If you missed what happened earlier today at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, here’s a quick overview of everything Microsoft revealed (or revealed again) at the first keynote of BUILD 2013.
Steve Ballmer
- Microsoft is on a more rapid development and release cycle
- This BUILD conference is much sooner than previous developer conferences – 8 months since the last one
- Windows 8.1 preview is available today to download, lays new groundwork for developers to do great work
- Small ~8” Windows tablets are a very important form factor
- New workhorse 2-in-1 tablets that are both powerful docked, lightweight undocked
- All attendees get a free Acer Iconia 8.1” tablet and a Surface Pro to take home
- One innovative (user) experience for devices for everyone from work to play
- “Windows Windows Windows”. “The future of Windows is very bright”
Windows 8.1
- Refines the Windows 8 vision, response to latest industry trends
- Continuous improvements, over 800 updates to Windows 8 since release
- New Windows 8 apps coming soon: Flipboard, Facebook, NFL
- Telemetrics indicate over 2.3 million apps used on Windows, including desktop apps
- Windows 8.1 “refines the blend” between desktop and modern experience
- Start menu is more optimized for portrait mode
- New on-screen-keyboard gestures allows swiping left-right on spacebar for suggestion selection, swiping up on keys for symbols
- Updates to all inbox apps or new apps
- Major improvements to Mail app with power-pane sidebar, filter emails by social, newsletters, favorite people
- Redesigned Xbox Music app UI with share-to support that automatically finds songs from webpage and creates playlist
- Search pane, with Bing integration – the modern command line
- Smart search results integrate weather, maps, photos, travel, music – “not just a list of links but things you can do”
- Live lockscreen slideshow and ability to answer Skype calls and take photos from lockscreen
- More personalization options through wallpaper and colors
- Drag-up gesture to access all applications from Start screen
- Native SkyDrive file storage integration
- Simple picture editing built-in
- Improvements to desktop: Start button, boot to desktop, Start tiles float on desktop, default to tiles or all apps
- Flexible app snapping sizes, automatically snaps two apps side-by-side from opening links
- Multi-monitor multiple DPI scaling for connecting low-res displays with high-res displays: supported by all desktop and modern apps natively
Developer improvements
- Existing apps are all supported by 8.1 and will run better
- Over 5000 new APIs in Windows 8.1
- Visual Studio 2013 developer preview available today
- New powerful performance and power usage analysis tools built into VS2013
- New support for debugging asynchronous processes
- Simplified wizard for integrating Windows push notifications
- Added hardware-accelerated support for MPEG DASH and WebGL in Windows 8.1 browser and native apps
- Windows 8.1 WebView control can now be composited/overlaid with other controls
- Windows Store improvements to make it easier find and buy apps
- Personalised Store app picks powered by Bing recommendation engine with apps installed, ratings and similar people
- Related apps, apps by developer for cross-merchandise opportunities
- Automatic app updates for all Windows Store apps
- New DirectX tiled resources support
- Developed in collaboration with AMD and NVIDIA
- Allows high-resolution textures to be dynamically loaded for a resource-limited graphics card
- Only available in Windows 8.1 and Xbox One
- Native 3D printer, driver and app printing support
- Support for Lego Education robot
Bing platform
- Bing now has 17.4% of US search engine market share
- Powering Facebook, Yahoo and Apple Siri
- Launching Bing as a platform for all developers
- Giving the same capabilities as first party apps
- New mapping control with 3D mapping/flyover capability
- Text-to-speech and speech-to-text processing by Bing
- Camera scanning API for text OCR
- Providing apps eyes, ears and mouths
See all the photos from the keynote on my Flickr or embedded below
Typo: Start screen not Start menu. 😛
Also, Work Folders feature.