Pori Fashion Show is a dress up children’s game created for iOS. Kids can drag and drop the clothes and accessories that they want to wear on ‘paper doll’ cartoons, save the images for sharing later, or even walk them down an animated fashion runway like top models.

This game, like many apps, was once restricted solely to iOS. Dong Yoon Park, creator of the Pori Fashion Show, is also the Senior User Experience Designer at Microsoft. As the design leader for Windows Bridge for iOS, Park decided to bring his game over to the Windows platform while re-using the existing code.

About the Game

Pori Fashion Show uses a standard UIKit controls like UICollectionView, UIImageView, and UIButton. UILongPressGestureRecognizer and UIPanGestureRecognizer enable the drag and drop gestures in the game.

Importing the Project

For developers that use a Mac, the easiest way to get started is to set up Windows 10 and Virtual Studio on a virtual machine. This will make it simpler to switch between Xcode and Visual Studio. Developers can download an evaluation virtual machines with both Windows 10 and Visual Studio installed already on the bottom of the Windows Bridge for iOS page.

After configuring your developing environment:

1. Use the vsimporter tool to import your Xcode project to a new Visual Studio Universal Windows Platform project with Objective-C support.
2. Type ‘powershell“ in Cortana’s search box to open Windows PowerShell.
3. Run ‘C:\YOUR_WINOBJC_PATH\bin\vsimporter’. The .vsimporter and .sln will be generated automatically.

Using a virtual machine will provide a shared folder feature on a network drive which Visual Studio will not allow. The easiest means to share the source code folder to Windows is to override the project’s output directory. Right-click the project, click on Properties, and change the output directory under the General menu to $(Temp)\$(MSBuildProjectName)\bin\$(Configuration)\. Please note that Temp should be an environment variable pointing to your Temp directory.

Building A Solution

At this point, clicking the Build Solution button will come up with many errors. The most common errors are caused by developers forgetting to remove the iOS-specific frameworks and libraries. Other errors might crop up from libraries that are still in active development. The Pori Fashion Show app had both, creating the need to remove the StoreKit, MessageUI, and Social frameworks and find a workaround to replace Storyboard.

For some errors, you might have to rewrite the iOS layout in the code. For most common issues, Auto-Layout Constraints can fix the problem. However, if a developer has trouble adding them, there is a Programmatically Creating Constraints webpage to help. In Pori Fashion Show’s case, the Auto-Layout Constraints worked just fine.

Park’s app uses standard UIKit controls with custom images. Most of the UI elements are container types that don’t have OS-specific style or UI controls with custom images. For these types, Windows Bridge for iOS will not require any changes to run the app. For UIKit controls without customization, however, the program will try to translate them into UI controls for Windows.

When your app is accessing unimplemented APIs, the console will respond with an error message “[Stubbed function called!]” or “(E_NOTIMPL)” in the output console. Even though Pori Fashion Show uses two APIs for gestures, the console only came up with a recognizer error. UILongPressGestureRecognizer is the API that makes it possible to scroll through the collection of neat clothes collection on the app.

Finding alternatives and workarounds to unimplemented APIs might take a few creative tricks. For Pori Fashion Show, this meant using the app’s other recognizer’s velocity to detect the scrolling direction instead.

Another common problem for errors is failing to use cross-platform naming conventions such as using colons in iOS while Windows does not allow it. Pori Fashion Show updated their screen capture code but now there was another problem! Saving images of the dressed up dolls caused the colors to be altered. Since Windows Bridge for iOS is under constant development, Park went back to the source. After opening an issue with WinObjC on GitHub, the team responded and fixed the issue with an updated SDK release.

Bridging the Gap

It’s best to test the shared source code in both Xcode and Visual Studio. After confirming that the code ran on both Windows and iOS, Pori Fashion Show was successfully bridged!

Bridging current iOS apps to the Windows platform is an effective way to bring your project to a new level with a larger market. Universal Windows Platform apps are capable of running across many types of devices including smart phones, tablets, laptops, desktops, and even the upcoming XBox that is still in development.

One of the more frustrating aspects of using a personal computer–any computer, in fact–are the inevitable bugs and crashes. Every modern operating system suffers from the same, and sometimes those crashes can be catastrophic, requiring hard reboots to resolve. Windows has its own version of these sorts of crashes, once called the black screen of death (BSOD) and more recently evolved into the blue screen of death (also BSOD).

BSOD’s have always presented sometimes arcane bits of information on what problem caused the crash, and in the past, the information sometimes flew by so quickly that no normal person could jot down error codes and other information fast enough to help with troubleshooting. It looks like Microsoft might be working to help with this specific issue, according to forum visitor at BetaArchive, who posted a screenshot from Windows 10 Insider build 14316 showing a QR code embedded in a BSOD.

This looks like a nice solution for grabbing information on exactly which codes were generated during a BSOD and quickly researching a solution to them. We’ll need to keep our eye on this and future Windows 10 Insider builds to see how helpful these new QR codes really are in the troubleshooting process.

A few months after the Office team announced new features for OneNote Class Notebooks and Staff Notebooks, Microsoft announced today that school leaders, teachers, and education staff who do not have an Office 365 Education account can now sign up to get a free Office 365 account that will allow them to create OneNote Staff Notebooks for their schools. Staff Notebooks are an Office 365 feature that allows education staff leaders to “set up a collaboration space for meeting notes, shared curriculum or initiatives, create a content library for read-only staff material and add a private workspace for each staff member.”

To sign up for a free Office 365 Education account, education staff just need to visit this address and click on “Sign up for a free Office 365 account.” Then, users have to enter their school email address to check if their institution is eligible for a free Office 365 account. In case you already have an Office 365 account set up by your school, then you can just click on “Staff Notebook Sign-In” to sign in with your existing account and launch the Staff Notebook app.

Once your Office 365 account is set up, open the app launcher on the upper left corner and select “View all my apps” in the lower left corner to launch the Staff Notebook app. Then, you will first have to choose a name for your notebook before being allowed to add staff members by entering their school email addresses (your colleagues will then receive an email invitation to set up an Office 365 account and join your Staff Notebook). Right after that, you will be able to see a preview of your Staff Notebook, just click on “create” to follow through.

To complete the process, you will receive a link to the Staff notebook that you can share with other staff members. Clicking the link will open your Staff Notebook in OneNote, and your staff members who will open it will receive an email invite to join it. The overall process is pretty straightforward, but you can get more detailed instructions on this help page if you need it. Last, Microsoft has also set up a dedicated page for free OneNote professional development for education staff.

In today’s modern world of phishing and malware, clicking what may seem like a legitimate link in an email may end up not only compromising your own computer, but also your entire company. Luckily, the folks over at Office 365 are working on rolling out an additional layer of email protection for all users of Office 365.

Named Safety Tips in Exchange Protection, the addition layer will ensure a warning to the user in an email that is marked suspicious, or reassurance when a message is safe.  Under the new protection, Messages will be marked in color-coded categories as either, Suspicious, Unkown, Trusted, or Safe. As per Microsoft, the categories are described below:

• Messages marked Suspicious have a red safety tip and are either a known phishing message, have failed sender authentication, are a suspected spoofing message or have met some other criteria that Exchange Online Protection has used to determine the message is fraudulent. You should not interact with suspicious messages and instead should delete them.
• A yellow bar at the top of the message indicates an Unknown safety level. Being marked as Unknown indicates that Exchange Online Protection has marked the message as spam. You can click the It’s not spam link in the yellow bar of a junk mail item to move the message to your inbox.
• Messages from a Trusted sender display a green bar at the top of the message. These are from domains identified by Microsoft as being safe.
• Messages marked with a gray safety tip indicates that the email was not filtered for spam because it is either considered Safe by the user’s organization, is on the user’s safe senders list or Exchange Online Protection marked the message as junk but the user moved it out of the junk folder to the inbox. The gray safety bar also appears when images within the message have been disabled.

This level of protection analyzes data patterns across millions of emails to identify spam, malware and phishing threats.  Then, based on this ongoing analysis, Exchange Online Protection is able to identify suspicious messages and apply the appropriate Safety Tip.

All types of Safety tips are included in Outlook on the web, and Outlook clients will only display the Suspicious safety tips. It is also worth noting that most messages will not have a safety tip, as Microsoft only adds them in as when they have information users need.

The 25th annual World Wide Web conference kicks off today in Montreal. From now until Friday, tech experts and academics from around the globe will be discussing research, development, standards and applications for the future of the web.

Microsoft is one of the high-level sponsors of the event, but Microsoft Research is there this week for very practical reasons. In a blog post published today, Microsoft research detailed more about why they are attending the 25th annual WWW conference and what they hope to achieve.

At last year’s WWW conference, Microsoft Researched announced the release of Microsoft Academic Graph to help academic researchers map the citation relationships between scientific publications. This allows researchers to map out when scientific studies and journal articles cite each other or have other relationships such as similar authors, institutions, journals, venues, and fields of study. As a result, researchers and academics can connect with existing research in new ways as they perform their own studies.

Now Microsoft Research is back at the WWW conference with two new workshops related to the Microsoft Academic Graph. One workshop, titled BigScholar, focuses on how researchers from the National University of Singapore are using MAG data “to explore a methodology for conference rating” based on the research that is related to a conference and how that research is used by other academics.

Microsoft Research’s second workshop is SAVE-SD, which stands for Semantics, Analytics, Visualization: Enhancing Scholarly Data). This workshop is described as focusing “on bridging the gap between theoretical and practical aspects of scholarly data.”

Microsoft Research states they are hoping this year to connect with “innovators and researchers to learn more about how they’re using and integrating our academic services,” as well as explain the future direction of Microsoft Academic. They feel their two workshops show how in the past year Microsoft Research’s Academic Graph has had an impact on the variety of research. They are also excited by new possibilities with practical applications which they will be speaking more about this week at the WWW conference.

If you are attending this year’s WWW conference in Montreal, you can stop by booth 701 to speak with the Microsoft Research team which is eager to hear more about how academics are utilizing their Academic Graph.

Quantum Break, Microsoft’s newest Xbox One exclusive title is less than a week old, but it has already broken records. Aaron Greenberg, Xbox’s head of marketing, has just said that Quantum Break is now the best selling new Microsoft Studios IP this generation, as well as the best-selling boxed game in the UK this week.

Thanks to our fans for making @QuantumBreak our best selling new IP of this generation and #1 game in the UK! https://t.co/HYw1MWXZsv

— Aaron Greenberg ????????‍♂️????U (@aarongreenberg) April 11, 2016

Overall, the milestone also means that in one week Quantum Break has outsold other IP titles from this Xbox generation, such as Sunset Overdrive and Crytek’s Ryse.

ChartTrack, meanwhile, is the group behind the statistics for the best-selling boxed game in the UK statistic. Tracking only Xbox One physical disc based sales for the title, the group claims that Quantum  beat out Codemasters Dirty Rally for the top spot in the UK.

We previously reviewed Quantum Break, and we found it to be a masterfully presented game that achieved exactly what it set out to do—marry the mediums of live action film and video games.

Microsoft’s popular storytelling app Sway has picked up an update on Windows 10 with some notable new changes on board. Along with the usual bug fixes, the new update give users the ability to zoom in and navigate photos on touch-enabled devices by touching their screen.

Additionally, another new feature introduced in the latest update is Jump lists, which offer users a quick way to access the recent sways and pin them. Simply right click on the Sway app in Windows taskbar to access the recent sway and add them to their jump lists.

Here’s the complete change log:

• Picture Zoom: You can now touch your screen to zoom in and navigate through groups of photos on touch-enabled devices.
• Jump List: Right-click the Sway app in the Windows taskbar to quickly access recent Sways. You can also pin your favorites so they always show up in the Jump List
• Miscellaneous: We’ve fixed several bugs in this release.

Other Recent Updates:

• New Languages — Sway now supports 14 additional languages.
• Living Images — Sway now supports Windows 10 Living Images, bringing more life to your stories.
• Viewing Navigation — While viewing any Sway, you can now select your preferred navigation style.
• Recent Documents — Using your Microsoft Account, it’s now easy to find documents on your OneDrive sorted by work you’ve done most recently and then drag and drop them right into your Sway.
• Faster Viewing — Viewing Sways with multiple photos is now a faster, more fluid, and responsive experience.

If you happen to be a regular user of Sway, head over to the Windows Store and update the app to make use of all the new features introduced in the update.

Download
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Sway

Developer:
Microsoft Corporation

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For those of you who are Windows app developers, you utilize Microsoft’s Dev Center as a resource to update and monitor your app in the Windows Store. With the Dev Center app, you can monitor the health and performance of your app, as well as see acquisitions data, investigate app crashes, and more using the official Dev Center app for Windows 10.

“The Microsoft Dev Center app allows you to quickly view details about the health and performance of your Windows Store apps on any Windows 10 device. Note: You must have an active Windows developer account in order to view this data,” the app description reads.

The app is universal and works on both mobile and desktop. This is the first public release of the Dev Center app and there is one known issue in regards to analytics data. “Some Analytics data shown in the app may differ slightly from what you find on the Dev Center Dashboard. This difference has to do with differences in the data refresh times of the two systems. We are actively working to bring these two systems in sync.”

This is the first public release of the Dev Center app and there is one known issue in regards to analytics data. “Some Analytics data shown in the app may differ slightly from what you find on the Dev Center Dashboard. This difference has to do with differences in the data refresh times of the two systems. We are actively working to bring these two systems in sync.”

Microsoft is working to add IAP reporting, payouts reporting, and more features to the app this summer. Thanks @nithinsuren for the tip!

Download
QR-Code

Dev Center

Developer:
Microsoft Corporation

Price:
Free

Enpass is a desktop and mobile app that’s designed to manage your passwords and make sure that you can keep all of your sensitive information together in a way that’s not only convenient, but secure. It only makes sense that an application focused around the cutting edge of digital security would look into what Microsoft has been doing, and according to Enpass’ Twitter account, the app may soon be making its way onto Microsoft Edge some time in the near future as an extension.

@TiagoJoseMC We are working on an Edge extension. Details soon!

— Enpass (@EnpassApp) April 7, 2016

There’s a whole lot of room for Enpass to integrate their service into Microsoft Edge, most notably – as Tiago mentioned – the upcoming integration with Windows Hello that was announced during Build last week. We know that Windows Hello is going to be an asset for any organizations that intend to make a priority out of security, especially ones like Enpass whose entire business revolves around managing sensitive login information.

With this being a brief Twitter announcement, we don’t know much of anything about the details of Enpass’ upcoming Edge integration. As stated in their tweet, details should be coming soon.

Thanks to BiggishTuba558 for the tip!

Feedback! Feedback! Feedback! An argument could be made that ever since Microsoft cut part of its software and code testing division, the company has outsourced those jobs and responsibilities to consumers at larger by “inviting” eager participants into Insider, Preview and Beta programs for its various software and services. While that’s a strictly speculative assumption, the reality is that Microsoft has opened various programs, apps, and software up for feedback from its more educated and vocal minority groups of users to better assess how it should approach its entire consumer base.

In the latest “Made by You” article posted in the new Feedback Hub, the Windows team walks Insiders through the process of using the digital assistant Cortana, to gather even more feedback from users.

One of the key sources of feedback comes from within the Cortana experience. You can provide ideas, likes and dislikes to our team. Each is recorded by our systems, including a screenshot (if you allow), as well as a few key details such as the Windows language used.

All that feedback is correlated into our system to the tune of thousands of items every week for Cortana alone. User-reported issues and ideas are key to finding which problems to concentrate on fixing and what the new experiences you want most. Don’t forget to add positive feedback too – we use this feedback to see which experiences we should invest in with even more features.”

Similar to the pop-ups that accompany the various new and retooled experiences in Windows 10, the Windows team is also seeking user info and feedback directly from within the Cortana app. While some users might argue that their feedback gets lost in the ether of Windows 10 because they never hear back about a particular request or the time frame between feedback given and implementation are so wildly spaced apart, an example of Cortana sourced feedback come by way of recent Cortana customizations.

When we first shipped Cortana on the desktop, the final step of setting up Cortana required that users convert the local account they used to sign into their PC into a Microsoft account. Our Insiders reported that this was not quite ideal and that feedback helped us prioritize the fix. Now when you are setting up Cortana for the first time, you are given the ability to “Sign in to just this app instead”, instead of switching your entire login to use your Microsoft Account. This brings Cortana in-line with the other Windows 10 apps that make use of your Microsoft Account, such as Groove and Store.”

The feedback implementations didn’t stop there, however.

Another of the first major pieces of feedback that we received via the Insider program was the taskbar enabled Search Box, while useful, was taking up too much space. The Cortana team was able to quickly respond to that feedback by adding additional sizing options to the search box accessible via the right-click menu.”

The net result was a move from the seemingly large search box option to a more refined Cortana icon that sits flush with the other icons in the taskbar. The post continues at length about the new features found in Cortana as well as walking Insiders through a discoverability of Cortana-specific navigations.

At the end of the day, conspiracy theories withstanding, Microsoft’s approach to user feedback is a welcomed change from most. Despite the time it takes to gather, digest, and act upon user feedback, the Windows, Azure, Xbox, Office, and other software and hardware division within the company seem to value and appreciate what their users have to say about products. Hopefully, the trend continues and as a result, Windows 10 and the other software as a service model, projects get the attention and consideration users have been clamoring for.

If your organization is using Microsoft’s cloud services, it’s likely that you have some interest in knowing how your users are accessing them. Whether it’s because you need to predict the resources you’ll need as your organization grows and shrinks, or you have security and privacy issues around how your data is accessed and shared, being able to determine usage is vital.

Today, Microsoft announced at the Office blog that some new usage reports are available for a variety of Office 365 services. Specifically, SharePoint, OneDrive, Yammer, and Skype can now access the following usage reporting tools:

• Activity dashboard (also called reporting dashboard)—Provides you with a high-level overview of how many people in your organization are using Office 365. Each service in the suite, such as Skype for Business and Exchange, has its own tile that surfaces key activity data, making it easy for you to get a quick understanding of the activity within that service. To view detailed information by service or by individual user, simply click the specific tile or use the drop-down menu at the top of the reporting dashboard.
• Email activity report—Enables you to understand email usage, such as send, receive and read activity. It also enables you to monitor trends in email traffic, and can be especially helpful in scenarios such as user migration.
• Office activations report—Shows which users who have been assigned an Office 365 license have signed into Office 365 on at least one device, including a breakdown by device type. This report helps you identify users who have been assigned a license but have not yet activated it, so you can provide assistance as necessary.
• SharePoint site usage report—Provides you with storage consumption details across all your SharePoint sites. The report helps you see activity across sites, how much storage is available per site and how the sites are being used for file storage.
• OneDrive for Business usage report—This report helps you understand storage and sharing activity across OneDrive for Business, including number and size of files stored, in aggregate and per user.
• Skype for Business report—Shows Skype for Business usage, with details such as minutes spent in a Skype Meeting and with breakouts on peer-to-peer activity such as IMs and calls, meetings organized and meeting participation.
• Yammer report—Provides details on Yammer engagement—breaking out Like, Read and Post activities.

The reports are available both en masse and on a per-user level, providing some flexibility in how much detail are provided by reports. Reporting timeframes also vary, with 7 day, 30 day, 90 day, and 150 day options, and reports can be exported to CVS and Excel formats.

You can find additional information at the Compliance Center, and Microsoft promises more reports will become available in the future. Right now, the usage reports are available to Office 365 customers in the U.S., Australia, and Canada, and other regions will start receiving them in May, 2016. Finally, APIs to allow customers to develop their own reports will be coming this fall.

Over the past couple of months, the folks over in the Xbox division of Microsoft has dropped some rather large bombshells on both the gaming as well as the developer communities as they announced Xbox One dev kits, cross network play, and the development of Universal Windows Apps.

Some of the announcements are a bit of a rehash from what the console was originally introduced as over three years ago, but now with Microsoft finalizing the API underpinnings for cross-platform development and shared experiences across devices, Xbox executives are finally free to promote their efforts.

Speaking with Tom Philips from Eurogamer, ID@Xbox’s European boss Agostino Simonetta talked to the Xbox development efforts post announcements as well as Microsoft’s overall plan to re-court indie developers. While relatively new to his position within the Xbox division, Simonetta seems well versed about Microsoft’s cross-network efforts.

Well, now I should get back to programming as a hobby! Cross-network play was extremely well received; Rocket League will be the first to do it. And then there’s Game Preview, which when we announced we said was a pilot. Ark: Survival Evolved is unbelievable – after two, three weeks they came out and said how many concurrent users they had – they’ve been very vocal about how good it has been. Then there’s the Solus Project, Starbound, they’re both here [at Rezzed], and we’re working with them on their launch via Game Preview. Subnautica, too.”

Off to a modest start, the question of whether or not the full suite of tools for indie developers were available also came up during the interview.

But all the technology is there?

Absolutely – we’re ready. Rocket League is the first game – and it is a heavily network-orientated game. Last weekend I had a problem with my wife, I was playing too much Rocket League.

But yes, any title that wants to update their game to include cross-network play, any title that wants to launch soon and take advantage of that, we are ready.”

Moving onto a more recent announcement unveiled at Build 2016, Simonetta discusses the new Xbox One dev kit enabling the feature for developers. Back during the Xbox One’s unveiling event in 2013, Xbox executives highlighted the console’s differing development environment from previous generations by allowing consumer versions of the hardware to be turned into dev kits with a few software tweaks.

Rather devs having to purchase a console for a few thousand dollars to develop and test indie or less than AAA fidelity games, Microsoft would enact a software switch that could turn a four-hundred-dollar console into a test rig. As the company sought to right a colossal mismanagement in communication early on in the consoles life, it seemed the Xbox team had all but forgotten its promise to developers.

Fortunately, with a bit of stability underneath them, the Xbox team is ready to revisit the conversation in a much more substantial way.

We went into preview mode for it on 30th March, and right now we’re seeing more professional developers use it. But it’s still in preview – when it’s not, we expect to see plenty more use it. We expect developers to take advantage of that path. 1400 developers now have Xbox One dev kits in their living rooms, basements. We build the technology, and the development community will get on board at their own pace. We were very keen to get this out there.

We have been dealing with a university in the UK which was interested because it’s an easy way to get their students programming.”

Beyond being able to create indie games on current consoles or enabling cross-network play in games, Simonetta cautions developers to consider timing when attempting to capitalize on the new tools allowed by Microsoft.

There is an element of timing – the way the industry behaves as a whole regarding releases is always changing. We’re always in discussion with the game creators. They are the publishers, but we can give them help or advice on when launching their project might maximize their profitability.

September until December, in general, is a difficult period for the retail business. We advise indie developers to be smart about their release dates. There was one game in particular recently who launched at the right time and got a lot of visibility in the console store’s list. There are busy periods in the year, but it’s not just games – it is the amount of content coming out. It’s not just an indie-related problem.”

There seems to be a lot of moving parts for developers to consider these days, but at least the landscape appears to be opening up. Hopefully, with a more integrated storefront, relatively inexpensive developer kits and a more open cross-network field, gamers and app developers alike will begin to offer consumers experiences never before seen in console history.

Microsoft became the newest partner for the Seattle Reign FC today for the 2016 season, starting April 17. The Seattle Feign FC are a part of the National Women’s Soccer League and the latest Seattle team to join up with Microsoft. The Seattle Sounders FC and the Seattle Seahawks also partner with Microsoft. The Seattle Reign FC will utilize Microsoft’s technology and services on the field and in their offices.

Seattle Reign FC owner, Bill Predmore, released a statement about the new partnership with Microsoft:

“We are excited by the opportunity to partner with Microsoft and look forward to the chance to work together during the upcoming season. Our collaboration with Microsoft exemplifies what we believe our partnerships can and should be: an opportunity to leverage our unique assets and experiences to add meaningful value to our partner’s business.”

The Kits! pic.twitter.com/0OemQAMOOj

— OL Reign (@OLReign) April 8, 2016

For the 2016 season, Microsoft’s logo will be branded on all Seattle Reign’s jerseys. Since 2009, Microsoft has a similar deal with the Seattle Sounders FC with the Xbox-themed logos printed on their jerseys. Previously, Microsoft had a partnership deal with the WNBA team, Seattle Storm, in 2010, but that deal expired in 2014.

Seattle Reign’s head coach and general manager thinks the Microsoft partnership will be good news for the club:

“I am a firm believer that player data can be utilized to improve player and team performance and to better manage the fitness of our players. Microsoft’s sports science and analytics platform provides our club with a powerful, easy-to-use way to develop actionable insights from the data we collect. I am excited about the impact this information can have on our club, and I am looking forward to working with Microsoft to provide a footballer’s perspective on how to optimize and evolve the platform.”

In addition to the Microsoft-branded jerseys and Microsoft wearables and hardware, like the Microsoft Band and tablets from the Surface Pro line, Seattle Reign’s front office will use the power of Microsoft’s other products and services like Microsoft Azure and Office 365 to help with Seattle Reign’s business operations.

The Windows team has just published the next post in a series of best practices in designing Universal Windows Apps (UWA), and this time, it’s about designing visual cues.

Specifically, the Windows team looks at the generals of visual cues before diving deeper into how they can inform users of possible interactions, as well as guiding them to do transactions. One of the rules being emphasized is that visual cue should never distract users from the main content. They also need to be easy to understand,  visible, and eye-catching.

Visual cues help your user to quickly understand what is happening in your app and to see what is important and what is not.

Similar to real-world objects, visual cues should also communicate well what they do and how they can be interacted with. The specific kind of visual cues that instruct people on these interactions are called “affordances”. These mostly come in the form of contextual changes to visual cues. According to famed designer Don Norman, two things matter in affordance design: whether they can be readily perceived and interpreted, and whether the desired action can be discovered.

Call-to-actions (CTA), on the other hand, are used to guide users towards transactions, by inviting them to give information, urging them to act, and offering an opportunity. These are often seen in free-to-play games and apps that rely heavily on ads and in-app-purchases. Some oft-used elements in CTAs are contrasting colors, noticeable difference in scale, larger fonts, and noticeable margins. Nevertheless, they should not be jarring and frustrating to look at.

All in all, the post presents fascinating and useful guidelines on making your apps not just attractive, but also usable and effective. While the Windows team’s intention is obviously geared towards UWA builders, these guidelines should work for any developer who wants their apps to be as effortless to users as possible.

Image credits: The Windows Blog

TRON Run/r has finally arrived on the Xbox One. The game had initially been set for a February release on the console and despite it coming out on the PlayStation 4, TRON Run/r stayed in the “coming soon” section of the Xbox One game store and appeared to jump around with release dates until ending up with no release date at all and being placed in the bottom of the upcoming games list.

It’s unclear what caused the delay but it’s out now and should be available in most Xbox One regions.

TRON Run/r is an endless runner game that incorporates elements from the brilliant Tron Legacy movie that came out several years ago. The film was originally scheduled to get a sequel that was to begin filming in 2015 but even with the director and actors on board, it was cancelled a week after being announced, presumably due to the poor box office earnings of Tomorrowland, another live action Disney movie that came out the same week.

The game’s creation may seem a bit odd given how many years have passed since Tron Legacy came out but it’s likely that it was initially planned to help reintroduce audiences to the franchise in the lead-up to the now-cancelled film which would have come out in late 2016 or early 2017. Here’s TRON Run/r’s official description:

Return to the world of TRON with TRON RUN/r, a new lightning fast, action-adventure runner with a twist! Blaze through dynamic circuits, facing-off against virulent adversaries while taking on all challengers. Pack your loadouts with dozens of combinations of cycles, suits and powerups. Hone your DISC and CYCLE skills on the 32 included levels, then challenge your friends to the grueling STREAM program that throws endless combinations of modes and levels at you until you crash. New music from EDM godfather Giorgio Moroder and Raney Shockne, and remixes by Autechre, Bibio, patten, Joywave and others power you through this dazzling TRON universe.

TRON Run/r is available as a basic stand-alone edition or a special TRON RUN/r Digital Deluxe Edition which comes with the main game as well as all of the current and future add-on content. Some of this extra content right now includes 18 new levels, 8 more multipliers, 6 new light cycles and 3 new suits, extra in-game currency, and the special OUTLANDS and DISC Extender packs.

This OUTLANDS pack is rather significant and features an entire alternate game theme, 16 more levels, and 20 more multipliers while the DISC Extender pack comes with 9 new levels of DISC mode, 4 multipliers, 3 new light cycles, and a variety of character skins based on characters such as Classic Flynn, Legacy Clu, Legacy Quorra, Rinzler, Beck, and Mara.

With the cancellation of the third TRON movie, it’s fantastic to see new content being made for fans of the franchise. TRON characters and themes have also recently appeared in Disney Infinity 3.0, also on the Xbox One (and Windows 10 and Xbox 360), which features Sam Flynn and Quorra as playable characters, Tron Legacy and Tron objects, and two downloadable levels that tell an original story set after the events in Tron Legacy.

Are you a TRON fan and will you be supporting the franchise by buying TRON Run/r? Let us know in the comments below.

Buy TRON Run/r on Xbox One

Buy TRON Run/r Digital Deluxe Edition on Xbox One

In a rather perplexing move, Ubisoft has re-released the Windows 8 video game, Rayman Fiesta Run in a new version designed for the Windows 10 operating system but without some of the features that made the original release so popular.

While the game appears to very almost identical to the previous version, Rayman Fiesta Run Windows 10 Edition lacks any support for the Xbox Live service which means no syncing between devices, no Xbox Live cloud saves, and no Xbox Achievements. The most insulting aspect of this release is that it’s being sold as a completely separate game from the original Rayman Fiesta Run so even if users already own it, they’re expected to buy the Windows 10 version all over again. Granted, the game is only a few dollars but it’s still a very unusual decision to make on Ubisoft’s part.

Here’s the official description:

Join legendary platforming hero Rayman for a new adventure on your favorite mobile device! If you enjoyed Rayman Jungle Run, you will love Rayman Fiesta Run and its new wacky Fiesta world! Lunge for cocktail umbrellas, leap on limes and punch those piñatas…the sky’s the limit!

PARTY ALL NIGHT LONG

More than 75 levels welcome you for the Fiesta!

Bounce on sausages and make your way through 4 new festive worlds

Beat all 3 new epic bosses to reach the dreaded Land of the Livid Dead Island!

Collect Lums to get awesome rewards and power-ups

The game appears to have added Facebook connectivity, so that may be a feature that could appeal to those with no Xbox Live friends though. However, with the growing connectivity between Windows 10 on PC and Mobile and the Xbox One console, this does seem like a bit of a move backwards.

Let us know what you think in the comments. Does this release of Rayman Fiesta Run make sense to you?

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Rayman Fiesta Run Windows 10 Edition

Developer:
Ubisoft

Price:
Free

Flash helped glamorize the web back in its heyday as it ran rampant across various websites and services, bringing never-before-seen animations and video content to millions of Web pages. Unfortunately, as with most beautiful things on the internet, advertisers and hackers hijacked the technology and made Flash implementation something to fear in recent times. Coupled with poor website implementations, virus-riddled updates, and gratuitous use by advertisers, Flash is increasingly becoming the older child in a group home that nobody wants to adopt.

However, an equivalent replacement technology has yet to standardize and overtake Flash’s abundant usage, so Microsoft has found itself trying to implement a happy compromise for Windows users. According to the Microsoft Edge team, the Windows 10 Anniversary Update, scheduled for later this year, will bring a new pause feature that users can enact when engaging with Flash content.

With the Anniversary Update to Windows 10, Microsoft Edge will intelligently auto-pause content that is not central to the web page.  Peripheral content like animations or advertisements built with Flash will be displayed in a paused state unless the user explicitly clicks to play that content. This significantly reduces power consumption and improves performance while preserving the full fidelity of the page. Flash content that is central to the page, like video and games, will not be paused.”

The net result is a more efficient browsing experience for Edge users when navigating around websites that implement Flash, by presumably suspending all the annoying sidebars, popup ads, and auto play banners that tend to slow down a Flash-heavy page. The new pause feature should, in theory, also minimize the number of crashes users run into on various pages as well.

Even though Microsoft is working to give Edge users a more reliable Flash experience in the browser, the company is still pushing for the reduced use of the technology for more standard compliant implementations.

We encourage the web community to continue the transition away from Flash and towards open web standards.  Standards like Encrypted Media Extensions, Media Source Extensions, Canvas, Web Audio, and RTC offer a rich way to deliver similar experiences with increased performance and security.”

Beyond providing a crash-free and lag-free experience, Microsoft would like to see the adoption of more secure methods of animation and video content be applied across the web, thus unburdening the company from having to fight uphill against socially engineered attacks on Windows users. We think everyone can agree that Microsoft’s direction is a good one.