Dolby Laboratories warned shareholders last August that its audio/DVD playback technologies were unlikely to be incorporated into Windows 8. It looks like the Windows client team has had a change of heart. Dolby today announced that its Dolby Digital Plus technology would be part of the Windows 8 client releases. Dolby's Digital Plus is built into Windows 7 Home Premium, Professional, and Ultimate, according to Dolby's Web site.
Microsoft's perpetually confusing Windows Live branding is about to get a long-overdue clean up. Microsoft is doing away with the Windows Live brand, according to a May 2 post on the Building Windows 8 blog. The Windows Live Essentials name for the collection of Windows add-ons - including Messenger, Photo Gallery, Movie Maker, Writer, Live Mesh and Family Safety - is going away. Other Windows Live services which weren't part of Live Essentials - like Hotmail and SkyDrive - also are getting simpler names.
Windows Phone OS may not have the market share or the apps, but one thing Jessica Dolcour will say is that Microsoft is finally going after developers with more vigor. This time it's to the tune of a developer summit on June 21 and 22. Microsoft is serious about closing the gap separating its Windows Phone application Marketplace from Android's Google Play and iPhone's App Store. The San Francisco location couldn't be a better spot to tap into Silicon Valley's software-development mojo.
Microsoft has released a fixed version of its Service Pack 2 update for Office 2011. The update was originally on April 12 and offered a number of improvements for Microsoft's Outlook e-mail client; however, soon after its release a number of people found that the update had caused corruption in their identity databases. This resulted in the suite's programs not opening correctly.
Microsoft will release a "release preview" version of Windows 8 in the first week of June, the company announced last night. Microsoft President Steven Sinofsky made the announcement during an on-stage appearance at Japan's Windows 8 Dev Days and more broadly on the Build Windows 8 Twitter feed.
Microsoft announced yesterday that Windows Server "8" will be named Windows Server 2012 when it is released later this year. Dubbed as a "cloud-optimized" operating system, Windows Server 2012 is currently in the beta testing stage and an additional Release Candidate version is expected around June.
Those hoping for fewer Windows editions than in previous versions, your prayers have been answered. Sort of…. It’s official as of yesterday, April 16: Windows 8 is the name for the next version of x86/64 edition of Windows. And there will be four SKUs only. According to a blog post on the Windows Team Blog, there will be two editions of Windows 8 for x86/64 processors: Windows 8 and Windows 8 Pro.
Vista, the problem-plagued operating system that never really took hold among users, will exit mainstream support on Tuesday, April 10. According to Microsoft, Office 2007 left mainstream support yesterday. In a product's extended support phrase, Microsoft continues to provide security patches to all users, but offers other fixes - such as reliability and stability updates - only to organizations that have signed support contracts with the company.
While Windows 8 already supports development using a number of programming languages, Microsoft wants developers to bring even more to the new Windows runtime (WinRT) at the heart of the next version of Windows. Martyn Lovell, Development Manager for the WinRT team, made the pitch for more language support for Windows 8 on April 3, during his Lang.Next conference session at Microsoft.