After giving you the first taste of Windows 8 two months ago, we are back with the Release Preview.
The Release Preview is the final test version of Windows 8 before we go ahead with RTM, Release to Manufacturing. Between that time, we will still be making changes to Windows 8, which you can follow at the Windows Team blog.
Here are 5 new changes in the Release Preview:
· Local Windows Store: Singapore is one of them! Featuring apps like Channel News Asia, Straits TImes, Razor TV and many more new Metro style apps like Wikipedia, other News and Sports apps and Bing Travel
· Improvements to the Mail, Photos, and People apps that initially debuted with the Windows 8 Consumer Preview
· Improved multi-monitor support
· A touch-friendly, secure and power-optimized Adobe Flash Player is now fully integrated into IE10
· First browser to feature Do Not Track “on” by default, giving you more choice and control over their privacy
Here’s a quick video that showcases the interface for Windows 8 RP at work and play:
The Windows Store now also supports app submission for local markets and Singapore is one of the countries. We’ve gotten great response from developers here who are planning to build Metro style apps and will be holding events such as hackathons, hands-on-labs for you to get started building them!
Updates for Developers: Improved Visual Studio templates
Another area where we have made a lot of improvements is templates in Visual Studio. We’ve made lots of updates to our templates and even added a new one so that it is easier for you to start a new project and get a great app up and running in no time.
Updates to all templates
We improved navigation for all templates. In the Consumer Preview the navigation in the templates was primarily structured for touch. Now the templates fully support keyboard and mouse navigation using the back and forward buttons and keyboard shortcuts. Using the templates, your app’s navigation structure is automatically configured to support all forms of input.
Dev Center updates
In addition to all the work we’ve been doing on the development platform we spent a lot of time improving our documentation on theDev Center. The Dev Center is your gateway for learning all there is to know about Metro style app development and we worked hard to make it as complete as possible for the Release Preview.
The first way that we improved the Dev Center is by simply adding more content. In the Consumer Preview the Dev Center had the essentials you needed to get started. Now in the Release Preview it’s much easier to find guidance on the advanced topics that make great Metro style apps stand out. Here are some of the highlights:
- We added lots of new samples, including samples for the XAML WebView control, IndexedDB, the thread pool, JS web workers, and many more.
- There are now over 200 new conceptual, Quickstart, and how-to topics to help you build Metro style apps.
- The API reference documentation is more complete than ever.
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