Windows 11's February feature update is causing issues for some users, where the Start menu disappears as soon as you hover over to it, thanks to a conflict with widgets trying to appear at the same time.
The update brought a preview option for Android apps on the Microsoft Store, alongside dark mode in Notepad, the return of Windows Media Player, and more.
But there's a growing number of users who are reporting issues with the Start menu, where it looks to be conflicting with the widgets in the Taskbar.
In our tests, we also found the same issue, while pressing the Windows key to keep the menu from disappearing, instead of using the mouse to click on the Start menu icon, seemed to fix the problem.
Analysis: a glaring bug that should have been fixed before release
It's certainly a frustrating bug, and it raises the question of why wasn't this fixed before the February update landed? The Taskbar and the Start menu have both seen polarizing changes since Windows 11 was announced in June 2021.
This bug won't help matters for – to have the Start menu disappear, especially when you want to quickly launch an app or a document, is going to frustrate many people.
But Microsoft is aware of the bug, according to Windows Latest, so we may not have to wait long for the next fix to arrive. But, in a time when a big change to a feature that's been in Windows for almost thirty years is rendered useless because of a bug, it isn't going to be a good advert for Windows 11.
So the company has to act fast here and make sure that something like this doesn't appear in the release update for all users in the future. But if you're also experiencing the same or other issues, let Microsoft know in the Feedback Hub.
Microsoft is looking to bring two of its most successful software offerings in recent months closer together with another significant update to its video conferencing platform.
The company has announced it is working on a new feature that will allow LinkedIn profiles to be displayed in Microsoft Teams.
The information will be displayed in personal chats, meaning colleagues can find out more about their co-workers, say when planning for a project or looking to help with onboarding.
Microsoft Teams LinkedIn
The official entry in the Microsoft 365 roadmap notes that the change will allow users to see LinkedIn profiles of their colleagues in 1:1 chats only to begin with. Users will be able to view information on a person's profile via the LinkedIn tab in the 1:1 chat panel.
The update is still currently in development, with Microsoft projecting a March 2022 release date at the moment. The tool is also noted as being generally available to all global users across Microsoft Teams web and desktop versions.
Microsoft bought LinkedIn back in 2016 for around $ 26.2 billion as it looked to get a foothold in the social media space. The move has so far proved successful, with Microsoft's most recent financial results showing that Productivity and Businesses Processes, which includes Microsoft 365 and LinkedIn, was up 19% YoY to $ 15.9 billion.
However, the site has struggled to break into the potentially-lucrative Chinese market, with Microsoft forced to launch InCareer, a completely new app solely for Chinese users after being forced to withdraw its standard offering.
Elsewhere, however, LinkedIn appears to be enjoying strong growth in other markets, with Microsoft recently announcing the launch of its worldwide Services Marketplace for freelancers and adding a Hindi option, opening the service up to over 600 million speakers globally.
Microsoft Teams continues to go from strength to strength, with the latest figures from the company showing that the service now boasts over 270 million monthly active users (MAUs).
Recent data collected by software firm StarLeaf found almost all (97%) businesses say that tools such as Zoom, Webex and Teams are now essential to their operations.
More than half (57%) of the 2,000 UK-based respondents claim their company would not be able to operate for more than an hour without access to their communications tools, while 27% admitted they would struggle to function for even 30 minutes.
Microsoft has achieved a major milestone after its ad network – spread across Bing, Outlook.com, AOL, MSN.com, Yahoo, and other properties – reached one billion people last year.
The news comes via MediaPost, which cites Microsoft internal data and ComScore as evidence of the huge reach of the company's ad business.
According to Microsoft, many of the viewers are “overlapping audiences” – the term used for when an audience member uses multiple properties or services from the company at once. As such, 64% of US Windows users also visited a Microsoft service in Q3 2021.
How did we get here?
You might be wondering how Microsoft has somehow managed to create an ad business that compares to Google and Facebook and the answer is essentially that Microsoft has been plugging away for a long time to get here.
Back in 2006, Microsoft struck a deal with Facebook to supply ad inventory to the growing service, giving the former much-needed eyeballs and letting Facebook focus on growing its service.
The success of MSN.com has also played a role. According to Alexa.com, MSN.com records an average of 40 million daily visits, ranking 59th in the world. The news service, which often aggregates others, outranks CNN.com by this metric.
Microsoft also recently acquired AT&T's programmatic ad marketplace Xandr, suggesting the company's ambitions are extensive.
WhatsApp is great at letting you know when you have received a new message, but also gives you the option of quietening notifications for those times when you don’t want to be disturbed. Now there is a new preview version of the app available that introduces an important upgrade to notifications that make them even more useful.
If another member of a group chat replies to a message you have posted, or if they @ mentions you, the notification you see now includes the profiles picture of the person in question. Again, this is a relatively minor change, but it is a tweak that can make a world of different to usability.
While you need to update to the latest preview build of WhatsApp in TestFlight in order to access all of the latest features as options, making the upgrade is not necessarily a guarantee that you will be able to see these new notifications images.
Keep informed
This latest change is just the latest update to notifications, and it comes hot on the heels of the addition of profile photos to notifications in iOS. But this most recent update is about more than just changes to notifications.
As WABetaInfo notes, with this beta version, WhatsApp has also changes the way app version numbers are formatted. While the previous version of WhatsApp for iOS was 2.22.1.1, the latest is now listed as 22.1.71 – quite a jump. However, if you check within the settings of the app, it is shown to be 2.22.1.71, and it's not clear when – or, indeed, if – the two will be brought in line with each other.
As the year begins to end and people focus on taking a well-earned break over the Christmas holidays, it's a good time to take stock of life, work, and love. We're only focused on the second of those three today and specifically email usage.
TechRadar Pro has commissioned an exclusive poll of 500 respondents from OnePulse showing which email services people use and some details about how.
Surprise, surprise Gmail comes out on top.
(Image credit: Geralt / Pixabay)
A lot of people absolutely hate email, and with good reason. Clients, especially default clients like Apple Mail, are often slow and geared towards casual users, not power users at work.
On top of that, Slack and Teams, plus a bunch of others, have sprouted up to fulfil work-specific chat needs – even Meta has got in on the action with Workplace.
To email or not to email
So, let's break down the results.
According to our survey, the dominant email service is Gmail – and it's not even close. A full 59% of respondents use Google's email offerings, followed by Outlook (19.7%), Yahoo (13%), iCloud (2.9%), and others (5%).
But what about power users? Well, they're in the minority too. Most people (75.6%) have between one and 10,000 emails in their inbox, followed by 16.75% who have between 10,001 and 100,000, and then a rarified 7.59% have over 100,001 or more.
The story is similar for email storage: just over half (50.2%) either don't know or don't care how full their inbox is. The rest have up to 5GB filled (32.8%) or over 5GB (17%).
With or without Omicron, a significant portion of Brits were already planning celebrate the holidays over video conference, new research suggests.
Surveying 2,023 UK adults for the report, networking firm Global Wireless Solutions (GWS) found that 11% expect to use live-streaming apps to connect with their friends and family during Christmas and the New Year, as compared with 12% last year.
While keeping in touch with friends and family over digital platforms is a necessary evil for more than a third (37%), almost the same proportion (34%) say the technology helped them feel included when they were unable to participate in-person last time round. A further 28% said it helped them feel connected, which is particularly important during the holiday season.
A digital Christmas
As a result of the pandemic, the use of live-streaming and video conferencing services is on the rise, with Facebook Messenger, FaceTime and Zoom all attracting more users than before.
However, connectivity issues are hampering their experience, the report suggests, with a quarter of people encountering fuzzy or low-quality pictures, or video freezes.
Part of the problem, GWS hints, lies with the telecoms sector. Of all the users that have suitable devices (e.g. a decent mobile device, webcam and headset), a third (33%) do not have adequate speeds to watch or broadcast an HD live-stream effectively. According to the report, a mobile device would need at least 5 Mbps download speeds and 4.5 Mbps upload.
The report singles out O2 as attracting the fewest complaints from customers in this context. Roughly half of O2 customers (51%) did not report any issues when live-streaming, and 02 customers also had fewer issues with audio and picture quality.
For those suffering from connectivity issues, 5G could roll out just in time to save the day. More than a quarter (28%) of Brits are excited about the launch of 5G, with a fifth (22%) seeing it as important for keeping in touch with their loved ones.
Check out our list of the best VoIP services around
Meta, Facebook’s parent company, said that the seven banned actors run fake accounts on its platforms to deceive users and plant malware on targets’ phones. Threatpost
Google is rolling out improvements for its calendar app that should help people better manage their busy schedules.
As described in a blog post, Google Calendar users will soon benefit from the ability to prevent unwanted invitations from being added to their calendar.
Under the updated system, users can choose for meetings and other events to be added to their calendar only after they have responded to the email invitation. The effect, says Google, is a less cluttered calendar interface and less time spent on administration.
The new Google Calendar feature should go live for all Workspace users (both business and personal) within the next two weeks.
Google Calendar invitations
Since the transition to remote and hybrid working, many more meetings have taken place over video conferencing and VoIP services. Managers have also been encouraged to check in more frequently with employees, in the absence of a quick chat or coffee break at the office.
All of this means a larger volume of meetings and more unwieldy calendars, which is somewhat of a nightmare for anyone who already spent more than their fair share of time in meetings before the pandemic.
With this latest update, however, Google Workspace users will be able to manage their calendars more effectively with less manual effort, as well as highlighting the events and meetings most important to them.
Of course, the ability to divert invitations doesn’t address endemic problems with meetings culture in this new world of hybrid working, but it will at least go some way to alleviating the symptoms.
To activate or deactivate the new feature, use the following pathway in the Google Calendar web app: Settings > Event settings > Add invitations to my calendar.
It looks like both Google and Apple saw record-breaking numbers when it came to mobile app installs in 2021.
SensorTower measures the most popular app installs for Google and Apple devices, and in 2021 there was a 20% increase in users purchasing apps.
Many of the most popular apps appear to be social media apps and games, with TikTok, Facebook and Instagram being at the top of the most-installed charts, alongside games such as Honor of Kings and Coin Master.
However, we’re starting to see different ways in which we can access these apps, with Apple M1-powered Macs allowing iOS apps to be used and Chromebooks running Android apps. Windows 11 is also about to be able to download and run Android apps through Amazon.
With mobile apps coming to more operating systems, we may see a big change in SensorTower’s charts in a year’s time of how apps will be downloaded and purchased.
An App Store in more places
These charts give users a good idea of what apps were used across the year. With the global Covid-19 pandemic, people are using devices more in their homes as lockdowns became enforced, which would have influenced the charts from SensorTower in 2021.
But thanks to vaccines, users are going out again, trying different apps for different situations. This could lead to an increase in travel apps, for example, with users looking into what public transport they should use.
The MacBook Pro 14-inch (2021) is a recent example that’s powered by Apple’s M1 Pro or M1 Max chips, which let you download previously-purchased iOS apps. This is because the CPU is the same architecture as used in the iPhone and iPad, and this has allowed apps to also run in macOS, as long as the developer has allowed for this.
This means that if you see an app on the iOS App Store, there’s a good chance that you can also use it on your Mac as well as your iPhone or iPad.
This could have a big influence on the charts that SensorTower creates each year. We use our devices in different ways in different places – for instance, an app you download from the iOS App Store may be more suited on your Mac. Games are a good example of this, with Grand Theft Auto: Vice City being available for iPhone and iPad, but can now be downloaded on an M1-powered Mac, so you can carry on your progress during a commute on the train for instance.
Meanwhile, Microsoft is also doing its own take on this, thanks to an agreement with Amazon.
(Image credit: Apple)
A Windows App Store fusion
Windows 11 was announced in June with a redesigned Microsoft Store, where you can download and install apps, much like you can in Android and iOS. But a surprise arrived in the form of Android apps from the Amazon App Store, which are also coming to the Microsoft Store.
While it’s in testing on the Windows Insider channels, where you can test features under development, it could heavily influence how the Android charts from SensorTower could appear this time next year. Users who have an Android phone could carry on their work or progress in a game on their Windows tablet and PC, as long as the app is available on the Microsoft Store.
Users have already found methods to install any Android app from Google Play on Windows 11, which showcases how other apps could be used in Microsoft’s software if the company went beyond the Amazon App Store agreement.
We’re in a time where mobile apps are about to expand to other devices in a big way, which could also encourage developers to create apps or update their existing ones to cater for these changes.
Both iOS apps in macOS and Android apps in Windows 11 throw down the gauntlet to see how developers can adapt to these upcoming changes. It’ll also be interesting to see how these new ways of using mobile apps influence next year’s charts.
Advertisements have begun appearing in the lower right corner of Microsoft Edge following a recent update to Microsoft's browser.
These ads or recommendations are for service such as Microsoft Start according to a new report from Windows Latest. For those unfamiliar, Microsoft Start is a rebranded MSN feed that provides users with “personalized trusted news, plus games, weather and more – all in one app”.
Apparently Microsoft has begun experimenting with showing more ads and recommendations that appear when a user opens the New Tab Page in its browser. While they can be distracting and somewhat annoying, these pop-ups can be easily dismissed by clicking on the “Maybe later” button.
At the same time, Microsoft appears to be using its new Assistance from Microsoft Edge feature to collect search results from users in an effort to improve its Bing search engine. While the data collected by the software giant isn't associated with users or their devices, not everyone wants to hand over their search data even if doing so does help improve their preferred search engine.
Office integration
Microsoft is also testing out a new Office integration for its browser that will allow users to access Microsoft 365 apps directly from Edge.
On the Microsoft Edge Canary Channel, the company has added a new option called “New Office Tab” to the browser's context menu that can be accessed by right-clicking on an open window. This new feature will allow users to open Word, PowerPoint and Excel directly in Edge without having to leave the browser.
It also appears that Microsoft's new Office integration won't be exclusive to Microsoft 365 subscribers and anyone with a Microsoft account will be able to take advantage of it. However, just like with “Read Aloud”, “Add page to Collections” and the other options in the context menu, users won't be able to disable it.
As Microsoft's new Office integration is currently being tested out in Edge Canary, it likely won't be long until this feature comes to the stable version of the company's browser.
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