Well, I still subscribe to that view. But when experimenting with Cortana, we came to the conclusion that it would be nice to have a couple of more commands to make the experiment meaningful.

Plus, more languages would be good, too.

That’s why we updated the list of commands and translated all the commands into all the languages we support: English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish. A big thanks to all the people who helped us with that.

So it’s still an experiment, but the experiment just got bigger!

-Andreas

PS A list of all current commands can be found here

Of course, Cortana requires one thing to do its job: speech recognition. Without speech recognition, you could talk to Cortana for hours and hours, it couldn’t care less With speech recognition, Cortana might be able to understand what you are saying. And in the best case, it might even figure out what you want.

And here’s the thing: Speech recognition on Windows 10 is not limited to Cortana. All Windows 10 apps can make use of it. Cool.

But beyond being cool, is it also helpful? Well, the proof is in the pudding, so we thought. That’s why we activated speech recognition in bitsofMine, gave it a handful of phrases and pushed this version to the store. And no, we don’t call it a feature and hence we did not mention Cortana in the Windows Store. It’s more of an experiment. At this point in time, bitsofMine only reacts to these English phrases when you are currently viewing your timeline:

• “Open map” – you’ll probably can guess what should happen!?
• “Close map” – yes, that’s as straightforward as it sounds, too
• “Play bits of Mine”,
• “Play random bits”, and
• “Start random bits” will start the random slideshow
• “Move timeline to next year”,
• “Move timeline to the next year”, and
• “Move timeline to the following year” will move the timeline from its current position one year into the future
• “Move timeline to last year”,
• “Move timeline to the last year”, and
• “Move timeline to the previous year” will move the timeline from its current position one year into the past

When toying with these commands ourselves, we found the ones that trigger large time leaps to be especially useful. Also, they are a very good fit to Cortana, because it’s hard to set them up in the graphical UI – unless we wanted to bloat bitsofMine’s UI, which we don’t

But anyway, the floor and the experiment are yours: Just give it a go and let us know what you think. All you need is a good mic (we found that the right mic will make a huge difference…) and an environment where you can talk to your computer without receiving strange looks.

Happy talking!

-Andreas

Let’s take, for example, Facebook status updates. Facebook status updates have always been different to Facebook photos. And sure, it’s quite straightforward to understand that a text status update isn’t a photo, right?

But why isn’t a Facebook photo posting also considered to be a status update? Good question. On a technical level, the answer is simple: Because photos and status updates are different objects with different identifiers and even different timestamps! (Sorry about the semi-techie gibberish) If an app has the right to access your Facebook photos, Facebook still requires a different access right for the app to access your status updates. Which is fair, because an app should only have access to that part of your data it really needs to do its job, right?

So far that distinction between status updates and photos hasn’t been causing much trouble from an app’s perspective: In most cases, a photo upload was a photo upload was a photo upload. And not a status update. In the odd cases, when a Facebook client used a photo also to update your status, however, some strange effects could kick in. For example, sometimes the photo collected “likes” that the status update didn’t collect – and vice versa. We can only guess, these strange effects made Facebook rethink their policy: Photo uploads via Facebook’s own clients now always appear to be duplicated as both photo uploads and status updates.

So why don’t you see any duplicates in your Facebook browser, you may ask? Because your browser most likely uses an API which gives access to everything in your feed: status updates, photos, links, likes, comments etc. And in this API, Facebook takes care of that duplication.

So why do you see duplicates in bitsofMine, you may ask? Because bitsofMine is using a different API that only gives it access to the data it really needs: Status updates, photos, and videos. And in this API, Facebook doesn’t flag any potential overlaps between status updates and photos.

But no matter what the underlying reasons are, the experience is not what we want you to have. Therefore, for our Windows 10 version of bitsofMine we came up with a filter that will take care of such “duplicates” from now on. Please note, that this approach will not eliminate any duplicates that you already have collected. Instead it should stop bitsofMine from collecting any presumed duplicates when going forward: If you have a new photo status update, it will only show up as an update once in the bitsofMine timeline.

And yes, you can already find our updated bitsofMine release in the Windows Store. We hope it does the trick for you.

Wishing you a great 2016!
-Andreas

PS Thanks to the user who brought this issue to our attention!

Ok, that’s not exactly new news: The version has been in the Windows Store since the end of October. But in this case, we wanted to do a rather silent launch and see whether there’ll be any unwanted or unexpected side effects of this new version. Looks like there isn’t

So what’s new in this version: If you have been a bitsofMine user since the days of Windows 8, you might want to learn about the new menu setup here. In short, if you want to navigate to a specific page, you should tap the hamburger button in the top left corner of the timeline. If you want to trigger a specific activity, you should tap on the action button (“…”) in the bottom right corner of your screen. That sounds a bit confusing at first, but hopefully it will feel straightforward after a few taps.

And what’s new in this version in terms of features? Probably the most prominent addition is the addition of a slideshow feature. Slideshow in our case means almost three different things: When you’re viewing the timeline, you will be able to play a random selection of photos. That is, you start the random slideshow (“random bits”) from the navigation menu and bitsofMine will play back a random selection to you.

Apart from the random slideshow, you can also trigger a slideshow of all photos with a given tag. You can trigger that feature from the tag view.

And you can do an exhaustive slideshow with all photos in time sequence: Just tap on the starting photo in the timeline and once the photo opened in full screen display, select the slideshow feature from the action menu.

And since Windows 10 is less touch focused than Windows 8.1 was, we also added support for a small selection of keyboard shortcuts. Please see a summary of these shortcuts here. Don’t you worry, we will still focus on touch in bitsofMine, but we just wanted to give you the option

Have fun!

-Andreas

PS We have heard that bitsofMine for Windows 10 can also be successfully installed on Windows Phone 10. Please be warned that we haven’t seen it ourselves yet -and we certainly haven’t tested it…

Well, the ones who are running Windows 10 and have installed bitsofMine on it already know: technically, bitsofMine is “working” on Windows 10. But the user experience is suboptimal, to say the least.

bitsofMine has been designed with Windows 8 in mind, it targets fullscreen mode and works best with touch interaction. When you run bitsofMine (or any Windows 8 app) on Windows 10, you will always get the app in a window, interaction with the app suddenly brings up scrollbars in places where there haven’t been any on Windows 8, thumbnails are smaller than they could and should be, interaction elements look out of place etc. In short, the app just feels weird.

So why isn’t there a Windows 10 version yet? Well, to be honest, building such a Windows 10 version is not that trivial. Even when attempting to just preserve the existing look and feel, Windows 10 requires many changes and a lot of exploring while developing. I won’t bore you with the details, but on a high level it might be fair to say that when launching Windows 10, Microsoft was keen on keeping the July deadline. Giving Windows 8 developers a head start wasn’t on top of Microsoft’s priority list this time. So like everybody else, developers had to wait for launch day before we could know for sure what we are dealing with.

But now for the good news: For the last couple of months we were working full speed on a Windows 10 version of bitsofMine! By now, we have been able to address the biggest migration issues, bitsofMine for Windows 10 runs nicely on our development machines and we are confident that we will have the release finally ready for the store in October!

We definitely would have preferred to be ready at launch date of Windows 10, but sometimes gravity gets in the way of our wishes.

Stay tuned !

-Andreas

We have learned that some of our users currently experience issues with the Facebook integration of bitsofMine. Because of these issues, at present some of you might be unable to log into Facebook, get updates from Facebook and/or share your photos and videos via Facebook. We are working hard to solve these issues as quickly as possible. Stay tuned.

In case you are interested, here is some additional background information:

On May 1st, Facebook has turned off its original Facebook API. This move has been announced many months in advance and developers had been repeatedly informed about it. Because of these announcements, we had adapted bitsofMine already in the beginning of the year and by now, bitsofMine had been using the new APIs for several months.

However, in addition to the data access changes, Facebook also changed the way it is issuing permissions regarding what data an app can access. If you want to know more about Facebook’s user permissions, you can find the current list of permissions here: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/facebook-login/permissions/v2.3

More specifically, bitsofMine requests the following permissions that require Facebook approval: user_photos, user_videos, user_status, publish_actions. bitsofMine requires these permissions in order to download your items into your collection and in order to share items on your behalf. Just that there is no misunderstanding: at no point does bitsofMine redirect/store your data to other locations than the ones you have specified. And at no point does bitsofMine share data on Facebook other than the one you have selected to be shared. Plus: even if Facebook grants bitsofMine these permissions, you will still be in control. You have to countersign these permissions in order to make Facebook accessible from within bitsofMine! Without your permission, bitsofMine can and will not do anything.

So far our understanding had been that these revised app permission policy only affects new apps. But as it turns out now, we were wrong: bitsofMine has to ask for reapproval of its permissions.

By now we have provided Facebook with all the information it requested. Whether and when you will be able to download/upload data with the help of bitsofMine again is a bit unknown, but we should learn more within the next five days. We will keep you posted.

Believe us, we are terribly sorry about this and we will do everything we can to make all of this work smoothly again as quickly as possible. In case you have any questions, please get in touch.

Best,

Andreas

Last time I had a look at the calendar it was August 2. We had just issued release 15 of bitsofMine and Summer in Finland was in full swing. My personal celebrations in the aftermath of this year’s football world cup were starting to slow down, at least a bit, and full focus shifted to bitsofMine again.

Today, it is October 24. More than two and a half months after release 15. And today, we released our release 17.

2.5 months for 2 releases is an awful long time! Especially given that our goal always was and still is to issue a new meaningful release every 2-3 weeks. Probably, it would sound way cooler if I added that we spent two out of these 2.5 months surfing the Mentawai islands. But we didn’t. We spent most of the time developing bitsofMine.

So what on earth took us so long? Basically just two things: support for *long* timelines (= large collections) and support for backups.

Both are what product dudes call “hygiene features”. Right. But both are darn important features for a digital shoebox. A shoebox needs to be big enough to store all the stuff that matters to you and a digital shoebox requires backups. Again: a digital shoebox requires backups. Fast backups. Reliable backups. Easy backups and restores.

And to be honest, some of the earlier shoebox size limitations were noticed by one of our users before we did. We thought we had large test collections ourselves. But her collection was way bigger. What a fantastic challenge!

Looking forward to the next challenges, whether or not they can be solved in two weeks!

Have a great Autumn!

Sure, I already took videos in the 80’s and 90’s. All of them were recorded on VHS and they still exist somewhere in my parents’ home. I think. But they were too bulky to put them into a shoebox. Let alone, take them with me. So maybe that’s the reason why they felt less personal to me than still pictures always did. Videos felt semi pro.

The digital age has changed that: Videos are personal now. Wherever you are, you can record videos with your smartphone. Your rather tiny action camera will capture all your runs when snowboarding.  You can share your videos via Facebook. And like all digital memorabilia, videos require little physical space, so you can take them with you wherever you roam.

On top, platform vendors and device vendors such as Microsoft and Facebook have taken care of the format pain. We don’t need to think about MPEG4, Quicktime, AVI, or WMV anymore. Instead, we just think about visuals – and every day a larger amount of these visuals starts moving. Interestingly enough, most of us didn’t even need to sign up for Hogwarts for that to happen.

Did I mention that starting today, bitsofMine supports video?

Have a great Summer!

Best,

Harry Potter, ah, I mean, Andreas

Hey, I always wanted to say that.

In the latest bitsofMine release, published today, we have added an InfoGraphics page which gives you some interesting details about your bitsofMine collection, such as:

• how many items there are in your collection
• how your collection developed over the last year
• whether you have more Facebook postings or more tweets
• how active you have been on Wednesdays
• what Facebook posting got the most comments
• etc.

Is this information life-critical? Probably not. But it can be fun!

Have fun!
-Andreas

Swiping the timeline is now much smoother. *Much* smoother. *Much* *much* smoother!

And: we have added 1-Click Maintenance! 1-Click Maintenance, what’s that? Every now and then, it will be handy to do a cleanup, for example

• if you have deleted some files from your bitsofMine folder instead of from the app
• if you have renamed files in the file system
• if you have added photos to the bitsofMine folder directly
• if you have changed your display to a display with a different resolution, etc.

1-Click Maintenance will do the necessary changes in the bitsofMine app so you don’t have to do any cumbersome cleanup yourself.

But it was also interesting to realize that no matter how valuable these changes might be to users, these are the kind of features that rarely make it to a press release. That’s a pity. But luckily we don’t have a Marketing department yet that could be upset now

Cheers from sunny Espoo!

-Andreas

PS Thanks to the guys at the Microsoft Windows XAML team with whom I had the pleasure to discuss at Build 2014: We could not have done the timeline improvements without your expertise and willingness to share information!