Articles about Windows Store

Little more than two months after Windows 8's release, popular cloud storage service Dropbox finally offers an app through the Windows Store. However, unlike Box and SkyDrive, which both deliver a fairly competent feature set, the Dropbox app for Windows 8/RT is a half-baked affair, leaving much to be desired.

Even at first glance, the Dropbox app touts a modest feature set with no advanced functionality to speak of. It allows users to browse and preview uploaded files, edit, open and save items from "other Windows 8 apps", and share and find files using the Search Charm. Users cannot edit uploaded Dropbox files using the app, only open items, making it a glorified file browser with a few extra features. Furthermore Dropbox for Windows 8 appears to be rather unstable.

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Tenth in a series. Welcome to this year's first look at what's new and hot in Windows Store and the Windows 8 ecosystem. The week has been rather uneventful but that can easily be explained with the Holiday season, which is never the most productive time of the year when it comes to software. This week there are 23,788 apps in the U.S. Windows Store of which 4,439 are paid applications of which about half offer free trials, and 19,365 free apps. Some of the free apps may include advertisement or in-store purchases, but there is unfortunately no statistic available on that.

Here is a selection of 10 Windows 8 apps that released this week or were updated.

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For those used to cutting the rope or drawing "something", Microsoft Surface Pro is not going to be the tablet for you. Microsoft’s latest attempt to conquer the business end of the tablet market has left many puzzled as to why the software giant has priced a basically untested product right at the $900 mark, when the latest generation iPad starts at $499. They assume, perhaps understandably, that Surface Pro competes with Apple's pride and joy, yet they are wrong. Surface Pro is actually a miniaturized laptop trapped inside a tablet's shell.

For professionals and power users it doesn’t take long to realize that Surface Pro is as far away as possible from a basic consumer-oriented tablet. The dead giveaway is the processor and graphics card combination -- a third generation Core i5 CPU paired with an HD Graphics 4000 GPU, both made by Intel. Together they really shout from the top of their silicons: "We really come from PC technology!" The naysayers should therefore understand where Microsoft is actually going with Surface Pro -- towards professionals and power users, not the Cut The Rope or Draw Something crowd (although it can be used for that too).

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Ninth in a series. The world did not end last week, so here we are with this weeks installment of our weekly look at the greatest Windows 8 apps that got released or updated this week.

The store recently crossed the 35,000 apps mark worldwide according to MetroStore Scanner, and while you won't find that many apps in your local store -- the US app store has 22,876 currently -- it is remarkable after two months of release; 18,618 of those apps in the US store are free to download and use, while 4,249 are paid apps. That is a ratio of more than four to one, and while some free apps may include advertisement or in-game purchase options, it's still a healthy ratio for the store.

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Eighth in a series. Since the world is going down today anyway there is not really much need for today's article and while I thought for a moment about taking the day off, I'd like the idea of leaving the world with work done. So, here it is, the eighth part of the best Windows 8 apps of the week series on Doomsday.

Pssst: If the world doesn't end, and you have Windows 8, now you have something to look forward to.

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Seventh in a series. Welcome to another episode of what's hot and new in Windows Store. This week we have seen the release of a couple of official apps, Adobe Reader and Yahoo! Mail for instance, that made an appearance in store.

Other companies like Google or Facebook are monitoring the development of Windows 8 before they commit resources to building apps for the operating system. It is likely, however, that we will see additional official app releases for Microsoft's operating system in the weeks to come.

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Sixth in a series. Every seven days we look at some of the best new app releases for Windows 8. This week's releases include Amazon and Nascar official applications, as well as a selection of mostly media-orientated offerings.

Microsoft has added a top-paid category to select localized stores that displays top-rated paid applications. It is likely that this will be rolled out eventually to all stores.

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Microsoft officially unveiled Windows 8 and its ARM counterpart little more than a month ago. But even today apps like Twitter are still missing from the official Store selection. However, third-party alternative, Tweetro+ should be available soon for die-hard users of the social network.

Previously available as a free app on Windows Store, Tweetro was pulled due to the 100,000 access token limit, imposed by the Twitter API. The developers announced that Tweetro+ will take its place, but as a paid app due to the associated costs. This appears to be the preferred solution instead of going the ad-supported route.

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Windows Store is among the noteworthy features of Microsoft's new operating system released just a month ago. Users can install free and paid applications right from the store interface that is integrated into Windows 8's new Start screen interface. This improves security for users as store apps do get verified by Microsoft before they are made available in Windows Store.

Many paid applications in Windows Store are available as trial versions that you can try for a seven-day period before you need to make a buying decision. Developers do not have to offer their products as trial versions in the store, but they are encouraged to do so to make their apps available to a wider audience.

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Fourth in a series. A month has passed since the release of Windows 8 and in that time, Windows Store has grown significantly.  Wes Miller, an independent analyst, recently reported that the worldwide app count broke the 20,000 mark, and that about 500 new apps are added to the store each day.

While that is still far from the numbers that Google Play or Apple's Apple Store get, it is an indicator of a healthy store ecosystem. On we go with this week's best apps for Windows 8.

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If you do not like the Windows 8 Start screen, you can bypass it easily with a few simple modifications or by installing a program that handles that for you. If you miss the Start menu on the desktop, you can get that back as well by installing a program like Start8 or Classic Shell that also handle the redirecting and mapping of shortcuts keys for you if you want.

RetroUI Pro is another Start menu program for Windows 8. It looks different than the others as you can see from the photo, but on first glance, it is just another Start menu for the operating system.

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Like it or not, Windows 8 is here to stay and Microsoft wants to make sure developers are ready to provide users with all the apps they desire. To that end, the company has announced a series of online and in-person developer camps in an effort to increase the population of the Windows Store.

In an email sent out recently by Microsoft, the company brags that its new OS allows developers to "code once and have a great app experience that scales across devices from tablets to all-in-one PCs". The company attempts to further entice coders with the fact that the new Windows Store offers a "higher profit potential" than other app stores, which amounts to an 80% revenue share if you reach $25,000 USD or more in total sales. Indie software developers who oppose the new centralized Windows software distribution ecosystem are unlikely to take much comfort in that fact. Analytics firm VisionMobile recently did a survey which found the average monthly take for a centrally-distributed app was between $1,200 and $3,900 per month, depending on the platform. The new Windows Store, however, is a new frontier for this type of app store.

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I’ve spent the past couple of weeks reading review after review of Microsoft Surface. I feel like 90-percent of them were not written for me. You see, I’m your average user. I’m the average Joe user with a strong interest in the field of technology. I don’t care about pixel densities, or all the other niggles on performance tech geeks fight about all the time.

What matters to me: Does a particular device allow me to not only consume content but create it as well. And Surface accomplishes those two goals tremendously well. I write this review on a Surface RT using Microsoft Word in Office 2013.

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Second in a series. Welcome to this week's installment of the new "best Windows 8 apps" series here on BetaNews. The first post went live on Sunday but we decided to move the series to Friday instead, which means that there are only five days between posts this time. All posts of this series will be posted on Friday from now on.

The links point to Microsoft's Windows Store, which offers detailed information about each app. To get an application, open the Windows Store on your computer and type the name as listed on the store front to find the program and install it on the system.

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First in a series. Welcome to this new series here on BetaNews where I'll take a weekly look at some of the exciting new apps released for Windows 8. The overview does not include games and will be limited to around 10 apps per week to keep things manageable.

Microsoft launched Windows 8 on October 26, introducing the new Modern UI. To get supporting apps, you need go no further than the built-in Windows Store, which also is the only place you can get them. To start off the series, here are 10 apps that were recently published to the Windows Store.

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