September, 2012

When we reimagined Windows, we took the opportunity to rethink all the different aspects of printing – the user experience, the developer platform, and the broad device ecosystem - and how they work together to give a great overall experience. In this post, I give an overview of the user experience and the developer platform of printing in Windows 8. I also describe how you can tailor the user experience in a way that meets your app’s requirements. Printing from Windows 8 apps First, let’s look at...

One of the hallmarks of a Windows 8 app is that accessibility is built into the platform. You can use accessibility features to widen the reach of your app with very little effort. We have received positive feedback on this approach from both developers and users and have refined the platform. Now we walk you through how to think about accessibility in your HTML and JavaScript apps during the design phase, show how to implement and test accessibility for some of the common UI patterns, provide some...

In the past, users organized, shared, and maintained their documents, photos, videos, and music on the local PC. But the cloud is quickly providing users with much richer ways to access, experience, and manage the files they care about. Windows 8 embraces these new scenarios by allowing you to deeply integrate cloud services directly into your apps to create completely new experiences that were not possible before. You can see many of these scenarios highlighted in the SkyDrive app which uses the...

Creating a great app requires honing in on what makes your app best in its category and making that shine. Windows 8 provides tools like charms and app bars to make it easy to really focus on what makes your app best in class and minimize anything that distracts from it. Learn to use those tools and your app and your users will be able to really enjoy what makes your app great. Focusing on what your app is best at When you watch a movie in the theatre, the movie is playing on a huge screen so it...

In the blog post for testing Windows Store apps , we’ve primarily covered what to test your apps for. While you can manually execute the verification areas we’ve discussed in the previous post, it is more efficient to automate some of these verification areas. Automating the verification of your app has many benefits. Automated testing saves time and money that you’d otherwise spend doing manual testing. Once created, automated tests can be run over and over again at minimal cost and are much faster...