Microsoft’s massive Surface Hub is just now reaching customers, and the company is making it really simple to develop apps for it.
During a session today at Build, Microsoft’s Surface Hub team says the only real consideration developers should make when considering the larger screen is input and distance.
Touch and Pen are the two main sources of input for Hub, so Microsoft strongly encourages developers to optimize their apps for those input types. It also says developers should make the apps available across platforms, and for “future devices” in settings.
Developers should also consider how people will use Surface Hub. In most cases, they’re either really close to the screen inputing information or up to six meters away viewing what’s on-screen. They may also be using multiple devices; a Surface Hub can have screens cast to it from mobile devices, and spit information to smaller screens as well.
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Aside from that, it’s status quo. The apps will scale appropriately to the massive screen, and Surface Hubs run all Universal Windows Apps. It won’t support Win32 apps, but that’s easily solved using Microsoft’s new porting tool.
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