We’ve officially launched the Goalite iOS app and opened up consumer subscriptions! Just in time for the moment when millions of people start thinking seriously about what they want next year to look like.

This wasn’t about shipping everything. It was about shipping what matters most.

Why We Built the iOS App First

As January 1st approaches, goals don’t live at desks. They live in moments:

• When you complete a step and want to mark progress immediately
• When a habit needs ticking off before the day disappears
• When inspiration strikes and you want to capture a dream before it fades

So we prioritised action on the go.

With the Goalite iOS app, you can:

• ✅ Complete steps and move goals forward
• ✅ Swipe to complete habits daily
• ✅ Create new habits whenever momentum hits
• ✅ Capture and prioritise dreams the moment they appear

Goal‑setting itself remains on the web for now, intentionally. That’s where deeper thinking, fine‑tuning, and planning belong.

Notes and Reflections are coming soon to the app.

Subscriptions That Match Real Life

Alongside the app, we’ve launched consumer subscriptions, shaped directly by feedback from our private preview.

Free

Perfect for starting your journey:

• Unlimited dreams
• 1 goal
• 3 habits
• AI‑powered planning and progress tracking

Pro (Most Popular)

For builders turning intent into consistent progress:

• Up to 7 goals
• Up to 10 habits
• Notes and reflections
• Additional context for AI planning

Unlimited

For achievers who refuse constraints:

• Unlimited goals
• Unlimited habits
• Notes and reflections
• Additional context for AI planning
• Priority support

We trialled these tiers extensively and Pro consistently emerged as the sweet spot for people who want flexibility without overwhelm.

Why This Matters

Most New Year’s Resolutions fail because they’re vague, invisible, or disconnected from daily life.

Goalite exists to change that.

We help people:

• Turn dreams into clear goals
• Break goals into milestones and steps
• Build habits that make progress inevitable
• See momentum, not just hope for it

Launching iOS and subscriptions before the New Year wasn’t accidental. It was the goal.

And today, we’re proud to say: we hit it.

Start Where You Are

If you’re thinking about what you want 2026 to look like, if you want progress, not pressure, if you want a system that carries you beyond January then…

Goalite is ready!

📱 Download the iOS app

💡 Explore plans and pricing

Here’s to clearer goals, visible progress, and a New Year that actually sticks.

Goalite for iPhone is Live and Ready for Your New Year was originally published in Goalite on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

If you lead a scale-up or a rapidly growing team, you already know this truth:

Alignment is the first thing to slip, and the last thing anyone notices until it’s too late.

One month, every team seems perfectly in sync.
The next, product is pursuing one set of priorities, sales is chasing another, and leadership is quietly wondering when everyone stopped rowing in the same direction.

This friction isn’t about talent. It’s about clarity.

It’s why we’re building Goalite: a modern, lightweight way for teams to stay aligned without adding more process or overhead.

And right now, there’s a moment of change that matters.

Microsoft has confirmed that Viva Goals will be retired at the end of 2025. For many organisations, Viva Goals was the default way to manage OKRs . It wasn’t perfect, but was familiar and accessible.

Its retirement creates a natural inflection point.
A chance to rethink how alignment should work.
A chance to design something simpler, smarter, and built for the pace of modern teams.

That’s where Goalite steps in.

Why Alignment Is Breaking Faster Than Companies Can Fix It

Growing companies don’t lose alignment because people stop caring.
They lose alignment because their systems can’t keep up.

• Hiring outpaces onboarding
• Priorities shift weekly
• Teams become siloed simply through speed
• “Goal reviews” turn into quarterly archaeology missions
• Tools feel heavy, clunky, or disconnected from daily workflows

The reality is simple:

If the tools we use don’t create clarity, they create noise. And scale-up teams can’t afford noisy priorities.

This is exactly the moment organisations are now facing as Viva Goals steps away.

What Goalite Is Building (And Why It Matters Now)

Goalite isn’t another rigid OKR tool.
The world doesn’t need more dashboards people forget to open.

We’re building an alignment system designed for how modern teams actually operate:

🌱 Lightweight goal creation

Fast, simple, and human without over-engineering.

⚡ Real-time team visibility

Know what matters right now, not what mattered at the start of the quarter.

📡 Intelligent momentum nudges

Support progress without micromanagement. Momentum without meetings.

🌐 Seamless integrations

Because goals only work when they live where your team already works.

🧭 Leader clarity without leader overhead

One place to see what’s blocked, what’s progressing, and where attention is needed.

In short:
Goalite turns goals from a quarterly exercise into a impactful, consistent, human part of how your team operates.

Why the Retirement of Viva Goals Is a Catalytic Moment

When a widely adopted tool steps away, teams face a decision:

Replace it like-for-like?
Return to spreadsheets?
Or re-evaluate the entire approach to alignment?

For scale-ups, especially during rapid growth, this is more than a tooling gap.
It’s an opportunity to redesign alignment into something that genuinely supports the pace and culture of your organisation.

And that’s exactly why we’re opening the Goalite Pilot Program now.

Goalite’s Pilot Program: Built With Fast-Growing Teams

We want to shape Goalite with the organisations who will benefit most from it, teams navigating complexity, speed, and constant change.

Ideal pilot partners include:

• Scale-ups where growth is outpacing alignment
• Innovative teams looking for clarity without bureaucracy
• People & operations leaders strengthening culture and focus
• Former Viva Goals users exploring smarter alternatives for Teams
• Leaders who want goals lived daily, not archived quarterly

This isn’t a passive pilot.
It’s a genuine co-build.

Pilot partners receive:

• Early access to Goalite
• Influence over feature development and workflow design
• Priority support and direct engagement with our team
• Preferential pricing when we launch publicly
• A chance to shape the next generation of alignment tooling

This is a limited pilot, not because of exclusivity theatre, but because we want meaningful collaboration with the right organisations.

If You Want to Shape the Future of Team Alignment, Let’s Talk

The retirement of Viva Goals marks the end of one chapter, but the start of a better one for teams ready to build clarity into their culture.

If you’d like your company or team to be part of the Goalite pilot:

👉 Email us at: hi@goalite.com

Let’s build something that helps teams move faster, align better, and stay focused on what matters, no matter how fast they’re growing.

As Microsoft Retires Viva Goals, Goalite Opens Its Pilot for Fast-Growing Teams was originally published in Goalite on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Goalite is officially launching publicly!

After months in private preview, countless iterations, deep conversations with our early users, and a relentless pursuit to make personal achievement truly achievable we’re opening the doors.

If you’re someone with big dreams but limited structure…
If you’ve tried goal-setting tools that turned into abandoned apps…
If you’ve ever said: “I know what I want, I just can’t seem to make it happen consistently”…

Goalite was built for you.

Goalite is built on the IMPACT Framework — our evidence-driven approach influenced by the work of Simon Sinek (“Start with Why”), James Clear (“Atomic Habits”), and decades of behavioural science showing that transformation requires identity, clarity, systems, and consistent action — not willpower alone.

And today, you can join us!

✨ Why Goalite Exists

Most people don’t need more motivation.
They need clarity, structure, and supportive habits that help them show up for the things that matter.

But traditional goal-setting tools fall short. They’re checklist apps disguised as transformation tools. They don’t help you think, plan, adapt, or understand the real path between today and the life you want.

We built Goalite because:

• People don’t struggle with dreaming — they struggle with turning dreams into plans that actually work.
• Goals fail because they’re undefined, unstructured, or unrealistic — not because people lack discipline.
• Achievements come from integrated systems — goals, habits, and reflections working together, not in separate apps.
• AI can do more than generate generic advice — it can become a collaborator in designing meaningful change.

Everything inside Goalite is intentionally structured around IMPACT — Identify, Motivate, Plan, Act, Check, and Transform — a cycle designed to support real human behaviour, not just productivity theory.

Goalite isn’t another productivity app.
It’s your personal transformation engine.

And now, you can experience the full journey.

🚀 Starting Your Journey: The Today Screen

When you open the app, you land on your Today screen. It’s your homebase.

Your habits, your active goals, your dreams, everything you’re working toward, are right there, organised and actionable.

It’s intentionally simple. The point is to focus, not overwhelm.

From here, the real magic begins.

🌟 Dreams: The Starting Point of Every Achievement

Think of the Dreams page as your personal horizon, the place where every idea, desire, and possibility lives.

You can:

• Add new dreams in seconds
• See dreams you’re actively working toward
• Browse your long-term list of everything you want to achieve

Let’s walk through an example dream:
“Get healthier.”

You add it. It appears immediately.
But then something special happens:

You feel the dream. You grab it — literally.

You drag the dream into the “impactful next goal” drop zone, creating a tactile moment of intent.

And suddenly, that dream becomes a turning point.

🎯 Transforming a Dream into a Goal

Once you drop the dream into the transformation area, Goalite asks:

• When do you want to achieve this?
• Why does this matter to you?
• Would you like to add additional context to help Goalite AI craft a deeper, more personalised plan?

This is where the first two stages of the IMPACT Framework come alive — you Identify what matters and Motivate yourself by connecting to your deeper “why,” a principle championed by behavioural thinkers like Simon Sinek.

For our example, we set:

• When: July 2026
• Why: “I want to be healthier and to lose weight.”

Then Goalite AI gets to work.

🧠 Making Your Target SMART (Automatically)

Here’s where people often get stuck:
“Get healthier” isn’t a SMART goal. It’s not specific. It’s not measurable. While SMART isn’t the best for goals, it’s brilliant for targets.

So Goalite AI checks if the target is:

• Specific?
• Measurable?
• Achievable?
• Relevant?

(And it already knows how it’s Time-bound from the “when” of the goal.)

And if it’s not, Goalite doesn’t judge.
It suggests realistic, personalised, SMART alternatives.

For example:
A measurable, safe amount of weight to lose over the time frame of the goal.

You simply choose the best one.

This moment of clarity changes everything.
What was vague becomes actionable.

🛠️ Your AI-Built Plan: Building the “Plan” Stage of IMPACT

This is the “Plan” stage of the IMPACT Framework — where clarity becomes structure. Goalite AI doesn’t give you a generic template; it builds a personalised roadmap that honours what you want, why you want it, and how you’re most likely to succeed.

This isn’t a generic template.

Goalite AI builds:

• Milestones that map the journey
• Steps that make each milestone achievable
• A cohesive flow where each step supports the next, aligned to your purpose

And the best part?

You stay in control.

You can:

• Edit any milestone or step
• Add new milestones and steps
• Remove suggestions
• Tailor the plan to your lifestyle, your preferences, your reality

This is your journey, Goalite simply gives you the structure to succeed.

🏁 Starting Your Goal (and the Power of Habits)

When you approve your plan and start your goal, Goalite instantly recommends supportive habits.

These habits are pulled directly from your plan meaning they are strategically aligned with your success.

In our example, Goalite suggested:

• Daily morning hydration
• Twice-weekly evening meal prep

These aren’t random habits.
They’re the habits that sustain the plan you just committed to.

You add them, and your ecosystem comes alive.

This is the “Act” stage of IMPACT. Where habits become the daily expression of your long-term goals, echoing James Clear’s principle that small, consistent actions compound into remarkable change.

🔁 Habit Tracking, Streaks, and Reflection

Every habit comes with:

• A clear schedule
• An activity calendar
• Your current and best streak
• Your next upcoming activity

But the most powerful part?
Reflection.

When you complete a habit, Goalite asks:

• What went well?
• What challenged you?

Goalite does this for more than just Habits too. The Steps, Milestones, and Goals themselves all ask you to think about how things are going.

Your reflections help you understand your behaviour. If you upgrade, Goalite stores these insights to improve future goals and habits so your personal growth becomes part of the system.

This is the “Check” stage of IMPACT. A feedback loop that turns experience into insight, allowing Goalite to learn from you and adapt your future plans accordingly.

This turns your journey into a cycle of learning, not just checking boxes.

🌱 Why This Matters

Transformation doesn’t happen because we “work harder.” It happens because we follow a system that supports who we want to become. Goalite brings that system to life through the IMPACT Framework — Identify, Motivate, Plan, Act, Check, Transform — an evidence-based cycle influenced by the work of thought-leaders like Simon Sinek, James Clear, and decades of behavioural and cognitive research.

With IMPACT, you can:

• Identify what truly matters — your dreams, purpose, and personal definition of success
• Motivate yourself with clarity of “why,” not guilt or pressure
• Plan using structured milestones and actionable steps
• Act through supportive habits that make progress natural and consistent
• Check your reflections, learning from what’s working and what isn’t
• Transform by iterating, adjusting, and growing into someone who can achieve more than you first imagined

Goalite isn’t just helping you reach goals. It’s helping you evolve, one intentional cycle at a time.

📣 And Next? We’re Building Goalite for Teams

Today we launch Goalite for individuals.

But our next frontier is even bigger:

Goalite for Teams
A shared environment where groups can work toward a common mission with clarity, structure, and collective accountability.

Whether it’s a startup, a nonprofit, a classroom, or a department; teams deserve a transformation engine too.

If you want early access, keep an eye out as we’ll share more soon.

🌟 We Built Goalite So You Can Build the Life You Want

This isn’t just a product release.
It’s an invitation.

If you have dreams you’ve been postponing…
If you feel stuck between ambition and execution…
If you’re ready to finally move from intention to progress…

Start your journey with Goalite today.

👉 Sign up now and begin transforming your dreams into reality.

This is your moment.
Start your IMPACT journey today — Identify your dreams, Motivate your purpose, Plan your path, Act with supportive habits, Check your progress, and Transform your life.

Goalite is ready to guide you.

Goalite Is Live: A New Era of Turning Dreams Into Daily Action was originally published in Goalite on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Why the frameworks you’ve trusted are quietly killing momentum — and how to reclaim clarity, focus, and impact.

You’re busy. Let’s start where the pain is. It’s Monday night, your to do list is all ticked off, and somehow you still feel behind. You hit the numbers, you ticked the boxes, and yet nothing essential seems closer. That’s not on you. It’s on a system that confused motion with momentum and measurement with meaning.

We’ve been sold lies about goals — tidy frameworks that fit in slide decks and die in the real world. The fix is a different operating rhythm: one that starts with why, compounds through systems, and pays off through disciplined planning you can actually live with.

“People don’t buy what you do; they buy why you do it.”

Simon Sinek didn’t write that for marketers. He wrote it for people and leaders who want outcomes that survive. If your goals don’t start with a reason that matters, they collapse at the first trade‑off.

You know that SMART Goals aren’t actually all that smart.

The comfort lie

“Be realistic” is the corporate lullaby. Realistic goals keep you safe, not better. The problem isn’t ambition — it’s aim. Most goals protect ego and calendar hygiene — the illusion of progress through tidy scheduling, not individual and team growth. The fix is discomfort with direction: define the change that would genuinely alter your trajectory, and anchor it to stakes you can’t ignore.

How Goalite handles it: when you enter a goal, Goalite’s AI interrogates the target. It flags vague verbs, hunts for missing stakes, and proposes bolder, still‑winnable versions calibrated to your constraints. If your goal reads like a to‑do, it won’t survive. Goalite forces a choice: meaningful or meaningless.

The measurement trap

SMART taught you to make goals measurable. Good. Then it implied that measurability equals progress. Not good. A number without a plan, cadence, and adaptation is just a vanity metric. The fix is simple to state and hard to live: build the system around the target.

“You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.”

James Clear’s point is brutal and freeing. If the system is weak, the outcome is luck. If the system is strong, progress compounds. Goalite operationalises this with the IMPACT Framework rhythm in motion, not in theory:

• Identify is the first step, you can write your dreams and ruthlessly prioritise them by those that will have the biggest impact.
• Motivate happens when you transform your dreams into goals: the problem, the target, and the stakes live together so the why — the all important purpose of the goal — doesn’t get lost.
• Plan isn’t a blank page. Goalite drafts a staged path — milestones with owners, dependencies, and evidence you’ll collect to prove they’re done.
• Act is right‑sized execution: steps that are finishable in a real day, not fantasy hours, with “start here” guidance when you open the app.
• Check is a living cadence: weekly reviews with contextual prompts (“What changed? What did I learn? What gets cut?”) so adaptation is automatic, not aspirational.
• Transform is the identity layer: what this goal is training you and your team to become — captured, reviewed, and rolled into the next cycle so wins don’t evaporate.

The alignment myth

Cascading targets are not alignment. You can distribute numbers without ever creating shared purpose. Alignment happens when the why is visible, the rhythm is shared, and trade‑offs are made in public.

Goalite keeps the why pinned to the goal card and threads it through every milestone and step. Today that’s personal clarity. Next up: shared goal views, roll‑ups, and team cadences where evidence and exceptions are visible without a meeting. Alignment stops being a PowerPoint presentation and becomes a habit.

The calendar trap

Reality doesn’t care about your quarter. Arbitrary deadlines create fake failure and bad work. Dates are tools, not traps. The fix is to time‑box for focus and adjust when evidence changes.

In Goalite, due dates are elastic in the right places. You lock the cadence (we review on Fridays; we deliver every Tuesday), and you adjust milestones when the market moves — with a written reason captured at the moment of change. That audit trail safeguards quality — and earns trust.

KPI theatre

You can hit every KPI and still lose the market. Activity looks like progress until it doesn’t. The fix is ruthless prioritisation: fewer, consequential goals with obvious next actions.

Goalite’s impact‑first focus engine highlights the few goals that actually move the needle by surfacing the one or two steps that deserve your next hour based on potential upside, proximity to tipping points, and blocking dependencies. When everything is important, nothing gets done. When the next step is obvious, progress compounds.

The willpower myth

“Try harder” is not a strategy. Motivation fades. Systems don’t. Clear’s core math is worth remembering: get one percent better each day and the compounding is astonishing by year‑end. But compounding only happens when the friction is low enough to keep going.

Goalite designs for friction‑light consistency. Check‑ins take seconds — and they actually matter. You get nudges tied to the work, not generic notifications, and soon, habits that link directly to outcomes (not streaks for their own sake). Consistency beats intensity, every time.

The ownership mistake

Top‑down goals rarely create commitment. People don’t own what they don’t help shape. The fix is co‑creation: connect personal meaning to organisational outcomes and keep that connection alive.

Goalite’s prompts pull real motives into the plan (what this win unlocks for you, your team, your customer) and keep them visible. When the tough day hits, purpose is one tap away — not buried in a kick-off slides.

Why IMPACT, not just SMART

SMART is great at defining targets. But a target isn’t the goal; it’s one ingredient. The IMPACT rhythm — Identify, Motivate, Plan, Act, Check, Transform — is what turns a target into a transformation loop. It brings Sinek’s why, Clear’s systems, and Tracy’s discipline under one roof.

And about discipline — there’s a reason planning pays outrageous dividends: “Every minute you spend in planning saves ten minutes in execution.” Brian Tracy’s math isn’t poetry; it’s operations. Goalite bakes that return into the UI. The time you spend up front is multiplied through the weeks because the path, the cadence, and the next action are always clear.

How Goalite makes progress inevitable

Here’s what that looks like when you’re moving fast:

You write the true goal, not the polite version. Goalite challenges the language, pressures the stakes, and locks the target you’ll be proud to hit. It immediately drafts a plan you can work against tomorrow morning, with milestones you won’t have to redefine later. It will schedule your reviews so there’s a heartbeat to the work. It tells you, at 9:07 on Thursday, the one action that moves the needle. When something shifts, you adjust inside the goal — reason captured, trade‑offs remembered — and keep going. You don’t rebuild your plan from scratch every week; you refine a living system.

Today you get crystal‑clear personal visibility and traction by design. Next, shared alignment: team roll‑ups, cross‑goal evidence, and habit links that hard‑wire consistency to outcomes. This isn’t task tracking. It’s transformation engineering.

The pivot busy leaders are making

The highest‑leverage shift you can make this quarter isn’t “more goals.” It’s fewer, truer goals run through a system that refuses to let meaning, cadence, or clarity slip. That’s the pivot from performance theatre to real impact. It’s also the difference between feeling busy and being dangerous.

If this read like a mirror, good. That discomfort is useful. It means you’re done pretending that tidy dashboards equal progress.

Your move

Comment “Day One” to get a Private Preview invite — we’ll prioritise commenters. Or head to goalite.com and start prioritising your dreams that change you, your team, and your results. Which lie has cost you the most progress — comfort, calendar, measurement, or ownership? Tell us below, and we’ll respond with a tailored way to reframe it in Goalite.

Sinek gave us the why. Clear gave us the system. Tracy gave us the discipline. Goalite turns that into a weekly rhythm you can live with — and consistently win with.

The Goal‑Setting Lies — And the System That Replaces Them. was originally published in Goalite on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We’ve had an exciting first week at Goalite, and we’re pleased to share some highlights and new features with you.

Active Community of Dreamers

In just one week, we’ve welcomed many new users who have started writing and rewriting their dreams. Some users have already listed many more than ten dreams! This shows the ambition of our users and strong interest in setting and achieving personal goals.

Easier Prioritisation of Dreams

To help our users focus on what’s most important, we’ve introduced a new feature that makes it easier to prioritise dreams. Users can now organize their dreams by importance, making it simpler to stay on track. This includes a countdown to help users add at least ten dreams.

Once 10 dreams have been added, a new area becomes available where users can drag their most impactful dream to the top of the list. This makes the process clearer and more streamlined and aligned with Brian Tracey’s powerful approach to identifying the most important dreams.

Looking Ahead

Our first week has been a great success, thanks to the enthusiasm and dedication of our users. We wanted to share this great comment from one of our users!

“Goalite has transformed how I approach my dreams. The prioritisation feature has been a game-changer for me and I can’t wait to start turning my dreams into goals!”

We’re excited to keep improving the platform and helping everyone achieve their goals — we have lots more to share with you soon!

Join Us Today

Ready to turn your dreams into reality? Join our growing community at goalite.com and start setting and prioritising your goals with ease.

Goalite.com: A Successful First Week and Exciting New Features! was originally published in Goalite on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Today I have made available a couple of new festive and nerdy designs for you to get you into the holiday spirit! (Yes, I know it’s early, but I want to make sure they arrive before December.)

Check out the new festive designs!

First up, is Ninja Cat riding a fire breathing unicorn in a faux knitted style design, so it fulfils the festive jumper/ugly sweater vibe we all go for. This is available on t-shirts, jumpers and even face masks and in a range of colour options.

Check out the Happy Holiday merch today.

The second design also features Ninja Cat but once she has found her Santa Clause outfit and uses Rudolph the red nosed T-Rex to travel the world delivering festive cheer. There’s a version of this design without and without text and it’s not only available on clothing and masks but also cushions to furnish your house too!

Find your Santa Paws merch now. You can see the designs with text too.

Finally, I wanted share some of the geeky face masks I have made over the past few weeks as they might be a great gift for a friend, family member of just as a gift to yourself. There is a BSoD inspired one as 2020 ran into a problem and the second is giving us the clear instruction to turn off 2020 (this is even available on regular clothing too).

Get your BSoD Masks and Turn Off 2020 Masks right now.

There’s plenty more geeky designs and products on the WallpaperHub Merch Store. All proceeds from the store go into helping me run the site so thank you in advance for anything you buy.

Festive Clothing and Geeky Masks Now Available was originally published in My Microsoft Life on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Today marks 2 years of WallpaperHub and I want to take this opportunity to thank you all for your continued support! Over the years I’ve added over 1,800 wallpapers and you have downloaded them several million times!

To celebrate I have two things to share with you…

A 20% Discount and New Merch

To mark this occasion, I am offering a 20% discount on the WallpaperHub Merch store for the next 2 weeks! Use the voucher code “PCT10LQXLEJW” to get 20% off at the checkout.

But there’s more! There are three new t-shirt designs in the Store including a t-shirt with a Ninja Cat Microsoft badge, a t-shirt for Family & Friends’ Tech Support and one to help you C# with “softwear” glasses.

Announcing the WallpaperHub API

Over the past few months, I have been working on creating a brand-new API for WallpaperHub, I was hoping it would be ready for today, but it’s taken me longer than planned. The plan for this API is to launch it as a beta for the developers out there to play around with and see what new experiences you can create to show off the awesome images available on WallpaperHub. Once we’re happy it stands up to the traffic, I’ll be putting it into production.

Also, I will be moving the WallpaperHub website over to this API once it’s finished and the API will be bringing new features, improved performance, and better reliability to the site!

I’ll keep you updated on its progress!

Thank you again for your continued support and love for WallpaperHub, it makes working on the site and creating wallpapers all worth it!

WallpaperHub Turns 2! was originally published in My Microsoft Life on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I was holiday in 2014 in Florida when I bought my second ever Surface device, the newly released Surface Pro 3 and it’s been my daily driver ever since. Once the excitement of the Disney World had worn off and we were chilling by the pool I can remember setting the device up and quickly replacing my old PC with this shiny new one.

As the years have gone on so the device has been a real champ. It’s enabled me to design wallpapers and then go on to build WallpaperHub, BuildBingo and a few other Microsoft related projects. I used my SP3 for my wedding to build a Messenger Bot that allowed our guests to choose the music for our playlist. I even built an app and sorted out legal matters for a startup app that I sought funding for, sadly that project never went anywhere. The Surface Pro 3 was great at allowing me to build what I wanted.

It travelled the world with me to various trips around Europe and a few back to its homeland, the US. It came with me on my first MVP Summit and to my first Microsoft Build. I’ve been all over the UK with it, convinced a number of my family to get Surface Pro 3s and it even helped me buy my first house in London. It’s been on all the Windows Insiders rings at one stage or another. There have been a few bad times with it but they’ve come from being on the Insider Fast Ring builds, but that is what comes with living on the “bleeding edge”.

I’ve relied and depended on it and it’s done me well but it’s beginning to show its age and tomorrow it is going to be finally retired for a brand-new Surface Book 3 (so long as it gets delivered). I can’t wait to set up the new Surface but I will miss this Surface Pro 3, it’s been a reliable, versatile and trusty companion for the past 6 years!

Here’s to the next 6 years with my Surface Book 3!

P.S. Cheers to the Pen Loop.

Retiring My Trusty Surface Pro 3 was originally published in My Microsoft Life on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

For just over 2 weeks I have been using the Surface Earbuds and it’s about time I shared my thoughts of them with you. Firstly, it’s worth knowing that I own a pair of first-generation Surface Headphones and some wired USB C headphones that came with my Galaxy Note 10+, these are the devices I’ll be comparing the Earbuds too.

Out Running

This topic might come as a surprise to; it’s a surprise to me for sure. At the beginning of the year I decided to start doing running and am now doing it multiple times a time ranging from 3k to 10k and music and podcasts are really helpful for me.

I’ve never run with the Surface Headphones; they aren’t exactly tight fitting and I’ve always thought I would spend most of the run repositioning them on my head. Instead I have used the wired Samsung headphones which did the job but came with some significant tradeoffs with firstly having a wire and secondly it being difficult to control the song I was listening to.

The Surface Earbuds are clearly better than my old wired headphones through just being wireless but a surprising thing that I found was that my old ones were noisy through the wire hitting my chest as I ran. I wasn’t aware of this before but the Earbuds brought a new quietness that I appreciate when out on a run.

The concern I had with the Earbuds for running was how well they would stay in my ears but I must have run about 10 times with them now and not once have they moved, felt loose or have I had to reposition them. This surprised me and it’s great. Plus, with the swipable surface on the Earbuds it’s really easy for me to skip track and increase volume allowing me to listen to the right song to get me to that next kilometer.

Running with the Surface Earbuds is better than I expected and I can’t imagine not using them for this.

When working

Whilst working at home and not on Microsoft Teams calls, I usually listen to music through my Amazon Echo using my phone to control the songs. By not using Spotify on my PC I find this helps to limit the distraction and procrastination of trawling through Spotify’s countless playlists. Since getting the Surface Earbuds I have used them every day instead of the Echo. Through listening to an eclectic mix I’ve found the Earbuds to be great, from reggae to classical I’ve been very happy with the sound. I’m sure larger headphones can pack more of a punch and deal with ranges better but for these lightweight buds they really are very good.

The Earbuds have an unusual way of sitting in the ear and whilst initially comfortable I was concerned how they would feel over long periods of time. I’m happy to be able to say that I forget I am wearing them. They are so lightweight and comfortable that they really do fade away. I have yet to try and put my work over-ear headphones on for a call although I can only imagine that days away from happening! (Work lockdown connections from unknown devices so I have to used approved hardware 🤷‍♂️)

I will probably continue to use both the Echo and Earbuds to listen to music, the nice thing with the Earbuds is I can really crack up the volume without annoying anyone else!

At home

When I close the laptop and stop working, I’ve continued to use the Earbuds, often to make calls. What I have found to be really good is to have just 1 Earbud in. I can have a call but am not closed off to things going on in the house. I could do the same thing with the Surface Headphones but I feel over-ear ones give the appearance of being closed off, even if I was actually amplifying the noises around me.

When using just 1 Earbud is when you might encounter the biggest negative I have about that the device and that is that the left and right buds have different controls. The left Earbud offers skipping when swiping and the right controls the volume. When just using 1 you’ll miss out on some crucial functionality and it seems like something that something I should be able to config. I think it would be good to have the option to turn off mirrored or different controls per Earbud so I can avoid this situation as and when I need to. My guess as to why this has been done is that we’re probably not that accurate at swiping on the Earbuds when they’re in our ears to it’s easier to have very few gestures on each bud.

I will definitely continue to have calls using the Earbuds when around the house.

But what of my Surface Headphones, I hear you ask. Well, I am sure that when commuting and travelling are options again, I fully expect to want to use them for the noise cancelling they offer. The ability to close out the noises of trains and planes is awesome and I know it’s not what the Earbuds are able to offer.

I will be using both the Headphone and Earbuds as both offer something unique but if I had to choose just 1 of them, I think I would go with the Earbuds. They are more versatile, especially with regards to running, than the Headphones with the only real omission being the lack of noise cancelling — for some though noise cancelling is an absolute must.

Let me know if you have any questions about the Surface Earbuds.

My thoughts on the Surface Earbuds after 2 weeks was originally published in My Microsoft Life on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Today I’m pleased to announce something new for WallpaperHub: Merchandise! You’ve shown your love of the original wallpaper designs and now they are available in more ways for you to enjoy from t-shirts to phone cases. Explore the new WallpaperHub Merch Store now.

But wallpaper designs aren’t the only things available; I’ve also created some nerdy and Microsoft related items to purchase such as a Blue Shirt of Death (BSoD) and a towel to help you be like your code, DRY.

On the Store you will find a few categories to help navigate the various designs:

• WallpaperHub
• Geek Chic
• Wallpapers

Each design comes on a number of different products, including:

• t-shirts (men and women's)
• hoodies
• baby grows (start the nerd young!)
• children’s jumper/sweater
• bags
• canvas prints
• posters
• phone cases
• towels
• mugs
• jewelry
• cushions

The site that I am using for this promises good quality items and printing with international deliveries so I hope everyone who likes WallpaperHub can order items if they want to.

The Merch Store is an experiment; my hope is that you like the products and through your support it’ll help cover the costs of WallpaperHub.app.

I plan to bring more original wallpaper designs to the store and create more geeky items too. For example, I am sure Clippy deserves some love within the WallpaperHub.app Merch Store. I am limited to the types of products I can put these designs on to, but hopefully this will expand over time.

Please let me know your thoughts on these products. What other designs and what other items would you want to see in the store? Is the website I am using for this good enough for you?

Thank you, as ever, for your support of WallpaperHub.app. I hope you enjoying checking out the Merch Store.

Announcing WallpaperHub Merch Store was originally published in My Microsoft Life on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.