Windows Store Applications Bring New Design Goals

Windows 8 emphasizes a new Modern user interface (UI). The Desktop mode of Windows 8 offers the legacy Windows UI that has evolved while maintaining most user input and control metaphors over the past two decades, but the Modern UI with its Start screen is the view nearly all users will see upon starting Windows 8. Developers, IT staff, and users will need to become familiarized with the Modern UI concepts and elements to build, maintain, and use applications that work in the new environment.

Biggest UI Change in Decades

The Windows 8 Modern UI is the most dramatic change to the way users interact with the OS since Windows first became popular in the early 1990s. Further, the WinRT environment and Modern UI is not an optional UI that users can easily turn off, and it will be the same for all devices running Windows 8, including desktop PCs, notebooks, and tablet devices, so all users of Windows 8 will need to work with the new UI at least some of the time.

The Modern UI is Microsoft’s response to the rapidly growing market of tablet devices, such as Apple’s iPad, which present UIs that are designed primarily for touch and gesture input. Windows PCs have always depended largely on keyboard and mouse input, and even Microsoft’s early attempts at a tablet-based PC depended on a stylus to drive the UI. Thus, the Modern UI provides a completely new look and feel for interacting with Windows, and developers, IT personnel, and end users will face a learning curve when adopting the upgrade. (See the sidebar “What Is Modern?“.)