Three-hundred-and-eighty-three in a series. Welcome to this week's overview of the best apps, games and extensions released for Windows 10 on the Microsoft Store in the past seven days.

Microsoft plans to release the next feature update for Windows 10 in May 2020. Check out Mark's post if you want to know what is new and changed in that version. Wayne's review of a new privacy app for Windows 10 is another good read this week.

As always, if I've missed an app or game that has been released this week that you believe is particularly good, let me know in the comments below or notify me via email.

Discounts this week

The following list is a selection of the best deals. Make sure you check out the Store for all offers.

Some apps are discounted for more than one week. Only new apps and games are listed below.Check out the previous postin the series for past offers that may still be valid.

New Windows apps and games

Bing Wallpaper

Bing Wallpaper is a new desktop program for Windows devices that downloads the latest wallpaper from Microsoft's Bing search engine to set it as the desktop background on the Windows machine.

The app runs in the background so that new backgrounds are set on the system automatically in regular intervals. You can check out my full review of Bing Wallpaper here.

BrightnessSwitch

The application uses the light sensor of the device to switch between light and dark theme on Windows 10 automatically. Options to override the theme are provided by the application as well.

Windows Notepad (makes a return)

Microsoft pushed the classic Notepad application to the Microsoft Store last year but removed the application again from the store shortly thereafter.

The application is now available again and with it improved functionality such as find & replace improvements, text zooming support, line numbers with word-wrap, as well as performance improvements.

Windows 10 themes

None this week

Notable Updates

Threema will be removed from the Microsoft Store in July 2020. The app was only available for Windows Phone.

Twitter update introduces direct messages and multi-account improvements.

Excerpt from:
Best Windows 10 apps this week - BetaNews

It's one of the most basic components of Windows, but also one of the most loved and most useful. Notepad has been with us for decades, and now it has found a new home in the Microsoft Store.

This is not the first time the app has appeared in the Microsoft Store. Originally announced in August last year, Notepad appeared for a while before vanishing. Now it's back, and it's better than ever with a host of new features.

See also:

While still very much a no-nonsense, no frills app, Notepad has come a long way in its 30 years of existence. Microsoft bills it as an app that you can use to "view, edit, and search through plain text documents and source code files instantly", and it can be used for this and so much more. Microsoft's decision to add the app to its Store came after the company made it possible for people to uninstall Notepad from Windows 10.

If you've not investigated Notepad for a while, there have been a number of changes that you may well not be aware of:

Wrap-around find/replace: We've made significant improvement to the find/replace experience in Notepad. We added the option to do wrap-around find/replace to the find dialog and Notepad will now remember previously entered values and the state of checkboxes and automatically populate them the next time you open the find dialog. Additionally, when you have text selected and open the find dialog we will automatically populate the search field with the selected text.

Text zooming: We've added options to make it quick and easy to zoom text in Notepad. There is a new menu option under View > Zoom to change the zoom level and we display the current zoom level in the status bar. You can also use Ctrl + Plus, Ctrl + Minus and Ctrl + MouseWheel to zoom in and out and use Ctrl + 0 to restore the zoom level to the default.

Line numbers with word-wrap: A long outstanding request has been to add the ability to display line and column numbers when word-wrap is enabled. This is now possible in Notepad and we've made the status bar visible by default. You can still turn the status bar off in the View menu.

Other Improvements:

If you would like to install the Microsoft Store version of Windows Notepad, you can grab it here. In order to use the app, you need to be running Windows 10 version 19541.0 or higher.

More:
Windows Notepad returns to the Microsoft Store with new features - BetaNews

MARIETTA Work on Macs Chophouse, the newest Marietta Square restaurant venture that has replaced the four-decade mainstay Shillings on the Square, is nearly complete, owner Randy McCray tells the MDJ.

New signs have gone up on the historic two-story building at the corner of North Park Square and Church Street, and while butcher paper still blocks the windows, a few passersby have recently been seen trying to sneak a peek inside through slivers left uncovered.

Dave Reardon, who owned Shillings for the length of its life on the Square, sold the restaurant in November. McCrays new restaurant will have a focus on steaks and seafood, with menu items to include slow-cooked meat, six to eight prime Angus beef options and seafood dishes such as sea bass.

The new establishment will also boast a wide variety of wines, craft cocktails and 10 to 12 beers on tap, and the lunch menu will include a variety of sandwiches, salads and other lighter choices, he said.

Other items such as pimiento cheese fritters are expected to be adapted from the menu of The Mill Kitchen & Bar in downtown Roswell, another of McCrays restaurants. He said the restaurant will be open for lunch and dinner, as well as Sunday brunch. Upstairs will be a more formal dining experience, while downstairs will be a little more lively, McCray said.

McCray said remodeling of the restaurant is about 90% complete, and contractors are installing booths, hanging light fixtures and completing touch-up work. He said the coronavirus delayed the goal of opening in March, and though theres only about a week of work left to go, hell be cautious with a grand opening date, which he said should be during the first week of June.

We just feel its the right thing to do right now, McCray said, adding that the restaurant will eventually employ 40 to 50 staff. All in all, it probably was a good thing, because it allowed us to do what we wanted to do instead of trying to rush the process.

The restaurateur said those who visited the former Shillings will notice a marked difference the space has been opened up significantly, the upstairs bar has been replaced and the building has received new plumbing, electrical, countertops and other features but there will be touches of the buildings past sprinkled throughout the new restaurant.

Its much brighter and cleaner and fresher in the restaurant. It doesnt look the same. The restaurant has been completely revitalized. Its a total overhaul, he said, adding that the restaurant will be a high-quality but affordable dining option. But weve kept a large portion of the antique bar that (Reardon) had thats probably, gosh, its probably over 100 years old.

Wood that was taken out of floors or ceilings in portions of the building has also been repurposed for other parts of the renovations, and the buildings original red oak hardwood floors have been restored, maintaining its history but also making it warm, McCray and his contractors said.

We brought back a lot of exposed brick on the inside. Back in the 70s and 80s people ... plastered and covered up a lot of that beautiful brick and we just decided to go back in and tear that off, McCray said.

For Gordon Brans, a 30-year Marietta resident and the contractor remodeling the building, the Macs job has come full circle.

(My wife and I) used to come here for brunch when our kids were babies. Theyre all in their 20s now. And I actually had a surprise birthday party upstairs for my wife about 10 years ago, he said. And we used to come up here and have dinner and drinks at the bar.

Brans said revitalization of the restaurant needed to happen, calling the newly renovated Macs the only really authentic bar, in the area. Pointing to the floors, portions of shelving, windows and other features dating back to the early 1900s, when the building housed Schillings Hardware Store, Brans said keeping the history is both important and fascinating for customers.

The Square needs a bar like this, he said.

Former Marietta Councilman Philip Goldstein, whose family owns the Macs building, said the restaurant will be a fresh and likely welcome addition to the Square.

Theyve done a phenomenal job with the remodeling of the building, he said. Its a lot more open and they made it where its much more accessible ... and the look is just a great look.

Goldstein said the new restaurant certainly has the potential to become the next Square staple, but only time will tell.

That, said McCray, is what he and his wife, Kelly, are hoping for. He said the most exciting part of opening the restaurant will be joining the Marietta restaurant community.

(We want) to have something to offer and try to help freshen Marietta Square up a little bit, give people within the community and outside the community reasons to come to the Square more, he said.

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Transformation from Shillings on the Square to Mac's Chophouse nearly complete - MDJOnline.com

Editor's Note: On April 21, sources close to Microsoft said that the first of these Surface devices will now be launched in early May.

Weve known for a while that Microsoft plans to launch the powerhouse Surface Book 3 and ultramobile Surface Go 2 sometime before the end of May. But what will be inside Microsofts new devices, exactly?

Weve rounded up whats leaked and whats been rumored about each device. Weve been told that the launch was pushed back a bit because of the coronavirus, and Microsofts fears that it wouldnt have enough finished product to stock store shelves. No ones been able to pin down a shipping date yet, though its sure to be within the near future if these leaks are to believed.

Like the original Surface Book 2, weve been told that the Surface Book 3 should ship in two different configurations, with 13.5-inch and 15-inch displays.

We also havent seen any indication that the Surface Book 3 will differ radically from its predecessora convertible 2-in-1 whose screen can be undocked as a separate tablet, though without the kickstand of the Surface Pro series. That design is unique to the Surface Book (and the erstwhile Porsche Design Book One), and that comes with other benefits, namely two discrete batteriesone in the base, and one in the tablet portionproviding plenty of battery life. Microsofts Surface Book 3 is also the only Surface that has a discrete GPU, a feature thats expected to carry over to the Surface Book 3.

The Surface Book 2 is Microsofts flagship Surface.

What will be inside? According toWinfuture.de, which claims to have uncovered several dealer configurations for the European market, the 13.5-inch version of the Surface Book 3 will be powered by either the Intel Core i5-10210U(1.6GHz, 4.2GHz turbo) or the Core i7-10510U (1.8GHz, 4.9GHz turbo).

Both of Intels chips are quad-core, eight-thread 25W Comet Lake chips optimized for clock speed, rather than all the bells and whistles of their Ice Lake cousins. They have basic UHD graphics inside of them, but will be optimized to work with discrete GPUs.

The listings Winfuture.de uncovered offer no real memory or storage surprises: RAM options may include 8GB, 16GB and 32GB, while SSD options may include 256GB, 512GB, and 1TB. Thats roughly the same as Microsoft offered as part of the Surface Book 2, though those machines offered just 8GB and 16GB memory options.

Unfortunately, theres no word about what type of memory Microsoft will offer, though the Comet Lake chips support bothDDR4-2666 and LPDDR3-2133, according to their specifications. Either would be a bump up from the 1,866MHz DDR3 memory used by the Surface Book 2.

Part tablet, part workstation, the Surface Book 2 is the only detachable tablet that doubles as a laptop.

We dont know nearly as much about the GPU, however, and thats because we cant be entirely sure how Microsoft is positioning the Surface Book 3. In years past, devices like the Surface Pro 6 have been marketed in both consumer and business configurations, mainly differentiated by the use of Windows 10 Professional for the Business version. The hardware, however, has been otherwise identical.

That may change.Both WinFuture and Petris Brad Sams have suggested that the most powerful Surface Book 3 options will include an Nvidia Quadro GPU, a workstation-specific GPU in keeping with the Surface Books role as a workstation-esque laptop. Sams also reported that Nvidias 16xx-series GTX GPUs would be offered elsewhere in the lineup.

Both reports would be consistent with one another if Microsoft offered both a Quadro-powered version of the Surface Book 3 for developers or business customers, and a more traditional GTX option for consumers. Neither, unfortunately, would max out the Surface Book lineup with Nvidia's exciting RTX ray-tracing GPUs.

Pricing is the final question. According to WinFuture, the 13.5-inch options will range from about 1,023 to 1,523 euros, or about $1,110 to $1,650. Microsoft will sell the 15-inch Surface Book 3 for 1,410 to 4,324 euros, or between $1,530 and a whopping $4,690. (A slightly more reasonable 15-inch option would be the 16GB RAM/256GB SSD configuration, which will cost 1,410 euro or about $1,530.)

The Surface Book 2 is a magnificent machine. But the original Surface Book 2 had a power problemits internals drew too much power for either the stock charger or the legacy Surface Dock to power the Surface Book 2 under load. (The Surface Book 2s charger put out 100W, while the 100W Dock reportedly supplies 60 watts to the Surface Connector, reserving the rest for other ports.)

Expect the redesigned Surface Dock 2 to look very similar, but with USB-C ports replacing the miniDP connectors.

Enter the Surface Dock 2. Dr. Windows.de, a German site, has also claimed to see retailer listings which indicate the presence of a new Surface Dock, with an updated port selection and a reported 200W output. A separate 125W charger for the Surface Book 3 is also being developed, the site adds. Both are thought to be sufficient for the Surface Book 3s needs.

According to Dr. Windows, Microsoft has replaced the miniDisplayPorts on the current Surface Dock with USB-C. Two more USB-C ports replace the USB Type A ports on the front. But Microsoft hasnt substituted USB-C for USB-A entirely. Reportedly, there are still two USB-A ports on the back, plus ethernet, an audio jack and a Kensington lock.

What we dont know is whether the USB-C ports are Thunderbolt-enabled. On the other hand, each USB-C port should be able to power a 4K/60 display, the site reports. All thats good news for a Dock whose connectivity had become quite stale.

If you wanted a compact, ultraportable Windows tablet, the original Surface Go was an excellent choice. Its performance was not in the least competitive with anything else in the Surface lineup, though. Now, the Surface Go 2 has reportedly shown up at the FCC, a good sign that its about to launch soon. Its predecessor is also out of stock on Microsofts site.

The original Surface Go was small and compact, ideal for on-the-go users. Expect the Surface Go 2 to be the same.

Microsoft appears to be designing the Surface Go 2 in the originals image: portability first, performance second. LTE, thankfully, appears to be an option at some point.

Sources including Winfuture put the Surface Go's screen size at about 11 inches, with a resolution of 1,800x1,200 pixelsa possible bump up from the 10-inch display of the Surface Go. (Smaller bezels? Possibly.) Otherwise, expect the same tried-and-true tablet with a kickstand behind it, paired with a Type Cover. (Hopefully the Surface Gos typing experience has been improved as well.)

Though the Surface Go 2 will almost certainly be offered in a single physical configuration, youll reportedly have a choice of processors: either the Pentium Gold 4425Y or the Core m3-8100Y. Neither chip is particularly powerful. The dual-core, four-thread 6W Pentium Gold runs at a fixed speed of 1.7GHz, while the dual-core, four-thread Core m3 runs at 1.1GHz but powers up to 3.4GHz turbo under load. The latter chip, of course, should offer a great deal more performance.

Several Type Covers were available for the original Surface Go.

WinFuture reports that the Pentium Gold version will ship with 4GB of memory and a 128GB SSD. Opting for the more powerful Core m3 will add 8GB of memory and a 256GB SSD.

Prices could start as low as 500 euro or $550, according to the dealer prices WinFuture saw, to just over $1,000. Because the Surface Go shipped with a Type Cover as part of the bundle, its likely the Surface Go 2 will do the same, saving you a few bucks.

Correction: The listings for the Surface Book 3 attribute an Nvidia Quadro GPU inside, not an Nvidia Tegra GPU.

See the original post here:
Will Microsoft launch Surface Book 3, Surface Go 2, and Surface Dock 2 soon? Here's what we know - PCWorld

Is it worth it to upgrade a laptop's RAM or storage? We had a chance to find out when Dell asked us to test the upgradability of its Inspiron 15 7000.

I admit that as I faced this challenge, I started sweating. Panic-sweating. In my experience, upgrading a laptop is never a fun time. Cracking the case open feels borderline illegal, and once youre inside you find a maze of tiny screws, tiny parts, tiny wireslike disarming a bomb built for ants. Many laptops don't want to be opened, hiding the screws or voiding the warranty if you dare.

Imagine my surprise when I found the Inspiron 15 7000 almost...friendly? Getting inside still feels a bit illicit, but it was pretty easy to do. Was it worth it? We ran benchmarks to find out.

The Inspiron 15 7000 is a good candidate for upgrades, because no single configuration is perfect. The model Dell sent over is the top-of-the-line Inspiron 15 7000 Model 7591 (currently $1,050 on Dell.comRemove non-product link), a humble little machine that packs an Intel Core i7-9750H, an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050, a 512GB M.2 SSD, and 8GB of DDR4 RAM.

Its a strange machine, for sure. At just over $1,000, the Inspiron 15 7000 still feels a bit overpricedblame the Core i7 processor and that generous 512GB of storage. But only 8GB of RAM? Meanwhile, the cheaper $900 modelRemove non-product link touts a Core i5-9300H and Intel UHD 630 graphics, but 16GB of RAM.

Whats an enterprising buyer to do if they want a Core i7-9750H and 16GB of RAM to go with it? You do it yourself, of course.

The Inspiron 15 7000 is held together by eight screws, all very visible on the bottom of the machine. The three along the hinge side are captive, meaning theyre not meant to come out of the lid. After turning them a bit, youll hear a pop as the threads snap back into place. Stop turning! Theyre out, even if its difficult to tell.

Captive screws help separate the bottom panel from the rest of the chassis. Once youve loosened all three, you should notice the side with the hinges has already begun separating. All thats left is to loosen the five remaining screws. Keep a coffee cup nearby to stash them so they dont get lost.

Then, get ready to rockby which I mean, find a guitar pick if you have one. A spudger is the correct tool for the job, but anything will do so long as its thin, durable, and plastic. Starting from the existing gaps on the hinge side, run your plastic doohickey under the edges to pop the clips holding the bottom panel in place. This is the part that always feels illegal. Even after youve freed the edges you might notice the panels still holding on. Give the captive screws one more twist if this happens. Thats usually the culprit.

And voila, were inside. From here, the hardest part is just deciphering all the various components.

Luckily if youre here to swap RAM, Dell labeled everything for you. DIMM A and B are covered by a thin black sheet. Lift it up and youll see the existing 8GB stick, which is easily freed by pressing down the little clips on either side. Line up your replacement RAM with the slot, press it in (firmly), then lower it until it clicks into place.

Out with the old...

...and in with the new.

Keep in mind: You ideally want RAM to match. Tempting as it may be to buy one 8GB stick and pair it with the existing one, youll typically find better performance (and fewer headaches) buying a 16GB set instead. We stuck with 16GB because its what we had on hand, but you could go higher if youd like.

Dells provided plenty of storage options. In the bottom left corner (if the hinges are facing down) youll see a big, silvery panel attached by a single screw. Lift it, and you can install a standard 2.5-inch HDD or SSD. Hard drives are pretty cheap nowadays, offering massive amounts of storage spaceassuming you dont care about speed.

Those with a bit more spending money can add a second M.2 SSDor replace the existing SSD, or replace and add. Youve got a lot of options here.

Adding an M.2 drive is the most straightforward, though spotting the M.2 slot is hard at first. With the hinges facing down, look to the right of the RAM enclosure and youll see a little black stripeand a screw two inches farther to the right. Remove that screw, insert the M.2 drive into the port, press it down, and then put the screw back in. Thats it. Youre done.

This is what youre looking for. Notice the M.2 label on the motherboard.

All secured! Easy.

Replacing the existing drive is a bit more complicated because Dell uses an M.2 2230-size SSD. This is quite a bit smaller than the usual M.2 2280 (or 22mm x 80mm) form factor used by a Samsung 970 Evo, our 1TB Firecuda, and so forth.

The primary drive is also semi-hidden underneath a thermal panelthough proximity to the empty 2.5-inch enclosure means you might mistake it as the place for your secondary drive. (I did.)

It looks like this when closed up.

Unscrew this tiny piece of metal, then unscrew the primary drive and remove it. Once its out, youll see a tiny metal brace set to the 2230 marker. Remove that as well, swivel it, and then slot it into the clips for the 2280 setting (assuming youre using a standard M.2 drive). And then...put it all back together.

Remove the default M.2 2230 form factor drive.

Next, look for this metal clip thats in the 2230 position...

...turn it around and reinsert it at the 2280 position for most off-the-shelf M.2 drives.

This approach is also more complicated because youve removed the C: drive. Before upgrading, youll need to navigate to Dells website and download the Dell OS Recovery Tool, then put it on a 16GB USB stick. Plug this drive in when you boot the machine for the first time, and youll be walked through Dells custom Windows 10 installation. An OEM Windows installer will not work.

Once youre done mucking around inside, lay the bottom panel back on the laptops gutschecking the orientation, of course. Secure the captive screws first, then press the keyboard layer and bottom panel back together. The area around the trackpad is tricky, and you may need to use your spudger to wedge the whole thing apart and try again. Youll probably need to push harder than you think for everything to snap into place.

These angled screws are a bit of a pain. A magnetic screwdriver helps with this step.

Once thats done, find your coffee cup of screws and replace them as well. Assuming you didnt replace the OS drive, Dell will run a quick check on your memory to make sure everything looks good.

Fingers crossed.

Its (at least in my experience) pretty hard to seat RAM improperly in a laptop and still get it to close, so barring a malfunctioning stick you should be good to go.

So...should you do it? Is it worth it?

Upgrading the Inspiron 15 7000 was easier than I anticipated. No special tools (except a guitar pick), no hidden tricks. Its not the only laptop to make it this easy, but its one of the few that does so while staying relatively thin and lightweight. Usually this level of access is reserved for larger gaming laptops with more room inside.

The thinner you get, the harder it is for manufacturers to lay out the components while keeping them accessible. Considering all that, the Inspiron 15 7000 is pretty impressive. Its very clean inside, and I could get the bottom panel off, the parts replaced, and everything screwed back together in under 10 minutes, easy. Maybe five minutes, if I rushed.

There are obvious benefitsparticularly when it comes to storage. When you need more space, you really need it, and the Inspiron 15 7000 makes it easy. While its included 512GB is a respectable amount of storage, its hardly impossible to fill. Throw in a 2TB 2.5-inch drive or another M.2, and youll have plenty of space to expand.

Having more memory is just generally usefulas is filling out that second DIMM. Your PC can only read and write so much information to memory at a time. Two DIMMS means effectively double the bandwidth, especially with a Core i7-9750H that can take advantage. Check out the results we saw when we ran the Inspiron 15 7000 through GeekBench 4:

Thats a huge bandwidth increase, most of it resulting from adding a second stick of RAM. You probably wont notice the additional speed, but it will make the Inspiron 15 7000 a little bit more responsive across the board.

For instance, when we ran our usual HandBrake test, encoding a 30GB MKV file down to the Android Tablet preset, our upgraded Inspiron 15 7000 finished the task approximately a minute faster than the default hardware.

The same pattern played out in Cinebench, which tests the CPU over a much shorter period of time:

The trend repeated in 3DMark, where we used the Sky Diver benchmark to simulate some basic gaming performance, as well as some real-world testing with Counter-Strike: Global Offensive at 720p, where the performance bump from a memory increase could better come into play. Across the board, our in-house upgrades performed better than the stock Inspiron 15 7000.

Now, was it much better? No, and I think the performance benefits are probably secondary to the more tangible benefits. Adding another M.2 drive is better first and foremost because you have more space to store your files. Moving to 16GB of RAM allows you to open more Chrome tabs or run games that require 16GB of memory. Thats more important than any day-to-day speed increase.

One final note: Dell specifically asked us to explore the benefits of installing the second drive as a RAID 0 array instead of a separate drive. RAID 0 links two (or more) drives into one massive storage space, and in theory can improve performance. I typically dont bother with RAID, though, because the speed increase is offset by the risk. If one drive in the array fails, the entire array fails, and you can lose all your data.

Still, we tried itand if youre sticking with the default Dell-provided drive, I wouldnt recommend it. As youll see in the charts above, our benchmarks actually came in lower (for the most part) when we set up RAID 0 compared to running programs directly off our newly-installed secondary M.2 drive. The Firecudas speed dragged the average up, meaning the OS and anything else installed only to the C: drive probably performed better. Anything we couldve installed directly to the secondary drive? It all performed worse, as a consequence of being split across the slower Dell drive and the faster Firecuda.

If you install two zippy new M.2 drives, RAID 0 might net a slight speed increase. Otherwise, if youre just adding a secondary drive, its probably better to take full advantage of your faster M.2 speeds when needed, and leave the original drive to handle the OS and anything thats less sensitive.

I hope laptopsespecially gaming laptopscontinue to trend toward upgradability. One of the biggest problems with gaming laptops (compared to their desktop counterparts) is they tend to last only three or four years before theyre irrelevant. Maybe five if you dont mind dipping settings. Thats while costing two to three times as much as comparable desktop hardware.

But if you could get in there and replace some of the parts, you could potentially add another few years of use. RAM and storage are a good start, and Dells made it such upgrades easy.

What we really need are CPU and GPU upgrades, though. Thats trickier, but imagine buying an Inspiron 15 7000 and then being able to swap out the already-dated GTX 1050 for a top-shelf part. Thats the dream. Maybe one day.

Read more from the original source:
Is upgrading a laptop's SSD and RAM worth it? We try it in the Dell Inspiron 15 7000 - PCWorld

A developer has submitted plans to convert a former monastery and college building in the West End into luxury homes.

Adam Scotland has just lodged plans for 10 Partickhill Road with Glasgows planning committee.

St Kentigerns Hostel, formerly Wellpark House and St Peters College, is a category B listed building.

St Kentigerns Hostel on Partickhill Road is earmarked for four new homes. Image: NVDC Architects

Papers set out external alterations including site works, replacement or refurbished windows and new grilles/flues to the rear of the property.

The proposal is to create four spacious three-bedroom apartments with appropriate amenity space and parking.

NVDC Architects say the building was most recently run by the Marist Brothers and is situated within the Glasgow West Conservation Area.

A report says the building is generally in good condition externally apart from some poor concrete repairs to the rear elevation.

But some of the sash and case windows are in a state of disrepair.

Adam Scotland is to undertake a survey to see how many windows can be retained and how many will need to be replaced.

City officials have already indicated their general support for the conversion of the property into homes.

Map: St Kentigerns Hostel on Partickhill Road. Google/NVDC Architects

They stipulate that car parking requirements are for one space per flat and one visitor parking space.

Officials point out that all the trees on the site are protected.

In pre-application correspondence they said: Landscaping proposals will be required and should demonstrate how the development will enhance biodiversity.

Architects say trees will be retained and new planting will take place to enhance the existing building and surrounding conservation area.

According to its Wikipedia listing, St Kentigerns Hostel is a Jacobean-style building, constructed around 1869.

The entry says: In 1874, the building became St Peters College, a seminary for men training to become Roman Catholic priests.

In 1877, a small wooden chapel was built behind the house. In 1892, the college was moved to Bearsden.

Wikipedia adds: In 1906, the Archdiocese of Glasgow turned the building into a St Kentigerns Hostel, a residence for students at nearby teacher training college.

It was run by the Marist Brothers. From 1954 to 1956, the interior of the house was renovated by Gillespie, Kidd & Coia.

In the 1960s it was a residence for students at the Notre Dame College of Education in Bearsden.

In 1991, flats were built within the grounds of St Kentigerns, behind the house.

The application will be decided for approval or refusal at a later date.

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NEWS: Plans to convert former West End monastery into luxury homes - Glasgow West End Today

Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang has been linked with a move from Arsenal this summer.

The forward will have just a year left on his contract and the Gunners will face the tough choice of cashing in now or letting him leave for free in 2021.

Getty - Contributor

Aubameyang has been a great success with the north London club since his 56million move in 2018.

He has scored 61 goals in 97 games for Arsenal and won the Premier League Golden Boot last season, shared with Mohamed Salah and Sadio Mane.

The 30-year-old has been linked with moves to Real Madrid, Barcelona and Manchester United. Man City have also been backed to make a move for the Gabon international.

Gunners boss Mikel Arteta was already hoping to make several additions to his team over the summer but now may need to replace his star striker.

Reports suggested he wanted to strengthen the spine of his team with a new centre-back, defensive midfielder and attacking midfielder.

There may be some tough choices ahead over who needs to be axed and what positions to prioritise, particularly with the uncertainty caused by the coronavirus pandemic.

Arteta told Sky Sports: Im planning two or three different scenarios that we can face. Depending on one of those three, we will be able to do more, less or nothing.

We have to react daily. We dont know what the financial situation is going to be, we dont know the rules, the timing window. There are so many things we cannot control at the moment.

Getty Images - Getty

Here at talkSPORT.com, we have taken a look at who Arsenal could sign as replacements in the summer.

Arsenal are thought to be considering a move for the Celtic striker in the summer, according to French publication Le10 Sport.

The 22-year-old has scored 28 goals in all competitions this season and is thought to be valued at around 35m.

Edouard has played as the central striker for Celtic, a role mainly filled by Alexandre Lacazette this season.

Lacazette has struggled for goals and even lost his place in the side to Eddie Nketiah.

Artetas preference appears to be to sell the French forward but they could look to get rid Lacazette and Aubameyang to have a fresh start.

Getty Images - Getty

Arsenal signed youngsters Gabriel Martinelli and Nicolas Pepe last summer and look to be real talents for the future.

If Edouard was signed he could play as the main striker with Martinelli, Ozil and Pepe in the attacking midfield roles behind him.

Arsenal have shown particular interest in Partey in recent weeks and months with Atletico Madrid doing all they can to convince him to stay.

Various reports suggest he has a 43.6m release clause in his contract but the LaLiga are said to be willing to double his wages in a bid to fend of interest.

Partey has made no secret of his desire to one day play in the Premier League.

Getty Images - Getty

He told KweseESPN in 2018: At the moment, I am happy at my club. But in football, you never know when and where youll be in the next day or year.

The Premier League is a good league, its very competitive and has some of the best players in the world. Hopefully, one day. I would like to play there.

Parteys addition would certain be an upgrade in the defensive midfield area where Artetas current options are Granit Xhaka, Matteo Guendouzi and Lucas Torreira.

Buildlineup.com

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How Arsenal could line-up next season with Edouard as Aubameyang linked to Manchester United and Barcelona, - talkSPORT.com

Microsoft is currently building a new Spotlight-like launcher app for Windows 10. Designed to replace the existing Win + R shortcut, the new launcher will include options to quickly search apps and files across Windows and support for plugins like calculators, dictionaries, and search engines.

The software giant has been working on the launcher since January, and an initial public beta is planned for May. An early version of the launcher will support basic search tasks that are typically handled by the built-in Windows Start menu search functionality. But there are plans to make this a more powerful launcher thats similar to Alfred on macOS and more functional than Apples Spotlight search.

For most Windows users the Start menu search will be enough, as it acts as a basic launcher of sorts. Power users demand more, and the built-in search doesnt include plugins or the ability to add custom web searches, snippets, and more. The Start menu search also forces you into Bing search results and opens the Edge browser for any web queries.

Microsoft is working with the open-source community and apps like Wox to integrate plugins. UX designer Niels Laute created a concept design for the launcher back in February, and Microsoft is adopting some of Lautes code so the launcher has a modern design.

Its one of many PowerToys that Microsoft is actively developing, and Microsoft is looking for help naming the app. Microsoft originally brought back PowerToys last year to allow anyone to improve Windows 10 for power users, and the first set arrived in September. Microsoft originally introduced the concept of PowerToys back in Windows 95. The apps were a quick way for Windows engineers to test prototype features, and Microsoft soon packaged some of the best ones into PowerToys bundles.

The current Win + R functionality is outdated and used by Windows power users to launch cmd prompts, regedit, powershell instances, and even shortcuts to areas in Windows like the Control Panel. This new launcher will support all of the same commands that Run does currently in Windows, but the hope is that it will be a powerful alternative that the community of Windows power users can build on.

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Microsofts new Spotlight-like launcher for Windows 10 will arrive in May - The Verge

Old-school PC users will fondly remember PowerToys for Windows 95 and XP a set of semi-official utilities that let you tweak operating system features and behaviours that werent normally customisable. Now, Windows 10 has its own set of PowerToys. There are currently just three toys available, compared to the 15 that launched for Windows 95, but the collection is growing over time and rather than developing PowerToys as an in-house project, Microsoft is hosting them on GitHub and allowing third-party contributors to develop and contribute their own. Heres our guide to the first tranche of Windows 10 PowerToys, with a look ahead to whats coming soon.

To run PowerToys, youll need to be using Windows 10 build 17134 or later. This was released back in early 2018, so as long as youve kept up to date with your patches, that shouldnt be an issue. At the moment, PowerToys only supports Intel processors, but a revision for versions of Windows running on ARM is in development. Note that youll need a 64-bit version of the OS, too: recent posts in the PowerToys support forums suggest that there are no plans for 32-bit support.

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If youre ready to install PowerToys, you can download the installer here: look in the uppermost Assets section for the latest installer file. At the time of writing, the current version is called PowerToysSetup-0.16.1-x64.msi, although the version number may have gone up by the time you download it.

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You can also install PowerToys from either the Command Prompt or PowerShell, using the Chocolatey package manager. Simply run the command choco install powertoys to fetch the code and as new builds are released, you can upgrade with choco upgrade powertoys.

Once youve installed PowerToys, an icon will appear at the right of the taskbar (and then disappear into the hidden icons stack after a few seconds of idleness). Click it to open the PowerToys Settings UI, in which you can switch the individual PowerToys on and off.

Of the three currently available PowerToys, FancyZones is our favourite: the other two are useful utilities that you might use a few times a month, but for us this one is a daily must-have.

What does it do? Well, youll already know that holding down the Windows key while pressing the cursor keys causes your active window to snap to one edge of the screen, making it easy to organise multiple apps side by side. FancyZones takes this idea much further, underpinning the default layouts with a more finely grained grid, a range of preset arrangements and the option to create custom layouts to suit your needs.

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You can switch between five predefined layouts from the FancyZones overlay; the documentation claims that you can bring this up by pressing Windows+`, but this didnt work for us. However, you can pick any key combination you like by opening FancyZones from the PowerTools sidebar, clicking in the Configure the zone editor hotkey box and pressing your chosen shortcut.

Once youve picked a layout, try holding down Shift and dragging a window around your screen: youll see multiple zones overlaid on your desktop, with each one highlighted as the mouse pointer reaches it. Dropping the window over a highlighted zone instantly resizes it to fill that region. If you prefer to use the keyboard, you can override Windows existing shortcuts for snapping apps by clicking the switch to activate Override Windows Snap hotkeys to move windows between zones in the FancyZones settings.

These predefined layouts make FancyZones useful straight out of the box, but it really comes into its own when you create your own layouts. To do this, click Edit zones and Custom, followed by Edit selected layout (at present, you wont have any custom layouts configured so this will create a new one).

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Now enter a name for your new layout: weve called ours Writing and research, as its intended for writing articles, but almost any task where you need to have multiple apps in view simultaneously can benefit from a custom configuration. Next, click the Add new zone button above and drag the edges of the grey frame that appears below the zone-editing dialog until it occupies the part of the screen you want to use. Then click Add new zone again and repeat the process to define the next snapping zone. Carry on until youve created your desired layout, remembering that you dont have to use every available pixel. Nor do your zones have to be completely separate from one another: you can overlap sections if you want windows to sit in front of each other when in use.

Finally, click Save and apply, and try Shift-dragging your windows around the screen again. As you can see from the screengrab to the left, our custom grid comprises a large window to the left and a smaller window to the right. The idea is to have a full-width word processor and a smaller browser window for reference, but if the mood takes us were free to switch them around or to use a completely different pair of programs, such as Excel in the smaller window and Mahjong in the larger.

Using the Windows File Explorer to rename a folder full of files means clicking and typing a new name for each one in turn a slow and tiresome process. The Command Prompt is much faster, letting you rename multiple files with a single command, but the syntax can be complex, and getting it wrong could have frustrating consequences.

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PowerRename combines the efficiency of batch processing with a user-friendly front-end. To use it, you simply navigate to the folder that contains the files you want to rename, select the ones you want to work with, then right-click and select PowerRename from the context menu.

The PowerRename window will now open, prompting you to enter text in the Search for field, and specify what you want to replace it with in the Replace box. As an example, lets consider a folder full of Windows screengrabs, which are automatically named with the date and time of their capture. If we want (for whatever reason) to make it look like all of the grabs wed taken in December 2019 were actually captured in March 2020, we can search for 2019-12- and replace it with 2020-03-.

Just as if you were using the find and replace function in a word processor, the rest of each filename is left the same. And to reassure you that youve entered the right terms, PowerRename includes a terrifically helpful Preview pane, so you can see exactly what the effect of your input will be before you hit the Rename button.

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Thats a powerful capability on its own, but its just the start of PowerRenames potential. Lets suppose we want to change the day as well as the month: if you just used the Search and Replace fields, youd need to run the process 31 times to catch all the different dates. Thankfully, thats not necessary as PowerRename also supports regular expressions, better known as regex.

Regular expressions are a sophisticated system of wildcards. You probably already know that the asterisk character, when used in a search term, matches everything so searching for *.png will return all files with the appropriate extension. Regex takes this idea much further, with a wide range of operators to differentiate between letters, numbers and special characters, as well as specifying things such as maximum string lengths. This means you can use it to build complex search equations that precisely match specific criteria.

If youre feeling daunted, dont worry. As weve mentioned, the Preview pane takes the guesswork out of using wildcards and you dont need to master the whole regex system to take advantage of it. You can use as many or as few of the regex features as you want for each search.

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This is best illustrated with a couple of examples, starting with our idea of changing the day component of each filename. We can do this using the regex operator d, which stands in for any single digit. First, we need to click the Use Regular Expressions and Match All Occurences [sic] boxes below the search and replace fields; then we can set our search term to 2019-12-dd, and set the Replace text to (for example) 2020-03-01. This will change the filename on every screenshot captured during December 2019 to indicate that it was in fact taken on 1 March 2020.

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What if you wanted to replace the numerical month with the word March? In this case, you could search for 2019-dd-dd, then put 1 March 2020 in the Replace box. And to include files created in November as well as December, you could use the syntax [x|y], which means either x or y. Search for 2019-[11|12]-dd and all files from either November or December 2019 will be returned.

Clearly, regex is a wildly powerful tool, with more potential than we can fully go into here. Its something thats well worth learning if youre frequently going to use PowerRename or the Windows Subsystem for Linux, which includes full support for regular expressions. As a starting point, check out the primer that Microsoft itself recommends at pcpro.link/307regex.

After the powerful, practical potential of the first two PowerToys, the third may seem like something of a damp squib. Shortcut Guide brings up a desktop overlay when you hold down the Windows key for a second, showing a list of keyboard shortcuts you can use to access specific Windows functions such as Windows+H for dictation, Windows+S for search and so on. Let go of the key and it instantly vanishes again.

Shortcut Guide has no further function of its own, but if youre the sort of person who likes to use Windows in the quickest and most efficient way, its a handy reference and could well introduce you to some speedy desktop shortcuts you never knew about.

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Google is beginning to replace some Android apps on the Play Store for Chrome OS users with their Progressive Web App (PWA) counterparts. The first of the apps to be replaced was the Twitter app earlier this month, with the Youtube TV app also following suit. This change is a somewhat major transition and is a welcome addition for users of Chromebooks.

While the ability to install Android apps on a Chromebook is a nifty feature, those apps tend to be more resource-hungry adversely affecting Chrome OS devices in terms of performance and battery life. PWAs are nothing but websites that run through the browser on almost any platform, that also contain added capabilities, such as the ability to serve notifications through service workers mimicking the capabilities of native apps. The Twitter PWA is the default app on platforms like Windows 10.

When Chrome OS users install Twitter or YouTube TV from the Play Store, the Store installs the PWA as default. However, users will not see a difference in behavior in comparison to native apps since the PWA will act like a native app that can be opened from the shelf or even uninstalled. Another advantage of using PWAs is that of seamless updates, as any server-side updates to these services will automatically apply to the apps, without needing a store update.

With Chromebooks ranging from premium, performant devices to affordable, moderately powerful options for education, the ability to run PWAs as the default solution for some apps makes sense. It will be interesting to see what apps see this change and if Google officially announces the efforts in the future.

Source: Chrome Unboxed via 9to5Google

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Google is replacing some Android apps with PWAs in the Play Store for Chrome OS - Neowin