Microsoft has released a new app called Project Sienna and it"s about to become a staple app for Microsoft. The reason why this app is important to Microsoft’s mission is that it allows you to create apps, within the app, that can easily be published to the Microsoft Store and can be done so, for free.
Here is how it works, you download Project Siena and when you open it up, with a little bit of know-how (and we stress little, here) you can create a new app in minutes.
If you understand Visual Basic, this app will feel right at home on your machine and know that the apps that are created are not template based products and that there is quite a bit of flexibility here to pull in outside content. More so, if you are familiar with Excel, you will feel right at home with Project Siena as the expressions are quite similar to connect your data.
This app is targeted at business experts and analysts but can be used by anyone who needs an easy way to create apps that pull curated content from external streams.
A few weeks back, when we posted up our hands on time with Microsoft’s Perceptive Pixel display, we also got a demo of Project Siena and in only a few short minutes, an app was created that was dynamically pulling in content from external feeds to create a working app that would serve as a business dashboard for a corporation.
This may not sound impressive, but when someone with only basic programming skills (Excel and Visual Basic) can put together an app that creates a visual dashboard, in only minutes, it’s a tremendous achievement. More so, the app that was created can be shared among team members or sent to the Microsoft store for distribution. It’s hard to quantify how awesome this type of product is, until you have had to manually create reports by hand and then distribute them to management. Being able to do this within a visual environment and with only basic programming skills is a huge win for Microsoft and business users as well.
Oh, and this app is touch friendly. So when you are working on a Surface (or PPI display) it’s an immersive development application and that’s not something you see very often.
Download: Project Siena