Quote:
Originally Posted by
timgriff84 
I've played with the demo, looked at the dev tools and read a bit of the documentation. Basically you need to write a few lines of code.
Obviously we're talking more than 5 or 6 when we say a few, and your not going to be making something like Photoshop touch friendly. But ultimately all your doing is re-positioning some stuff, making buttons bigger. Your business logic layers going to stay as it is.
With the HTML5 support built in as well, it also looks like without to much pain you could get that running as an app to.
Well, see, I think that's a problem. As I've said, if your response to making an app "touch friendly" is to make buttons bigger and reposition some stuff then you've failed. You got a bunch of Windows apps with an awkward interface and little consistency between them, which is basically the model that MS has been failing at for years. You get Windows 7 Touch Edition with a nicer overlay.
Now, I've watched the talk on making good Metro apps, and MS is providing a template for new apps so they have consistency. But it doesn't look like that applies to ported apps, and guess which category is going to be bigger? Especially when MS is pitching how easy it is to just make some button bigger and whatnot?
Again, as I've been saying, this kind of thing, plus the fallback Windows environment, really encourages the path of least resistance. I can't see a great deal of incentive for developers to write great Metro apps, or to take care with moving big apps over, when they can default to Windows or just do a cursory touch job.
My guess is we'll see a bunch of Twitter clients, Facebook apps, weather apps, friend feeds, photo sharing apps, etc. right out of the gate. In other words, widgets made big by Metro, and positioned as first class citizens. Productivity apps are going to be thin on the ground to non-existant, and with MS probably having no plans at all to offer a Metro Office.
Meanwhile, Apple isn't playing games with a "few lines of code" transition from OS X (although I'm sure it would be technically possible) because they know that real tablet apps have to be designed from the ground up. And they're clearly intent on pushing the boundaries of what you can do on a tablet, with each iteration of iWork for the iPad gaining ground on its desktop analog. They're doing that because the iPad doesn't have OS X to fall back on, and Apple doesn't think that that's where the puck will be. They think touch is the next mainstream computing paradigm, and they're not content to leave the heavy lifting to desktops. Clearly, MS is, and if they're wrong they've possibly made their last big mistake.
(unless you are being sarcastic, in which case I have egg on my face) .In computing the "System Chrome" refers to the graphical user interface elements of an operating system or software application. So if I was to alter the system chrome of my application, what I would then effectively be doing is altering or replacing the widget designs.
