Recently we've spent most of our time working on the brand new "ship" that will exist as a backbone for our next major update to LCARS Interface for Windows 8. Our preliminary work on that has been very promising! We are looking forward to continuing that work soon.
Now that we've had a bit of time to examine the changes for developers with Windows 8.1, we are finally starting to go ahead and make the changes in order to take full advantage of all the new features. The first step was mentioned previously and that was to divide out the Windows Phone 7 code from our portable class libraries that make it possible to share code between the different platforms. Some of the modules taking advantage of this are the Clock, Weather, and Calculator. The Simulator also follows this structure. We have made all of the necessary changes and upgraded our projects to isolate WP7 so that we can continue to support it as best we can, while moving the other platforms forward with all of the API improvements Microsoft has made available.
Today we are turning our focus to re-targeting LCARS Interface for Windows 8 (and its associated framework components) to Windows 8.1, which if we did nothing else than re-compile it and release, it would benefit from many performance enhancements. We have been pretty successful in making this app run lean and mean as it is, so any additional optimizations we get for free are most welcome as well! In our opinion, Microsoft has been doing a fantastic job of listening to developers and they have been making tons of changes to make our lives easier. Some things we had to work around before are now fixed. We may even be able to finally provide a basic web browser for the next version that so many of you have asked for! We will continue looking into this as we have always promised and evaluate what we can do within the new limitations.
We could blog for days upon days describing all of the changes that Windows 8.1 will bring, but safe to say it is going to take a bit of time to optimize everything for a new set of APIs and to add new functionality to existing modules. We know you all have been missing our previous rapid updates, but we are rebuilding the entire foundation of the entertainment side of things, as well as making bug fixes, optimizations, and feature additions to pretty much every module in the app! That is in addition to adding several brand new modules, and topping everything off with a huge helping of animations. As you can imagine, this is no small task, and we need to make sure that every feature still works as intended after the updates.
We have no ETA on when the next update will be yet, but at this point it is possible we will do it in two stages now instead of one. We may make the updates to the productivity side of things first, and then update the entertainment side later on, as that will take the most time. This will allow us to roll in all of the new API calls and take advantage of the new performance improvements for the existing modules more quickly. We will continue to make updates as we narrow down the release cycle.
ocha .. the only real thing I like about windows 8 series of os is your lcars I like some of the other stuff it has like the tiles to choose a app to run but they get stuck cause when you goto desktop even after closing all app you can bring up task manger in the processes tab you will find all the app are still in memory and to close them all the way right click each one and close it. when I do this I leave only desktop and lcars active. then you wonder why it seem to slow down. if your computer has been on for a period of time. lcars lets me run media player without the system jumping out lcars to an app to run it.. if I goto desktop and play the same video it jumps out of windows to play in a same app which remains open after you close it . you use the start button to get out of the player app go to tiles to desktop to program manager and turn the thing off. just a bunch of unnecessary steps which in lcars doesn't happens I loves lcars
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