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As a counterpoint, when my wife and I saw Rogue One we were both impressed that they managed to find somebody that looks just like Tarkin from the original film. I had no idea he was CG until reading about it after the fact.

This is true for even some small-town banks. I switched to Windows Phone last year and built a personal banking app that would display my financial details on a live tile. While using Fiddler to figure out the necessary API calls, I discovered that my tiny bank's Android and iOS API was actually provided and maintained by a much larger bank.

It turns out that the bigger bank has dozens of smaller banks using the very same API, and its a trivial matter of switching a URL slug to make my makeshift API work for these other banks.

It was an interesting learning experience, but I did manage to get myself locked out of my own bank account a few times while replicating the login process.

I've had a Band for most of the year and highly recommend it. Unlike watty, I think it's pretty comfortable. Admittedly it took a couple of days to get used to, but I rarely notice that it's on my wrist. The only exception being that the non-curved display does get in the way when I type on a laptop — which is very rare for me, your mileage may vary.

I'd recommend that you get a screen protector for your band, though. The weird, soft bezel around this version is extremely prone to scratches doing even the most mundane tasks.

Google OnHub Review 11 years ago

What I'm most concerned about, as somebody switching back to a Windows Phone soon, is the apparent lack of a web interface for the OnHub. According to this page [1] the OnHub requires an Android or iOS device, with the app installed, to setup and configure the router. I don't blame Google for not supporting Windows Phone, the market share is still very low, but I'm not convinced that requiring an app instead of using a web interface like every other router is what I want from this.

[1] https://on.google.com/hub/support/#get-started

Instead I have to have the Xbox brand shoved in my face at every opportunity?

I know this isn't your point, but you might be happy to learn that Xbox Music and Xbox Video have been renamed in Windows 10 to "Groove Music" and "Video", respectively. According to Microsoft, most users thought "I don't have an Xbox, why would I want to use Xbox Music?" — so they rebranded those apps.

Good for you! Magento isn't in my wheelhouse, but I'd be interested in hearing how you've gone about marketing your book before release — building a mailing list, sharing articles to social media, guest blog posts, etc. Do you have anything you'd do differently if you were to write another book in the future?

It's interesting that Lumia sales are up by more than 10%, but revenue through phone sales decreased by 38%. That was primarily caused by Microsoft's refusal to sell any flagship Windows Phones after they purchased Nokia. I was personally affected by that decision — after my Lumia 1520 broke, I had to reluctantly upgrade to an LG G4 because there are no flagship Windows Phones for sale anymore.

It's an unfortunate state of affairs when a modern browser has to spoof another browser just to get the right content. The user agent in Microsoft's new browser does this by default [1][2]. As a user, I'd love to see a day when browsers don't reveal their user agents and web developers rely on feature detection instead. I admit, though, that I haven't fully considered the collateral damage that might come with that.

[1] http://stackoverflow.com/a/31279980

[2] http://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2015/06/17/building-a-mor...

Again, this is all subjective, but I'll try to explain why I prefer live tiles over Android's widgets.

1. Android widgets are huge, I can fit maybe 4-5 widgets on one page of the Android desktop. More than that, they become so scrunched that you can't get any information out of them. This is compounded by the fact that some widgets only allow a certain size unless you download 3rd-party launchers.

2. Widget design is largely up to the app developer, and a lot of widgets are ugly (subjective) or at least don't match the other widgets you have them grouped with.

3. Widgets try to be interactive, and I can't tell you how frustrated it makes me when I'm scrolling across the desktops to look at widgets and I accidentally cross an item off of a todo list, or scroll through my list of emails instead of continuing on to the next desktop.

To me, the Android (and iPhone) home screens feel lifeless and dead when compared to a Windows Phone. On WP, my live tiles are always flipping around and displaying the latest emails, tweets, facebook posts, news articles, pictures from my camera roll, etc. The Windows Phone start screen displays all of that information to me at a glance, and I can pick and choose what to do next based on the summary that I see on my start screen. On Android, though, I have to actively search for that information by going from app to app.

Personally, I switched over to Windows Phone from a Nexus 4 after I bought a generic Windows 8 tablet and started using the live tiles. In my opinion, compared to the iOS and Android "grid of icons", live tiles are just superior in every way. I'm honestly surprised that neither Google nor Apple have copied Microsoft here.

MS publishes new builds like biweekly through MSDN.

While this is supposed to be true, there hasn't been a new public build in 50-something days. Most of the new information is coming from leaked internal builds.

Similarly, if you prefer the American date format you can change the two $scope.text lines near the end of controllers.js to

  $scope.text = "Good " + $scope.getStateOfDay(moment().get('hour')) + ", today is " + moment().format('dddd MM/DD/YYYY') + ".";
which looks like 'Thursday 03/12/2015'; or you can change both lines to
  $scope.text = "Good " + $scope.getStateOfDay(moment().get('hour')) + ", today is " + moment().format('dddd, MMMM DD, YYYY') + ".";
which looks like 'Thursday, March 12, 2015'.

IE10+ is already evergreen by default and should automatically update to IE11 (assuming the user didn't turn off auto-update).

Do you have any plans for a Windows Phone app? The SMS backup works well, but an app would be ideal; it's one of the few things I'm still missing after switching from Android.

As somebody that rarely uses illustrator or other graphical software, spending $30 or $50 for something neat like turning my code into a poster that I can hang on the wall is easily worth it — despite how little time it might take someone else to fire up illustrator or bang out some script.

Actually I think he is on the current Windows 10 build. Right now there's a button at the top-right of the start menu that switches it between full-screen and regular mode. This [1] is what it looks like on my system when full screen. It looks much worse in the article however, because the author only has three apps pinned to their start menu, and the three apps are in their 'medium' size rather than wide or large.

[1] http://i.imgur.com/xKCH1td.png

This is a good point. Few developers would care about Windows Phone if they can just build for Android and do a lazy port to WP (if they port at all). But what if Microsoft instead wants to make Windows apps work on Android? Microsoft is championing their "universal apps" now, where you build one Windows app and it runs on Windows 8/10, Windows Phone and soon Xbox One. Adding Android to that list would be big.