Microsoft Garage is a program inside the Redmond campus where the company encourages innovation by letting its employees work on any project they desire. Yesterday, the company gave us a glimpse of the projects its employees have been working on recently. These projects included three amazing Android apps, and a Windows Phone lock screen app. In that list of achievements, three more applications have been added, and these are for Windows 8.1-powered machines.
AutoTag ‘n Search My Photos
AutoTag ‘n Search My Photos checks the tagged photos from your Facebook profile to remember your friends, which it then automatically tags in places like OneDrive camera roll. It also analyzes the photos taken on your Windows phone that were recently included in the Pictures Library.
Here’s the full list of features:
- Automatically learns faces of strong connections in your Facebook graph. You can also selectively learn other friends.
- Provides a person centric view of all your photos including your local, OneDrive, and Facebook photos.
- Creates a uniquely managed identity for friends who are not on Facebook so that with some initial tagging, the app learns a face model and later automatically tags such “UserCreated” friends.
- Allows selective uploading of tagged photo(s) to Facebook.
- Provides unidentified photos view clustering faces with similar features for easy tagging.
- Allows existing tags generated by other apps to be leveraged by merging them with tags managed by AutoTag ‘n Search My Photos.
- Gets more accurate as you interact with the app and fix mistags or confirm Autotags.
Student Planner
Microsoft does really care a lot about students, so much that it has created an app to help them organize their academic information for the semester with this new application called Student Planner. The application lets students take notes, store documents, input events to the calendar and enter data all in one place.
Once a course document has been uploaded to the Student Planner app, it will automatically extract the useful information out of it, which it will use to set calendar reminders among other things.
Here’s the complete set of features:
- Automatic parsing of due-dates from PDF / docx files
- Synchronization of important due dates to your Outlook.com calendar
- Synchronization course documents to your OneDrive storage
- Integration with OneNote
Collaborate
The third software is Collaborate. It is the same white boarding application that got launched on Windows Phone recently. It allows people to host or join together to work on canvases that come with text cards and images. Users can write on the canvases, and manipulate the inputs by pinch, drag and rotate gestures. The application allows users to tap, simply drag and drop content onto the canvases.
Here’s the complete set of features:
- Create and send text and image cards from your computer or Windows Phone to a canvas that is shared with your colleagues
- Resize, move, and rotate content on the shared canvas as you would on a whiteboard.
- Connect to shared sessions quickly and easily by scanning the session’s QR code or entering the unique Session ID.
- Share content directly from other applications into your Staging Area via the Share Charm.
- Host a collaboration session for your colleagues to join.
You can grab these applications from the download links mentioned below.
Further reading: Collaborate, Microsoft Garage, Windows 8.1
