Last week, we reported that Avast had told us it had no plans to offer a Metro UI version of its popular anti-virus software for Microsoft's Windows 8 operating system, saying that Microsoft was "actively discouraging" such moves. Today the company sent us a new statement with more information about that decision, which may indicate a slight change in their original stance.
The statement, written by its chief technology officer Ondrej Vlcek, says:
With the Metro UI, the question is ‘how deep are the visuals’? The Metro UI looks like a lot like a mobile phone and has been optimized for touch. It is visual and a new programming framework. This makes it great for applets, and apps such as games and browsers that are used for entertainment but not for low-level protection.
On the other hand, it is paired with the standard desktop for traditional productivity applications. You could say that this creates some schizophrenia between the two worlds which users can switch back and forth between. However, underneath the visuals, both worlds are running on Windows 8. AV is and will stay at the desktop level. By definition, a security app has to work with the entire operating system at the moment of start-up. This puts it in desktop territory.
As I said before, our avast! is already compatible with Windows 8 Beta. For Metro, we are debating potential graphic changes. But, this should be seen as visuals that are complimentary with Metro and not as a stand-alone Metro security app.
This would seem to indicate that Avast is at least thinking about creating some kind of Metro-based UI for its anti-virus software, even though the basis of the program will remain on the desktop version of Windows 8.
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