ClintonFitch.com

Google Photos for Android has a small but handy update rolling out to users today.  The update, version 3.6 for those keeping score at home, brings improved speeds when it comes to sharing videos from your collection.

The improvements in speeds comes in the way that Photos handles video sharing.  When you want to share a video, a low resolution version of that video is uploaded to the service while the full resolution version is uploaded more slowly.  This is particularly handy when you are in congested network or have low signal while out-and-about.  Now you can share the video and it not take a long time to upload before you can share it.

As expected with it being the first Monday of the month, Google has released the Android Security Update for October.  While there are still two patches that were released per the norm, they contain far fewer patches and fixes than normal.

The first updated, dated October 1st, is general Android fixes and contains a total of 8 patches and fixes, three of which are considered critical.  The second patch, dated October 5th, has 6 total fixes with 2 of them marked as critical.  As a reminder, the Google Pixel and Nexus devices will be getting the October 5th updates, which are cumulative to the 1st, and is aimed at hardware specific driver fixes for those devices.

The ever popular photo editing app Paint.net has finally made its way to the Microsoft Store for Windows 10.  The app will sell for $8.99 but right now has a special launch price of $5.99 along with a free 30-day trial for first time users.

The updated version of Paint.net is build 4.0.18 for those keeping score at home and with it now in the Microsoft Store, you have automatic updating and overall stability improvements in Windows 10.

For the first time since 2015, I am writing a post here at ClintonFitch.com on a Windows PC.  It is not that I necessarily planned to move away from my MacBook and MacOS, far from it actually.  Nor does it mean that I’ve given up on Chrome OS.  My trusty Acer Chromebook 14 is sitting next to me as I write.  But the reality of my day-to-day job kept pushing me ever closer to this eventuality.  We are a pure Microsoft shop so while I could somewhat get away with it on MacOS, it was becoming increasingly difficult to leverage Chrome OS.

Add to this my general unhappiness with MacOS Sierra.  It was okay but it never really performed well on my 2016 MacBook Pro.  I had stability issues with it (even after a complete wipe of the system) and, going back to my point about my day-to-day job, Office apps were never really all that great.  Sure, Office 2016 is way, way better than 2011 for Mac but there was still a feature gap between it and the Windows version.  This was especially true of Outlook.

So I made the jump.  Having updated my wife’s Lenovo ThinkCentre to version 1703 several weeks ago and playing with it, I was impressed with how far Windows 10 had come along.  It was smooth, it was stable and it was usable.  My last experience with Windows was 8.1 and it was, in a word, disastrous.  It was everything that you didn’t want in an OS.  I assumed Windows 10 was more-or-less the same beast.  I was wrong, oh so very wrong.