Obviously the App needs to handle the UX based on interface display. You can't have the big screen experience on a phone device. Unless you have eagle vision and 1mm finger tips but you are thinking in the terms of today's limitations.
But that's exactly what
isn't happening here. Windows 8 doesn't provide two different but equally important user interfaces for the two types of devices it's targeting, it provides one tablet-oriented UI and begrudgingly, disdainfully provides only the parts of the old desktop UI they couldn't get away with cutting, on the publically-stated assumption that developers are supposed to port their "desktop" software to Metro, simply because MS says so.
And even if they
were trying to build a coherent dual-headed OS, I think it's a fundamentally misguided goal to begin with. Trying to build one program that works identically on two radically different kinds of devices is crazy. Either it's going to be tailored for one and poorly adapted to the other, or it's going to be so abstracted that it's not any good on either. Application design is guided by knowledge of how the user will interact with the program; that's why DOS programs simply aren't designed the way Windows programs are (and why programs that
tried to be identical across both DOS and Windows, back in the 3.1 days, sucked at it.) It's not going to lead to a single unbroken user experience, it's going to lead to tablet software that poorly attempts to be desktop software and vice versa.
Imagine a world where you can never have a physical or complete digital copy of the software you own on your hard drive. Imagine a world where NO software can be written for Apple or Microsloth OS' without their direct approval.
If you love technology, keep it free, avoid these beasts...
Word to that.
