As a Windows Phone user, I absolutely love the People Hub, especially the Facebook integration. However, due to the way that either Microsoft or Facebook have chosen to implement the Facebook integration into the phone, it can become a broken experience depending on choices that your friends have made. The answer to this problem actually lies in a much deeper and what I believe to be murkier feature of Facebook around how 3rd party app permissions work. To explain the whole situation, I'm going to bring out an old friend who I've used in a previous article about Facebook's privacy settings: Johnny Technophobe to help demonstrate what exactly is happening to cause this problem. This article will explain exactly how the Facebook 3rd party apps system accesses your data and then explain how Windows Phone works in relation to this and the problems that stem from that.

At 2am on Wednesday September 14th Australian Eastern Standard Time (9am, Tuesday September 13th United States Pacific Daylight Saving Time) Stephen Sinofsky stepped onto the stage to deliver the opening keynote at the BUILD conference, held in Anaheim, California. This keynote is probably the most important keynote that Microsoft has given in the 36 years of it's existence and was entirely devoted to revealing details of the next version of Windows, currently codenamed 'Windows 8'. Microsoft's CEO Steve Ballmer has described the next version of Windows as 'Microsoft's riskiest product bet' and with what was revealed during that keynote, his comments now make complete sense. Windows 8 is what Microsoft describes as "a re-imagining of Windows" and will include a major redesign of the user interface, developer platform, chipset support and tightly integrated cloud support. This article aims to detail some of the fundamental concepts that Microsoft is pushing in Windows 8 and explain why I think Microsoft's risky bet on the next version of Windows will pay off.

Windows 8 was publicly demoed for the first time about three weeks ago now at the D9 conference and it is still wowing people who see it and it's causing a divide throughout the tech community over whether the radical new UI is a good idea or not. I've now had that 3 weeks to think carefully about what this all means and how I would write about Windows 8 in a unique way (there's plenty of articles on the web showing demos of the new Start Screen). I had originally planned to write 2 articles, one about Windows 8 and the other one about user interface design (more specifically the Metro design), but I'm going to combine them into this one article, because I think that it's hard to talk about them separately anymore considering we know what Microsoft's plans are in the future regarding the UI for their products. It's an exciting time, but you really need to understand the key principles behind what's going on before you can truly appreciate what's going on. When I first saw what Microsoft planned to do in Windows 8, I was quite shocked, but after a while, it just clicked. I now have a good understanding of what Microsoft's strategy for the future is (and it revolves around Windows, Office, Skype & Xbox although this article will mainly focus on Windows) and I'm hoping after reading this, their strategy finally just clicks for you too.

Back in January I wrote an article titled the "Windows Phone 7 Feature Availability Matrix". This article was essentially a chart describing the feature availability in different countries around the world where Windows Phone 7 handsets are sold. That article is currently my most popular article to date with 10,000 more views than the article in 2nd place, which shows that this is a very important issue for many Windows Phone users around the world who are outside the United States. At the MIX '11 developers show this year in April, Microsoft made some announcements regarding expanding the countries where the Windows Phone Marketplace would be established as well, as new languages to support these countries in time for their 'Mango' update which was made available on the 28th of September 2011 (Australian Eastern Standard Time). So I decided to update this chart again to reflect the new feature availablity for the Windows Phone 7.5 (Mango) release and have continously updated this chart all throughout this Winter (Summer in Northern Hemisphere). Now that Windows Phone 7.5 has been officially released, I now believe that this chart is at a finished (or very near finished) stage for this release. The features detailed in my two charts are what will be available in your country, if you buy a handset running Windows Phone 7.5.

Last Friday I wrote an article discussing Telstra's inaction and silence on the issue of Windows Phone 7 Updates, or more specifically the NoDo (March) update. If you wish to reread that article you can view the whole article (which includes the letter I sent to Telstra's CEO) here, but I'll recap the main points here. Microsoft released their March Update to Windows Phone (codenamed NoDo) on March 24 2011 and as of Thursday April 28th (when I wrote the letter) Telstra was still "testing" the update and instead of keeping their customers updated, they were directing their customers to an outdated update chart. Well after that letter (co-incidence or not), Telstra officially approved the update for the HTC 7 Mozart on Friday 29th April and promised to approve the LG Optimus 7Q in early May. Well today I received an offical reply from Telstra detailing some of the reasons why they took over a month to test some fairly small updates and it clears a lot of things up and even opens up some questions that Microsoft needs to answer, so I thought I'd write about that here.