Cut the Rope is just one of the apps available (free for now) in the Windows App Store for the desktop OS update that at least a million people downloaded in 24 hours. Its path to Windows 8 Metro interface may be fairly indicative how other popular apps (on other more well-established app platforms) could make the same journey.
Though developed by ZeptoLab, Cut the Rope was ported by PixelLab, a small five-person development design shop and it wasn’t originally ported for Windows 8. Robby Ingebretsen, Founder of Creative Director of Pixellab, says Microsoft played matchmaker and connected his firm with ZeptoLabs for an Internet Explorer 9 port. As a result, most of the heavy lifting, taking Cut the Rope’s C++ code and converting it to HTML 5 and JavaScript was done last year. The work to bring Cut the Rope to Windows 8 Metro was relatively trivial and took about 10 days.
From a development standpoint, Ingebretsen likes what he sees in Windows 8. He said it’s a high-quality platform without a lot of bugs and said it’s “ready to work with and has a set of features that make sense.” There are some feature tradeoffs, areas where Ingebretsen says he thinks Microsoft could have gone further -- though Ingebretson did not elaborate. However, the tradeoffs Microsoft made to get this far with Windows 8 Consumer Preview’s development environment are, he believes, “understandable decisions.”
There are, actually, three Windows 8 app development flavors: HTML 5 (which is what Cut the Rope is built in), Direct X (mostly for gaming apps) and XAML (eXtensible Markup Language), which Ingebretsen said is a more sophisticated form of HTML, more akin to Microsoft’s Silverlight, though Microsoft apparently does not like to call it that.
Ingebretsen also has kind words for Windows 8, in general. When he used it on a tablet, he said, “I was really surprised how much I loved it. A lot of UI stuff really made sense to me. I think Microsoft is incredibly innovative with UI, more than Apple or Android--really pushing boundaries of what you can do in digital design."
Windows 8 Metro, for example, eschews old-school interface metaphors, so a button doesn’t have to look like a button on screen. Has Microsoft gone too far? Ingebretsen does worry that Microsoft is positioning Windows “as being a UI that’s touch first.”
“I don’t know,” he continued, “if people are willing to make Windows touch first, yet. Not sure it feels right yet.” That said, Ingebretsen does believe that with the amount of convergence on the horizon, Windows 8 Metro is “a really great bet for them.”
Have you downloaded the Windows 8 Consumer Preview and tried some of the available apps? Tell us your experiences in the comments.
BONUS: Windows 8 Consumer Preview: The Good, the Bad and the Metro [REVIEW]