Microsoft's Windows 8 operating system, as planned, will arrive on both tablets and traditional PCs, yet poses a big problem to developers entailing that they may have a lot of work ahead of them if they want their apps to run on both kinds of systems (old OS and Win 8). Different kinds of processors and different types of user interfaces may make for a complicated learning curve.
Over half a million copies of the developer preview of Windows 8 have been downloaded, according to Microsoft. The tablet versions of Windows 8 apps will be built for the OS's Metro user interface, and the Metro version of the Internet Explorer browser will not include Flash or other plug-ins. Further, they will run on devices powered by ARM (Nasdaq: ARMHY) processors, while the desktop version of Windows 8 will run on x86 PCs. That means developers will have to create two versions of Windows 8 apps if they want them to run across the two different platforms which entails that the rise of Windows 8 poses a problem for apps developers.
The lack of Flash support in Metro will not be a problem because "Windows apps today do not use Flash; they're written in native languages on Windows," Hilwa said.
Their fear was that they'd have to abandon Visual Basic, .NET, Silverlight and other languages with which they'd learned to create apps in for Windows.
The question of whether or not applications created for the x86 platform can run on ARM devices led to a row between Microsoft and Intel (Nasdaq: INTC) back in May.
Announcing Windows 8 last Tuesday, Steven Sinofsky, president of Microsoft's Windows Division, had stated that apps developed for Windows 8 would run on both x86 and ARM platforms, and demonstrated that it was easy to convert desktop apps to Metro apps.
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