Universal Apps on Windows 8.1 and Windows Phone 8.1

This is a good video that you should review if you are either developing or working with Apps for the the new Windows 8.1 OS.

The video from Channel 9 touches upon many of the features of the Universal Apps and Kevin Gallo speaks from his experience using Surface Pro and Nokia 1020.

Universal apps have just one solution containing both Windows 8.1 and Windows Phone 8.1 projects sharing common code addressing hardware platforms with different foot prints, Windows
Phone, Surface and laptops.

The audio/video is  of good quality.  There are lots of related Q & A's.
The answers are quite focused such as,

-Supported languages JavaScript, C#, C++, C and VB.NET.
-Action Center
-Game development
-App migration
-Mix and match languages
-Leveraging legacy apps
-WinRT Broker
-DirectX with only C or C++ and no C#
and many more.

I hear in the video that you can create Universal apps using VB as well. However, Visual Studio does not seem to have a template to create one. Perhaps you may have to create one for yourself.

In the case of Universal Apps with Javascript you have the same .js file for both of Windows 8.1 apps and Windows Phone 8.1 apps. For other supported languages also a major portion of the code is shared.

 

There are some differences (version) in the WinJS script file sources for 'base' and 'ui' to address features special to the devices in their default.html pages.

Since the device foot prints are different; the package manifest are different requiring developers, for example, to tailor their graphics to suit the devices. Here there is a whole lot of icons to create which may be one of the time consuming tasks in development although some general recommendations are given.

It would have been nice if the develper supplied just one image (vector/SVG) and the program create required images from it without having have to create a number of images of different sizes and scale factors.