The Windows 8 Consumer Preview is now live to download and with it comes the first public appearance of the Windows Store, the downloadable store front where Microsoft hopes people will use to download, and eventually purchase, Metro apps for the OS.
In December, Microsoft announced the Windows Store First Apps contest where the company gave app developers a chance to create apps that would be made available to users of the Windows 8 Consumer Preview. Today, Microsoft has announced the winners of the Windows Store First Apps contest on the official Windows Store blog site. All of these apps are now available to download from the Windows 8 Consumer Preview version of the Microsoft Store.
Microsoft says that all of these winning apps were made in less than eight weeks using development tools such as Microsoft Visual Studio 11 Express Beta and Expression Blend. After the finalists were picked, Microsoft worked with the development teams to polish their apps so they would work well in Windows 8. Finally, Microsoft picked the eight apps the company felt best fit the features used in Windows 8"s Metro style.
The winning apps are:
- Elements Weather Forecast by Andrei Pushkin and Dima Suponau, Jujuba Software
- Pew Pew by Bernd Paradies
- PuzzleTouch by Tim Greenfield, Greenfield Technologies
- SigFig Portfolio by Patrick Cushing, SigFig
- Air Soccer by Imran Shafiq, Dangling Concepts
- Physamajig by Andy Beaulieu, Spritehand LLC
- FlipSaw by Ratish Philip
- CookBook by Sacha Leroux, Bewise
As you might expect many of the apps are casual games such as Air Soccer, made by Imran Shafiq. He previously made a Windows Phone game called Air Soccer Tour but decided to make his Metro version just two weeks before the contest submission deadline.
Other apps are for more serious work such as SigFig Portfolio, a financial app that tracks a user"s stocks, offers financial news and more. This apps was designed by a ten man team at SigFig.
Finally there"s the new CookBook app, created by a four man team at developer Bewise. The app is definitely for all those aspiring chefs out there as it lets users browse through over 200,000 recipes.
Images via Microsoft