Alternatively, this could be the last hurrah for these desktop-orientated applications as the team moves to bring all those apps to Windows 8 new touch-friendly UI. There will remain many Windows 7 machines, so future updates would be nice to keep the older OS up to speed. Perhaps the touch UI challenge and re-working is too complex and too time consuming to bother?Įssentials 2012 picks up some surprising new features, and perhaps feature development hadn’t come to a standstill there could be more updates coming. The message in relation to Windows 8 story is mixed: in an ideal world, apps already present in WinRT would have all the deep functionality embedded to negate installing Essentials 2012 and avoid the classic/WinRT flip flopping that can become visually distressing at times. With the arrival of Windows 8 we shall not only see duality of functionality between ‘apps’ and applications, we’ll also be darting back and forth between WinRT apps and the traditional desktop in order to get the meaty stuff done. In many cases these applications may be the only productivity applications some users will ever own.

These applications have traditionally been at the forefront of helping showcase a new version of Windows. The latest version of Office shows what could have been done with the UI to bring it in line with Windows 8. It remains an odd mix of styles that keep it out of step with every OS that it’s existed on or will be run on. Generally these apps continue with all the same graphical assets as before, much more in keeping with its pseudo Windows XP/Vista/Windows 7 style UI themes. On the whole the package lacks any real design pointers to Windows 8. If this suite of apps were to bring Essentials in line with Windows in the 2012 timeframe then the package misses its goal. It appears on the surface to be a rebranding exercise but deeper in, the Live name still existing in abundance.

Essentials 2012 is rather confusing in its message.

Microsoft essentials 2012 movie maker