August, 2022 - Softonic English

Microsoft gives OneDrive a facelift on its 15th birthday

Cloud storage apps like Dropbox, Google Drive, and Microsoft’s OneDrive have revolutionized how we work and collaborate with teams that could be spread out across the globe. Even still, however, they are far from sexy and are often seen as just boring file storage apps. As OneDrive is approaching its 15^th birthday, Microsoft is giving it a facelift and adding some new features that probably won’t, but then again just might make the app a little cooler in the eyes of the world. Let’s take a look.

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In a blog post celebrating the evolution of OneDrive up to its 15^th anniversary, Microsoft has released details about a new OneDrive landing page, which should make it easier to stay on top of your work.

When the update rolls out, instead of arriving on the My Files tab when you head over to OneDrive you will land on a new landing page called OneDrive Home. The new homepage will look a little like the homepage for Microsoft 365, which is Microsoft’s subscription version of its Office productivity suite, which can also be accessed online. OneDrive Home will contain a list of all your files and the default view will show them based on how recently you used them. You will of course be able to filter your files and reorder them based on a number of recognizable criteria such as file type including Word doc, Excel spreadsheet, PowerPoint presentation, and PDF document.

According to the blog post announcing the update, the new OneDrive Home landing page isn’t ready to roll out just yet. Instead, Microsoft plans to roll out the new look and much more user-friendly OneDrive Home in the “coming months”.

In other recent Microsoft OneDrive News did you know that Microsoft is trying to move in on Instagram’s space by implementing a Photo Story feature in OneDrive?

Image via: Microsoft

Spotify update gives more space to podcasts

Spotify’s homepage has long been the place where a lot of people discover new music and learn about new episodes of their favorite podcasts. The streaming giant has announced a new update, however, that is going to break up that old routine by giving podcasts and new shows their very own tab on the home screen. In essence, Spotify is splitting the home screen in two. Let’s check out this change in more detail.

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In a blog post announcing a major makeover to the Spotify mobile app homepage, the streaking platform has announced that users will be able to access separate feeds for “Music” and “Podcasts and Shows”.

Tapping on the new Music tab will show you the artists and playlists you have been listening to recently and will also show up all the recommendations that Spotify has for you based on your listening habits.

Heading over to the new Podcasts and Shows tab, however, will give you access to the latest episodes of your favorite podcasts as well as serving up recommendations for new podcasts that Spotify thinks you may be interested in.

The good thing about the move is that by giving Podcasts and Shows their own tab on the homepage, Spotify now has space to include extra useful information such as the synopses for new episodes. This means users won’t have to manually open an individual episode to gain access to that information.

Generally, however, the update declutters the homepage and offers Spotify users a much more intuitive user experience. Yes, music and podcasts are both audio experiences, which is why Spotify offers them to users but beyond that association, they are fundamentally different listening experiences.

This also lines up nicely with Spotify’s upcoming move to offer audiobooks too. The homepage was already buckling under its offering of two distinct audio content types so adding audiobooks to the mix would have created an even bigger mess. Everything is ready now for a third Audiobooks tab when Spotify officially launches the new feature. The update has already started rolling out to Android users and iOS users will soon get access to it too.

In other recent Spotify news, the streaming platform has relented to user pressure and implemented a separate play and shuffle button.

Image via: Spotify

Google Calendar gets a creepy update

The virtual calendar and diary app has become a mainstay of the modern worker. Not only can you check your availability, quickly schedule meetings, set agendas, and even host meetings from your computer or smartphone, but you can also consult with colleagues’ online schedules to check their availability too. Google Calendar, however, looks set to take this a little further with an update that some might think is a little creepy.

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Google is introducing an update to Google Calendar that will allow your colleagues to know your location while working. The update will give you the ability to set the building you are working in as your location so that other people can then see where you are working and when. The information will then be displayed on your Google Calendar.

In the google Workspace blog post announcing the update, Google said:

“Whether you’re suggesting a meeting room to your colleagues or want to know where someone might be working for the day, we hope this update makes planning in-person collaboration easier.”

Like a lot of things these days, Google says that this information is as much for its algorithm as it is for your colleagues. Sure, colleagues will be able to check which building you are working in, what time you will be finishing, and then maybe wait outside for you when you are done, but Google says this update will also help Google Calendar make improved meeting room suggestions when you trying to book a meeting on the app.

Google also says that the move will help users better organize their day and should also be a big help for people who are managing the calendars of other people as they’ll be able to update the working locations of the people whose schedules they are managing.

In today’s increasingly virtual modern workplace, it is refreshing to see an update that will help better plan in-person meetings and collaboration. It is the increased efficiency in this area that is likely behind this update from Google.

In other Google Workspace news, did you know that Google is boosting the scheduling options for Workspace users?

Blizzard announces the end of Overwatch loot boxes

Recently, Blizzard confirmed that Overwatch loot boxes will be phased out in anticipation of a new Battle Pass system and before Overwatch 2 launches. If you had blinked around the time that the announcement was issued, you would, in all likelihood, have missed it entirely.

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The announcement was issued quietly in a blog post that concerned Overwatch’s Anniversary Remix Volume 3 Event. In the post, Blizzard announced that the loot boxes we’ve come to know and somewhat love will no longer be available after the 30th of August. That doesn’t give players much time to make the most of the loot boxes they love.

However, you shouldn’t feel the need to collectively rush out and claim loot boxes left, right, and center. Blizzard says that even though loot boxes are being phased out, you’ll still be able to earn standard loot boxes once the Remix event has concluded.

That said, the upcoming Overwatch Anniversary Remix Volume 3 Event is Blizzard’s chosen broom when it comes to cleaning house. This is in preparation for the launch of Overwatch 2 on the 4th of October 2022. You could see this as a sort of grace period, during which you can still purchase or earn cosmetics before the new game’s launch. Available during this grace period will be all the skins and cosmetics that have been featured in previous Overwatch Challenge events.

Blizzard’s reasoning for removing loot boxes is simple. In the company’s own words, it wanted to furnish players with ‘a lot more control over how they interact with the game and acquire new content.’ Say what you want about loot boxes, these little power-ups have been a massively contentious subject throughout the history of the modern gaming industry.

Even though most loot box features are relatively innocuous and don’t seek to do any harm to the game or the player, some loot box systems have been linked to illegal gambling. Loot boxes also sometimes give pay-to-win players an advantage over other players, and take the fun, competitive spirit out of the game in favor of pure capitalism.

Overwatch isn’t the only game that recently decided to ditch loot boxes for a more competitive system. In fact, Overwatch may just be following the lead of Diablo Immortal whose creators also recently announced the end of support for in-game loot boxes.

Overwatch 2 set to ditch loot boxes following Diablo Immortal READ MORE

Rockstar is set to make GTA 6 a benchmark for every entertainment industry

By now, we all know GTA 6 is going to be one heck of a game. We saw how ambitious GTA 5 was, and it’s only going to get bigger from here. According to the Take-Two CEO, you can expect this Rockstar release to be the biggest game in the industry and will set the tone for all entertainment industries.

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Strauss Zelnick is known for making outlandish statements in the past. He didn’t believe that backward compatibility mattered, and he was sure every gaming would be willing to pay $70 for quality games. This latest statement on GTA 6 comes from a recent earnings presentation.

In this case, it’s hard to argue with the Take-Two CEO. GTA 5 was such a massive success that it raked in well over a billion dollars over the first three days. Many of us, me included, are still playing GTA Online. Also, many gamers have subscribed to the latest GTA + membership.

We’ve already covered how GTA 6 may be the most ambitious project to date, but it seems like there’s more in store than we can ever believe. Zelnick believes it will set a benchmark for everyone in the entertainment industry, including movies. That means we’ll probably see a stellar plot, deep character development, superb graphics, detailed campaign quests, and more.

Rockstar is set to make GTA 6 a benchmark for every entertainment industry

The Take-Two CEO is certainly getting us more excited about the upcoming open-world shooting game. The main question is at what cost this glorified Rockstar benchmark will come? I’m not only talking about the selling price here but also storage. Should we expect to save as much storage space as possible on our consoles and PCs?

What we do know so far is that GTA 6 is set to have a female protagonist in the lead, but she may not be the only one. If you recall from GTA 5, we had three main characters we could switch when we felt like it. If the new Grand Theft Auto is going to be more ambitious, I suspect we’ll have more characters to enjoy.

Watch the exciting sci-fi thriller Prey, exclusive to Disney+

The Predator is back, albeit at a different time on Earth. The new exciting movie Prey is set more than 300 years before the first film, and we get to see the Native Indian tribe, Comanches, in action. It’s exclusive to Disney+, and you can stream it now live on your account by the Star brand.

If you don’t have a Disney+ subscription, you’ll want to grab one to catch the exciting science-fiction action in the latest Prey movie featuring the iconic Predator. Stay tuned until the end for more details on a thrilling discount.

The Predator hunting Prey in historic lands

You may recall that the first predator movie was in 1987 with Arnold Schwarzenegger as the lead actor. Also known as Predator: Prey, the exclusive Disney+ movie goes back more than 300 years to the lands of the Comanches. It was a time when young hunters had to prove their worth while the elders continued to bring fresh meat to the table.

Naru is a young female healer who believes she’s as skilled as any hunter in his tribe. She’s continuously on the lookout for danger or any prey she can hunt. One day, she lands in some danger, only to be rescued by an invisible being at the last moment. That’s when she realizes she’s become the prey.

Intent on proving himself to the tribe, she first warns them about the strange creature, but no one listens. Armed with only her primitive weapons, she sets out to track and hunt the Predator. In some ways, it sets a similar scene as Assassin’s Creed 3, but with an alien twist. You’ll have to watch the thrilling science fiction adventure on Disney+ to find out who’s the better hunter.

A thrilling movie featuring the Comanches

One of the main features of Prey is that it provides some insight into the Comanches’ heritage and history. Jhane Myers, one of the producers, has a Comanches ancestry, while many of the cast consists of Native and First Nations star talent. It helps bring some authenticity to the film, while also driving home the action on the screen.

You may know Dane DiLiegro from American Horror Story. Well, he’s acting as the Predator this time around. Naru is portrayed by the actress Amber Midthunder, who you may recognize from shows like Banshee, Legion, The Originals, and Roswell, New Mexico.

Get set for an action-packed Disney+ adventure

It’s really exciting to see the Predator return to the screen again, even if it’s straight to television. The new Prey feature on Disney+ will have your heart pounding as you root for Naru to hunt down the alien and take it down.

Be sure you don’t miss out on the sci-fi action by obtaining a Disney+ account at a discounted price over a year. You can claim the 12-month membership at the cost of 10 months, which means you can then stream Prey immediately!

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In a blow to the Super Bowl and FIFA World Cup, the Microsoft Excel Championships is becoming increasingly popular

It is a common meme these days that the entire Global economy and pretty much all of human civilization is propped up by Microsoft Excel. The no-nonsense powerful spreadsheet tool competently handles all the business work needed to manage companies and organize projects. Did you know, however, that spread sheeting is an adrenaline-pumping Esport that has its own set of grand world championships? Well, it does, and we are here to tell you all about it.

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The Microsoft Excel World Championship took place at the weekend and was shown on ESPN 2. Incredibly, the event even went viral on Twitter as well, as viewers took to tweeting about the events and sharing videos of the epic battles.

The Excel event is a part of the Financial Modeling World Cup (FMWC), which organizes what they call educational, fun, and exciting competitions in Excel. After confirming that Excel Esports events are actually a thing, the organizes say:

“Participants solve unusual game tasks in Excel. No finance, just Excel and logical thinking skills. Use IFS, XLOOKUP, SUM, VBA, Power Query: anything is allowed, and the strategy is up to you. All battles are live-streamed and can be spectated on our Youtube channel.”

It is exciting stuff too, with some of the events participants taking to the FMWC site to offer testimonials about the event. Cecelia Rieb, who was a participant in the FMWC Open in 2021 said:

“Never have I been so stressed and so excited at the same time! The bracket-style competition is really fun and watching the best-of-the-best go head-to-head was both educational and validating. I can’t wait for the next one!”

If this sounds like something that you would like to see you can watch the whole event below:

If, however, you want a piece of the action and think you could take on the best-of-the-best, you too can sign up for the FMWC Open 2022. All you have to do is head over to the event’s homepage and hit the Enter the Competition button. To help you take the gold, we’ve put together a guide to 12 essential Excel formulas that will help you become a pro.

Security flaw at Twitter leaves certain accounts exposed

Twitter is having a really bad time of it at the minute. With Elon Musk trying desperately to pull out of his bid to buy the company while repeatedly trashing it in public, things are looking desperate. Unfortunately, however, things look set to get a little worse a security flaw in Twitter’s code has opened up a vulnerability that hackers and malicious actors have been exploiting. Here is what you need to know.

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Twitter released details about the security breach in a blog post. The post explains that the flaw enabled malicious actors to enter phone numbers and email addresses into Twitter’s log-in flow to learn if the details were attached to an account as well as the account they were tied to. This, in essence, gave them the ability to match identities to accounts, even if those accounts were anonymous.

According to the blog post, the flaw came from an update to Twitter’s code back in June 2021. Even though Twitter found nobody was leveraging the vulnerability back then, this changed earlier this summer with Twitter saying:

“In July 2022, we learned through a press report that someone had potentially leveraged this and was offering to sell the information they had compiled. After reviewing a sample of the available data for sale, we confirmed that a bad actor had taken advantage of the issue before it was addressed.”

Twitter will be notifying all users who were affected by the bug and whose identities have been exposed. The company first learnt about the vulnerability thanks to its bug bounty program and has since closed it off so that no more users will face losing their anonymity.

In other recent Twitter security news, be sure to look out for various phishing scams that have been targeting verified accounts.

Big new privacy features coming to WhatsApp

WhatsApp has always prided itself on the end-to-end encryption it uses to protect its messages. Privacy is a big deal these days and the world’s biggest messaging app has always prided itself on being a messaging app you can trust. Now, however, it looks like the app wants to boost its privacy credentials even further as Mark Zuckerberg has announced a big privacy push that is coming to WhatsApp. Let’s take a look at the details.

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Mark Zuckerberg has taken to Facebook to announce a slew of new privacy features coming to WhatsApp. We have already seen many of these features on other messaging services, but it is refreshing to see them all coming to WhatsApp.

In his Facebook post, Zuckerberg said:

“New privacy features coming to WhatsApp: exit group chats without notifying everyone, control who can see when you’re online, and prevent screenshots on view once messages. We’ll keep building new ways to protect your messages and keep them as private and secure as face-to-face conversations.”

These are features reminiscent of former unique selling points for messaging apps and social networks like Snapchat and Telegram.

We’ve been reporting extensively on the new privacy-boosting features coming to WhatsApp for quite some time now. On top of the features mentioned in Zuckerberg’s message, WhatsApp also has a more private way of sharing images in the pipeline, and we covered the ability to prevent other people from seeing your online status a while back too.

Interestingly, the feature Zuckerberg mentions about leaving groups without letting other users know will also come with a past participants feature, which will show all the past participants in a group chat from the last 60 days. This means that while users won’t get a message in the chat about you leaving the group, they will be able to find out if you are a past participant by doing a little digging.

These are interesting moves from WhatsApp. Make sure to bookmark our WhatsApp News page and subscribe to push notifications to ensure you are always up to date with the latest news and updates.

Image via: WABetaInfo

Netflix plans to expand its games with less than 1% playing them

As you may already know, Netflix has massive plans to expand its steps into the gaming arena. With plenty of marketing underway, you should be hearing more about new titles coming up in the next few months. It’s just a pity that less than 1% of the company’s audience is busy playing the games on the mobile app.

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CNBC presented a report that goes to great lengths to show how many subscribers Netflix has lost over the past year. The main competitors appear to be TikTok and Epic Games, with the latter being the main focus of the gaming industry. Netflix intends to compete with the best of the best, but it only has 24 games on its list at the moment.

The plan is to push for 50 games by the end of 2022. Now, let’s look at some numbers. In total, 221 million people are subscribed to the streaming platform worldwide. Of that, 23.3 million have downloaded games, while 1.7 million are actively playing them on a daily basis. As you can see, that’s less than 1%.

Netflix plans to expand its games with less than 1% playing them

I feel we should be a little bit realistic here. I want to mention the fact that I haven’t seen the Netflix games app or any of its games appear in my country as yet. Therefore, it seems to be limited to select locations. That could be the reason why the numbers seem so low in the first place.

Another consideration is whether Netflix is marketing its game correctly or simply relying on the app of Google Play store to do all the work. In either case, I feel it’s still too early to make a judgment call on whether the company’s game component will succeed or not. In other news, it looks like Netflix has started charging for sharing account passwords with others.