Hasta La Gadget!

Companies love milestones nearly as much as bees love honey, so it doesn’t come as much of a surprise that Microsoft would take advantage of Build 2013 to announce as much positive news as it possibly can. This time, MS head Steve Ballmer has revealed to us that he expects the Windows Store to hit the 100,000 mark (in terms of total apps) sometime this month. Sounds about right if you monitor services like MetroStore Scanner to get a good feel for the OS’s progress: it lists over 95,000 apps, which certainly fits the bill.

Additionally, Microsoft also claimed that the very same Windows Store has witnessed app downloads in the vicinity of “hundreds of millions.” This vague indicator is not as impressive as it could certainly be if an actual number was attached, but we have a feeling that our friends in Redmond are trying to keep the specifics as hush-hush as possible.

Filed under: Cellphones, Wireless, Microsoft

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We already knew that Windows RT tablets would be getting their very own Outlook app with Windows 8.1, but apparently Microsoft has even more plans up its sleeve. Here at Build, the company is teasing a Metro-style Office suite that will be available through the Windows Store, just like any other non-desktop Windows program. Unfortunately, this is a tease in the truest sense of the word: Redmond won’t say when the app will be available, and isn’t providing many official screenshots. However, a company spokesperson did tell reporters that PowerPoint will have “all of the same transitions, the same graphic power [and] file format capability” as the desktop version, so presumably the same is true of Word and Excel too. That’s all we have to share for now, though you can bet we’ll be back with a proper hands-on as soon as Microsoft is ready to show off a more final version of the app.

Update: ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley reports that the Metro-style Office applications (codenamed Gemini) will hit the Windows Store in 2014.

Filed under: Software, Microsoft

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Microsoft rolls out the next version of windows, 8.1, at its annual Build developers conference today. It’s a big deal. Windows 8 was a crazy ambitious step, what follows is just as important. This is what Microsoft’s taken from your months of feedback (or just, yelling).

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Hello, and welcome to sunny San Franciscso where Microsoft is about to kick off its annual Build developer conference. We already know today is the day Windows 8.1 becomes available as a public preview, and the execs in Redmond have hinted they have even more to share about the big OS update. But what else? Will those rumors of WebGL support for IE11 come to fruition? And how ’bout some news indie gaming developers can use? We’ll be giving you the blow by blow, starting around 12PM ET today. Stay tuned!

Filed under: Microsoft

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It’s flown under the radar a little bit, but today’s the day we see the new Windows. We’ll be covering it in depth, but you can watch Microsoft’s streamed live here. The keynote begins at 9AM PDT, noon Eastern.

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