Articles about Windows App

Seventy-six in a series. Microsoft released the feature pack update for Windows 8.1 this week which added several usability improvements for mouse and keyboard users.

Wayne covered the update and if you have not had the time yet to read about it, you may want to head over there to do so. One interesting aspect of it is that the update is mandatory for systems running Windows 8.1 as it is a requirement for all future updates of the operating system.

Continue reading →

For many, small tablets are synonymous with low cost. This is thanks to Android tablets like the Nexus 7, which is great. While there is nothing wrong with being inexpensive, many of those Android tablets are also of poor quality -- the market is flooded with no-name variants. This has given small tablets a bad name. Small Windows tablets have been hit or miss. There have been duds such as the Acer Iconia W3 and good ones such as the Lenovo Miix 2 8. What has eluded the market thus far, is a great one.

The ThinkPad name is synonymous with business-class quality and durability. The laptops under this branding are known to be rugged, but elegant too.  Leonovo only designates this moniker to computers that meet a certain high standard. So when given the opportunity to review an 8.3 inch ThinkPad tablet, I was excited for a quality product. Is it the great tablet we have been waiting for?

Continue reading →

Seventy-five in a series. Microsoft announced the Windows 8.1 Update officially at the BUILD 2014 developer conference two days ago. It will roll out on April 8, 2014 as part of patch Tuesday to all users of the Windows 8 operating system.

The update introduces improvements for keyboard and mouse users, including options to right-click on the Start Screen to manage tiles, a title bar for apps, and app icons on the Windows Taskbar.

Continue reading →

Seventy-four in a series. Several Windows 8 applications have received important updates this week that increase their functionality significantly.

The official Music application by Microsoft for instance filters out music automatically that you cannot play when you are not connected to the Internet.

Continue reading →

Seventy-three in a series. Mozilla announced that it had made the decision to cancel the Firefox for Metro development and put the project on hold to concentrate on other more promising projects instead.

The core reason given was the low active user rate of the app which never got higher than 1,000 active users at any one time.

Continue reading →

Seventy-two in a series. Welcome to this week's Best Windows 8 apps guide. I browse the store each week to find the best new apps for Windows 8 that have been released to it that week.

The big news this week was Mozilla's announcement that it would be postponing the release of the Modern UI version of the Firefox web browser once again.

Continue reading →

Seventy-one in a series. Microsoft is about to release an update for Windows 8.1 that became accidentally available yesterday but has since been pulled again by the company.

While it is still possible to download the update from file sharing websites, it needs to be noted that there is always risk involved when downloading updates from third-party sources.

Continue reading →

Seventieth in a series.  Microsoft modifies how apps are listed in Windows Store this week. Instead of listing all apps in a category, all lists of the store are now limited to 1,000 applications.

Since there is no option anymore to display the overall number of apps in each category or the store itself, there is no option to keep track of rising and falling numbers of total apps in store.

Continue reading →

Sixty-nine in a series. The last six weeks have not seen any movement in regards to the total number of applications available in the US Windows Store.

Six weeks ago, 105,216 apps were listed in the store, which is about 150 less than this week's 105,379 application count.

Continue reading →

Sixty-eight in a series. Welcome to this week's edition of the Best Windows 8 apps series.

After last week's negative growth we are seeing a slight increase in apps this week. It is nothing to brag about though, as the total number of apps increased by 50 only, but still better than negative growth.

Continue reading →

Sixty-seventh in a series. Microsoft continues its efforts to remove unwanted applications from its Windows 8 store. That's the reason why this week's growth is negative.

The total number of applications dropped by 534 apps to 105,509 thanks to efforts to clean up the store's Entertainment, Photo, Lifestyle and Education categories. The Entertainment category alone lost 659 apps in the past seven days.

Continue reading →

Sixty-sixth in a series. There are now over 106,000 apps in the US Windows Store. Growth has improved considerably after last week's weak performance, as 773 new apps were published to the store in the last seven days.

83,437 of those are free to download and install, while the remaining 22,606 are either paid apps or desktop applications.

Continue reading →

Sixty-fifth in a series. Growth has been almost negative this week. Not because of a lack of new applications published to Windows Store, but because of Microsoft's continuing clean-up operations.

About 500 apps were removed from the Tools category alone, and slower than usual growth in other categories is an indicator that Microsoft removed apps from other categories as well in this week.

Continue reading →

Sixty-fourth in a series. A total of 1,107 new apps were released to the US Windows Store this week, which is more than double last week's abysmal performance of 476 apps.

The growth is even higher than that -- without options to find out exactly how high -- as Microsoft removed apps from the Food & Dining, and Travel category this week.

Continue reading →

Sixty-third in a series. The week by week app growth in Microsoft's Windows Store has taken a turn for the worse in the past couple of weeks.

Apps stayed steadily over the 2,000 apps per week mark after the release of Windows 8.1, but have fallen below that in the past three weeks.

Continue reading →