Tag Archives: Metro

Microsoft Rebranding Metro This Week!

Metro has been the integral part of Microsoft’s effort to bring the changes to the user interface of their ecosystem.Be it the Zune player or the Windows Phone or even the recently RTM’ed Windows 8 operating system.

But if the reports from TheVerge has to be believed,Microsoft is all set to Rebrand Metro design name,according to their tipster,that Microsoft came to this decision after discussion with a European partner,so from now we will not see Metro as a design name for Windows 8,Windows Phone or any other Microsoft Product.

While the Windows team is working on a new replacement term for Metro which is expected to be announced at the end of this week,until they do so, the company employees are advised to use “Windows 8 style UI” for the Windows 8 Metro Interface.So by the end of this week we will see a re-branding of Metro.

The Metro UI has been the part of Windows Phone,Windows 8 and quite recently the Office 2013 the upcoming version of popular productivity suite from the Software Giant.

Office 2013 and Windows Phone 8 Release Dates Supposedly Leaked

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A couple of days ago Microsoft officially announced the release dates for the Windows 8 public release on 26th of October,but that is not the only product scheduled to be released by the software giant.

Windows Phone 8 and the next version of Microsoft office i.e Office 2013 is also expected to be released in the coming months,with the Preview release of Office 2013 which was released a few days ago,its about time for the rumors for the launch dates for both the products.

Apparently ZDNet has got some inside news from an unnamed sources about the supposed release dates for both Windows Phone 8 and Office 2013.According to their sources the Windows Phone 8 will hit RTM by the month of September while the devices will be available by the month of November.While the Office 2013 is said to be ready for RTM by November while the final release will be in the month of February 2013.

They also reported about the release dates of other Microsoft products like Visual Studio 2012 with RTM coming in August and General Availability by September and Microsoft Dynamics NAV RTM by September and general availability by October.

So it seems that there is a packed scheduled coming up as far as the product launch goes for the Software Giant.

Source:[ZDNet]

Microsoft Announces Office 2013 Customer Preview, Windows XP and Vista Not Supported

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Yesterday at the press conference held in San Francisco the Software Giant announced the much awaited Office 2013,next version of company’s popular productivity suite.

The rumors about a supposed beta release of Office 2013 were floating around at the start of the month,but now as confirmed yesterday by Microsoft,the Customer Preview version of Office 2013 is now available for download over web.The suite contains all the good old popular tools like Word,PowerPoint,One Note,OutLook and Excel with a touch of Metro interface,with intuitive design which works well with touch, stylus, mouse or keyboard inputs across Windows-based devices, including tablets.along with the other features like Cloud support and social service support like Yammer and Skype.

This version of Office will support Windows 7 as well as the upcoming Windows 8 operating system,however Microsoft has decided to close the doors for the older operating systems,so all those who own a Windows XP or Vista operating system wont be able to use this version of office suite.To use it with the Windows 8 version,you would have to at least update to Windows 8 Release Preview till the final release goes public in October.

This is quite a clever move by Microsoft,to lure the consumers to upgrade to the latest and greatest operating system.With the newly announced upgrade plans for the users it won’t burn their pockets to shed 39.99$ for a Windows 8 Pro upgrade which is the cheapest of all the version.This version will support both the Wind0ws 8 version as well as the newly launched Windows RT version of devices including Microsoft Surface Tablet.

You can download the Office 2013 Customer Preview Now

Windows 8 App Development Discussed In Detail

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Recently, we mentioned in our post of Microsoft’s new Windows 8 app development blog site which included Windows 8 app development, after the release of Windows 8 Consumer Preview and how things have changed for app developers from the initial Windows 8 Developer Preview. Today, the app development blog has posted the second part of that discussion with even more information for app developers.

As was the first post,this too is a technical post and is mainly focused on programmers. Amongst many,One of the important topics discussed this time is tile and toast notifications for Metro apps. The blog states that the Windows 8 Consumer preview now lets app maker use the periodic tile notification API to tell Windows to poll your cloud service for tile content specific to your app. Also,to make it easier to work with tile and toast notifications Microsoft has introduced a notification template object model, which is a library that ships as part of the Windows SDK. The library adds constructors (and IntelliSense) for tile and toast notification templates.

The blog post also gives information for app developers who wish to make Metro apps via JavaScript. Microsoft says it has improved the performance of JavaScript IntelliSense in Windows 8 and has also improved the JavaScript debugging and diagnostic tools. Microsoft has also improved the binding of data by introducing C++Data Binding, which reduces the overhead of writing multiple interfaces.Other improvements mentioned in the blog include changing the HTML AppBar for easier use by developers and being able to create Metro style apps with a combination of programming languages in Visual Studio.

So if you haven’t already done so, download the Consumer Preview, install the new Visual Studio beta, grab some samples/docs from the Dev Center, and start building awesome apps.