FRAMINGHAM – If there was any doubt that Microsoft wants to grab some of the iPad market, there’s none any more: Now Microsoft has a web page that shows developers how to translate iPad apps into Windows 8 ones with a Metro style look and feel.

“In this case study we want to help designers and developers who are familiar with iOS to reimagine their apps using Metro style design principles,” says the blog. “We show you how to translate common user interface and experience patterns found in iPad apps to Windows 8 Metro style apps.”

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Why would anyone want to do that? “To learn more about the business opportunity of Windows 8, see Selling Apps,” the posting says early on. Ultimately that leads to a site with this enticement: “With successful apps on Windows, you’ll make more money than the industry standard, earning 80% of every customer dollar, after an app makes more than 25,000 USD in sales. For the first 25,000 USD of an app’s sales, you get the industry-standard 70%.”

Money aside, the case-study post shows how an iPad photo journal application was adapted to fit with Metro style. Both Windows 8 and iOS on iPads cater to touch commands and navigation, but where iPads rely on icons and toolbars, Windows 8 centers around words on tiles and hiding toolbars.

In converting to Windows 8 the first thing to go from the iPad app is the “chrome” – the navigation bar, pagination controls and the bottom control bar, resulting in a less cluttered application surface. In the Windows 8 version, they are gone but are less necessary because the navigation hierarchy is flattened.

For example, the hub screen for the iPad app shows a single photo for each of the 12 months, with a tab to switch to comments about the photos.

In the Windows 8 version the hub screen is a single month with a featured large photo for the month with other, smaller photos from that month displayed next to it. About a third of the same screen is devoted to comments. For more comments, tap (it’s designed for touchscreen) the Recent Comment header. For more pictures, tap the This Month header.

A second navigation alternative involves pinch to zoom – making a pinching gesture while touching the screen to pull out hierarchically from a single photo to sets of 12 squares or tiles, each set representing a different year. Users can, for instance, go from a photo from March 2012 to a photo from July 2010 by pinching the March photo, zooming out to the sets of tiles, tapping the one for July 2010 and sorting through the photos that are brought up. There is no navigation bar.

With the iPad app, the same transition calls for tapping a Years button on the navigation bar at the top of the screen, selecting the year as it appears in a popover box and then sorting through that year.

Similarly, commands are hidden off screen and can be drawn up from the bottom or down from the top with a finger swipe. The commands shown depend on what object on the screen is designated. So if a photo is highlighted, the commands might include delete or upload.

In the iPad app, that is done via the always visible navigation bar.

On the iPad app, search is done via a search window on the app’s home page. With Metro, it’s always available on the charms bar – a bar of a consistent set of icons that can be swiped out from the right hand side of the screen. It searches the application that the user is inside of.

The features go on and on, including sharing content between applications and to various social networking sites.

MIAMI – Microsoft has fixed a bug that made it impossible for about a dozen models of Skype-certified phones to log into the popular IM, VoIP and video-conferencing service.

Microsoft said on Thursday it was deploying a solution to the problem, according to a post on Skype’s Heartbeat blog, which is devoted to bugs and system problems affecting the service.

“Over the past 24 hours, we have started deploying a fix on our end that resolves the log-in issues. We apologize for the inconvenience,” Skype official Jennifer Caukin wrote in the post.

A Skype spokeswoman confirmed via email Friday afternoon that the issue is fully resolved, but declined to comment on what caused the problem and how many users were affected.

The problem apparently started last weekend, according to multiple discussion threads posted in the Other Devices section of the Skype support forum, where affected users flocked to complain about the problem, including some who use Skype for work.

The problem affected Skype-certified phones from vendors including Panasonic, Linksys, GE and Netgear.

SAN FRANCISCO – Windows 8 may seem like a radical change from what came before it, but some of the stuff Microsoft has cooking in its research labs makes Windows 8 look boring by comparison.

Researchers at Microsoft’s Applied Sciences Group developed a 3D-looking computer interface displayed on a transparent screen. Microsoft’s 3D computing combines Samsung’s new transparent OLED screen, as well Microsoft’s own Kinect sensors. Combining the two allowed the research team to create a virtual 3D desktop that you can manipulate with hand gestures.
The Kinect sensors track the hand gestures, as well as your eye and head movements, adjusting the perspective of the screen accordingly. In what may be a strange, backwards setup to most, the screen is actually positioned in front of the keyboard. This makes it so you can switch from interacting with objects in 3D behind the screen to the more conventional interaction via the keyboard. And since the screen is transparent, you can still see what you’re typing.

This technology is purely experimental for now. Whether this technology ever sees the light of day depends on whether or not transparent screens become practical, but it’s clear that the computing giants are looking at way to change the way we interact with our computers.

SAN FRANCISCO – Even as questions remain about Microsoft’s commitment to its Silverlight rich Internet plug-in platform, the company made available on Friday version 5 of the technology, featuring a variety of new capabilities.

Silverlight 5 includes hardware decode of H.264 media, which improves performance with the decoding of unprotected content using the GPU. Also featured is Postscript Vector Printing to improve quality and file size, and an improved graphics stack with 3D support using the XNA API on Windows gains low-level access to the GPU for drawing low-level 3D primitives and vertex shaders, Microsoft’s Silverlight team said.

Also featured in Silverlight 5 is a “Trusted Application” model extended to the browser. This means that when the model is enabled via a group policy registry key and an application certificate, users will not need to leave the browser to perform complex tasks, such as multiple window support.

“Silverlight is part of a rich offering of technologies from Microsoft helping developers deliver applications for the Web, desktop, and mobile devices,” the Silverlight team said in a blog post. “Download Silverlight 5, a free plug-in less than 7 MB in size that can be installed in less than 10 seconds.”

But Microsoft’s commitment to Silverlight appears less than solid. Recently, the company said no plug-ins, such as Silverlight, would work with the Metro-style interface planned for the Internet Explorer browser. Metro is new UI and mobile-oriented application mode planned for the Windows 8 OS. Instead, HTML5 will be the technology of choice. And Scott Guthrie, a Microsoft corporate vice president who has been a key advocate for Silverlight, moved over to the Windows Azure cloud platform team several months ago.

Nonetheless, Microsoft marches on with Silverlight.

Analyst Al Hilwa, of IDC, still sees significant potential for Silverlight 5, for the time being. “There is a considerable body of existing apps or websites written in Silverlight, and those apps and their users will benefit from the improvements in the Silverlight runtime, especially the hardware acceleration. Addressing large user populations with HTML5 on desktop browsers is still a challenge because many users will continue to use non-HTML5 browsers for the next two years.” Hilwa added, though, that he expects that in five years, fewer websites will be supporting Silverlight and Silveright on the desktop is “strategically challenged.”

SAN FRANCISCO – According to a report from Forrester Research, consumer desire to purchase Windows 8 tablets has suffered a massive decrease, slumping from 46 percent in the first quarter of the year to a mediocre 25 percent six months later. That’s not good news for a product still a close to a year away from seeing an official launch.
Can Microsoft produce a tablet operating system for both consumers and business users to rave about? Yes, especially if the Windows 8 development team takes the time to consider and act on these five points.

1. Ensure Ample App Offerings

Unfortunately, not all Windows 8 tablets will be created equal. Where some will no doubt boast powerful Intel chipsets, loads of RAM, and a luxurious amount of storage space, other more reasonably priced devices will come packing ARM mobile processors and more modest storage and memory sets. These less-powerful devices won’t have the horsepower to run the full desktop iterations of Microsoft Office, FileMaker, or other software that many businesses rely on daily to make the wheels go ’round.
In order to make Windows 8 tablets not only a viable but an attractive alternative to consumers, Microsoft must have a substantial launch-day library of useful applications to offer potential customers. It needs key third-party developers on board with ARM-compatible offerings that allow the power of their desktop software to be enjoyed on a low-powered, tablet-based sibling.

2. Work Toward Unification

Since I’ve already mentioned that not all Windows 8 hardware will be created equal, the time is right to discusss whether users of the various flavors of Windows 8 will be able to communicate and collaborate easily. SkyDrive will play a significant role in Microsoft’s Windows 8 strategy. This has document sharing and communications covered. But it leaves open whether users of a Windows 8 desktop or Intel tablet with access to a full version of Microsoft Office would be able to collaborate with users packing ARM-powered tablets and their less-capable iterations of Microsoft’s productivity tools. If Microsoft can crack this nut, it will be well on their way to capturing the hearts and minds of business users.
3. Do Away with Past Frustrations

While users of Windows 7 tablets can leverage the power of desktop software on the go, doing so has been an exercise in frustration, thanks to the operating system’s lackluster touchscreen interface features. Fortunately, it looks like Microsoft is taking steps to address this with Windows 8. The virtual keyboard offered as part of the developer’s build of the OS offers the best tablet typing experience on the market today, handwriting recognition is respectable, and the Metro UI was made for poking and swiping. When using legacy applications such as Microsoft Word and Tweetdeck, window closure options as well as maximize and minimize buttons are all a touch-friendly size.

Unfortunately, despite all of these features, the relatively small amount of screen real estate doesn’t allow for easy use of legacy app interface items, such as PowerPoint’s ribbon interface, or the selection of individual cells on an Excel spreadsheet. If Microsoft finds a way to do away with such interface frustrations without forcing users to invest in new, tablet-oriented versions of software they already own, it could have a serious win on their hands.

4. Keep It Simple

One of the key reasons that the iPad has become such a staggering success is the device’s simplicity of form and function. Microsoft would do well to take note of this and keep things simple. With the Metro interface system of floating, resizable, and moveable tiles, it would appear that Windows 8 is on the path to the zen enlightenment that could make it the tablet computing hit we’re hoping it will be. But a lot can happen between now and when the OS is released later next year. Here’s hoping it stays on target.

5. Watch Quality Control

As any PC user will tell you, an operating system is only as good as the computer it’s paired to. When installed to a high-quality machine with respectable tech specs and excellent build quality, users can expect a superior computing experience. When that same operating system is installed to a rig that barely meets the OS’s minimal requirements? Not so much. With Microsoft’s history of offering the Windows OS to any grey box manufacturer under the sun as an OEM installation option, we’re betting to see any number of tablet manufacturers adopt Windows 8 as an alternative to Android.
That said, we’d like to see Microsoft hold off on making Windows 8 available to every tablet computing vendor under the sun, even if it’s only for a little while. In order for the OS to be considered a true contender in mobile computing, it needs to be showcased on well-spec’ed hardware developed by premium manufacturers such as Asus or Samsung with an eye to quality and performance.

This would allow consumers to have an opportunity to see what the OS is capable of on top-drawer hardware, before choosing to go slumming for kit available at a bargain basement price.

SEATTLE – Microsoft will build a Kinect device specifically for use with PCs, as the company prepares to launch a program to support commercial products developed for Kinect and Windows.

Kinect is the motion and voice technology that Microsoft first introduced as an add-on to the Xbox. Gamers with Kinect play games by moving their bodies, rather than pushing buttons on a controller.

In a recent video, Microsoft showed some possible applications for Kinect with Windows, including people playing musical instruments by moving their hands in the air; a surgeon flipping through X-ray images without touching the screen; a teacher controlling a display of the night sky by moving his arms; and a technician remotely controlling a robot that defuses a bomb.

Earlier this year, Microsoft released a software development kit to let developers build applications on Windows that make use of the Kinect sensor. The Kinect device Microsoft will build for PCs has a few adjustments that should make it better suited for use with computers.

“Of particular interest to developers will be the new firmware which enables the depth camera to see objects as close as 50 centimeters in front of the device without losing accuracy or precision, with graceful degradation down to 40 centimeters,” Craig Eisler, general manager of Kinect for Windows, wrote in a blog post.

This “near mode” will be more suitable for someone sitting at a computer, as opposed to standing in front of a TV. It’s been one of the most requested features from developers already working on products, Eisler said. The new hardware will also have a shorter USB cable for connecting to computers.

When Microsoft first released the SDK for Kinect for Windows, it limited developers to non-commercial use only, saying it would release a commercial package in the future. It recently promised to launch that program early next year.

Some developers may be worried about how much to invest in their products without knowing more about the commercial program. Eisler wrote that users have said they want assurance of support and continued innovation from Microsoft. He hinted that the commercial program will give licensed customers access to ongoing updates in speech and human tracking technology as well as full support for Kinect hardware for Windows.

Microsoft recently announced an incubator program for getting startups with Kinect ideas off the ground. A Microsoft spokesperson said that Kinect for Windows will be commercially available prior to the incubation phase of Kinect Accelerator. Microsoft is accepting applications through Jan. 25 and the program will start in March.