Sunday, August 30, 2015

Duolingo now supports Windows 10 Mobile & Desktop; Adds Esperanto and Norwegian.


Learning a new language can be a daunting task, but it does not have to be that way. Enter Duolingo, a free app for Windows Phone and Windows that makes the learning experience fun, rewarding and FUN. This app will definitely win your heart. I used it to learn italian. With Duolingo you can learn Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian, Irish, Dutch, Danish and English. The app will remind you if you miss your daily intake of whatever language you're learning. It was not necessary for me as Duolingo is so engaging.

Duolingo has been updated today and is now a Windows 10 universal app. Two new languages have been added and you can now learn Esperanto and Norwegian from English. Head over in the Windows Phone and Windows Store to download Duolingo and start the language of your choice.

Wednesday, August 19, 2015

Telescope for Periscope brings all live broadcasts in new global screen.

If you're a fan of live video broadcasting, then you probably already use Telescope for Periscope, a third party client of Twitter's Periscope service. Telescope was released on Windows Phone shortly after Twitter made the the first official app available on iOS. It was released on Android months later. The latter joined the club of users who enjoyed broadcasting live videos to the world. 

Telescope for Periscope (I'll just call it Telescope as from now) has picked up an update today that raises the version number to 1.1.05 with the following changes:

  • Loading indicator on sign-in.
  • Updates to home screen to show broadcasts from followers and most recent ended broadcasts.
  • New global screen to see all live broadcasts.
Download the update in the Windows Phone Store.



Wednesday, August 12, 2015

Microsoft announces Windows 10 Mobile Build 10512.


Microsoft has unexpectedly made Build 10512 of the Windows 10 Mobile available to the Fast ring of the Windows Insider program. Gabe Aul, also known as the ring master, posted a list of improvements and fixes on the Windows blog:
  • General improvement in overall stability and performance.
  • You can now set the Lock screen and background image from within the Photos app.
  • We fixed an issue where apps installed on SD cards weren’t working after a reboot.
  • We have improved Latvian and Chinese inputs.
  • We have made improvements to the Kid’s Corner tile layout.
  • We have improved reliability of Data Sense notifications.
  • Modified Shape Writing algorithm to be less aggressive in suggesting contact names over common words.
  • Resolved an issue where Camera would not launch when the phone was locked.
  • We fixed an issue where notifications for incoming text messages weren’t appearing.
  • We fixed an issue where the touch screen wouldn’t be responsive after ending a phone call on some devices.
  • And we fixed an issue where folder tiles have obviously overlapping text.
According to Gabe Aul, Windows 10 Mobile builds should be released more frequently now. He also posted a list of known issues that needs to be addressed:

  • Mobile hotspot doesn’t work in this build. When sharing the Internet from your phone using Mobile Hotspot, devices will fail to get a valid IP address from your phone and will show no internet access.
  • Two-factor authentication for your MSA with a phone number doesn’t work in this build. If you reset your phone and go through the first run experience, you won’t be able to input more than 2 characters for validating phone or text authentication. If you have a secondary email for two-factor authentication – you can choose that. As a workaround, add secondary email for two-factor authentication.
  • Some phones might spend a long time in the post update migration experience – just let the phone sit and it should complete this migration.
  • Apps that use background audio such as Groove, Podcast, Pandora, etc. will crash when launching after receiving an app update from the Store. Rebooting the device will resolve this issue.
  • Some phones with a large number of tiles pinned to the Start screen may get stuck in a state where the device shows “Loading…”; the device will need to be reset or rolled back to Windows Phone 8.1 using Windows Phone Recovery Tool.
  • Some apps may fail to update through the Store with the error code 0x80073cf9; uninstalling the application and reinstalling it will resolve this issue.
  • The Movies & TV app will not work in this build (video playback is currently broken).
The most annoying issue for me is the 5th item in the list where the phone will remain stuck while loading the Start screen. There are two workarounds which are to hard reset or go back to Windows Phone 8.1 and I'm not willing to go through this again on my Lumia 1520. I had to roll my 920 back to 8.1 today, so I'll wait for the next build with hope that Microsoft will definitely fix the "loading" problem.