News
News is one of the best-populated
categories in the Windows Store. As mentioned above, Microsoft’s own News app
leads by example, providing an attractive digest of international and local
news from a variety of sources, including the AAP, ABC online, The Australian,
SBS, SMH and more. My News allows you to pick topics (say “Google” or “Carbon
Tax”) to track within a personalised newsfeed, although it falls short of iOS
apps such as Zite, which base your newsfeed on past reading habits.
Several news outlets also have a presence
in the store. However, most of the apps are of a type: normally designed as a
grid of stories with a photo and a headline. Whether this is due to developers
still getting to grips with Metro app layouts or Microsoft’s strict presentation
guidelines is hard to say, but the lack of variety is noticeable.
News
is one of the best-populated categories in the Windows Store.
Yet Microsoft’s Finance app demonstrates
how Metro apps can be bustling and bursting with life. It marries the latest financial
news with graphs and widgets showing live data from the major markets and a
handpicked list of stocks. A matrix of major currencies makes it easy to get an
exchange rate at a glance, and the Finance Live Tile scrolls through your
selected quotes on the Start screen. Let’s hope there are more apps of this ilk
to come.
Photo And Video
If there’s one thing the iOS and Android
app stores are overflowing with, it’s apps with which to edit and share photos.
However, the Windows Store so far contains only a handful of such titles, Odder
still, some of those that appeared in the Consumer Preview have now been
removed, including the effective Ashampoo lmageFX.
What remains is unlikely to have Facebook’s
Mark Zuckerberg regretting writing that huge cheque for Instagram. The default
Photo app does a decent job of displaying photos stored locally and across
various online accounts, such as Facebook and Flickr, but little else.
The
default Photo app does a decent job of displaying photos stored locally and across
various online accounts, such as Facebook and Flickr, but little else.
The Awesome Picture app proves that
Instagram -style “apply a thousand different retro filters to my photos” apps
are perfectly possible within Windows 8, although it brings nothing new to the
table, bar the option to import from and save photos to Microsoft’s SkyDrive -
an option available to all apps applying Microsoft’s Share API (or Contract, as
Microsoft calls it).
There’s also a distinct lack of video-
editing apps. CyberLink’s YouCam enhances and records footage snapped from your
device’s webcam and the frankly bizarre Composite app “allows you to remix your
surroundings to create artistic compositions” - which basically means drawing
over the top of live video shot from your webcam to create terrifying images of
your own face. We’re confident there’s more to come from photo and video apps
on Windows 8- there can barely.
CyberLink’s
YouCam
Games
Windows x86 obviously has a huge gaming
heritage, ranging from legendary staples such as Football Manager through to
cutting-edge 3D titles such as Crysis. The limited range of programming
resources open to Metro app developers, not to mention the need to make apps
run on the low-power hardware found in tablets, means Metro games are likely to
have more in common with the titles typically found on tablets/smartphones than
PCs, however.
Indeed, many of the early games in the
Windows Store have been previously released on rival mobile platforms or even
Google’s Chrome browser store, Touch-optirnised titles such as Cut The Rope and
Fruit Ninja have previously been hits on iOS and Android, suggesting many
developers will attempt to port their back catalogue to Windows 8.
Google’s
Chrome browser store
With all the apps in the Windows Store currently
free, developers may not be willing to part with their premium titles, but
there’s nothing to suggest Metro games are going to raise the bar for tablet
gaming. Nightmares From The Deep and Dark Arcana are cutesy point -and-click
adventures in the Monkey Island mould, and the rest of the Games section is
largely filled with puzzle games. Music Maker Jam - a low-rent equivalent of
Apple’s GarageBand - is the most fun we’ve found in Microsoft’s Store. Well
reserve full judgement until developers of the calibre of EA, Rockstar Games
and Rovio have weighed in.
Browsers
A more interesting class of Metro app will
be web browsers. Microsoft has produced a Metro version of Internet Explorer
10, with a different touch- friendly interface to the desktop version, but it
won’t have it all its own way. Google and Mozilla are creating Metro versions
of Chrome and Firefox.
The Metro version of Chrome that appeared
in June was almost identical to the desktop browser, with very little done to
make the browser’s interface any easier to prod with a finger. Google stated it
would spend time before the launch of Windows 8 “smoothing out” the UI and
touch support.
Google
and Mozilla are creating Metro versions of Chrome and Firefox.
Mozilla had yet to release a Metro version
of Firefox at the time of writing. Its public plans state that the browser will
implement the familiar “Awesome Bar”, but make no mention of the third- party
extensions that made Firefox a household name.
