😀 Smile! The Unicode emoji characters from Windows 8 and Windows Phone are now also available to Windows 7 users through a new Windows Update released a couple of days ago.

Microsoft KB2729094 titled “An update for the Segoe UI symbol font in Windows 7 and in Windows Server 2008 R2 is available” is presumed to be made available through Windows Update soon.

This article introduces an update to the Segoe UI symbol font in Windows 7 and in Windows Server 2008 R2. This update adds support for emoji characters and some control glyphs that are included in Windows 8 and in Windows Server 2012.

Note Emoji characters come from emoji-capable platforms and devices. The platforms or devices enable users to easily insert emoji characters into documents, email messages, or chat conversations by using an emoji picker feature or an emoji palette feature. In Windows 8 or in Windows Server 2012, these characters are inserted by using the on-screen keyboard.

After installing the update, Segoe UI Symbol (version 5.01) should be installed in the fonts folder.

To see the new characters after they’ve been installed, I’ve put together a quick test page with the help of Wikipedia that puts Segoe UI Symbol’s new Unicode superpowers to the test. Note: the backported set is not the full set as Windows 8 so there will still be rectangles.

P.S. This guy 😷 looks like Bane.

While designing and developing MetroTwit for Windows 8, I grew very close to StandardStyles.xaml (BFF) – one of the files Visual Studio 2012 automatically pre-populates for a Metro-style application.

The resource file provides some of the core and standardized XAML control styles for a consistent Windows 8 app user experience. In the RTM version of Visual Studio released earlier this week, StandardStyles was updated to provide a more comprehensive dictionary of AppBar button styles. It grew from tens to hundreds.

As a designer, it was very hard to visualize just what the AppBar icons looked like so I decided to come up with a simple way to visualize them.

With the help of Rafael Rivera, I made a Metro app which loads StandardStyles, reads the XML, filters out just the AppBarButtonStyles and then spits them out into a grid so you can see them all at once, with their names available on hover.

Since this would be pretty handy to other Metro developers as well so I’ve put the C# source code on MetroTwit’s GitHub.

Update: Microsoft seems to have updated the documentation again in the last 24 hours removing the clause about names containing “Metro”, instead, replacing it with a generic clause about apps infringing on other’s trademarks may be requested to be removed by the trademark holder.

Don’t use names trademarked by others
Make sure to select a name for your app that belongs to you. If you use a name that doesn’t belong to you, the owner of that name could have your app removed from the store. If that happens, you would need to change the name of your app and all instances of the name throughout your app and its content before you can submit your app for certification again.

If Microsoft’s Metro kerfuffle wasn’t enough of a logistical nightmare internally already, why not also make life hard for third-party developers?

Thanks to a heads up from MarkedUp’s blog post, Microsoft seems to have recently (August 14th) added to their Windows Store certification documentation the following piece of gem:

Note Make sure your app name doesn’t include the word metro. Apps with a name that includes the word metro will fail certification and won’t be listed in the Windows Store.

As Aaron rightfully pointed out, this implies applications like MetroTwit and a number of other third-party applications are now banned from the Windows Store. Even though MetroTwit is already in the Windows Store up and until now and is one of the most downloaded, highly rated and even most used applications in the social category.

What seems illogical to me is that if Microsoft was in a trademark dispute, there shouldn’t be any precedence for Microsoft to enforce naming rights by third-parties in an open market. In my understanding of copyright law, the trademark holder is the only one that should enforce its trademark by filing disputes.

In any case, we will be seeking legal advice. In the meantime, if MetroTwit doesn’t show up or stops showing up in the Windows Store, you know what happened. I guess that update with streaming and multi-accounts will just have to wait a little longer.

The above image was captioned “Very early design exploration work as part of Windows Phone and Windows alignment effort“.

It comes from Mike Guss who joined Microsoft as a designer to work on the then-secretive Windows Phone project. In the years that followed, he has helped define much of the design language we formerly affectionately called Metro.

Since, it appears he’s been on a company-wide crusade of sorts to help “spread the word” about what he now just refers to as “M”. In fact, he’s even gone as far as black-out any mention of the word from his recount of the journey from its inception to May of this year.

If you have any interest in design and Microsoft, then have a read of Mike’s unforgiving insight into how M evolved from a skunkworks project to something that is now at the core of the Microsoft brand and ecosystem. Here’s just a brief snippet…

In the winter of 2009/2010, XXXXX was still an underground thing. The Microsoft ecosystem was a cluster fuck frankenstein machine of all the different brands/products, so it was a challenge when it came to taking products such as Bing, Office and Xbox into the rest of the phone experience. This ultimately led us to validate our assumptions that this was a much bigger problem with Microsoft as a whole. We needed to go back to the XXXXX principles.

…

In spring of 2012 XXXXX XXXXXXX shouted out “XXXXX, XXXXX, XXXXX!” at a conference, and that is the moment that Microsoft’s “new look” have been said to have gone mainstream. I think it’s great that Microsoft has a new design direction that everyone is gravitating towards. It will help bring all the experiences together, not just in the products but in the branding and messaging as well…creating a more cohesive ecosystem. But XXXXX is not about any particular school of design. Some designers look at XXXXX as a style guide. Using beautiful typography, negative space and grids should be a given. It is not simply getting rid of gradients, limited use of color, san-serifs, placing squares, cutting off text, and presto, you have XXXXX! The original intended use of XXXXX was a set of principles that helped us not lose focus on what our goals are when designing a product. On a philosophical level, XXXXX is ultimately about making and doing things better.

Just don’t call it Metro, unless you were Steve Ballmer, who continues to be a great source of retrospective amusement.

(Thanks to Stephen Chapman for sharing one of Mike’s other works which led me to this.)

I’ve been heavily using (and loving) my MacBoook Air in the last couple of weeks and I just stumbled across a really simple but powerful tip for anyone like me who prefers running Windows 8 as a VMware Fusion virtual machine on OSX.

Since Windows 8 has a heavy reliance on edge-based gestures (ex. top-left for switching apps, bottom-left Start menu, top-right Charms, top-to-bottom to close apps), being able to do these easily with the mouse is very much necessary.

Unfortunately, most modern virtual machine software optimize the mouse for fluid switching between the host system and the guest system which means none of these gestures work in a windowed mode. In full-screen mode, it’s a little bit better but it’s still very easy to accidentally activate the OS X menu and dock.

That is until yesterday when I came across quite a nice fix. Enabling “optimize mouse for games” actually solves this very problem.

As far as I know, it does two things – the most important being always locking the mouse inside the VM window, and the other is to improve the responsiveness of the cursor.

You can now activate all the gestures with ease in windowed mode or triggering the OS X menu or dock in full-screen mode.

To “escape” the mouse, one simply has to press the default Command (⌘) + Control shortcut.

Hopefully this helps any other Windows 8 users on Mac which works remarkably well with what I believe to be the industry-leading trackpad. Two-finger scroll works wonders in Windows 8 and three-finger swipe to back to one of my other Mac desktops is just too easy.

Microsoft Australia is hosting its own “hackathon”-style event at the TechEd Australia 2012 conference this year for Windows 8 developers to get their hands dirty building some cool apps.

During the 24 hour event, “Windows 8 App Fest 2012” encourages developers to come together to come up with interesting app ideas for glory in the Windows Store.

After brainstorming and pitching ideas to the group. Teams will form and code throughout the day, night and morning after before demoing the final product to the group once again. Mentors and industry experts will be on-site for assistance. (MetroTwit’s David Golden may be one of them).

The event (Sep 10-11) preludes the actual conference where I would hope the “winning” Windows 8 app would get showcased during the opening keynote.

Unfortunately for some reason the event does cost $165 (on top of TechEd registration) which is a bit steep for a fun-spirited meetup. I hope Microsoft Australia will find a way to decrease the barrier to entry in the future to get more people involved.

Having participated in a Startup Weekend Melbourne event a few months ago, I think it’s awesome to see these type of developer & startup events having more presence in the Australian technology community. It can definitely be a bit of a thrill to code for almost 24 hours straight, but the enthusiasm and environment can sometimes bring out the best in people.

At worst, it’s a fun way to meet like-minded enthusiasts.