ICYMI: Microsoft throws everything into mixed reality

Today on In Case You Missed It: Microsoft introduced a bunch of new products this week but the darling might be the new Surface Studio, with 65% more pixels in it than a standard 4K monitor. Meanwhile Anheuser-Busch teamed with self-driving truck company Otto for a beer run demo through Colorado.

Finally make sure you send your virtual reality friends this fail of a VR mountain climber so we don’t all learn the same lesson. As always, please share any interesting tech or science videos you find by using the #ICYMI hashtag on Twitter for @mskerryd.

Microsoft Explains How Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and Outlook Work With Touch Bar

Yesterday during its Hello Again event, Apple confirmed that the Microsoft Office suite of apps will be gaining support for Touch Bar on the new MacBook Pro, and now Microsoft has detailed what that will look like for each app. The company said that with Touch Bar support on Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and Outlook, it’s “continually evolving Office to take advantage of the latest and greatest hardware innovations across the industry.”

In Word, users will be able to use “Word Focus Mode,” which eliminates the clutter of on-screen ribbons and commands “so you can simply focus on your work.” All of the relevant UI is then moved down onto Touch Bar, with classic buttons like copy/paste, bold, italics, underline, list, indent, and more found on Apple’s new multi-touch panel.

Microsoft said PowerPoint’s addition of Touch Bar support lets users “easily manipulate graphic elements.” Buttons like “Reorder Objects” make it easy to find the exact object users are looking for and move it to a new location, thanks to an easy-to-read graphical map of a slide’s layers. Object manipulation and slides can also be rotated and tracked by sliding a finger across the Touch Bar.

Excel’s Touch Bar integration makes it quicker to write functions into rows of the program. By typing an equals sign into a cell, Excel will immediately pull up the most recently used functions and display them on the Touch Bar. As the company explained, “for example, with a tap (for the formula) and another tap (for a named range) in the Touch Bar, you can quickly sum a range in your spreadsheet.” Easy spreadsheet organization is also available through the Touch Bar, with borders, cell colors and recommended charts propagating on the panel.

The last program detailed was Outlook, and Microsoft said that here the Touch Bar will provide “the most commonly used commands” whenever a user is working in its calendar and email programs. This means when composing an email, an add file prompt appears, along with a list of recent documents that users can one-tap to attach as a full attachment or a link. While in Outlook’s calendar, users will be able to see their events for the day, and even jump into a Skype for Business video meeting.

Before Apple’s event, Microsoft held its own presentation on Wednesday, where it announced a new Surface Book and all-in-one desktop Surface Studio, as well as a “Creators Update” coming to Windows 10. Microsoft’s new computers are up for pre-order now, the Surface Book starting at $2,399 and Surface Studio at $2,999, and are expected to ship in November and December, respectively.

Related Roundup: MacBook Pro
Tags: Microsoft, Microsoft Office
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Microsoft’s Dial is coming to the Surface Pro and Book

As part of its event yesterday, Microsoft revealed the wireless Surface Dial, a control wheel that attaches directly to the Surface Studio’s screen, letting artists select colors and do other chores. While the $100 device is compatible with the any Windows 10 PC, including Surface Pro 4 and Surface Book, the company originally said the on-screen functions would only work on the Surface Studio. However, VP Terry Myerson told the Verge that you’ll be able to use it directly on the Surface Pro 4 and Surface Book displays early next year thanks to a firmware update.

The Surface Dial lets you flip through documents, change your screen brightness, and “rewind” your work back to an earlier version, to name a few functions. When you place it on the screen, it brings up a contextual radial menu so that you can select colors and do other chores with one hand, and sketch using a Surface Pen with the other. Thanks to haptic feedback, it gives the clicky feeling of a real dial.

The wheel seems better suited to the large 28-inch screen on the $2,999 Surface Studio, as it will take up a big chunk of space when you lay it on a Surface tablet. Some artists may find it handy for sketching on the go, though, particularly with the new high-horsepower Surface Book i7. As mentioned, we don’t have a precise date for the firmware, other than early 2017.

Source: The Verge

Microsoft is making a play for Apple’s base of creatives

During today’s Surface event Microsoft executives used the word “creative” tens of thousands of times. Sure, they talked about using Word, Excel and Powerpoint as a way to achieve these artistic goals, but at the core the company that’s traditionally filled meetings with large spreadsheets and bullet-pointed mission statements is going after the designers of the world. The question is: Why?

By all accounts the Surface Pro and Surface Book are solid computers. They’ll fit right into any Windows-centric home or office with their fancy pen and detachable displays. But wander down to the local coffee shop and you’ll be hard pressed to see the company’s hardware. A majority of the computers being used to write scripts, update web pages, create logos and compose songs are MacBooks. The Apple logo has been associated with artists for decades. Microsoft wants its logo on those machines creating content.

“Creatives” (ugh that word) form bonds with the machines that help them produce their work. That MacBook becomes their favorite paint brush or pencil. The attachment these folks have with Apple products kept the company afloat (barely) in the 90s. It’s an illogical love for a piece of hardware that I myself succumbed too when I was a designer in the late 90s.

Microsoft was about work. Apple was about art. Art is cool, work is not.

You can argue the merits of the competing operating systems until you’re blue in the face. But to designers and artists, Apple was and still is the obvious winner.

That dedication and evangelism not only kept Apple alive during its darkest hours, but it helped propel the company to become a tech juggernaut. Everyone wants to be cool and picking up few Apple products is a great way to show that you were one of the “crazy ones” ready to change your mindset to “think different.”

Microsoft and especially CEO Satya Nadella wants that sort of devotion for their products. They want to be loved. In fact at the Windows 10 event in 2015 Nadella said, “we want people to love Windows on a daily basis,” and “we wanna make Windows 10 the most loved release of Windows.”

To get that love — or at least a very strong like — it’s focusing on the computer users that make the deepest attachments to their tools: creatives aka the “cool kids.” They need them to show up to the coffee shops carrying a Surface Book to work on a client’s logo. It needs a creative director to guide clients over to a Surface Studio to walk them through the design of their site.

It’s human nature to want to be like the coolest person you know. If your job is working on mundane spreadsheets all day, the fashionista with the Surface Book looks like the awesomest person in the world. You might not be able to pull off the duds or the do, but you sure as hell can buy a computer to be cool.

That’s all Microsoft wants. It wants you to think you’re cool when you buy its products because it’s achieved that status in the eyes of artists. These hip new users probably won’t do much for the company’s bottom line (remember Apple almost died when all it had were the cool kids), but it’ll give it some much needed counter-culture clout. And if you happen to fall in love with a piece of metal and plastic and tell all your friends about your latest symphony, that’s even better.

What happened at Microsoft’s Surface event

Microsoft spent more than two hours on stage today introducing new products and software updates, but it all really comes down to one thing: the Surface Studio. It’s one of the most impressive pieces of hardware Microsoft has ever developed and a truly unique take on the all-in-one computer. If you’ve become addicted to using a digital pen on devices like Microsoft’s own Surface Pro or the iPad Pro but have craved a larger canvas, look no further. Of course, this doesn’t come cheap — the powerful and impeccably designed machine will set you back at least $2,999.

Beyond the Surface Studio, Microsoft also rolled out a new high-end Surface Book convertible laptop and announced that the Windows 10 “Creators Update,” which includes plenty of 3D-focused features, will roll out in the spring. Oh, and who can forget that crazy new Surface Dial? Let us catch you up with everything Microsoft rolled out today, won’t you?