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Microsoft details Windows 8 Calendar app design, wants to 'show your life clearly'
As part of its "Building Windows 8" blog series, Redmond has been doling inside info on apps like Mail and People, and now it's Calendar's turn in the spotlight. Steven Sinofsky blogged that one of the primary marks was to serve up a clear view of your life, and the team wanted Calendar to be easy to read and distraction free. To bring that about, it kept the info displayed to a minimum, giving users the option to easily change colors for important events and drop distracting ones from view if necessary. The designers also stressed ease of navigation, a simple interface for adding events, copious notification options and and advanced scheduling tricks -- like a full page of notes for each event. Of course, Microsoft also wanted to ensure the app conforms to Metro design standards and functionality, and it seems to fit that mold in spades. Sinofsky also said that a lot of user feedback was accounted for, so be sure to check the source to see if that "Caturday" idea made the cut.
Microsoft explains Windows 8's Mail app, promises more changes to come
It's not often that the folks in Redmond get to debut a new operating system as big as Windows 8, so we can't really blame them for going on at length about every feature of it. The latest to get the in-depth treatment on the Building Windows 8 blog is the Mail app, which has already gone through some fairly big changes since the Consumer Preview and is apparently set to receive even more before the final release. As Microsoft's Jeremy Epling explains in the post, central to the latest version is a three-pane view that's designed to take advantage of the 16:9 ratio Windows 8 is optimized for, and make the best use of all the space afforded by the full-screen "window" -- the latest release is now able to display 14 messages at a time at the standard 1366 x 768 resolution, for instance, as opposed to just 8.5 in the Consumer Preview version. It's also, of course, deeply integrated into Windows 8 itself, even taking advantage of a new networking APIs to detect if you're on a metered network and only download the first first 20KB of each message body if that's the case. Unfortunately, Epling didn't divulge much about those promised future changes, noting only that there are "many more features on the way." In the meantime, you can find out more than you may have wanted to know about Mail in its current state at the link below.
