I think that most people have come round to thinking that updateable help is, on balance, the better option.

This week we're seeing the real-world benefits of that with the first significant update to the help. If you run PowerShell as administrator and run Update-Help, you're going to get new content for the PowerShell core and workflow help. There's updated help content for the cmdlets and 112 About topics.

The update only applies to the en-US culture so far. Expect it to be localised to other cultures before too long.

Windows 8 Arrives

Today marks general availability for Microsoft's Windows 8 and also their Surface tablet running Windows RT. I've been using Windows 8 for some time and I do like it, but there is a learning curve and it does take a bit of getting used to. I just wanted to post a couple of links to help people get up to speed as quickly as possible...

Firstly, for the absolute beginner, we have Joanna Stern's 8 Things You Need to Know About Using Windows 8 on ABC News. Joanna does a good job of going throught the most important things you need to get started in a video that runs under 4 minutes.

One additional tip from me - to make the Start screen really pop by bringing those tiles to life, you're going to have to launch some of the apps first. Jump into Weather, News and Sport, then back to the Start screen and see the difference.

The Microsoft Windows site has some How-To guides to particular features on it's Get to know Windows page and if you find yourself stuck, you can get help from the Support page.

IT Pros, you can get a bit more in-depth info from the Windows 8 Jump Start on TechNet.

Not enough info? Got an insatiable desire for Windows 8 knowledge? O'Reilly have a couple of free webcasts coming up:
8+ Features You Will Love to Use in Windows 8 on the 31st October
Getting Started with Windows 8 on the 1st November

Incidentally, Microsoft added something like a thousand new apps to the Windows Store in the last 24 hours. Skype is now there, as is Lync. In addidion to those, I recommend you add OneNote to your Windows 8 or RT machine - it's my favourite Office app and you're getting it here for free with SkyDrive synching. If you want something to really show off how good apps can look on Windows 8/RT, then you should get the beautiful Cocktail Flow app.

UPDATE: Thanks to Peter Kriegel for posting in the comments regarding a free ebook from MS Press - Introducing Windows 8: An Overview for IT Professionals.