Just when you thought the location troubles in the mobile industry were finally over, Microsoft is now facing a class action lawsuit for allegedly tracking the location of Windows Phone 7 users without their permission. Apparently, when a user decides to turn off all location services on their device, Microsoft ignores the request and proceeds to store location data.

Rebecca Cousineau, a bold Windows Phone 7 customer, claims the camera application in particular transmits the latitude and longitude coordinates of a device when in use. The lawsuit states Microsoft built the camera app specifically for this purpose, and that Microsoft falsely told Congress it does not track the location of customers once they specify not to.

Earlier this year, Apple and Google faced very similar problems over accusations that both companies were using location services for their own benefits. The stored data was supposedly being shared for marketing purposes without users ever knowing. Weeks laterApple released iOS 4.3.3, which served to relieve any security concerns. The update reduced the size of the cache, put an end to backing up the cache to iTunes, and completely deletes it when a user switches location services off in Settings.

 

Over the years, Explorer and its forerunners have gone through several major iterations:

 
File Manager in Windows 3.1

 
Explorer in Windows XP

 

 
Explorer in Windows 7

Its a bit daunting but also pretty exciting to have the opportunity to revisit and rethink this cornerstone of our product. Many of you who are reading this are among the most extreme power usersof the file management tools in Explorer and likely start from a different perspective than the broad base of customers. As we approach the work to improve file management in Windows, we do so knowing many of you have long ago given up on Explorer and are using some of the wide variety of add-ons or alternatives.

 

Explorer in Windows 8

 

 

Microsoft has published a very detailed post about the new Explorer in Windows 8. It brings the ribbon interface well known from the latest MS Office packages. Many of you may not like it, but wait until you hear all about it.

The Explorer in Windows 8 brings at front a lot more functions thanks to those ribbons, there are a lot more customizable settings and even some old goodies back from XP are brought once again to life.

According to Microsoft, the new Explorer has three major goals: to optimize the management tasks, to create a streamlined command experience and respect the Explorer heritage. Well, all these sound like a big advertising talk, but it’s not. Those three goals have been taken very seriously to create a better Explorer.

So, the ribbon UI. Many people still disapprove the MS Office ribbons and use older version just to avoid it. I have to admit the ribbon UI is awkward in the beginning, but then you get used to it and starts feeling natural. The new Explorer utilizes exactly the same UI.

The ribbon UI has four tabs that should concern you the most File, Home, Share and View. Clicking on File opens a sub-menu where you find some trivial functions plus Open Command Prompt Menu where you can run the CMD in the current folder as normal user or admin. Thank you, Microsoft, for listening to our requests.

The Home tab hosts almost every of the most important elements of the Explorer Copy, Paste, Cut, Properties, Delete, Rename, etc. Some old fellas return from the past too Move to and Copy to. There are also Copy Path and Paste Shortcut keys. As you can see, the Home tab should be the place for the average Explorer user.

The Share tab allows you to Email, Zip, Print, Fax, Burn to CD and Share things with just one click.

The view tab will spare you the right clicks it hosts all the viewing options from Windows 7 plus switches for navigation and preview panes, groups and columns, file name settings (hide extensions, show hidden files, etc.), Refresh and more.

All those tabs are fully customizable and all functions in there have a dedicated keyboard shortcut (also customizable).

If you think the ribbon UI is a mess, you can rearrange, add or remove items in the tabs, assign them your own shortcuts, so every tab can fit your needs. But there is more you can minimize the ribbon UI in a lot smaller line of shortcuts. It can look much like the previous Windows versions and have all this functions still available for you. This should satisfy those who are not fans on the ribbon UI.

There are additional tabs that appear at some occasions picture files, libraries, etc.

I mentioned something about panes above in the View tab. There are three of them navigation (the left one), preview and details. The preview on details are now on the right instead at the bottom (as in Windows Vista/7) and show all the available file info. This way Microsoft fully utilizes the wide aspect screens.

Have you have ever heard about the Quick Access Toolbar? It includes a few small shortcuts at the very top left corner of a window. For example the QAT in Office 2010 has Save, Undo and Redo shortcuts by default. The Explorer 8 offers the a QAT in every window. Its fully customizable too, you can add whatever you want there.

One last thing, the Up key is back.

 

 

Skype will buy the GroupMe messaging service in order to expand its group messaging capabilities and gain points on the mobile battleground. People close to the deal say that the chat giant will cash out the whopping $85 million although Skype itself has not yet disclosed this information officially.

 

GroupMe is a very young company, started in 2010 and has around twenty employees. During the course of its first year it earned around $11 million in funding from the likes of Betaworks, First Round Capital, Khosla Ventures, General Catalyst and more.

 

Skype CEO Tony Bates has said that he is been in talks with GroupMe for a few months, around the time Skype was in negotiations with Microsoft, which is currently acquiring Skype for $8.5 billion. He has also said that Skype will keep GroupMe as a standalone brand, located in New York City, and look for points of integration with Skype service portfolio. The ultimate goal for Skype is to get to 1 billion active users and the company believes this would be done with the mobile ecosystem, where GroupMe would be a great asset to Skype.

 

 

This is a classic example of the saying that there is an opportunity in every loss. In this case, Microsoft is taking advantage of webOS demise by offering its developer community "free phones, dev tools, and training."

As you can see above, the words come from no other but Brandon Watson - the senior director of Windows Phone 7 development in Microsoft.

 

 

Here is one for frequent travelers with an iGadget Skype released an app called Skype Wi-Fi, available for all iOS 4.1+ devices (iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch).

What Skype Wi-Fi does is give you access to over a million commercial Wi-Fi hotspots around the world and lets you pay for using them on the go with your Skype Credit. Its good for quick connections to the Internet at odd places, but not so much for all-day usage as you are charged by by the minute.

For example, if you have a layover a some airport and need to check your email Skype Wi-Fi is an easy solution you do not need vouchers or anything, just some Skype Credit. Prices start at $0.06/€0.05 per minute and the app clearly displays how much it costs to use the current hotspot. This weekend (20-21 August) you get an hour of Wi-Fi use for free.

 

 

 

Downloading Microsoft camera codec pack (16.0.0652.0621) will enable your Windows 7 or Vista OS to show RAW format pictures in Windows Explorer and Photo Gallery and it has support for about 120 DSLR cameras. This means that you will no longer get the "unknown file" icon when looking into an album of RAW format images.

 

The RAW photo format is like a digital negative of a photo made with a DSLR camera. It contains uncompressed data from each individual pixel of the camera sensor and in layman terms its a bigger, unprocessed version of the JPEG photo.

 

Its not like addons such as the FastPictureViewer Codec Pack did not enable native RAW file support before but its more comfortable to have an in-built solution straight from Windows. Microsoft has even added runabout editing features through Windows. If you want to edit a RAW photo you select the option and Windows automatically creates an editable copy of your RAW file for you to manipulate. The original is safe and you have an already edited JPEG or JPEG-XR file.

 

Demo Below!

 

 

Microsoft CEO took the stage during the company Worldwide Partner Conference, which is held this week in Los Angeles, and revealed some interesting bits about the company mobile platform. Steve Ballmer admitted that Windows Phone 7 has not been particularly successful yet and in a year its market share has gone "from very small to… very small"

 

And while those are hardly the words Microsoft partners were hoping to hear, Ballmer remains optimistic about WP7 prospects. Expectations are that more users and developers will be drawn to the platform in the years to come and it will be able to compete with the Android and iOS behemoths.

 

 

Surely many of you already saw the Microsoft Arc Touch Mouse and a lot more are eager to get their hands on the Touch Mouse thats coming next month. It seems however that Microsoft is preparing another mouse for production a hybrid between the Arc Touch and Touch models called Explorer Touch.

 

The Explorer Touch Mouse inherits the haptic touch scroll pad from the Arc Touch and vibrates the same way when you use the scroll. The Explorer Touch Mouse has five customizable buttons and comes with Microsoft BlueTrack technology that allows it to work on a host of different surfaces.

 

 

The mouse seems to be quite compact and should be laptop oriented. Its expected to hit the stores at the end of July with a pricetag of £70 price

 

 

A popular joke has it that Microsoft default browser best feature is that it allows you to download a rival browser. But the fact is that IE is still the most popular browser worldwide and one that Microsoft is dead set on pushing to all of its devices PCs, tablets and WP7 smartphones.

So the release of the second platform preview of Internet Explorer 10 should still be pretty good news. Meant mainly for developers those platform previews are hardly anything to download and use on your PC, but they are a good indication that a release is nearing. Who knows, maybe Microsoft will finally be able to arrest the fall of IE market share.

So here is what IE10 has to offer at this stage. You get support for CSS3 positioned floats as well as huge update to its HTML5 support (drag and drop, file reader API, Media Query Listeners and initial support for HTML5 forms). Microsoft says latest web technologies will be a priority for them with the next IE, along with performance.

Video Below!

 

 

As Microsoft goes ahead all guns blazing with their new Windows Phone platform, they are starting to tear down the old Windows Mobile services. The web-based Marketplace will be put out of commission on July 15, leaving only the on-device app store functional. The My Phone back-up and sync service will be cut off on August 7, though contacts, calendar items, texts and photos will be migrated to SkyDrive, Microsoft’s cloud storage service. You are on your own for music, video, documents, and favourites, but you can always request that Microsoft ship you a CD with everything on it up until October 5 2012.

Windows Phone and the upcoming Mango update is offering a ton of services, including its own web-based app Marketplace, SkyDrive cloud storage, but it does not look like My Phone is returning for the sequel since its probably folded into SkyDrive. In any case, analysts are feeling optimistic about the future of Windows Phone; Microsoft is already well-entrenched in the home thanks to Windows on desktop and Xbox for the TV, plus they are roping in a bunch of smartphone manufacturers to support WP7. Microsoft is also well-poised for tablets this year through Windows 8.