Windows 8 from the Trenches

Last week Clarity was invited to the Windows 8 Developer Launch event in here in Chicago. Matt Hidinger and I were asked by some good friends at Microsoft to give our 2-cents on why we’re excited about Window 8. It was a packed event, and we had a great time. Below are some pictures, slides and a short recap on our talk. Pictures courtesy of Bob Laskey

Win8 : A Business Perspective

Here at Clarity we’re excited about Win8 for a number of reasons. One of the wins we see from a business perspective is reusability in three main areas: Design, Code, and Skillset.

Design – We can now share design assets and create a consistent brand experience across Microsoft’s three major screens: Xbox, Windows Phone, and now Windows 8.

Code – We primarily use C# and XAML to build our Windows Phone apps. Xbox, and Windows 8 also give us a framework to write C# and XAML. While the code isn’t necessarily copy & paste, there is a ton of overlap between the platforms.

Skillset – This is sort of a nice side-effect of having similar coding platforms. We are now sharing talent across our dev projects. In other words, our mobile guys are building Win8 apps and our XBOX guys are able to make the transition to Win8 or Win Phone just as easily.

Win8 : A Design Perspective

I’ve been building and designing software for a long time. And as a ‘design guy’ I tend to focus primarily on the UX aspects of software. With Windows 8, UX and aesthetics have finally been promoted to a first class citizen. This is great news for both designers and developers. This is especially exciting from a development perspective because it makes good design a hellava lot more accessible to the non-designer.

Metro makes Design More Accessible. . I like to think of Metro as a ‘developers kind of design’. It gets to the point, and promotes functionality over flash. Its about solving problems, visually, which is something we can all get on board with.

That last statement might seem a little broad. Specifically, the Windows 8 platform makes a handful of tedious design scenarios very easy for developers :

Touch First Controls – MS has finessed the crap out of these touch controls. They are accurate, and have a ton of user research driving their functionality. This is something that takes a lot of precision and therefore time to nail. Now you get it for ‘free’.
Animation – I’ve spend a good portion of my career figuring out the ‘perfect’ easing functions and timings to create snappy elegant motion in applications. MS has spent a bunch of time making the animation framework super easy to use for everyone. Its really good. Use it.
Built-in Styles – Margins, spacing, alignment, font-sizes, type-casing, font-weight. These are things that make most developers cringe. Well guess what, MS has been awesome enough to provide you with templates that have all of the base styling built-it so you don’t need to fret about those teeny-tiny pixels.

Win8 : A Development Perspective

Our own Matt Hindinger did an awesome job talking about the great new development opportunities that come with the Win8 Metro platform. I’ll make a feeble attempt to recap the highlights of his portion of the talk.

In Metro you have a choice to use 3 different development platforms : HTML5/Javascript, XAML/C++, XAML / C#. And the question we get asked the most is ‘when do I use what?‘. This is the when & where breakdown that we’ve come up with:

C++ XAML / DirectX – We think this platform is best used when you have a need for performance and precision. C++ and DirectX give you full control of every pixel on the screen and its super fast.
C# / XAML – This is our platform of choice. It offers a very reliable strongly typed coding environment that couples speed of development and a robust control set. If you come from a .net background, this is the one for you.
HTML5 / Javascript – We think this platform offers great flexibility and an awesome set of tools for loose and fast prototyping. If you are coming from a web background you will be pleasantly surprised at the modern CSS, js support. We’ve had really good success with this framework so far.