Now, with all these changes coming (Store apps in Taskbar in 8.1 Update 1, Store apps in floating windows on the desktop in Windows 9), I don't see why the stuff that's powering them in the back, the Windows Runtime, or more specifically: the native XAML stack it provides, shouldn't be opened up to be used by "traditional" non-Store Win32 applications as well. There are many APIs that can already be used from desktop applications, but the UI/XAML stuff is deliberately left out (no wonder, they want people to build apps instead of updating existing applications with a nice UI). To be honest, if Store apps can be run just like desktop applications today, I don't see the point why we need them in the first place. Imagine if they dropped that Store dependency and let every application make use of the new technologies... Oh, I forgot about the 30% cut-off...
Well it seems that Microsoft just wishes to appeal to the desktop user now because windows 8 wasn't really nice to them. If this is a transition OS from the niceness of Windows 7 to Windows 8 again I'm still going to have to pass. At the very least they need to make the dual UI integration into the OS nicer or do away with it entirely.
True... dabbled with Modern UI for WPF just yesterday... a different GUI and with tag type properties interface.. (BTW never even bothered with the store XAML so just experimenting with dektop apps) I think they may be taking a step in the right direction.. i.e. ModernUI desktop apps..
Thanks for the link Rob. Download is very slow ATM, will check it later, hopefully there will be more seeds then...
Good to see power button in start screen at the top right next to user name. But Why did Microsoft put those desktop context menus on top of metro interface, it looks ugly, either they should completely remove metro or keep the desktop and metro separately
They are a good thing, Microsoft just needs to make it fit better on the Start screen, give them a metro UI
Why the won't they merge metro with desktop, and make something like smart desktop (similar to active desktop) with live tiles? Geez, is it so hard to figure out that switching between start screen and desktop is extremely inconvenient? Even Mark Russinovich uses stardocks on windows 8
So the lower menu in metro UI will cancel ? I think the user need the option to choose between lower menu or context menu. I don't like the idea part of metro and desktop will mixed.