New Microsoft Garage Site Invites Public To Test a Wide Range of App Ideas

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New Microsoft Garage Site Invites Public To Test a Wide Range of App Ideas

Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday October 22, 2014 @04:30PM from the give-it-a-spin dept.

An anonymous reader writes Microsoft today launched a new section on its website: The Microsoft Garage is designed to give the public early access to various projects the company is testing right now. The team is kicking off with a total of 16 free consumer-facing apps, spanning Android, Android Wear, iOS, Windows Phone, Windows, and even the Xbox One. Microsoft Garage is still going to be everything it has been so far, but Microsoft has simply decided it's time for the public to get involved too: You can now test the wild projects the company's employees dream up.

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.:. fuck subjects .:. by Anonymous Coward · 2014-10-22 16:33 · Score: 1

"Microsoft Garage is still going to be everything it has been so far,"
You mean nothing, as it's being launched today?
1. Re:.:. fuck subjects .:. by shadowthunder · 2014-10-23 05:07 · Score: 1
  
  It's been an internal hackerspace (both hardware and software) at Microsoft for years. Mouse Without Borders (one-to-many mouse/keyboard control), BusAlarm (wakes you up when the bus gets to your stop), and Codeflow (my personal favorite diff/code review tool) all came out of the Garage years ago.
Unpaid labour? by innocent_white_lamb · 2014-10-22 16:51 · Score: 4, Insightful

Could someone tell me why we would want to do unpaid labour for Microsoft?
I'm quite prepared to test and help support Linux and open source projects. Microsoft? Not so much....

--
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
1. Re:Unpaid labour? by Anonymous Coward · 2014-10-22 17:19 · Score: 1
  
  Could someone tell me why we would want to do unpaid labour for Microsoft?
  From what I can tell, it's not just QA and bug testing, it's more like "Here's a new thing we might take to market soon, would you buy it? If not, show us how you would change it!" It's a way for them to get a bigger cross-section of their users involved in the feedback process. I don't see this as anything but a positive thing.
  
  I'm quite prepared to test and help support Linux and open source projects. Microsoft? Not so much....
  I'm vice-versa, but fortunately the world is bigger than the two of us.
2. Re:Unpaid labour? by innocent_white_lamb · 2014-10-22 17:22 · Score: 1
  
  I really don't have any use for ReactOS, but thanks for the pointer. Perhaps others who read this might find it interesting.
  Over the course of time I have discovered and reported bugs in programs like Libreoffice and Scribus, anaconda and even ncurses on one rather memorable occasion. But all of that software is of use, value and interest to me. ReactOS isn't.
  
  --
  If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
3. Re:Unpaid labour? by Anonymous Coward · 2014-10-22 18:04 · Score: 1
  
  Could someone tell me why we would want to do unpaid labour for Microsoft?
  I'm quite prepared to test and help support Linux and open source projects. Microsoft? Not so much....
  I'm sure the Linux distro makers (which often are commercial entities) gladly take your free labor, and laugh at their way to bank.
4. Re: Unpaid labour? by pinkushun · 2014-10-22 18:15 · Score: 1
  
  Absolutely!
5. Re:Unpaid labour? by tqk · 2014-10-22 18:27 · Score: 2
  
  Ha. Very funny. Not my desktop. Considering what it can do on a desktop, not even close to ready.
  When did MS finally discover the Internet even existed, or was something they ought to consider? Win95? WinFor Workgroups?
  No. Fuck no. Morons.
  
  --
  "Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit ..." -- Pink Floyd.
6. Re:Unpaid labour? by tqk · 2014-10-22 18:34 · Score: 1
  
  Perhaps others who read this might find it interesting.
  No, not much at all really.
  I wish the whole phenon would just disappear from spacetime. It's an annoyance, a malware magnet/enabler, a botnet in progress, ... You get my drift.
  
  --
  "Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit ..." -- Pink Floyd.
7. Re:Unpaid labour? by tqk · 2014-10-22 18:41 · Score: 1
  
  I'm sure the Linux distro makers (which often are commercial entities) gladly take your free labor, and laugh at their way to bank.
  They're not grabbing my scrotum as they laugh their way to the bank. Oh, you wanted security from malware and viruses and crackers? There are many Microsoft Partners who'd be happy to supply you with solutions ...
  Bite me! Microsoft's ineptitude created that pathetic market!
  Assholes.
  
  --
  "Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit ..." -- Pink Floyd.
8. Re:Unpaid labour? by Zontar+The+Mindless · 2014-10-22 18:46 · Score: 1
  
  Could someone tell me why we would want to do unpaid labour for Microsoft?
  I'm quite prepared to test and help support Linux and open source projects. Microsoft? Not so much....
  I'm sure the Linux distro makers (which often are commercial entities) gladly take your free labor, and laugh at their way to bank.
  The phrase is actually, "laugh all the way to the bank".
  In any event... You imply that I can't use Linux to make money without selling it. That's pretty silly.
  I make a pretty good living using Linux, in spite of neither paying nor receiving any money for Linux, and I am quite sure I'm far from being the only one. Why should I care that the maintainers of my distro sell a commercial version of it? They're not taking any money from me, and they've bills to pay same as most folks, including me, so it's all good. I conclude that you're ignorant and/or trolling.
  
  --
  Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
9. Re:Unpaid labour? by Anonymous Coward · 2014-10-22 18:48 · Score: 1
  
  Sure, got the drift. You're a Linux bigot.
10. Re:Unpaid labour? by westlake · 2014-10-22 18:53 · Score: 1
  
  When did MS finally discover the Internet even existed, or was something they ought to consider? Win95? WinFor Workgroups?
  It was about the time when AOL began serving an all-you-can eat dial-up buffet for a flat monthly rate and 14 K modems or better began being integrated into every home and stand-alone office PC.
11. Re:Unpaid labour? by Richard_at_work · 2014-10-22 19:15 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  Is your selective memory ignoring all the sendmail and bind exploits that did the rounds in the 80s and 90s?
12. Re:Unpaid labour? by tqk · 2014-10-22 19:19 · Score: 1
  
  Yup, and with good reason. Did you even read what I wrote?
  
  --
  "Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit ..." -- Pink Floyd.
13. Re:Unpaid labour? by tqk · 2014-10-22 19:30 · Score: 2
  
  I remember that. Just before the Winmodem wars started. Why's my machine always crashing every time I connect to the net?!?
  "Get a real (external) modem, doofus!"
  Damn, that was tedious! I wondered if it would ever end.
  
  --
  "Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit ..." -- Pink Floyd.
14. Re:Unpaid labour? by Richard_at_work · 2014-10-22 23:09 · Score: 2
  
  Wow, you *are* ignoring the sendmail and bind exploits - many of them were due to lax security rather than being coding bugs.
  And you also seem to ignore the thriving antivirus markets that existed for the Atari, Amiga and other non-MS platforms - I wonder how MS was responsible for those!
15. Re:Unpaid labour? by tehcyder · 2014-10-22 23:42 · Score: 1
  
  Meanwhile, in the real world, many businesses require continuing access to Windows XP, and so a working open source alternative would be very useful in the short term, and a potential introduction to FOSS in the longer term.
  
  --
  To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
16. Re:Unpaid labour? by Hamsterdan · 2014-10-23 08:36 · Score: 1
  
  "No, those were bugs, or things the software wasn't designed to worry about. What produced the malware and spam market? MS' laxity in *everything* system security related, maybe?"
  It's probably not related to the fact that MS had around 95% market share, that every ISP was configuring IE (since Netscape cost money), and most people didn't bother to pay for the trial AV installed on their store-bought discount computer.
  OSX started getting targeted by malware when it gained market share (and now profitable for malware writers). Don't worry, if Linux ever nears 10% market share it *WILL* be targeted too...
  
  --
  I've got better things to do tonight than die.
17. Re:Unpaid labour? by tqk · 2014-10-23 11:55 · Score: 1
  
  Wow, you *are* ignoring the sendmail and bind exploits - many of them were due to lax security rather than being coding bugs.
  I'll give you that. I should have called them design or implementation deficiencies, not coding bugs. The Internet began as a really "in-house" sort of thing. They didn't anticipate that their collaborators would go out of their way to abuse what was then a shared and mostly trusted resource. The Morris Worm was pretty much a kid's white hat hacking that (oopsie) got out of control, and SMTP wasn't designed to prevent it. The Green Card Lawyers taught us how robust those systems were - jerks in the system could get anything they wanted to go through and there was little in the way of defence built into the system to stop them. Telnet, ftp, rsh all transmitted passwords en clair. "Oh, was that wrong?" Arpanet was designed to ensure communication wouldn't be disrupted. After all, they weren't expecting the Soviets to have access to any of it.
  
  And you also seem to ignore the thriving antivirus markets that existed for the Atari, Amiga and other non-MS platforms - I wonder how MS was responsible for those!
  I never had any of those, so never really cared about them. Then MS showed up so ripe for exploitation, it was a magnet for abuse. How did it work, you could name malicious.exe to malicious.exe.jpg and it would walk right past any defences (which were non-existent)? Meanwhile, MS decided users didn't need to care about file extensions (even while the OS did care), so they were hidden from the user by default. Great.
  I can't believe anyone defends MS for the crap they've pulled. You should be livid about their multi-decade abuses, not to mention having had to pay them and other MS ecosystem crap purveyors for the privilege.
  
  --
  "Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit ..." -- Pink Floyd.
Make an app, then see if it has a market?? by Anonymous Coward · 2014-10-22 17:01 · Score: 4, Interesting

That's a bit dumb, make an app and then see if there's a market for it?
For example:
"Collaborate - This app lets you host or join sessions on canvases made up of text cards and images. You and multiple other users can draw on the canvas to organize content, or manipulate the text and images using pinch, drag, and rotate gestures."
WTF? Like finger painting for management consultants? Don't they have whiteboards for this? Why would they switch their huge whiteboards for small screens. Presumably for distance communications? So its integrated into some sort of VOIP and video app too?...no?
"Floatz - This is an app designed to let you float an idea out to the people around you to see what they think. You can join nearby Floatz conversations as well as start your own with a question, an idea, or an image that you share anonymously."
Now why would people whose opinion you want be required to download the 'Floatz' app for you to communicate with them? Why would they bother to use this?
"Journeys & Notes - This is a social app meant for the space between an origin and a destination: It connects you to a community of people who have traveled the same path that you’re on. Whether you’re taking the bus to work or jet-setting across the globe, you can both leave behind notes for others to discover and read what others have shared."
If I'm in Barcelona and want to know about Barcelona, what does it matter what my source point was and my destination point? Is a restaurant different in flavour if I arrived at it North to South than East to West? Does it make great tapas if I came down from Girona, but not if I drove up from Sitges?
Look, it appears that a lot of fluffy management types got together to think up app ideas, and they came up with some fluffy ideas that are really not of much use.
1. Re:Make an app, then see if it has a market?? by tehcyder · 2014-10-23 00:06 · Score: 1
  
  "Journeys & Notes - This is a social app meant for the space between an origin and a destination: It connects you to a community of people who have traveled the same path that youâ(TM)re on. Whether youâ(TM)re taking the bus to work or jet-setting across the globe, you can both leave behind notes for others to discover and read what others have shared."
  If I'm in Barcelona and want to know about Barcelona, what does it matter what my source point was and my destination point? Is a restaurant different in flavour if I arrived at it North to South than East to West? Does it make great tapas if I came down from Girona, but not if I drove up from Sitges?
  Until someone invents instantaneous teleportation, getting from A to B involves things happening in between. If you spent several hours driving from Sitges to Barcelona, other people might be interested in the sights you saw, what the roads were like, how good the roadside cafe halfway was, and so on.
  
  --
  To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
2. Re:Make an app, then see if it has a market?? by coofercat · 2014-10-23 00:30 · Score: 1
  
  It's just the "google 20%" output from Microsoft. They're trying to show that they're vaguely innovative - and the problem with innovation is that quite a lot of the time it doesn't work out (seemingly for Microsoft, more times than most).
  When Google came out with Wave, we all wondered why they'd bothered - they tried it, people didn't get it and so they closed it down. This is no different.
  That said, Floatz looks like a particularly crap idea - if I want feedback from my friends, I'll send them an email (or get my wife to post on facebook). I suppose there's something about finding other people around me that I don't know, but I'm not so sure I'd like to ask them their opinions.
3. Re:Make an app, then see if it has a market?? by Translation+Error · 2014-10-23 02:24 · Score: 1
  
  "Journeys & Notes - This is a social app meant for the space between an origin and a destination: It connects you to a community of people who have traveled the same path that you're on. Whether you're taking the bus to work or jet-setting across the globe, you can both leave behind notes for others to discover and read what others have shared."
  
  If I'm in Barcelona and want to know about Barcelona, what does it matter what my source point was and my destination point? Is a restaurant different in flavour if I arrived at it North to South than East to West? Does it make great tapas if I came down from Girona, but not if I drove up from Sitges?
  If you're in Barcelona and want to know about Barcelona, this isn't the right app for you. If you're traveling from, say, Boston to New York, however, how would you find out about interesting things along the way--look up info on each town/county/state you'll be traveling through? I know I wouldn't bother doing that, but if I could consult a single repository of things worth checking out on my trip...
  
  --
  When someone says, "Any fool can see ..." they're usually exactly right.
4. Re:Make an app, then see if it has a market?? by Dr.+Evil · 2014-10-23 06:21 · Score: 1
  
  Google Wave could have stuck around as a D&D app.
  I like these projects, they have a "throw it on the wall and see if it sticks." None of it is going to stick, but we'd never have had Clippy or Comic Sans if it wasn't for MS Bob.
  ... on second thought, MS shouldn't try to innovate.
Garage? by l0n3s0m3phr34k · 2014-10-22 17:02 · Score: 3, Funny

Awesome, can I leave a giant oil stain in the driveway?
Re:WTF is this? Microshdot? by Anonymous Coward · 2014-10-22 17:34 · Score: 2, Informative

...and Apple.
Slashdot is just non-stop Microsoft and Apple.
I'm sick of it here. I'm off to Pipedot.
ex microsoft shill by the_Bionic_lemming · 2014-10-22 17:48 · Score: 2, Insightful

Unless microsoft goes back to developing a better OS based off of win 2k or win xp - I'm more likely to tell MS to fuck off and just hope I can port all my games to Linux someday instead.
Vista Sucked - Win 7 slowed searches and locks up if you have a bad cd - win 8 was just a - well failure isn't anything but kind - so no, not interested in Microsoft wank stuff.
OS that works. That's what the focus should be. Unfortunately, Micrsoft jumped off the Star Trek movie Mantra after XP. Every other release sucked until after XP - then they all sucked.

--
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
1. Re:ex microsoft shill by lister+king+of+smeg · 2014-10-22 18:07 · Score: 2
  
  The CD problem you refer to is not a fault of the operating system, but rather the drive and the motherboard bios. I've had similar issues on both Linux and iOS with optical media
  how the hell did you have an optical drive failure on iOS?
  
  --
  ---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
2. Re:ex microsoft shill by the_Bionic_lemming · 2014-10-22 18:35 · Score: 1
  
  LMAO, so I'm not holding it right?
  
  --
  _ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
3. Re:ex microsoft shill by tqk · 2014-10-22 18:56 · Score: 2, Interesting
  
  The CD problem you refer to is not a fault of the operating system, but rather the drive and the motherboard bios.
  Bull. Shit. This goes back to win for workgroups. Copy a file to the floppy drive, takes over the whole damned CPU. They've never known, *had any clue*, as to how to build an OS. They only know how to cash checks from morons (accountants, doctors, lawyers; the stupidest computer users on the planet).
  
  --
  "Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit ..." -- Pink Floyd.
4. Re:ex microsoft shill by gstoddart · 2014-10-23 02:24 · Score: 1
  
  Not a case of the drive itself failing, but the OS becoming unresponsive when trying to read data from a damaged/corrupt disc. Had this problem first hand working on a client's iMac in 2008.
  Which, as the GP points out ... isn't running iOS, it's OSX.
  Do you know of any Apple phones or tablets with optical drives?
  
  --
  Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Unlocking the Lock by Anonymous Coward · 2014-10-22 17:50 · Score: 5, Interesting

Can someone explain to me the point of an unlocked lock screen? Take a look at their Next Lock Screen app. It basically bypasses the whole point of a lock screen by letting you launch apps, send emails, and auto-connect calls. What's the point of locking anymore if random users still have access to everything? Their app isn't the only one that does this.
I understand showing the time, accepting a phone call, and maybe showing upcoming events. But everything else? WTF.
1. Re: Unlocking the Lock by pinkushun · 2014-10-22 18:07 · Score: 2
  
  It must be microsoft's answer to running in kiosk mode. Just like how UAC was added after-the-fact to provide a secure userspace.
Is This Post a Paid Advertisement? by Anonymous Coward · 2014-10-22 18:20 · Score: 2, Insightful

The post appears to be a paid advertisement.
Please confirm, Slashdot. Open up, come clean. Transparency is good for a news aggregation site.
And in the fine print... by Torp · 2014-10-22 18:38 · Score: 1, Insightful

... you indenture your first born to Microsoft in exchange for using their apps.
Also, you are liable for patent fees.

--
I apologize for the lack of a signature.
Re:WTF is this? Microshdot? by tqk · 2014-10-22 18:44 · Score: 1

Well played.

--
"Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit ..." -- Pink Floyd.
Re:WTF is this? Microshdot? by roger10-4 · 2014-10-22 18:54 · Score: 2

Never heard of that site, but thought I'd go take a looksie.
The most recent article: "Escape from Microsoft Word"
Fuck Microsoft by ARos · 2014-10-22 20:55 · Score: 5, Funny

I wouldn't try any of their lame products if they paid me to try them. The trick to wooing developers [developers developers] is source code, evangelism, and community. Until you offer that, stay in your garage.
ob by Hognoxious · 2014-10-23 00:21 · Score: 4, Funny

You can now test the wild projects the company's employees dream up.
I'm doing that right now.
They call it Windows 8.

--
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Microsoft Garage Site .. by lippydude · 2014-10-23 00:40 · Score: 1

"You can now test the wild projects the company's employees dream up."

Microsoft was never cool, and never will be, besides which, even if you think up an original idea, it'll be sure to turn up in the next iteration of Windows ..
But if you think up a good idea... by Radical+Moderate · 2014-10-23 08:50 · Score: 1

...then where does it go?

--
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.