In a speech at the Mobile World Congress (MWC) on Sunday and a Microsoft blog post published the same day, Joe Belfiore, corporate VP of Windows Phone, also outlined new hardware initiatives around Windows Phone.
The announcements follow weeks of leaked builds of the Windows 8.1 update, revealing features like a new icon in the upper-left corner of Modern apps for splitting, minimizing, or closing the app; Power Down and Search tiles at the top right of the Modern screen; right-click contextual menus for tiles; and the ability to put icons for Windows Store apps on the desktop’s taskbar.
“We are making improvements to the user interface that will naturally bridge touch and desktop, especially for our mouse and keyboard users,” Belfiore wrote in his blog post.
“We have a number of targeted UI improvements that keep our highly satisfying touch experience intact, but that make the UI more familiar and more convenient for users with mouse/keyboard. Don’t worry, we still LOVE and BELIEVE IN touch… but you’ll like how much more smooth and convenient these changes make mouse and keyboard use!”
During his talk in Barcelona, Belfiore admitted that Windows 8′s full-screen Windows 8 titles can be disconcerting to users familiar with the traditional Windows user interface (UI). “People weren’t sure how to get out or how to get back,” he remarked.
In the blog, Belfiore also cited improvements for enterprise customers, including better Internet Explorer (IE) 8 compatibility in Windows 8′s IE 11. Many companies use custom web apps built around IE 8, and compatiblity problems have resulted in issues around HTML 5 support.
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