8 Days a Week: A Slow News Week

This week in Windows 8: A slow news week, with just a single Building Windows 8 post and a handful of nuggets from around the blogosphere. Oh, and I'm now writing a bit of Windows 8 Secrets each and every day.

Microsoft only provided one post to its Building Windows 8 blog this week, so for the first time in a while I actually wrote more about the company's next OS than did Microsoft. In keeping with months-long trends, however, that post--called Supporting sensors in Windows 8--didn't really shed any new light on Windows 8 per se, unless you were in the mood for mathematical symbols. 

But as I discussed in my own post about this topic, Microsoft Talks Up Windows 8 "Sensor Fusion", Microsoft did at least add a new term to the vernacular, even though my Windows 8 Secrets coauthor Rafael Rivera told me that Windows 8's use of sensors is not technically all that different from how Windows Phone already works.

And that's all she wrote, at least from Microsoft.

The blogosphere was also largely quiet on the Windows 8 front though we got a doozy of a rumor just last night courtesy of CNET: the troubled ARM versions of Windows 8 are allegedly now stable and heading to developers, whatever that means, while there's evidence that the Windows 8 desktop interface will indeed be included in those ARM-based versions of the OS. I've got the full rundown in my post, Report: Windows 8 on ARM Now Stable, Heading to Developers.

Some of the less savvy Windows watchers out there have fallen for a bit of subterfuge from Redmond and believe that Microsoft has responded to criticisms about Metro use on keyboard- and mouse-based PCs and has thus added better controls, which we'll see in the Beta/Consumer Preview. That's not true: Those features were all planned from before the release of last fall's Developer Preview, and while I'm sure feedback (both internal and external) has tweaked how those features work, it's nothing new, sorry.

Speaking of feedback and Windows 8, Mary Jo and I had an interesting conversation about how much user feedback has and will impact Windows 8 on the most recent episode of the Windows Weekly podcast. Please give it a listen. I'm hoping to speak with Microsoft about this topic on the record over the next month or two.

My favorite rumor of the week--because, seriously, I really want this to be true--is that Nokia is working on a Windows 8 tablet. OK, it's not new, but it's still fun to contemplate a Windows 8 tablet that looks and feels like one of Nokia's Lumia 800/900 handsets. Please, Nokia. Make it so.

I do want to provide one quick update for Windows 8 Secrets before signing off. As I mentioned last week, Rafael and I created and then edited a 17 chapter table of contents over the past few months and I spent some time creating "dummy" chapters full of L1 and L2 headings, and then started filling in some background content here and there. That latter bit has occurred only fitfully, with lengthy work stops between. 

So yesterday I decided to do more. And the plan going forward is to write a bit of Windows 8 Secrets each day, so I can make this part of my daily schedule and better prepare for the deluge of writing that will occur when the Beta/Consumer Preview release appears (hopefully early in leaked form). It's like training for a fight: A little bit each day, making progress.

This writing will all be background material as I'm nervous about what could change in the next milestone build. And that's fine, since there's plenty to write. As I've noted before, our goal with this book is simple: Windows 8 Secrets will be the only definitive, gotta-have-it guide to Microsoft's next OS, and based on what I know about the competition, we're already well ahead from a content/value perspective. But there's much to do. And I'm doing it now.

More next week.