Windows 8 Interface: Not Friendly to Windows Developers

Microsoft showed off its latest incarnation of the Windows operating system last week, and it was mostly received warmly by the public. People thought the new user interface and tablet experience were appealing, and a welcome change from the previous and current generation of Windows. But like most things, there are always downsides to everything.

In this case – the new user interface for the new Windows apps comes with a price. It is powered by  HTML5 and JavaScript, which is usually not the preferred “way” of doing things for Windows developers. This means that Windows Phone apps can’t be ported to Windows 8’s full screen mode, with minor tweaks. Obviously, some developers are already unhappy about this, while others may be glad. We suspect that most long-time Windows developers would be a bit upset over this.

While developers will be able to create apps using previous generation technologies that still run on the operating system (Windows 8 is said to be backwards compatible with older apps), they won’t be able to take full advantage of this aspect of Windows 8, without making full use of HTML5 and JavaScript.

The good news is that HTML5 + JavaScript would be (more or less) platform agnostic, although unless it runs in a browser it’s not 100% agnostic. Is this a good move by Microsoft? It’s still too early to tell, but we bet that this is cooling down some of the early enthusiasm that Windows developers had. In an ideal world, Microsoft should have made the new Windows 8 interface code-compatible with the Windows Phone platform.

George Wong
Categories: Computers
Tags: developers, html5, javascript, Microsoft, operating system, platform, Windows, Windows 8