It’s not the launch announcement that we were hoping for but at least Microsoft are being public about progress on their touch-focused Office for Modern applications. At the opening keynote today we saw a demonstration of progress, and it looks good.
Eric Mantion from Intel gives us an overview of a new tool Intel have developed for porting IOS apps into HTML5 so they can be re-distributed onto other platforms. The app porter does the ‘kickstart’ work in getting the bulk of the code working under HTML5 and Javascript and identifies areas of the code that need hand-tuning. For those people with existing IOS apps looking to go to other platforms, this could be a great way to get things moving or even to analyse the manpower involved in a porting project.
Gesture2Launch is a touch gesture mapping application that allows you to launch applications with different gestures. It’s tidy and it seems to work very well. It’s free too!
Thanks to some support fro Intel I’ve been able to spend time over the weekend to put together an Ultrabook Software Development primer and resource. In it you find an intro, some stats, resources lists and some very important software development articles from Intel, Microsoft and Ultrabooknews.
Windows 8 device numbers are growing quickly and Ultrabooks offer some unique propositions in terms of usage scenarios and unique hardware so all software developers need to be tracking this area carefully, especially as we move towards the 4th Gen cores that should be launching in the middle of the year. Connected Standby, Touch and other opportunities exist.
If you’re in the PC or tablet software business, and I know many of you are, take a look at the article, bookmark at and pass in on to your friends and colleagues.
The Ultrabook Software Development Primer and Resource is here and will be updated regularly.
The resource is sponsored by Intel but written entirely by Ultrabooknews.
Intel have just announced their Media SDK 2013, the software development kit that lets developers get to some of the unique media transcoding features found in the Intel processing platforms. As a core part of Intel Quick Sync that you find used in video conversion and video editing tools it’s something that can really help those video editing and rendering sessions and can help to improve battery life under these operations.
As part of our continuing co-op with Intel on highlighting interesting and useful Ultrabook resources we’ve got another bunch of info for software developers this week – a very useful guide to designing for Ultrabook Convertibles.
Related software development articles:
![windows 8 touch language_thumb[3]](https://www.umpcportal.com/files/2012/12/windows-8-touch-language_thumb3.jpg "windows 8 touch language_thumb[3]")
We’ve covered the importance of Windows 8, the Windows 8 Store and Windows 8 apps before on Ultrabooknews. [Video and article here] and we’ll be bringing you more on software development, apps and opportunities in the future because we believe it’s one of the most important opportunities there is for developers right now. It’s also something we want to promote because for every Ultrabook and touch-enabled app that is launched, the Ultrabook product gets a little bit better. In an article over at the Intel Developer Zone you’ll find a great overview of the considerations you need to give when designing a touch-enabled application.
The six teams competing in the Ultimate Coder Ultrabook Challenge have one more day to go. On the 28th September they must submit their final code to Intel. In the following week I will be testing and scoring with the other judges and on October 8th we’re going to see who’s won $10K.
Yes this is a promotional activity by Intel, but it’s one of the most interesting and educational I’ve ever been involved in. We’ve all learnt a lot and a useful trail of posts has been left by the contestants for anyone thinking about creating an Ultrabook-focused version of their Windows 8 application for either desktop or Windows 8 Store. You can find all of the posts, plus my commentary, here.
So on to the final week. Was it all about bug-fixing? Did anyone have to drop features? Read-on
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