Microsoft showed off its progress with Windows 8 at the D9 Conference as promised. A 4 minute video demonstrates how they have broken away from the interface that has been slowly evolving since Windows 1.0 and they haveve gone for something that looks a lot like Windows Phone 7. The major change here is the Start screen thats right, gone is the iconic Start menu, replaced with a tile-based screen, much like the WP7 one. Instead of shortcuts, apps get a tile, which they can use to display various relevant info.
A tap on a tile will launch the full-blown app. Much of the apps Microsoft showed were written in HTML5 and JavaScript, which I supposed was dictated by the need for apps to run on both x86 (Intel, AMD) processors and ARM processors (from NVIDIA, Qualcomm and Texas Instruments).
Microsoft made it clear that they have showed only a part of the work they have done so far Windows 8 supports native apps that run on Windows 7. Once you start a native app, you are dropped out of the tile-based interface and into something that looks just like the Windows 7 desktop.
Its interesting how Windows 8 handles multitasking as well a swipe on the screen moves between full screen apps. A neat trick is that if you do not swipe all the way through, you can dock an app so that the screen is split between both apps and you can readjust the split later. That trick works with native and HTML5 apps though if you mix them it looks kind of unnatural.
Demo Below!
