A month ago, Apple sparked a conversation about the emojis by including the racially diverse ones in the OS X 10.10. 3 and iOS 8.3 update. While those ripples were disrupting the pond, Microsoft has gone a step ahead by throwing in a bold emoji in the Windows 10.

One of the latest builds of the Windows 10 Technical Preview includes the bold middle finger emoji. Often referred as the finger or flipper, that emoji comes along with various skin tones as well. Technically being referred a “reverse hand with middle finger extended”, this emoji sounds nothing close to profane one at least in the Unicode Consortium’s listing. Read more »

A public preview version of Microsoft Office 2016 has been released for all Windows users to download and try out. Microsoft is working to release the next version of its productivity suite by the second half this year.

Microsoft Office 2016 brings in new tricks including Universal Apps, which were showcased during the BUILD 2015 conference last week. Read more »

In the future, Microsoft’s Office apps will get their own third party apps – running inside them across platforms, so on Windows but also on iOS and in the Web versions of the Office suite. This has been revealed today during Microsoft’s Build conference.

An Uber app running inside Outlook was demoed, as evidenced by the shot above. The Uber app or add-in doesn’t seem to intrude very much into the main Outlook workspace, but it will allow you to easily schedule rides from your calendar appointments. Read more »

BitTorrent has introduced its ambitious plan to offer a content friendly web access through its Project Maelstrom web browser. Now available as public beta, the Project Maelstrom is powered by distributed computing technology, very similar to the one used in its torrent client for peer-to-peer digital files distribution.

The idea behind Project Maelstrom is to offer a web browsing experience that provides seamless access to the content coming from everywhere. Read more »

After wooing the Windows users with a free upgrade to Windows 10, even for those with pirated versions, it’s clear that Microsoft has a bigger game plan. While that plan unfolds slowly, the Redmond headquartered software giant is rolling out new Windows 10 Technical Preview builds to early testers.

The latest Windows 10 TP build 10049 bundles the next generation web browser called Project Spartan. Read more »

For a lot of people Windows 10 sounds like the a dream come true. The net installment of the popular OS promises universal apps across all hardware platforms and versions and perhaps even more exciting – compatibility with every Windows Phone 8 handset out there.

Things looked even better after the US tech giant announced its plans to captivate the Chinese market by offering legal upgrades to both genuine and non-genuine Windows installs. Another piece of the Windows 10 puzzle has surfaces today, courtesy of a leaked China presentation and it could potentially show a slightly darker aspect of the upcoming OS. Read more »

Microsoft is working hard on the much anticipated launch of the Windows 10 operating system. The software giant has announced it will make Windows 10 available across 190 countries and in 111 different languages. No specific date has been revealed yet, though.

With over 1.5 billion users around the globe, Microsoft aims to make Windows 10 a desirable upgrade. That’s helped by the fact that existing users of Windows 7, Windows 8.1, and Windows Phone 8.1 will receive a free upgrade to Windows 10 OS for a uniform seamless experience across devices. Read more »

Yesterday we saw Android 5.1 make the rounds with a few official builds for Nexus devices. The next iteration of the popular OS brings new features and various improvements to the table and incorporated all of the patches and bug fixes from Android 5.0.1 and 5.0.2.

All and all, it is much more focused on updating Lollipop with new functionality and attending to some irritations, than the previous two builds and consequently comes with a few new APIs – API level 22 in Google talk. Read more »

Almost one month ago, Microsoft made the Office 2016 preview available for Windows. And today marks the release of the preview for Mac OS X 10.10 Yosemite.

As you may have gathered, Office 2016 will be the next version of Microsoft’s cash cow, and it’s expected to be out in the second half of this year. In the meantime, though, the Redmond software giant is working on it. Read more »

Tim Sweeney, CEO, technical director and original co-founder on Epic Games announced today that the company is making the latest version of its famous Unreal engine free to download and use. The fourth version of the complete and very impressive creative suite is now open source, which means that developers can not only use the powerful tools, but also freely tweak them and ideally make them better.

There is somewhat of a catch though. The software package is free for use in everything all the way from educational purposes to commercial projects, but Epic still wants to capitalize on its creation. The scheme they have come up with is ingenious. Instead of charging its current $19 monthly subscription fee, the team is making the entire platform free-for-all with the agreement that if your Unreal-based creation starts making more than $3,000 per month, per quarter, they are entitled to 5% of that gross revenue. Read more »

The Microsoft MWC event had a few interesting device announces, namely the new Lumia 640 and its bigger brother – the Lumia 640 XL. A large part of the company’s presentation, however was dedicated to the constantly improving universal application experience on Windows devices.

As most of you surely know, Windows 10 applications are now built around a brand new “One Windows” philosophy. The concept is incredibly straight-forward – have a uniform application ecosystem that will be supported across the whole range of Windows devices and allow developers to write uniform code and make for a seamless user experience transition from mobile screens all the way to full PC desktops. Read more »

Just days after Lenovo admitted that the Superfish software, which comes pre-installed on some of its consumer laptops, could leave systems vulnerable to a man-in-the-middle (MITM) attack, it has been slapped with a class-action lawsuit.

Filed by Jessica Bennett, whose laptop was damaged due to what she termed a “spyware”, the lawsuit charges both Lenovo and Superfish with fraudulent business practices, breaching users’ privacy, and tracking their Internet browsing habits. Read more »

After about ten years since it was first introduced, Google will be deprecating the Google Talk application for Windows. Google stopped allowing people to download the app long time ago but you can still continue using it, that is, until February 25.

Google already has a replacement in the form of Hangouts, which has been around for over a year now, and includes a lot more features, such as group messaging, audio and video calls, and emoji support. Read more »

Cortana is just one of the many new features that Windows 10 will bring to eager users. But among the overwhelming sea of new performance and experience improvements, cross-device support and advanced features it is easy to overlook the seemingly plain assistant ant its place in the new OS.

The truth is that Cortana is aiming to be a truly inspired and innovative take on assistant software which has gone far beyond the clever voice search tool it started out as on Windows Phone devices. The team behind the software has taken the time to walk interested users through the steps it took to create the assistant and explain how clever and personal it can actually be. This was done through a rather lengthy blog post on Microsoft’s website and a short video that can be seen below. Read more »

Microsoft Office 2016 preview is now available for users who are willing to commit to a non-disclosure agreement. The Redmond giant will officially release Office 2016 later this year.

The upcoming Office release is available through Microsoft Connect. Read more »