As always, it’s hard to be original. It’s easy to copy great stuff others have done but to think of something nice that others might have done is not trivial.

The number of applications in the Windows 8 Store is growing rappidly. That was to be expected; a lot of developers already have the skills needed to build Win8 apps so all it took was some ideas. And they have ideas.

Another factor that helps with the growing number of apps in the store is the availability of the project templates in Visual Studio 2012. When you start a new project you are given a ready to run sample that you can adapt to your needs. All the stuff needed to navigate through the app, to display data, to do semantic zoom, it’s all available.

So what do we do? We tweak, change, adapt and modify these samples to fit our application. However, the underlying structure of the app remains the same. Somehow developers can’t seem to break free from the structure that the sample apps give you. Result: all apps looks alike.

My tip for the day: take the samples and use them to learn. Don’t use them as a foundation of your app. Make you app different from those others and you’ll find you will have something special.

I’m curious to see what you come up with!