Windows Central: “Microsoft revamps the Start menu in Windows 11 — scrollable layout, new views, and fewer clicks”

The new Start menu offers a larger layout that adapts to the screen resolution, but you don’t have an option to set its size.

Given how large the new design is, I can already hear the complaints about not being able to resize the layout manually.

Since this new layout unifies the interface, it only provides one experience divided into three sections, including “Pinned”, “Recommended”, and “All”.

You will also notice that if you have a mobile device connected to your computer, then the Start menu will also show a toggle to show or hide the mobile sidebar.

Mauro Huculak

This updated layout has slowly made its way to my devices, first appearing on my work laptop sometime in December, and now on my personal laptop earlier this week. It looked like a rather underwhelming update at first. While I started using the Phone Link integration more often and generally find it useful — save for the instances when it stubbornly refuses to connect to my phone for no apparent reason — I don’t see the need for a dedicated panel in the Start Menu, so I immediately disabled this new feature. This aside, nothing much seemed to have changed in the Start layout.

Ars Technica: “The EU made Apple adopt new Wi-Fi standards, and now Android can support AirDrop”

Google has updated Android’s Quick Share feature to support Apple’s AirDrop, which allows users of Apple devices to share files directly using a local peer-to-peer Wi-Fi connection. Apple devices with AirDrop enabled and set to “everyone for 10 minutes” mode will show up in the Quick Share device list just like another Android phone would, and Android devices that support this new Quick Share version will also show up in the AirDrop menu.

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But earlier this year, the EU adopted new specification decisions that required Apple to adopt new interoperable wireless standards, starting in this year’s iOS 26 release. If you don’t want to wade through the regulatory documents, this post from cloud services company Ditto is a useful timeline of events written in plainer language.

The rulings required Apple to add support for the Wi-Fi Alliance’s Wi-Fi Aware standard instead of AWDL—and in fact required Apple to deprecate AWDL and to help add its features to Wi-Fi Aware so that any device could benefit from them. This wasn’t quite the imposition it sounded like; Wi-Fi Aware was developed with Apple’s help, based on the work Apple had already done on AWDL. But it meant that Apple could no longer keep other companies out of AirDrop by using a functionally similar but private communication protocol instead of the standardized version.

Andrew Cunningham

I didn’t pay much attention to the initial reports about this – AirDrop always struck me as the type of feature Apple fanboys incessantly fawn about while everyone else shrugs off because there are many alternatives to share files between people that aren’t confined to Apple devices – but this angle of reporting is certainly intriguing. This would not be the first time Apple was compelled by regulation to relax its tight control on its devices and users, the most famous being the forced adoption of USB-C on iPhones.

Windows Latest: “Meta just killed native WhatsApp on Windows 11, now it opens WebView, uses 1GB RAM all the time”

WhatsApp on Windows 11 has just got a ‘major’ upgrade, and you’re probably going to hate it because it simply loads web.whatsapp.com in a WebView2 container. This means WhatsApp on Windows 11 is cooked, and it’s back to being absolute garbage in terms of performance.

WhatsApp is one of those Windows apps that went from being a web wrapper to a native app and then back to the web again after all these years of investment.

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An app can use a lot of memory, and it does not necessarily mean it’s a performance nightmare, but the issue with the new WhatsApp is that it feels sluggish. You’re going to notice sluggish performance, long loading time, and other performance issues when browsing different conversations.

We also noticed that it does not work well with Windows notifications. It also struggles with Windows 11’s Do Not Disturb mode or Active Hours. And there are delayed notifications problems as well.

Mayank Parmar

While reading about this update I initially doubted it was as bad as people feared, since people do tend to exaggerate things online for dramatic purposes. But after the update reached one of my devices, I get what everyone was complaining about, and I feel compelled to join in!

Engadget: “Everything Apple revealed at the iPhone 17 launch event”

As expected, Apple announced a new member of the iPhone family during the event. The iPhone Air is the thinnest iPhone yet, measuring just 5.6mm thick, and made of spacecraft-grade titanium. Ceramic Shield 2 surrounds the iPhone Air on both sides, which helps make it more durable than any previous iPhone. The Air’s always-on screen measures 6.5-inches, and it supports ProMotion and up to 3,000 nits of brightness.

Valentina Palladino

Not sure how you can get away with claiming this as the thinnest iPhone yet when its upper quarter is thicker than many past iPhones. No longer the inconspicuous camera bump from 10 years ago, this is a full-blown bulge, with a camera bump on top.

The Lightroom Queen: “What’s New in Lightroom Classic 14.4, Mobile & Desktop (June 2025)?”

Enhance without creating a DNG (Classic & Desktop)

If you’ve enjoyed using the Enhance tool to increase the size of your best photos using Super Resolution or to benefit from the AI-generated noise reduction (Denoise), you’ll be excited to find that these tools are now available directly in the Detail panel, without needing to generate a separate DNG file. This also means you can go back and change the amount of Denoise applied without having to generate another DNG file. Great news!!

Victoria Bampton

While this update introduces other tools for distraction removal, one of which being the Reflection Removal demoed late last year, the highlight is certainly the non-destructive Enhance, consisting of Denoise, Raw Details, and Super Resolution. Up until now, these features would create a new DNG file from the original RAW image, which also meant you could not adjust the amount of denoise later, so you had to start the editing process from scratch.

Adobe Blog: “The Adobe Adaptive Profile”

The latest version of Camera Raw includes a new profile, called Adobe Adaptive. Unlike existing profiles such as Adobe Color or Adobe Landscape, Adobe Adaptive is image dependent. An AI model analyzes the photo and adjusts tones and colors to make them look just right. The effect is as if the AI had changed Exposure, Shadows, Highlights, Color Mixer, Curves and other controls for you, although the actual controls stay in their original neutral position.

The AI has been trained on thousands of hand-edited photos of people, pets, food, architecture, museum exhibits, cars, ships, airplanes, landscapes, and many other subjects. The photo collection covers various types of artificial lighting, as well as natural light during different seasons and times of day. The edited pictures were reviewed by a team of photographers to ensure a consistent style that looks appealing and natural, avoiding opinionated renderings with extreme contrast or unusual color choices.

Florian Kainz, Marc Levoy, & Lars Jebe

With Lightroom’s latest update, this feature has officially arrived in the Lightroom apps as well. I’m all for new features to enhance and expedite photo editing, but I’m a bit conflicted on this one. I like the concept of tweaking color profiles to individual images, but at the same time it feels like the implementation takes a lot of control out of the hand of the photographer and obscures it behind ‘magical’ AI algorithms.

The Verge: “Instagram profile grids are going to feature rectangles instead of squares”

Instagram’s profile grids will display content as rectangles instead of squares as part of a change rolling out over the weekend, Instagram chief Adam Mosseri said in an Instagram Story on Friday.

I know some of you really like your squares. And square photos are sort of the heritage of Instagram. But at this point, most of what’s uploaded, both photos and videos, are vertical in their orientation, Mosseri said. It’s a bummer to overly crop them, he added.

Jay Peters

This change caused quite a bit of uproar in my small photographic community, and on Threads more broadly.

Adobe Blog: “Removing window reflections in Adobe Camera Raw”

In this blog we describe Reflection Removal, a new technology that can eliminate reflections from photographs taken through windows with a single click. Our technology is powered by AI, but it’s not generative AI. This first iteration of the tech is designed to address only one kind of reflection — from plate glass windows that cover most or all of your field of view. It’s not designed to remove reflections from windows that are small or far away, or where the window frame is within the field of view, or reflections from objects like wine glasses, car bodies, or clouds reflected in a lake. We might address some of these applications in later updates. Our goal is to help you turn a photo you might otherwise delete into one that is good enough to share. Reflection Removal is available now in Camera Raw as a Technology Preview, to get feedback from the community, and will be coming soon to Lightroom.

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That said, removing window reflections is a hard problem, and this is our first stab at it, so there are inevitably some rough edges. For example, we don’t currently do well on cityscapes at night. In fact, removing reflections is what mathematicians call an ill-posed problem, meaning that for a given photograph it’s not possible to decide with certainty which objects are in the original scene versus the reflected scene. One polluted photo could have many plausible separations. The key is training our model to understand scenes that are likely to exist in the real world. We’re constantly improving the model, so stay tuned!

Marc Levoy, Eric Kee & Adam Pikielny

Here’s a genuinely positive use of AI – machine learning to be more exact. Though the results are impressive, the use case seems fairly limited for me. There are multiple methods to minimize reflections at capture time, as this blog post admits, and in many cases reflections can be put to great creative use. The only situation where I would always apply this tool are images taken through airplane windows. Nevertheless, it’s good to see Adobe investing in these sort of niche applications of AI – maybe someday they will get around to flare removal as well.

Chrome for Developers: “CSS Wrapped: 2023! text-wrap: balance and pretty”

As a developer, you don’t know the final size, font size, or even language of a headline or paragraph. All the variables needed for an effective and aesthetic treatment of text wrapping, are in the browser. Since the browser does know all the factors, like font size, language, and allocated area, it makes it a great candidate for handling advanced and high quality text layout.

This is where two new text wrapping techniques come in, one called balance and the other pretty. The balance value seeks to create a harmonious block of text while pretty seeks to prevent orphans and ensure healthy hyphenation. Both of these tasks have traditionally been done by hand, and it’s amazing to give the job to the browser and have it work for any translated language.

Una Kravets & Bramus & Adam Argyle

Nice to see the web platform introducing CSS features such as text-wrap that are easy to pick up and use – as opposed to things like grid layouts and nesting – while also being extremely useful and offloading to the browser tasks that would otherwise need complex work from web developers. The balance keyword is widely supported in browsers already, while pretty is exclusive to Chromium-based browsers for now. Even so, the lack of browser support for pretty won’t affect visitors in Safari and Firefox in any meaningful way, since the text will simply wrap in the default way.

Windows Latest: “Bye USB, File Explorer gets Android storage integration”

Android storage integration in File Explorer is one of those Windows 11 cross-platform features that works really well. It works smoothly without hiccups, and I can now see all my documents, pictures, and files from my Android phone (Galaxy S23) in File Explorer.

It’s identical to accessing the storage using a USB cable, but thanks to deeper integration using Cross Device Experience Host, it’s completely wireless.

With Windows 11’s Android integration, you can open File Explorer and notice your phone’s name on the left sidebar. When you click the shortcut, your phone’s internal storage opens in the File Explorer.

Mayank Parmar

After seeing this article shared on Reddit, I tried it on my devices today and it is already up and running here. The initial beta announcement for the feature was in late July this year, so a relatively fast rollout. Kudos to Microsoft for including Windows 10 in the release (although a more cynic take would be that they felt bound to support it because of the slow adoption of Windows 11); hopefully this means I can use this equally well on my Surface tablet, which I don’t intend to update until Windows 10’s end-of-life.

Mashable: “Elon Musk’s X lets users sort replies to find more relevant comments”

The latter two reply sorting options are pretty straightforward. “Most recent” shows replies in chronological order from newest to oldest. “Most liked” shows the replies with most likes first. Blue check accounts appear to have completely lost any advantage that the paid subscription provided them when selecting either of these two menu options.

It’s unclear exactly how X is determining how to sort posts via the “most relevant” option. However, it appears to be the same sorting method as the previous default. Blue checks do still appear to be prioritized in this view.

Any user can change the reply sorting options on any post that they view, not just their own posts.

Matt Binder

I’ve noticed this change a few days before this article, first on the Twitter web site, later in the Android app as well. Slightly impressive that the company is now shipping features simultaneously on the web and in its apps, whereas for years the standard for most tech giants was to test and launch features on iOS first, with the web and Android distant seconds. A lack of polish is however manifest in small details like different labels for the choices on the web and in apps (in the Android app, ‘Most relevant’ is called ‘Trending replies’). Unfortunately, this new feature is per post rather than saved globally on your account, meaning you can’t (yet?) choose your preferred reply sorting setting and have it automatically applied on each reply section, instead you need to switch modes on each new tweet.

TechCrunch: “Apple Maps launches on the web to challenge Google Maps”

Apple announced on Wednesday that Apple Maps is now available on the web via a public beta, which means you can now access the service directly from your browser. The launch puts Apple Maps in direct competition with Google Maps, which has long been available on the web.

Maps on the web is accessible in English and is compatible with Safari and Chrome on Mac and iPad, as well as Chrome and Edge on Windows PCs. Apple plans to bring support for additional languages, browsers and platforms in the future.

Apple Maps on the web works like it does on the mobile app. You can get driving and walking directions; order food from the Maps place card; browse curated guides and reviews; and more. Apple plans to bring additional functionality, like its 360-degree panoramic views “Look Around” feature, to the web version in the coming months.

Aisha Malik

Seven years on, I guess it’s time for another comparison between Apple and Google where it counts most for me: my hometown. Last time around I found Apple Maps utterly lacking, failing to show a large lake and the surrounding park on the map. This version is far closer to reality: Herăstrău lake is properly outlined, and so are several businesses and landmarks around it. But the park itself is still weirdly truncated: only the southern half is colored green to indicate vegetation, while the rest is tinted the dull dark grey of the offices and housing areas around it. The level of detail in the roads and alleyways in the park is also evidently lower than in Google Maps. On this basic test, Apple falls short of Google Maps one again, despite the praise in (US) tech circles about its massive improvements.

r/photography: “Internet is wrong–Instagram portrait resolution isn’t 1080x1350px in 4:5 aspect ratio”

All sites I can find claim Instagram portraits have a 4:5 aspect ratio at 1080x1350px. According to my testing that’s flat-out wrong

This testing was done on a desktop PC and a Samsung A52 smartphone. All Software is up-to-date.

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Mobile messes up the Aspect Ratio by cropping height: When I use my phone to upload a 4:5 photo the top and bottom get cut off. The app crops my portrait posts to 8:9, 1080x1210px resolution, and that resolution is not even entirely consistent. The missing portion doesn’t appear when you look at it on desktop. It’s not hidden. It’s fully hard-cropped out of the image file.

PC uploads do use 4:5 but have higher resolutions: Unlike mobile any desktop uploads actually do tell you the aspect ratio your post will have before you upload, and it actually does stick to the 4:5. However, the common claim that it will be posted in 1080x1350 is wrong here. The resolution is far higher. My photo got cropped to 1440x1800px!

wadsadgs

Interesting find on the r/photography subreddit. Indeed, every article I’ve seen recommends an upload resolution of 1080 for the horizontal edge of the image (1080 × 1080px for square posts, 1080 × 566px for landscape posts, 1080 × 1350px for portrait posts). I’ve always found that choice somewhat odd, as it translates into a smaller resolution for landscape images, but I guess Instagram only cares about the horizontal pixel density, to fill the width of a mobile screen in a consistent manner.

Android Police: “Google Maps Timeline now stores your location data on-device”

Right off the bat, it isn’t a Google change unless something is lost or killed off, and unsurprisingly, it’s time for Timeline on the web to bite the dust. Explaining the change, Google says it won’t have any data to display on the web interface after the switch to on-device location data management through the Maps app.

To retain access to your old Timeline data and ensure subsequent collection is localized, you’ll need to update to a recent version of Maps and follow the instructions in a push notification, in-app alert, or email you receive. You just need to specify your data management preferences on a device of your choice. That’s because the new system curates Timeline for each of your devices independently. Alternatively, you can back your Timeline data to Google servers manually or automatically. This can come in handy if you’re planning to switch to a new phone or tablet without losing the Timeline data.

The email we received mentioned that users have until December 1, 2024, to keep their saved visits and routes on the device or back them up. It warns that inaction could result in partial or complete loss of old data. If you miss the deadline, Google will try to move the last 90 days of location history to the first device you sign in to after the cutoff date, and all the older trips will be auto-deleted. We suggest keeping an eye out for this email.

Chandraveer Mathur

I haven’t received this email notification yet, so I’m still holding on to a slim hope that Google might reconsider until December. Needless to say, this news made me suddenly angry at Google for what I can only regard as a self-serving, user-hostile, and plainly stupid decision. Despite privacy concerns by some, Timeline was one of the best features of Google Maps, and I regularly checked that the places I visited were accurately recorded. The whole point of Timeline is to store your travel logs forever, so that you can revisit those years later to remind yourself of past trips and maybe find inspiration for new ones. Erasing this data automatically after some number of days or when you switch devices defeats this purpose entirely and makes Timeline borderline irrelevant.

XDA: “3 reasons people are moving from Windows 11 back to Windows 10”

Recently, StatCounter posted a chart showing that Windows 10’s market share is growing, while Windows 11’s is shrinking. This flies in the face of what Microsoft has planned, especially given how Windows 10’s end-of-life date is looming in the distance. As such, I wanted to do some research into the topic; did StatCounter’s statistics get things wrong? Or are people downgrading from Windows 11 to Windows 10? While there’s no way to state without a doubt that people are downgrading, I did find people with pain points with Windows 11 that might be contributing to the system’s downfall.

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Again, this is speculation on my part, but I can’t help but notice that the Windows 11 adoption rate began reversing in January 2024, when Microsoft began introducing and announcing new Copilot features. There’s a chance that people are turning back to Windows 10 to dodge the 24H2 update, either as individuals who dislike the tools or as businesses that don’t want to entrust their private data with artificial intelligence.

Simon Batt

Pretty embarrassing for Microsoft to be losing market share on their most recent OS – then again, Windows 11 has been a pretty embarrassing upgrade from Windows 10. In the three years since its release things have barely improved, while Microsoft seems completely oblivious to these challenges faced by consumers and focused on chasing wild AI dreams instead of polishing the OS and expanding hardware support. I expect adoption problems will only worsen as Microsoft adds more AI features, as these will require hardware upgrades many will be reluctant to perform – including corporate customers.

The Verge: “Instagram’s updated algorithm prioritizes original content instead of rip-offs”

Instagram is making significant changes to how its system recommends content, with a focus on original content and increased distribution for smaller accounts. The slew of changes were announced by the company in a blog post today.

The biggest change deals with aggregators — accounts that download or screenshot other users’ videos and photos and repost them. Sometimes aggregators will credit the original poster by tagging them in the post or caption, but often, content is wholesale ripped off with no acknowledgment, and engagement is siphoned off from the person who created the content in the first place.

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Instagram is going a step further than just cutting off repost accounts: the platform will replace the reposted content with the original creator’s post in recommendations. The company says it will only replace reposts when the original is “relatively new” and when the system is confident that the posts are identical “based on audio and visual signals”. Creators will get a notification when their original content takes the place of reposts and is recommended on the platform. These changes only apply to recommendations — if you follow an aggregation account, you’ll still see their reposted content on their profile or in feeds.

Mia Sato

Wonderful change for original creators – on paper at least. I am rather skeptical that in practice this will bring about meaningful changes for recommendations and significant boosts for the reach of smaller creators. Notice the if we can find it qualification in Adam Mosseri’s post about this on Threads (the craters typo is quite funny as well; I suppose Threads doesn’t have a way to edit posts yet) – I expect that whatever algorithmic system they put in place to detect original work will have a low confidence and few clear hits. After all, if the posts should be identical to be flagged, all an aggregator has to do is crop the original, maybe apply a light filter before reposting, and they are back in business.

Windows Insider Blog: “New updates for Snipping Tool and Phone Link begin rolling out to Windows Insiders”

With this update to Snipping Tool (version 11.2308.33.0), we are introducing Text Actions, which detects text in your captured screenshots, making it easy to copy text from any image to share with others or paste in another app. To get started, click the Text Actions button in the toolbar to show selectable text before selecting and copying text with your mouse. You can also click the Copy all text button in the toolbar or use Ctrl + A and Ctrl + C to select and copy all text using your keyboard.

With Text Actions, you can also redact sensitive information in screenshots before sharing. Select Quick Redact from the toolbar to automatically hide emails and phone numbers or select any text and select Redact Text from the right-click menu to hide the text.

Dave Grochocki

I noticed this update to the Snipping Tool just last week, although I usually don’t open the full app after taking a screenshot, so it may have been there for a while. It’s a handy addition, especially when you’re dealing with PDF documents (either scanned or locked to prevent text copying) and need to quickly extract some text. It can save a lot of time typing out information, and seems pretty accurate in my short experience with it.

The Lightroom Queen: “What’s New in Lightroom Classic 13.2 & Lightroom Ecosystem (February 2024)?”

Sort Order

There are a few new options in the Sort Order pop-up: City, State, Country, Aperture, Focal Length, Shutter Speed, and ISO Speed.

Filters & Smart Collections

There are a few new options in the Metadata Filter and Smart Collection criteria:

• Uses Masking shows images that have any kind of mask.
• Uses AI Mask shows images that have an AI-based mask (Sky, Subject, Background, Object or People).
• Uses Lens Blur uses the Early Access Lens Blur tool.
• Uses Healing shows images that use any kind of healing adjustment (Clone, Heal or Remove).
• Uses AI Heal shows images that use the AI-based Content-Aware Remove tool.

Victoria Bampton

Nice to see Lightroom expanding its sorting and filtering options, but as I have recently discovered, they remain oddly underdeveloped.

Social Media Today: “Instagram rolls out Achievement Awards for Creator Milestones”

Instagram’s trying out another way to incentivize creators, with a new “Achievements” display, available in “Creator Mode” in the app, which allocates different badges for engagement milestones, like reaching 100 total post likes, 1,000 video plays, and more.

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The most immediate example that springs to mind Snap Streaks, which have almost become religion to many Snap users over the years. To start a Snap streak, you and a friend have to send a Snap to each other every 24 hours for three days, then keep sending reciprocal Snaps every day to uphold the streak.

Some Snap users have maintained 6 year long streaks (and counting), and that compulsion has kept many users coming back to the app.

Andrew Hutchinson

And just like that the gamification of Instagram is complete! Apparently, it was not enough to chase likes, comments, and views, now Instagram wants to become Steam as well…

Ars Technica: “Gmail unleashes ‘email emoji reactions’ onto an unsuspecting world”

You can now reply to an email just like it’s an instant messaging chat, tacking on a “crying laughing” emoji to an email instead of replying. Google has a whole support article detailing the new feature, which allows you to express yourself and quickly respond to emails with emojis. Like a messaging app, a row of emoji reaction counts will appear below your email now, and other people on the thread can tap to add to the reaction count. Currently, it’s only on the Android Gmail app, but it’s presumably coming to other Gmail clients.

Of course, email is from the 1970s and does not natively support emoji reactions. That makes this a Gmail-proprietary feature, which is a problem for federated emails that are expected to work with a million different clients and providers. If you send an emoji reaction and someone on the email chain is not using an official Gmail client, they will get a new, additional email containing your singular reactive emoji. Google is not messing with the email standard, so people not using Gmail will be the most affected.

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If the idea of emoji reactions to email has you selecting the puke emoji, as far as we can tell, there’s no way to just turn this off.

Ron Amadeo

This so-called feature rolled out to my Gmail account on the web just last week, and I have to say it’s a serious contender for most useless update of 2023 – too bad Silicon Valley doesn’t have something like the Golden Raspberry Awards. Not only is it utterly unoriginal, since every messaging app and social network has something similar, it fits very badly into the more longform and serios medium of email. At this point, most personal communication flows through messaging, not email, and the types of discussion taking place over email are not well suited to quick emoji reactions.