Mark Linsangan | The Verge

Microsoft’s Surface Book isn’t the dream video-editing machine I hoped for

2016-12-09T13:08:10-05:00

There’s something about the Microsoft Surface Book that has always caught my attention whenever I see one in public. Its design is weird, but unique; it’s portable, but still has the power to outperform most 2-in-1s in this category. We’ve already covered the basics of how the laptop performs for everyday use, so I spent some time with it to see if it could work as my primary go-to laptop when I need to edit videos (a big part of Microsoft’s creative pitch behind the Surface line). I also was curious to see how it handled some light gaming with its new graphics card.

The Surface Book that I’ve been using is the Performance Base model that is equipped with Intel’s sixth-generation Intel Core i7 processor, NVIDIA’s GTX965M with 2GB of GDDR5 memory, 1TB SSD, and 16GB of RAM. It’s a $3,200 brick of a computer.

I’ve been traveling a lot lately. I spent nearly two weeks in DC, and brought the Surface Book with me to be my only laptop for the trip. It took the place of my usual workhorse: a 2015 15-inch MacBook Pro with dedicated graphics.

Initial impressions when using an external drive for my Premiere Pro project files weren’t great, as I encountered a lot of stuttering and lagging when trying to edit 1080p clips from a Canon C100. But after transferring my files to the Book’s internal SSD, scrubbing through my four-minute timeline was a breeze, and cutting clips was seamless. There was still some occasional stutter happening here and there when files were loading or if my timeline wasn’t rendered, but as a seasoned Premiere user this was expected behavior.

However, rendering and exporting videos on the Surface Book took longer than expected. It performed about the same or worse than my 2015 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro, which is not as good as I’d hoped from a brand-new computer released in late 2016. Even though it’s using a GTX965M, which seems like a massive improvement over last year’s custom Nvidia GeForce 940M, this graphics card is old, and not the best for editing. Doing basic camera tracking in After Effects took longer than I was accustomed to and playing back the clip in real time just wasn’t smooth.

Rendering and exporting video took longer than expected

To see how the Book fared with gaming, I installed Rocket League, NBA 2K17, Steep, and Rainbow Six Siege. Most of these games I tried running on low to medium settings, with most of the extra options turned off, and a resolution of 1920 x 1080 pixels. Running these games on their highest settings would either bog down the computer to the point of making it unusable or just crash the game entirely. Rocket League was the only game out of the bunch that ran smoothly, and that was with its graphical features turned way down. Ubisoft’s new game Steep barely ran at the lowest settings and lowest resolution. And NBA 2K17 was playable, but not a great experience because of the occasional lag and dropped frames. I can say the same for Rainbow Six Siege. If you’re thinking about gaming on the Surface Book, it might suffice for the lightest of needs, but will disappoint any heavy gamers.

The Book is a functional, but not ideal, mobile video rig

Would I consider using the Surface Book as my go-to mobile editing machine? Probably not. It was functional, but not ideal. The model I used is on the higher end of the spectrum for professional laptops, and there are definitely others on the market, like the new Razer Blade, or new 15-inch MacBook Pro with much better specs for relatively the same price.

Microsoft wants to pitch the Surface Book as the ultimate portable computer for creative professionals, but in my experience, it fell rather short of that mission. The Book might be fine for photo editing and other less demanding creative disciplines, but for my everyday needs as a video editor for The Verge, it missed the mark.

Twitter might be bringing Night Mode to iPhone users

2016-08-13T10:20:18-04:00

Last month, Twitter added a night mode for Android users, hoping that it would drive people to use the app and boost its flagging userbase. The update wasn’t extended to iOS users, who were left it in the dark (no pun intended). Now, it looks like Twitter might finally be adding night mode to its iOS app soon: it’s included in the latest beta build for iOS.

The setting is only available for beta users. The feature can be found in settings, where there’s a new night mode toggle option.

Night mode for iOS looks very similar to its Android counterpart with its navy blue color scheme. Unfortunately, there’s no way to automatically turn on night mode based on what time of day it is or based on your phone’s display brightness. I haven’t turned off night mode for Twitter on Android since it launched, and I think I’m doing the same thing for iOS.

There’s no word when this feature will publicly launch, but given that it’s in its beta stage, we’re hoping it’ll be in the next major update.

The best apps to get when switching from Mac to Windows

2016-08-04T10:42:08-04:00

Microsoft’s latest version of Windows 10 is available now, and it’s full of great improvements and refinements to the world’s most popular desktop operating system. If you’ve been using a Mac, you might be intrigued by Windows 10, now that it’s in a matured state.

While Windows and OS X (soon to be macOS) are similar in concept, in practice using them can be quite a different experience. Apple’s platform is full of helpful user experience features that make it easier to navigate the operating system. Windows has some of its own, but if you want to ease the transition from Mac to PC, here are a few of our favorite tools to make you feel a little bit more at home.

Seer

Seer for Windows.

One of the best things about OS X is the ability to preview files quickly and easily with your spacebar in Finder. Fortunately, I found Seer, which does exactly that, but more. Not only will you be able to preview photos or videos with just a tap on your spacebar, but you’ll also be able to dive into zip and rar files, as well as some of Adobe’s project files from Photoshop or Illustrator.

Lightshot

Lightshot for Windows.

Taking a screenshot on Windows 10 can be a hassle. You often have to fiddle around with a combination of keyboard shortcuts or copy and pasting it into Paint. However, there’s an app I started using recently called Lightshot. Lightshot provides a very similar experience to the native screenshot tool built into OS X. After installing Lightshot, all you have to do to take a screenshot is press the “Prt Scrn” key (or you can set another key combination if your keyboard doesn’t have a print screen button) on your keyboard and you’ll be able to select what area on your screen you want to capture. From there, you can save it, copy to your clipboard, or share it to other apps. You can also annotate the screenshot afterwards if you want to highlight exactly what you want others to see in your screenshot.

Wox

Wox for Windows.

Apple’s universal search tool, Spotlight is a core experience of OS X. Whether it was finding certain files or launching specific apps, I used it every single day. Windows 10 has Cortana, which can perform many of the same things, but its interface isn’t quite the same. Wox is an open-source app on GitHub that is essentially a Spotlight or Alfred alternative for Windows. You’ll be able to search for apps, files, search on the web, and you can even add plugins to make Wox even more powerful which is something you can’t quite do with Spotlight out of the box.

WinXCorners

WinXCorners for Windows.

Hot corners, which let you activate certain shortcuts by moving your mouse pointer to the corner of your screen, are a staple in OS X. They used to be in Windows 8, but were removed for Windows 10. WinXCorners is an app that restores basic hot corner functionality to Windows. It allows you to assign actions such as: task view, show desktop, start screensaver, or turn monitor off to the four corners of your desktop. Unfortunately, there aren’t as many options or customization features as I’d like, but for basic hot corner needs, it gets the job done.

Windows 10 Anniversary Update

Ctrl-Walt-Delete: Walt and Nilay lose track of time

2016-01-21T12:24:11-05:00

After almost a year since the Apple Watch has been released, Walt and Nilay question the nature of the smartwatch and analyze how we use it today while also discussing what we should see in the future.

We love your feedback and suggestions on how to make our show better and more fun — you can tweet to Walt at @waltmossberg and Nilay at @reckless. And of course, we’d love it if you subscribed in iTunes (and here’s the direct RSS feed, if you like), along with The Verge‘s other great podcasts like Verge ESP, What’s Tech, and The Vergecast.