Matmi visit Microsoft

There are a number of perks to working at Matmi – and last week Jeff and three of our developers (Rob, Juan and Derek) were lucky enough to be invited to a Developer Day at the Microsoft Offices down in Reading . Our developers were very impressed with Microsoft’s swanky high tech offices featuring glass buildings and lakes with swans! (I’m thinking we should definitely be investing in a lake and swans for the Matmi offices to keep up 😉 )The day was based around developing  for  Windows 8 and hopefully the guys picked up a tip or two!

The guys heard a number of interesting talks throughout the day that covered some key issues for developers working with Windows 8.  Some of these included how Unity 3D and Windows 8 share OS features which are going to be integrated into Windows store apps ( formerly called Metro apps) . This will  mean that programs can register a shared type of data (images, urls, contacts etc) with the operating system. This allows the OS to automatically bring up a list of all the programs available that can make use of that data; allowing the quick and easy transfer of information between applications that have no knowledge of each other.

 Derek had a chance to learn about the new Windows 8 touch interface and found it to be far better than Windows 7. He had this to say: “ One of the main improvements is the new windows 8 start menu ( the new start menu takes up a full screen ) which gives users much easier access to programmes/apps than in the typical start menu seen in all other versions of Windows thus making it much better for touch screen users – this isn’t the only reason it is better than Windows 7 but is one of the main ones”.

 Matmi also had the opportunity to demo one of our future releases to the guys from Microsoft. It’s safe to say it was received very well and we are really excited to be able to announce the project in the very near future!