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RE: Documenting in Windows 8 - Click? Press? Select?
Subject:RE: Documenting in Windows 8 - Click? Press? Select? From:"Wroblewski, Victoria" <vwroblewski -at- NECsphere -dot- com> To:Reshma <reshma_pendse -at- yahoo -dot- co -dot- in> Date:Thu, 24 Jan 2013 14:16:27 -0600
-----Original Message-----
From: Reshma
Sent: Thursday, January 24, 2013 1:46 PM
To: Wroblewski, Victoria
Subject: Re: Documenting in Windows 8 - Click? Press? Select?
>>>
Just because your application might be supported on win 8 does not necessarily mean it will be supported on all devices that run win 8. For example, while there are apps that work on ios 6 on iPhone and iPad, there are many others where you find separate apps for the two devices. So it's not enough that win 8 supports touch; you need to find out if your app will do that too.
>>>
We also do some apps (usually another writer - not me) that are iOS and Android specific. If we have the option of the now desktop app brought to a Windows 8 tablet device, we'd likely end up that route rather than going through a whole new development cycle for a tablet-specific Windows 8 app, if I guess correctly. And even if the first go at a Windows 8 app was "PC" only , we would likely be moving towards eventually supporting both tablets and PCs with the single app.
If the app is designed for just the operating system with iOS and Android, it really can run on most devices that meet the specific OS requirements. For instance, we have a mobile phone application for Android, and I run a development version of that (manually installed, not downloaded from an app store) on a non-phone Android player device (small tablet). The app store actually prevents me from installing it on my device since I don't have cellular features (we do enterprise level phone systems - but at the end of the line are end users who want all the newest technology), but the application itself does not prevent it from installing. And as a matter of fact, I can even still use our app for some of the calling features if I'm on Wifi and using the VoIP phone application I have installed.
So yes, the details on "what is supported" do need to be specific. But we do seem to be veering toward a world where this will be an easy route to app development for Windows based devices, both PCs and tablets. And an easy solution would be to provide slightly different docs for each scenario (and I do not have questions on how to accomplish that) but we only get one way to link to one help file/help system from the single application, and it does lead to a lot of bloat when you have to output multiple docs that only have slight differences. If Windows 8 only requires one application for both instances, we only want to provide one help file. Even with the app development, they are working to combine what used to be different apps for specific devices into a single app that runs on multiple devices.
- V
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