Welcome to Monday and a new week everyone! Here are a few items from the weekend to get you started as you begin your day.

‘Jobs’ bio-pic turns in disappointing opening weekend – Estimates late Sunday night show the movie about Steve Jobs and the early years at Apple only brought in about 6.7 million dollars.  According to the cNet story the distributor expected something in the 8 to 9 million dollar range.  It is very likely the the films revenues will make a steady retreat after its opening weekend. I still think this movie will live on through video kind of like the Pirates of Silicon Valley has done and if you watch Pirates after seeing Jobs you are going to definitely feel some deja-vu in certain scenes.  See my take on the movie, which I saw on Saturday, from a Microsoft guy’s perspective.

Xbox Music Gets Major Overhaul in Windows 8.1 – An unexpected update for the Xbox Music App in the Windows 8.1 Preview hit the Windows Store early Saturday morning and brought multiple interface enhancements and other improvements. Although it still lacks functionality for editing your music library and updating things like album art the improvements and performance increases continue as we close in on RTM this month. Check out this post which has a summary of the updates and a screenshot tour of some of the changes.

Mozilla schedules Metro Firefox for December release – Ed Bott writes about a release schedule for the first alternative browser that will come to Microsoft’s Metro interface in Windows 8. The key dates to be aware of are September 16 for a Metro Preview Release, a beta version on October 28 and a final version of Metro Firefox is expected December 10.  As Ed notes the Metro version will still be plug-in free just like the Metro Internet Explorer is. It will certainly be interesting to see how this turns out and I am sure many users like the idea of having an alternate browser choice on the Metro side.

The dates on the calendar just keep clicking by and we are already two-thirds of the way through August!

By the way, the Windows 8.1 General Availability is in:

  • 60 days
  • 1 month and 20 days
  • 5,184,000 seconds
  • 86,400 minutes
  • 1,440 hours

Just in case you are keeping track.