A couple of years ago, Microsoft acquired Mobile Data Labs, the company behind the mileage-tracking app MileIQ. This week, the team has quietly released a new mobile app called Spend, which purpose is to help users tracking expenses (via Techcrunch).

According to the App Store description, the new iOS app has been put under the Microsoft Garage banner, but it already looks pretty solid and currently enjoys a 5 stars rating on the App Store. The app is targeting professionals needing to track business expenses for reimbursements or taxes, and Spend can do that intelligently.

First of all, the app can sync purchases from cards and bank accounts, and let users classify them as business or personal, add notes or tags to purchases, and it’s also possible to take pictures of receipts to attach them to expenses. In addition to automatic expense tracking, Spend can also give users customizable summaries at a chosen frequency.

Spend is only available on iOS for now, but a web dashboard is also available where you can edit purchases and more. “This is an early version of the service, so you can expect rapid improvements, updates and some changes down the road,” the team wrote in a blog post. You can download Spend from the download link below.

The app was not found in the store. ?

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The last hurdle standing between Microsoft and its purchase of the largest open source repository community to-date has finally been removed.

According to a report from Reuters, the European Commission has officially approved of the Microsoft and GitHub purchase without any conditions and says the purchase would not damage competition in the sector.

“The Commission found that the combination of Microsoft and GitHub’s activities on these markets would raise no competition concerns because the merged entity would continue to face significant competition from other players on both markets.”

The EU’s rather complimentary approval comes just a few days ahead of Microsoft’s latest quarterly earnings report where we can be sure to hear of early plans incorporating the purchase into one of many business sectors the company reports on. Another take away from the unconditional nature of the EU’s approval speaks to the structural and principal shift of Microsoft’s business goals.

While the deal between Microsoft and GitHub may have been approved years prior, it seems reasonable to assume that based the history the EU and Microsoft have, the commission may have taken a much longer look at the purchase on paper and perhaps even added conditions in places it thought Microsoft of old might be tempted to step over.

Fortunately for Microsoft, the $7.5 billion acquisition was seen as having little undermining power to the open nature of GitHub, perhaps, due in part to Microsoft’s war chest of open source contributions.

Nevertheless, GitHub will become a business under the Microsoft umbrella of offerings and company CEO Satya Nadella says the company is eager to continue running its new purchase as an independent open source solution.

“We are committed to being stewards of the GitHub community, which will retain its developer-first ethos, operate independently and remain an open platform. We will always listen to developer feedback and invest in both fundamentals and new capabilities.”

It will be interesting to see what moves Microsoft makes with GitHub in the future to help expand its developer reach as well as add to its revenue bottom line.

The Meltdown and Spectre CPU vulnerabilities took the industry by storm this year, forcing Microsoft and its partners to collaborate to patch the security flaws. As you may know, the different mitigations caused a decrease in system performance, especially on older systems.

At the time, Microsoft said that slowdowns should be pretty minor on Windows 10 PCs powered by Skylake, Kabylake or newer CPUs, but Microsoft has recently made some changes to the Windows Kernel so that the Spectre mitigations now have a negligible impact on performance. This all thanks to the new “Retpoline kernel,” which according to Mehmet Iyigun
from the Windows/Azure Kernel Team as already been enabled in the latest 19H1 Insider builds for Fast and Skip Ahead Insiders (via MSPoweruser).

Yes, we have enabled retpoline by default in our 19H1 flights along with what we call "import optimization" to further reduce perf impact due to indirect calls in kernel-mode. Combined, these reduce the perf impact of Spectre v2 mitigations to noise-level for most scenarios. https://t.co/CPlYeryV9K

— Mehmet Iyigun (@mamyun) October 18, 2018

This is certainly good news for consumers with older PCs which were more impacted by performance slowdowns. The Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities were definitely a major headache for chip makers this year, and Intel was quick to announce that its latest Xeon and 8th gen Core CPUs would have built-in protections against these security flaws. We’re glad to see that Microsoft is also doing its part of the job on the software front, and in case you missed it, the company kicked off a new series of technical articles about Windows this week with a first post about the Windows Kernel.

In recent years, we’ve seen many video game publishers release remastered versions of classic games for current-gen consoles, but the release of the Xbox One X last year seemed to have changed things a bit. There are already many Xbox One games that have received special enhancements for the Xbox One X, but a growing number of Xbox 360 games and original Xbox have been getting a similar treatment this year.

Indeed, four Valve games that were already backward compatible on the Xbox One are now enhanced for the Xbox One X: these are the Half-Life 2: The Orange Box bundle, Portal: Still Alive, Left 4 Dead and its sequel Left 4 Dead 2. All these games are considered classics, and you can enjoy a 9X resolution bump and better textures on the Xbox One X.

“The power of Xbox One X enables the Xbox 360 emulator to showcase the very best version possible with the existing assets—all without touching the game code,” explained Xbox’s Will Tuttle. In addition to the higher resolution, all these games should also provide a smoother experience with less FPS drops on the Xbox One X.

As of today, there are now 21 Xbox One X Enhanced Xbox 360 titles including Assassin’s Creed, Fable Anniversary, Fallout 3, The Witcher 2, or Red Dead Redemption. Microsoft oftens markets the Xbox One X as “the best console to play the games of the past, present, and future,” and this has never been so true.

Microsoft has signed a deal with TransAlta Renewables to invest in environmentally friendly wind energy. As part of the investment, the Redmond giant will make a fifteen-year purchase of 90 megawatts of the power generated from the new facility, which will be located in Hector Township, Pennsylvania. Brian Janous, Microsoft’s General Manager of Energy and Sustainability, stated that,

“Working with companies like TransAlta to bring new projects online, especially wind projects in states outside the Wind Belt, is good for our business, the community and the clean energy economy. We’re pleased to enter a new state in the PJM region and take another step toward our goal of enabling a clean energy future for everyone.”

The company has made numerous other investments into cleaner energy in the past, including their 37-megawatt purchase of wind energy from GE in Ireland, and a whopping 237-megawatt purchase the company made a couple years back. Microsoft seems to have always been a big supporter in wind energy, because afterall, you can’t say Windows without “wind,” can you?

Do you think Microsoft’s investments in cleaner energy will entice other organizations and individuals to commit to going cleaner as well? Feel free to share your thought down below.

In the wake of a highly publicized fumble of a Windows 10 Update this fall, Microsoft’s Windows team is going back a trusted move from their playbook of old it seems.

Recently announced, the Windows team is unveiling its Windows Internals Series and is starting off the serial with a deep dive into the development of the One Windows Kernel.

I mentioned that the Windows team is using a familiar move with its announcement of the Windows Internals Series as it seems very reminiscent to an initiative the team used a couple of years ago where they published posts in what is now called the Feedback Hub, about the people behind the Windows 10 experience.

According to introductory post on the Windows Insider blog,

One of the pieces of feedback we regularly hear is that our fans want more detailed and technical articles diving deep into the behind-the-scenes on the development of the Windows OS. To address this feedback, we’re officially kicking off the Windows Internals series of articles today. Some of these articles will be new content published here on our Windows Insider website while others might be links to other blog posts from various teams talking about their work in Windows. The goal is to publish these articles whenever we can but there isn’t a set schedule. Sometimes we may have multiple articles within a single week and sometimes it might be a week or two between new articles. I’m keeping a list of topics in Microsoft To-Do and if you have any suggestions, feel free to tweet them my way!

The deep dive on the One Windows Kernel is published by Principal Group Program Manager Hari Pulapaka, who covers the flexibility and scale at which the Window Kernel operates. Despite the Windows team offering a mind-numbing amount of Stock Keeping Units or SKUs, the way the Windows Kernel operates among those different configurations remains relatively unchanged. The engineering development of such a flexible core is a rather impressive topic of discussion.

As with Windows CE, the One Windows Kernel is being plopped onto a multitude of devices such as laptops, game consoles, ATM machines, and countless IoT devices. Pulapaka covers the evolution of Microsoft’s highly touted One Windows Kernel and how it manages to scale to most architectures.

While this particular first piece of the Windows Internals Series does not directly tackle the feedback and development chain of Insider communication, it’s perhaps safe to say over the course of the series, Insiders will get a bit more clarity on how complex Windows development actually can be, and how somethings can be missed.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella hauled in a massive paycheck for the fiscal year 2018 which was recently revealed in Microsoft’s Annual Proxy Statement after a year where several milestones were met by different Microsoft businesses. Salary, stock awards and cash bonuses together brought home a whopping $25.84 million in total for Nadella, though in stock awards he hasn’t beaten Bill Gates’ records just yet.

This year Microsoft stock went over the $100 per share mark which made $100 billion in revenue for investors.

Despite a significant culture change at Microsoft that was arguably spurred by Nadella, the company still finds itself in a lawsuit for gender discrimination. Nadella has acknowledged this and is looking to address similar issues within the company.

We remain committed to increasing diversity and making sure that Microsoft is a workplace where everyone has an equal opportunity to succeed. The judge made the right decision that this case should not be a class action.

The proxy document also displays for the first time how Nadella’s compensation compares to the median employee at Microsoft, this is thanks to the new ruling where CEO’s have to disclose pay ratios.

The median employee at Microsoft makes roughly $167,689 in compensation which translates to 154:1 when compared to Nadella.

Shareholders will have a lot to discuss this November in Bellevue at the Annual Shareholder Meeting which will start at 8am on the 28th.

The proxy statement also shows the revenue from Microsoft’s cloud business equalling $23 billion, and the company’s gaming division hitting $10 billion. Integration with independent business LinkedIn and the acquisition of GitHub should also boost Microsoft’s revenue numbers this quarter. Nadella’s evaluated performance was marked at a 130 percent grade out of 200.

Not bad.

Microsoft’s Surface Pro 6 tablet started shipping in 10 markets yesterday, and the folks over at iFixit have already published their complete teardown. Surface devices are notoriously hard to repair, and as it turns out the Surface Pro 6 is unfortunately no exception.

Except from the new 8th gen quad-core Intel processors, iFixit found very little changes compared to the Surface Pro 5. Microsoft added new heat spreaders to deal with the additional heat produced by the more powerful processor, but there’s still no active cooling system inside. The battery is also identical to the one in the Pro 5, and it’s still glued-in, just like the display. Moreover, storage on the Surface Pro 6 is non-removable, and this wasn’t the case in previous versions.

iFixit highlighted a few positive things like the use of standard screws and a compatibility with the Surface Pro 5 display, but the new tablet is still very difficult to repair. “We found the same glued-shut (dare we say disposable?) 1/10 repairability score tablet we’ve seen for the past few years. No upgradability, no USB-C, a glued-in battery with a limited life—but hey, it comes in black,” wrote iFixit.

The teardown experts have yet to publish their analysis of the Surface Laptop 2, and expectations for this one may be a little bit higher. Last year, the original Surface Laptop got a 0/10 repairability score, with iFixit calling it a “glue-filled monstrosity.” The new model apparently kept the same chassis, and we doubt Microsoft made an extra effort to improve its repairability.

As one of the lucky winners of the #Insider2Campus contest, I got the chance to visit the Microsoft Campus in Redmond last week. The tour of the campus was an amazing experience. Some of you asked how did I enter the contest, what did I have to do and what did I see while I was there? Here is the full story.

The Windows Insiders Bug Bash and Contest

The contest consisted of participating in a Bug Bash where you go through step by step quests to try out the latest features from a new major Windows 10 update before it is released to the public. Windows Insiders leave feedback for the engineers back in Redmond so they can fix and resolve problems.

The rules were:

1. You have to had been a Windows Insider by joining the program
2. Download the latest preview build during the bug bash, there was one in June and one in July.
3. Complete at least one quest in the feedback hub
4. Post at least one feedback post in the Feedback Hub for the build you just downloaded.
5. Submit a video and short brief on why your a windows fan and there was some specific criteria for this video.

Who were the other lucky winners?

What a great bunch of Windows insiders really enjoyed the week with you! @windowsinsider @SimonHess @SecurityGarden @SamueleDassatti @lunaturk @ThomasMaurer @robert_haluska @danielschbarros @simonallisonuk

— Simon Allison #WIMVP (@simonallisonuk) October 15, 2018

The Tour:  

First off we had to get our Bacon! Yes, just like the strips from the narwhal (seriously I thought something was odd, it all made sense).

Then we were taken by bus to visit each of these places throughout the week.

A Modern Workplace – A look at how Microsoft is reshaping the workplace to make it more modern with spaces that provide collaborative working without sacrificing personal space. The Modern Workplace is so you can enjoy the secure environment and can exchange ideas and conversations so the best work can be produced in a faster more agile workspace.

The Anechoic Chamber – how audio is tested on devices namely Surface and Xbox devices. The chamber has won a Guinness World Record for being so quiet. The testing of sound on devices is important when used in certain conditions in the room, so this chamber cuts out all the noise levels and the devices get a proper test for all those decibel ranges.

A peek into what our #Insiders2Campus winners are up to – checking out the anechoic chamber, the quietest place on earth, right here at Microsoft headquarters. They say it's so quiet, you can hear your own joints moving…! pic.twitter.com/B0ig3AAVWn

— Windows Insider (@windowsinsider) October 12, 2018

The Surface Lab – A look at what makes up a Surface device, I was amazed at how much thought is put into the Surface Devices, every look and feel is designed with thoughtful care and attention. They are tested for durability so when you throw it at the wall it doesn’t crumble into pieces (Please don’t try this at home).

The Microsoft Garage – Experiments are conducted here and if they are lucky enough make it on the hall of fame. Some of these experiments include FindTime, a Microsoft App which is very useful when you’re trying to find time with a co-worker or family member. These experiments are made by small teams and interns also have a chance experiment.

Touring The Garage at Microsoft HQ with winners of the #Insiders2Campus contest! The Garage is a resource for Microsoft employees to support new ideas, creative problem solving, and more. https://t.co/yUnaP6Pim2 pic.twitter.com/D34e8jMXKZ

— Windows Insider (@windowsinsider) October 12, 2018

Microsoft Treehouse – Another touch on the Modern Workplace, a new venture outdoors, where your well-being can be improved with the forces of nature. The sound and space around you is different, a more relaxing atmosphere. If you like nature then you will hear the rustling sound of a squirrel.

Envisioning Center – The home of the future, and the future of the workplace, how rapid change in the home environment and busy working lives feel like they are merging together sometimes. It is a vision of the future where technology is made easier to use and faster connectivity.

The New Modern Campus was showcased – we got chance to see the new Microsoft Campus through Hololens and walk around the new campus as if we were there, there is a focus on local communities getting involved and selling their products on campus.

At the end of the week, we had some fun on the webcast! You can see a replay from Mixer. The whole tour was very well organized by the Windows Insider Team, so much energy and excitement for us to be there made the tour that much enjoyable. Look out for more contests from the Windows Insiders Blog posts, you may get lucky like me to visit the campus.

Microsoft has released its report on Office 365’s phishing miss rate. According to their own statistics, the company has blocked approximately 5 billion phishing attempts on Office 365. This is though the analyzation of more than 400 billion emails the company says it scans each month.

The Redmond giant admitted in their blog post that when comparing their email account service with others, the company’s blocking of phishing emails wasn’t close to the high of other major email vendors during last year.

This led to the company to hire thousands of security experts and to put in an annual $1 billion budget for cybersecurity protection. Enhancements include the detection of domain spoofing and display name impersonation as well blocking of links the service considers to be unsafe. The company really goes in depth in their post.

After a few months of improvement, the tech giant’s new statistics show that their security enhancements really paid off, and that their phishing miss rate was much lower than that of their leading competitors (although they didn’t specify which competitors were measured). Safe Links, the company’s URL link scanning service for Outlook, has protected users against 7 billion potential malicious links in 2018 alone.

Have you noticed improvement of Outlook’s phish-blocking when subscribed to Office 365? You thoughts are welcome in the comment box below.

If you ever tried to type text using the on-screen keyboard on the Xbox One or in the Windows Mixed Reality environment, you’re probably aware that the process can be really tedious. Microsoft and third-party manufacturers currently sell chatpads for the Xbox One controller, which make it easier to write text on Windows 10, the Xbox One or Windows Mixed Reality using a tiny keyboard, but it looks like Redmond could be developing a better solution based on a new radial interface (via Windows Central).

In a new patent titled “Text Entry Interface” and published last week, Microsoft explains why on-screen QWERTY keyboards offer a sub-optimal typing experience on gaming consoles and virtual reality headsets:

The QWERTY layout was designed and optimized for a two-handed, 10 finger input. However, it is inefficient and unnatural for the gaming, VR, AR, MR, and other input modalities (e.g., gamepad interaction, gaze, hand gestures, etc.). These modalities, by nature, are less efficient compared with simultaneous ten-fingers input. They are used to sequentially navigate a cursor or other indicator to desired characters on the QWERTY layout from character to character.

Microsoft’s alternative input solution for these devices would be a radial interface that would let consumers easily select letters using gamepad thumbsticks, which can be rotated to move the cursor and select different characters. You can see how it would work in the drawing below:

Moreover, the patent also mentions other types of inputs including voice, hand gestures, thumb gestures, as well as a “gaze” that would be performed through rotating eye movement. “Additionally or alternatively, identification of a character may be based on screen position, layer position, layer and/or character orientation, or other factors,” the patent description reads.

This all sounds pretty futuristic, but as with all patents this technology may never see the light of day. In the meantime, the good ol’ Xbox One chatpad with backlit keys is a pretty safe bet, even when using Windows Mixed Reality headsets: Starting with the October 2018 update, Microsoft added a new “Flashlight” feature to Windows 10 that lets you see your physical environment (in our case, the Xbox One chatpad or a PC keyboard) without removing your VR headset.

Taco Bell has partnered with Microsoft to create a special limited-edition platinum Xbox One X consoles which feature the fast food joint’s iconic bell noise upon the console’s boot. Starting tomorrow, customers of the fast food joint can participate in their limited-time contest to win the console, which comes with a White Special Edition Xbox Elite controller, plus a three-month subscription to both Xbox Live Gold and Xbox Game Pass.

Those who wish to enter can do so by buying the joint’s limited-time $5 Chalupa Cravings Deal. Inside the box, the customer receives a printed code, which can be sent via text to the phone number listed in the rules. The company says that a customer wins once every 10 minutes on average, and the promotion is here until November 21 (two days before Black Friday).

The Xbox One X is Microsoft’s latest and top-of-the-line console that plays Xbox One X Enhanced games in 4K and HDR. The console comes with 1 TB of storage and a built-in 4K-capable Blu-ray player. The limited-edition platinum edition is a slight variation of white version released a couple months back.

Will you be participating in the Xbox promotion? Let us know in the comments below.

Google may have just broken the dam on PWA’s being treated as first-class citizens on the desktop with its Chrome 70 release on Windows 10 and Chrome OS (Chrome 67). The latest Chrome upgrade comes with the rare collaborative support between Google’s browser and Microsoft’s Windows 10 that allows the browser to install PWA’s as regular applications on Windows 10.

The new feature means, apps such as Starbucks or Twitter which have been increasingly making use of PWAs, can now live on Windows 10 as more native experiences. Users can now install PWAs from the Chrome menu and see their installs appear in the Windows 10 Start Menu as any other Microsoft Store app or 3rd party application would, as well as supporting other Windows 10 settings like pinning the app to the taskbar or web notifications appearing in the Action Center.

The PWA version of Chrome apps act and appear much more like native apps by doing away with the browser chrome (pun intended) that usually surrounds the web version of the software and adhering to a higher experience standard for both Chrome and Windows 10 usage.

As part of the release notes, Google outlines the benefits of its PWA implementation as such,

Desktop progressive web apps can be ‘installed’ on the user’s device much like native apps. They’re fast. Feel integrated because they launched in the same way as other apps, and run in an app window, without an address bar or tabs. They’re reliable because service workers can cache all of the assets they need to run. And they create an engaging experience for users.

For its part, Google seems to view PWA’s as bridging the gap between the mobile experience and a familiar desktop paradigm for users.

Microsoft has pitched a similar narrative with its approach to PWA’s but has yet to drum up enough developer interest in its development platform.

Perhaps, as smartphone usage matures and the app paradigm resurfaces on the desktop in its more streamline mobile approach on Chrome OS or in the Microsoft Store iteration, and with the world’s leading browser developers putting its considerable influence behind it, Microsoft’s dream of a viable PWA platform could wind up being a more successful pivot than its UWP effort.

Xbox’s Major Nelson has just announced that Electronic Art’s classic Crysis trilogy of games for the Xbox 360 is now backward-compatible on the Xbox One. Crysis is EA’s sci-fi first-person shooter series where players are soldiers in high-tech “Nanosuits” who blast aliens that have come to invade and lay waste to the earth. As of this writing, each game can be individually purchased for just $19.99 on the Xbox 360 marketplace.

The Crysis trilogy follows the addition of Metal Gear Solid 2 and 3 HD to the backward compatibility list last week, and those games are also considered cult-classics. There are now over 600 Xbox 360 and original Xbox games that are playable on the Xbox One, and the full list is available here.

Since the Crysis is published by EA, it’s safe to expect that it may soon join EA Access, the company’s Xbox Game Pass-like service for the Xbox One. In the meantime, though, owners of digital or physical copies can revisit the trilogy on the Xbox One today at no additional cost.

Microsoft has announced that they have joined the Made by Dyslexia pledge, thus committing to give the hundreds of millions of dyslexic students all over the world access to tools to make it easier for them to effectively read and write. The company’s Learning Tools already helps people, including those with dyslexia, learn to do this without costing them anything.

Speech dictation is coming to the Word and OneNote web clients allowing the dyslexic to add written words to documents using their voices, which Microsoft says will be supported on all web browsers over the coming weeks. Speech dictation is already part of the company’s Office 365 desktop applications.

Immersive Reader is coming to Flipgrid, the company’s recently-acquired video-based learning platform. The new tool will make it easier for those struggling to read to do so with a lot more ease. Text can be spaced out, broken into syllables, and color-coded to indicate nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs. Immersive Reader is already a feature of Word and OneNote on Windows 10 devices.

In addition to making reading easier, Immersive reader will also add support for math problems though the use of speech-to-text as well as highlighting a single line of text at a time to boost focus. This is not only useful for those with dyslexia, but those with dyscalculia and others who are differently-abled.

In addition to the math-solving tools, Microsoft will also add Microsoft Translate support to Immersive Reader to make it easier for people to read in another language. The Translate tool will allow syllable separation, text-to-speech, and picture definition of words.

For those lucky enough to get the October 2018 Update before it was pulled, Edge includes a number of new features to help with reading, including a built-in Dictionary tool for PDF documents, ePub books, and sites in Reading View. Reading view will addtionally include line-focusing to keep the attention on the words, and ePub books will feature many color options as well.

Office Lens will support optical character recognition on Android and will roll out to users of the Android mobile operating system starting later today. The feature is already available on iOS devices.

All these features will roll out to users periodically over the coming months. How do you think these tools will help your child learn?

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Paul Allen, the former Lakeside School classmate of Bill Gates, who went on to form Microsoft with his high school buddy in 1975, has died of lung cancer at age 65. Allen and Gates started Microsoft to at first to sell BASIC interpreters to Altair, and then rose to prominence with the development of MS-DOS, and then Windows and Office and all the rest. Allen left the company in 1982, but retained his shares in Microsoft stock, making him a billionaire many times over. Allen has battled cancer for a number of years, and recently announced that he was resuming treatment for non-Hodgkins Lymphoma. He was an owner of the Seattle Seahawks, the Seattle Sounders and the Portland Trailblazers, and was active in local Seattle and Portland goings-on as well as a long list of scientific, environmental, an exploration efforts through his company Vulcan, Inc., and numerous other ventures.

Allen’s Wikipedia page goes on and on with his accomplishments, and they really are too numerous to mention. He will be missed, in the Seattle Sports, Arts, and philanthropy circles, at Microsoft, and in many places around the world.

Microsoft announced today its plans to drop support for Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol version 1.0 and 1.1 in Microsoft Edge and Internet Explorer 11 in the first half of 2020. This early notice comes just a couple of months before the 20th anniversary of TLS 1.0 on January 19, 2019.

“We are announcing our intent to disable these versions by default early, to allow the small portion  of remaining sites sufficient time to upgrade to a newer version,” said Kyle Pflug, Senior Program Manager, Microsoft Edge. According to data from SSL Labs that Microsoft’s blog post mentioned, 94% of the top websites already support the more recent TLS 1.2 cryptographic protocol, and less than 1% of secure connections in Microsoft Edge are currently using TLS 1.0 and 1.1.

“Most sites should not be impacted by this change,” said Pflug. If most websites already support the TLS 1.2 protocol, its successor TLS 1.3, which will allow faster and more secure connections has been defined by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in August of this year. Microsoft is already working to bring support for this new version of the protocol in Microsoft Edge.