In this week’s edition of Weekend Reading, we’ve got stories on the refreshed Outlook.com Calendar service, an update for Skype for Windows 8 and a major Skype milestone and an update to Visual Studio 2012.
The Outlook.com Calendar gets a refresh. On Tuesday, we released a new, modern calendar experience for Outlook.com. The Outlook.com calendar has been entirely redesigned with a modern, intuitive interface that puts you in control of your schedule. Our calendar service is faster than ever, helps you focus on the events and appointments and tasks you've added, and lets you take your calendar with you on any device. The new Outlook.com calendar is rolling out now and will be available around the world this week at https://calendar.live.com/. The Outlook Blog has the whole story. Below are screenshots showing how the new Calendar fits into the same family as your inbox, address book and SkyDrive:
And in Windows Phone app and game news… Free calls, texts, and photo messaging help make Viber one of the most popular VoIP apps in the world. On Tuesday, a new and improved version for Windows Phone 8 arrived in the Store. Download it here. The redesigned app offers free calls with HD sound, pinning of conversations to Start via Live Tiles, lock screen notifications, and beautiful improvements to its look and performance for Windows Phone 8. Get the rest of the story in this post on The Windows Phone Blog. Below are a few screenshots of Viber. Also, don’t miss this post on “Amazing Alex”, a new game from the makers of Angry Birds and this post with six tricks for powering through your inbox on Windows Phone 8.
Skype for Windows 8 updated. On March 29, we released an update to Skype for Windows 8. In the 1.6 release, we continue to address top user feedback and deliver the most requested features. With this update, we wanted to give our users higher control over who can contact them by adding the ability to block contacts. Read more about the update on Skype’s Garage & Updates Blog. Also, earlier this week, Skype hit a huge milestone - Skype users are spending more than 2 billion minutes per day connecting with each other! Get the full story (and a super cool infographic) over on Skype’s Big Blog.
And the Windows 8 Apps for Social Good Winners are… In November we launched the Windows 8 Apps for Social Good contest. You voted for your favorite app, and our judges voted for theirs. It was great to see the variety of social good apps submitted to the contest – nutrition, health care, emergency response, and more. The judges had a hard time selecting the winners because of the quality and usefulness of the apps. You can find the winning apps and all the other fantastic entries in the Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 stores or on the contest page. Without further ado, head on over to the Microsoft Corporate Citizenship Blog to see the winners. Below are a few screenshots from the Windows Phone 8 winner – Health Center.
Visual Studio 2012 Update 2 now available. We’re excited to announce that we’ve shipped Visual Studio 2012 Update 2 (VS2012.2) and that it’s now available for download. Just as with VS2012.1 (which is installed as part of VS2012.2 for those of you who don’t already have VS2012.1 installed), this release contains important fixes as well as a wealth of new functionality, addressing feedback we’ve received from the community and aligning with key software development trends in the market. The new functionality primarily spans (though is not limited to) five areas of investment: agile planning, quality enablement, Windows Store development, line-of-business development and the general developer experience. Read more about it in this Thursday post on S. Somasegar’s blog.
Introducing the new class at the Microsoft Accelerator for Windows Azure. We launched the Microsoft Accelerator for Windows Azure, powered by TechStars, to give early stage startups full access to Windows Azure and to help them succeed by connecting each company to leading technical and business mentors. We’re happy to share that the new spring 2013 class features a healthy mix of exciting solutions and an impressive list of founders whose feedback will directly inform future Windows Azure releases. On Monday, the 10 new teams in the Microsoft Accelerator for Windows Azure moved into their South Lake Union office space. Read more about it in this blog post from Scott Guthrie, Corporate Vice President of the Server & Tools Business.
That’s a wrap for this edition of Weekend Reading. Thanks for stopping by The Official Microsoft Blog.
Posted by Jeff Meisner
Editor, The Official Microsoft Blog