Tag Archives: metro UI

Windows 8 Store and Windows 8 Beta Coming February 2012

As we reported a couple of day ago Microsoft revealed what’s in store for the upcoming Windows 8 Store which is slated to be released in February next year.

Yesterday at an event Microsoft previewed the much awaited Windows 8 Store.Earlier this year at the build developer conference when they showcased the Windows 8 Developer Preview they also indicated that the Windows 8 store will allow the apps licensing,downloading and purchasing of the Metro Based Applications over the Windows 8 Store.However when it comes to purely desktop based apps those apps can only be allowed to be promoted over the store,but are not allowed to be downloaded,though the developers can publish the links for the same.

Talking about yesterday’s event,addressed by Corporate vice president Antoine Leblond,who revealed more details about the store and the revenue model amongst other things.Windows 8 Store which will be released along side the beta release of Windows 8 in the month of February next year will be showcasing only Free apps at the time of launch and the app submission will be invite only.

The revenue model goes like this,Upto 25,000 USD the revenue share base is 70%, when the app will cross the 25,000 USD mark the revenue share will rise to 80% for the lifetime of that app.Individual developers would have to pay $49 USD while the companies would have to pay $99 USD for registration.

For easy access and discovery of the apps over the store the landing page of the store is highly optimized with categories like latest, most popular, and fast rising apps and users will also get personalized application recommendations.The store will also feature an optimized search with panning through categories fast and fluid.

The store app catalog will be indexed by the search engines which will also include direct linking to the app pages.So users searching for the app over the search engine would find it easy to spot it.

The search will lead to the web version of the app listing and from there,if you are on Windows 8 the page will direct you to the Windows 8 Store,else it’ll display a message like”app is available on Windows 8″.

Talking about the Payment processing and structure for the app,the store will feature Trials as well as in-app purchases.Developers who want their own version of transaction mechanism for in app purchases can do the same with windows 8 store.So multiple choices for the end users as well as the developers for payment methods.

Yesterday they also announced an exciting contest for the developers who are eagerly waiting for their apps to be available by the time the store launches with the Windows 8 beta in February,more on the contest in coming posts.We also now have a dedicated blog for Windows 8 Store just like the Building Windows 8 Blog will be updated with the latest happenings in the Windows 8 Store front.

The Windows 8 Store is the next big thing from the developers point of view in terms of global reach and potential market for their app with over 500 million Windows 7 licensed users all over the world with potentially same number of users who’ll upgrade to Windows 8 when it launches and even if the potential upgraders with 50% upgrades from Windows 7 to Windows 8 would still put a huge number of 250 million user base with a worldwide reach in as many as 213 markets.

Checkout the Preview of Windows 8 Store:

Images and Video Courtesy : Microsoft

IDC Predicts Windows 8 to be Irrelevant to PC Users

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IDC is well known for its industry research has just released their Predictions for the upcoming year 2012.The same company which predicted the new born baby from Microsoft Windows Phone 7 to be the No.2 operating system in coming years has now predicted that the successor to highly popular Windows 7 i.e Windows 8 would be irrelevant to the PC users when it releases in the second half of the next year,reports ZDNet.

IDC recently released ” Worldwide System Infrastructure Software 2012 Top 10 Predictions “,of which one of the predictions made about the Windows 8 goes like this,as stated in the IDC prediction document:”Windows 8 will be largely irrelevant to the users of traditional PCs, and we expect effectively no upgrade activity from Windows 7 to Windows 8 in that form factor”.

Talking about the Windows 8′s Tablets future they predicted that ,

“(T)here will be intense scrutiny on Microsoft’s ability to deliver a successful tablet experience aboard both x86-based tablets and on devices running ARM processors. This is a tall order for Microsoft, and while the x86 tablet strategy makes sense as a transitional solution for today’s PC users, it will be the ARM-based devices that need to shine and clear a high bar already set by Apple.”

The ARM port and the supposed Metro Only Apps concept has been the central point of discussion for the past few days after a rumor about the same started floating around the web,so it might be one of the reasons inspiring this prediction for Windows 8 tablets future,Though there haven’t been any confirmation about the same from Microsoft.

No matter what the prediction says,the ultimate success or failure of Windows 8 will solely depend on what Choices does the Software Giant makes,we’ll have to wait and watch.

Microsoft Office 15 Beta Due Early Next Year [Rumor]

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The major chunk of Microsoft’s revenues would come from the OS and its prime software Office. Now that Microsoft is working on developing Windows 8 and releasing its beta versions sometime next year,the company hasn’t forgotten about releasing the latest version of its Office productivity suite.

According to Winrumors Microsoft is planning to release the first beta version of Office 15 (working title) sometime in late January. The company has reportedly been working on the final milestone builds of Office 15 in preparation for the beta launch.Microsoft is expected to offer a Technology Preview version of Office 15 to the public in early January at CES 2012, which is also when Microsoft is expected to launch the beta version of the Windows 8 operating system. Office 15 will likely support many of the touch interface features that are being developed for the Metro-style interface for Windows 8.

It’s more than likely that Microsoft will release the latest version of Office alongside Windows 8 which many analysts believe is scheduled to launch sometime in the third quarter of 2012. Even though Microsoft is moving more into the cloud server business with the launch earlier this year of Office 365, the company likely knows that it’s Office software suite will continue to be used on local PCs for a long time to come.And which the company don’t want to loose grasp on.

Personally, it would be great to see the launch of both Office as well as Windows 8 beta versions simultaneously,which will give the users an elaborated preview of what to expect from the actual products when they will be launched later next year.

New Xbox 360 Dashboard Gives Glimpses In To The Final Look And Feel Of Windows 8 Metro

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There’s a upgrade coming to the Xbox 360 gaming console’s dashboard and it seems to have been heavily influenced by the Metro interface from the current Windows Phone 7 and the upcoming Windows 8 platforms. Windows 8 is not even in Beta yet and this dashboard is a finalized UI. This gives us a peek in to what the Metro UI would feel like when Windows 8 is finally released.

The new dashboard features the signature Metro UI tiles with live updates and other relevant features. It is an colorful array of tiles that totally changes the experience that you have had so far with Xbox 360′s dashboard. Part of the Xbox Live platform, the new dashboard will be launching officially on December 6th, Tuesday. The new dashboard is not only a precursor to the full fledged Windows 8 Metro experience, it comes with a host of new features like Sky Drive storage, voice search through Bing (UK, CA and US only at the moment, needs Kinect), better voice and gesture control (also requires Kinect) and some new content.

This new content will be supplied by different providers in over 20 countries. Many of these providers have a worldwide presence. New movies and TV shows are only a part of the whole entertainment upgrade that is about to come in with the new upgrade to the Xbox 360.

In changing the look of the new Xbox 360 dashboard, Microsoft seems to have started its migration to a unified user experience. Its one of the best design decisions that Microsoft has taken so far. They are looking to keep the user experience unified across all their platforms. Currently that includes both the Windows Phone 7 series and the Xbox 360. Windows Phone 7 is what introduced Metro in the first place and now that Xbox also has it, Windows 8 will be launched amidst familiar grounds for users of either or both of these platforms. But most importantly, new users will always feel like they are on familiar territories once Windows 8 launches and completes the cycle.

Windows 8 Improved Setup Experience Detailed

Windows 8 Will Minimize Restarts After Installing Updates

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When it comes to Windows Update, one of the most discussed topics is the disruptive nature of restarts in the course of automatic updating. A recent post on Building Windows 8 blog enlists the improvements the Windows Update Team at Microsoft has put in to make it more user friendly and less disruptive.

WU (Windows Update) will consolidate all the restarts in a month, synchronizing with the monthly security release. This means that your PC will only restart when security updates are installed and require a restart. With this improvement, it does not matter when updates that require restarts are released in a month, since these restarts will wait till the security release. This simplification helps in three ways: it keeps the system secure in a timely manner, reduces restarts, and makes restarts more predictable. Only exception to this being in the case of critical security update to fix a worm-like vulnerability (for example, a Blaster worm). In that case, WU will not wait, but will go ahead and download, install, and restart automatically. But this will happen only when the security threat is dire enough.

WU notifies you of any upcoming automatic restart. Suppose, WU has already detected, downloaded, and installed security updates, and now requires a restart. Windows Update will notify you of an upcoming automatic restart through a message on the login screen that will persist for 3 days.

Farzana Rahman of Microsoft explains how this will work:

1. A message about the upcoming restart is shown in the login screen for three days or until the PC is restarted (whichever is sooner). This means you now have three days to restart the PC at your convenience. All you need to do is see the login screen once in 3 days to see the message about the upcoming restart and by default the lock screen will appear after 15-minute idle timeout.

2. In addition to the restart notification on the login screen, the Power options on the lock screen will change to “Update and restart” immediately after the update occurs, and will include “Update and shutdown” on days two and three, to make the message even more apparent to you. This allows you to restart your PC at your own convenience.

3. If after three days, the restart still has not occurred, then WU will automatically restart your PC for you. In this case, the automatic restart will happen either at the end of the three-day grace period, or, to prevent data loss if WU detects that there are critical applications open at the end of the three-day grace period, it will wait to automatically restart the next time you login. I’ll address this behavior in more depth in the next section.

4. After the restart has occurred, the message on the login screen will go away and the power options will revert to the original choices. We know people would like Windows to automatically log in after the restart, but we strongly advise against doing so, given the potential security issues with this configuration.

If the PC has hit the three-day deadline and still needs an automatic restart, WU will only automatically restart the machine if there is no chance of losing the user’s data. That means, if you are not at your PC (i.e. it is locked), if you have applications running in the background, or if there is potentially unsaved work, WU delays the automatic restart until the next time you come back to your machine and log in. At log-in, you will be asked to save your work, and you’ll see a warning that the machine will be restarted within 15 minutes.

Having a restart notification or dialog pop up in the middle of an important presentation, a game or a movie is not a pleasant situation, to say the least. When attempting to automatically restart the PC, if you are in presentation mode, playing a game, or watching a movie full-screen, WU detects this state, and delays the automatic restart until the next available opportune moment or the next time you log back in to the PC.

For PCs in an enterprise setting, if no policy has been set by the IT administrator, the updating experience is exactly the same as it is for home users. However, an IT administrator can set a policy to prevent auto-restart after automatic installs (just as in Windows 7). If they set this policy, there will be no three-day countdown and no automatic restart. Instead, users will see a message on the login screen indicating that the PC needs to be restarted, and the message persists until the restart occurs. This informs users that a restart is required while keeping them in control of when to restart.

Windows 8 Embedded Technical Preview In the Works for Q1 2012

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We might not see the Windows 8 Final release before the second half of 2012, but Microsoft is planning to release the Technical Preview of Windows 8 Embedded Operating System next year,as early as the first quarter of 2012, Winrumors reports.

This embedded version of Windows 8 operating system is tailor made for special kinds of devices like the kiosks, medical products, construction machinery and other such devices and not the usual desktops or laptops.This operating system like the general version of Windows 8 will support X86 and ARM based processors.Though there are no details available about the Windows 8 Embedded Operating System but it is said to be supporting different kinds of user interfaces.So it would feature Touch Screens as well as Speech Recognition Feature.

The embedded edition of Windows 8 will be fully compatible with all Windows Application and will be as powerful as the Windows 8 desktop operating system.The Final version of Windows 8 Embedded Operating System will be released after the official launch of Regular Windows 8 Operating System which is expected in the Q3 2012.

Checkout the Video of Windows 8 Embedded RoadMap:

Yet Another Windows 8 Pre Beta Screenshot Reveals Start Screen Background Changer

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A few days ago we reported about leaked Pre Beta build screenshots of the Windows 8 operating system showing off some of its yet unknown features like Start Screen color customization and the Summary View of Windows 8.

Now we have got some more Windows 8 Pre Beta build Screenshots from the same source winunleaked showing off yet another start screen feature the Start Screen background changer.

Image Credits Winunleaked

So now with the Color customization with Start Screen we can now change the Start Screen’s background image as well.The image might look like a half baked one and rightly so because this feature is still under construction and has not yet been fully implemented for the current build.As we inch closer for the beta launch which is expected in the first quarter as early as the first month of 2012 when the CES 2012 is scheduled,we can expect some more leaks by that time.Stay tuned for more Windows 8 Scoop.

Samsung Windows 8 Tablet Confirmed for Second Half of 2012

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For the past few weeks we have been hearing a lot of rumors about the upcoming Windows 8 tablets from Dell ,HP,Asus and that their Windows 8 tablet would most probably be released in the Q3 of 2012.

One of the main manufacturers to Watch out for the upcoming Windows 8 tablet is Samsung,as we already saw a glimpse of their Windows 8 offering at the build conference where the Developers were given Samsung Windows 8 Developer Preview Tablets and now Samsung’s Samsung’s head of sales and marketing Uhm Kyu Ho in an interview with Bloomberg that Samsung will launch its first Windows 8 based tablet in the second half of 2012.

The upcoming Windows 8 tablets from Samsung would be based on their existing 7 Series computer which consists of wireless keyboard and touchscreen rather a modified version of the same.Samsung’s 7 series computers are the devices eying the best of both worlds that is combining the goodness of laptops and the tablet PC’s.

Also the existing 7 series owners would get the Windows 8 upgrade when it releases next year.So with this confirmation we can say that the Q3 2012 launch for Windows 8 is definitely on the cards.

Via[TNW]

Microsoft Details Windows 8 Battery Optimization For Live Tiles

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Windows 8 operating system is expected to be launched in Q3 2012 and after the Developer Preview release there’s been a lot of work going on in the Windows 8 Development front.One of the most important issues is the Battery Life of the Devices on which Windows 8 would run,specifically the Tablets and the Laptops running on battery.

Windows 8 will feature the Metro UI which is inspired from the Windows Phones and like the Windows Phones the Metro UI on the Windows 8 will feature the live tiles concept.In a blog post on Building Windows 8 blog they detailed the work they have done so far to optimize the performance of the live tiles and reduce the battery consumption of the devices.

So here are the goals for the notification platform:

Allow hundreds of live tiles without degrading performance
Go beyond balloons, badges and text, with beautiful images
Make it easy for developers so they can just “fire and forget”
Achieve real-time delivery so delivering “instant messages” is instant

In order to achieve these goals Microsoft aims to take the data driven approach so that no app code is running in the background to power the Start screen while still delivering live content, which will eventually result in power savings and better performance for the system.

Here’s how they intend to do that,

Our solution was to build a data-driven model. This means that a developer can express their tile using a set of predefined properties and templates, in this case, using an XML schema. The XML tile data is then sent to the Windows Push Notification Service (WNS) via a simple HTTP POST and then we take care of the rest. All the code for connecting, retrying, authentication, caching, rendering, error handling, etc. is done in a uniform and power-efficient way.

Talking about the Push notifications platform,push notification would overcome the disadvantage of polling system which requires frequent access to start screen and which would’ve consumed more battery power.

Here are the details of the Push Notifications:

Windows Push Notification Service (WNS): This powers live tiles and toast notifications.
App service: This is the web service that a Metro style app runs (e.g. from their existing website), which sends toast notifications and tile updates via WNS. Examples of this would be the back-end service for the Weather app that shipped in the Developer Preview, or a back-end service hosting photos for a social networking app.
Windows 8 client platform: This represents the actual PC and the sub-components in the OS that form the plumbing for the end-to-end experience.

The new Task Manager would also feature the Tile resource usage (the bandwidth consumed by each tile is visible through the task manager).As you can see from the below image the last tiles column shows the bandwidth usage of specific tiles being used.

Image Courtesy Microsoft

In the security front for preventing all sorts of malicious attacks Microsoft’s anonymous authentication mechanism will create unique responses between the Windows 8 machine and the WNS. This mechanism will integrate apps and live tile services together so that no other applications can interfere and maliciously update the live tiles.