Previews what Microsoft’s Windows
store will have to offer
One reason why Windows 8 is Microsoft’s
most ambitious OS yet is the introduction of a new class of applications: Metro
style apps. Adorning the new Metro start screen and downloadable only from the
Microsoft Store, Metro apps are the centre piece of Windows 8 and are intended
to be used on desktops, laptops and tablets.
Whether any app can successfully straddle
anything from a 10in tablet touchscreen to a 27m desktop monitor is a matter of
debate, Although Metro apps can adjust their content to suit various screen
resolutions, they run in only two modes: full-screen or in a narrow bar down
either the left- or right-hand side of the screen. There’s no option to
dynamically resize a window and overlap three or four applications across
multiple monitors as there is with current Windows apps. Indeed, even if you
run Windows 8 on a multi-monitor setup. only one of them can display Metro
apps.
One
reason why Windows 8 is Microsoft’s most ambitious OS yet is the introduction
of a new class of applications: Metro style apps.
The Windows 8 Release Preview gives us our
clearest indication yet of how these Metro apps are taking shape. Many have
been revised since the Consumer Preview, others are entirely new for this
release. Significantly, they’re all currently free, which suggests publishers
will be holding back their finest wares until they can earn revenue from them.
Nevertheless, here we give you an insight
into what we can expect to find in the Windows Store come the full launch later
this year.
Microsoft Apps
You probably won’t need a cup of sweet tea
after this revelation, but some of the most impressive Metro apps released so
far are those produced by Microsoft itself. Windows 8 arrives with a selection
of Metro apps preinstalled: Mail, Music, Video, Calendar, Maps, SkyDrive, News
and Sports are all waiting on the Start screen from the moment the installation
is complete.
Many of these apps also appeared in the
Consumer Preview released in March, but most have been polished since. The Mail
app, for example, now looks much cleaner, with clear visual separation between
different inboxes (for Hotmail, Gmail and so on), an elegant two-tone design
and thumbnail photos of the sender appearing alongside their message (where
available). We’d go so far as to say it’s one of the best default mail clients
of any tablet OS, even if it’s Light on features by Windows client standards.
Many
of these apps also appeared in the Consumer Preview released in March, but most
have been polished since.
The Music and Video apps have also been
revamped since the Consumer Preview, both now showcasing Microsoft’s attempts
to deliver media content to Windows 8 users in a similar manner to Apple iTunes
and Google Play.
Alongside tiles of your own music and video
collections, you’ll find content from Microsoft’s Store, allowing you to buy
tracks or albums and buy or rent movies from the Zune store, Irritatingly, this
currently uses the daft Microsoft Points currency used on the Xbox. However,
there’s an upside: you can also choose to play back movies or music via your
Xbox, which cleverly allows a Windows tablet or laptop to become a companion
device for your console. Indeed, there’s even an Xbox Companion app in the
Store that allows you to use your Laptop/tablet to browse and open content on your
console, although parts of it aren’t yet fully functional.
News and Sport are the two newcomers, both
delivering the latest stories from a range of sources local to your country in
two smartly presented apps. The Formula 1 section of the Sports app shows how
Metro apps can become attractive dashboards of information, displaying the
latest race results, schedules and championship standings in clear tables. If
that data could be updated live during races, Microsoft would have an outright
winner on its hands. The constant ticker of the latest headlines that scroll
through each of the apps’ Metro start screen tiles often draw you in.
The disappointment among Microsoft’s
homegrown apps remains SkyDrive. It hasn’t progressed since the Consumer
Preview and it remains clunky. Click on a document stored in your SkyDrive arid
you’re immediately thrown into an Internet Explorer browser window and the
non-touch friendly interface you’re used to on the desktop. It’s passable on a
laptop! desktop, but a poor experience on a tablet. Microsoft will surely
improve SkyDrive integration when the Metro versions of Office arrive.
Social
In addition to the barrage of Microsoft
apps, there are a few social apps thrown in for good measure. The Messenger app
provides instant messaging, using both Microsoft’s Windows Live Messenger and
Facebook. This app can be set to run in a thin window down one side of the
screen, allowing you to continue conversations while running another Metro app
or even a shrunken Windows desktop. Alerts of new messages pop up on the Metro
start screen if you’ve pushed Messenger into the background.
However, Windows 8’s real social hub is the
People app. This is a one-stop shop for all your social networking services,
including Facebook, Twitter, Linkedln, Google, Hotmail and your Microsoft
Exchange contacts. Updates from all these services (where relevant) are blended
into a single stream, allowing you to keep up with your friends’ latest tweets
and status updates from one smartly presented, horizontally scrolling screen.
The
Messenger app provides instant messaging, using both Microsoft’s Windows Live
Messenger and Facebook.
However, the What’s New section of the
People app wastes too much screen space compared to regular Windows or
web-based Twitter and Facebook clients: on a 12m laptop screen, only four
tweets/Facebook updates appear at any one time: you can get as many as 40 using
the TweetDeck client. Astonishingly, other third-party Twitter clients in the
Windows Store, such as Rowi and Tweetro, are even more wasteful.
Profligate use of screen space isn’t
People’s only problem. The app is dreadful at Contact deduplication, resulting
in friends being listed twice if they have both Linkedln and Facebook accounts,
for example. Contacts are listed in alphabetical order, but by first name
instead of surname, with no option to switch. People also fails to distinguish
between close contacts, such as friends and colleagues, and more distant
acquaintances, such as the people you follow on Twitter. Consequently, you find
Bill Gates curiously slotted in alongside your friend Bob from school in your
enormous contacts list.
People’s worst crime, however, is its Live
Tile, which scrolls through photos of your contacts instead of providing
potentially useful status updates. When many of your contacts are IT
journalists, this leaves you gawping at an awful lot of familiar (if,
obviously, oh-so ruggedly handsome) faces during the course of a day. The
People app has potential, but it needs plenty of work before release time to be
a real game changer.
