Photo illustration by Aurich Lawson Microsoft wants Windows developers to write Windows 8-specific, Metro-style, touch-friendly applications, and to make sure that they crank these apps out, the company has decided that Visual Studio 11 Express, the free-to-use version of its integrated development environment, can produce nothing else. If you want to develop desktop applications—anything that runs at the command line or on the conventional Windows desktop that remains a fully supported, integral, essential part of Windows 8—you'll have two options: stick with the current Visual C++ 2010 Express and Visual C# 2010 Express products, or pay about $400-500 for Visual Studio 11 Professional. A second version, Visual Studio 11 Express for Web, will be able to produce HTML and JavaScript websites, and nothing more. Visual ... Continue reading →

Yahoo is aiming to get its foot into the browser market with a new product called Axis that launched this evening. The purpose of Axis is to add an extra layer to the user’s Web browsing experience, with interactive search capabilities and cross-device synchronization. On the desktop, Axis is implemented as an add-on that extends existing browsers with its own functionality. Yahoo also released an iOS implementation of Axis—a standalone Web browser application built with the platform-supplied WebKit HTML renderer. It works much like other popular third-party browsers for iOS, such as Dolphin and Mercury. Axis isn't available for Android at this time. The core feature of Axis is interactive search. It has a text box in which the user can input a search query ... Continue reading →

Sign Up for the Ars Newsletter Sign up for the Ars Technica Dispatch, which delivers links to the most popular articles, journals, and multimedia features via e-mail to your inbox every week. I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its User Agreement and Privacy Policy. Continue reading →