Windows 8 app store cyber squatting

As a user of Microsoft Windows 8, I have become increasingly displeased with the lack of control over app publishing in the Windows App Store.

The app store provides hosted copies of Metro applictations, and these appear to undergo some form of vetting.  However the store also supports links (not hosting) to Desktop applications so that software developers can have the desktop versions of their applications also searchable from the App Store.

These desktop apps appear to not undergo any vetting at all.  In the last three weeks I have found three separate links in the app store to popular desktop applications which I use.  When selecting these links, I was instead taken to a 3rd party website called "getdesktopapp.com" which supposedly hosts the files.

There's a number of reasons why this is utterly ridiculous.   For one, these "applications" in the store are nothing more than Link Bait which you are highly likely to click because, well, it's from the App Store.  Second, there is no guarantee the links themselves do not contain malware because they're not even hosted by the developer!

Microsoft needs to fix this FAST and vet all Desktop application links in the App Store to confirm they actually refer to the developer, and that the links contained within do NOT contain known Malware.  For the sake of Microsoft's own reputation, cyber squatting of application names in the app store should be impossible.

Don't Calibrate the touch screen on your Windows 8 device

This is a short one, but articles are appearing that suggest people calibrate the touch screen on their Microsoft Surface Pro devices.

As an owner of a Surface Pro and an incessant tinkerer I decided to give this a shot.  Here's a tip:  DON'T DO IT!

But Why not?

The touchscreen calibration for Windows restricts the border of the touch interface to the border of the screen itself.   However as anyone with Windows 8 and a touch interface would know, the touch interface extends beyond the borders of the visible screen.

When the touch calibration page appears, it asks you to click in the corners of the screen, which effectively changes the borders of the touch interface.  It then ignores touch input from outside those borders.

After ten calibration attempts on my Surface Pro, each time resulted in one or more off-screen swipes failing.   Either swipe from bottom, top, left, or right - one or more of them would stop functioning.

I've calibrated my screen and it's a mess...what do I do?!

Just go into the calibration tool and reset the calibration data.  This will set it back to defaults.  Personally I've not had any touch accuracy errors on any Windows 8 touch device, so I personally don't think there is a need to calibrate the touch screen on Windows 8 unless you are calibrating a pen device.  If your calibration is really bad you'll need to resort to using a mouse and keyboard to fix it (you old timer!).

Special note for Surface Pro owners

If you own a Surface Pro, the pen interface uses Wacom technology and is a magnetic resonance system - it is completely unrelated to the capacitive touchscreen technology which your finger interacts with.  You can easily see this by placing your pen tip near the screen - you will see the cursor appear even when you are about half an inch away from touching the screen.

So, essentially this means that if your pen accuracy is poor, calibration of the pen can be performed with no concern or risk of affecting the touchscreen.