Bing Finance, News, Sports, and Weather

Microsoft also provides four very similar looking apps, Bing Finance, News, Sports, and Weather, which take the notion of a news aggregator and turn it into something truly beautiful and useful. Each obviously focuses on its own core topic, with Finance providing a gorgeous front end to the stock market and financial news and topics, News providing a general purpose news experience, Sports taking on locale‑specific sports news of note, and Weather doing its best to make the weather look gorgeous, no matter how ugly it gets outside.

Since each is so similar from a presentation perspective, let’s just look at one, Sports, to see how something basic can be made to look so beautiful. In Figure 8‑63, you can see the Sports landing page, which provides beautiful, magazine‑style photography and layout.

Scroll over to the right and you’ll see other top stories from the day, highlighted again in a highly visual style with a nice layout as in Figure 8‑64.

Each of the apps is fully customizable in some way. In Sports, for example, you can follow your favorite sports, teams, or players. And in Weather, of course, you can configure the weather display for your favorite places, and even pin individual weather tiles for each on the Windows 8 Start screen.

Figure 8‑63: The Sports app

Figure 8‑64: Top stories in Sports