These days, business analysts and other users without programming skills are clamoring for the ability to create apps. To meet their needs, Microsoft has just released a beta version of Siena, a rapid application development tool. It allows users who are familiar with Office to create HTML5- and JavaScript-based Windows 8 applications “in a matter of minutes.”
“Siena provides a familiar and easy document-editing experience: Put your information on the canvas, compose and style it, and add custom logic and interactivity using the power of Excel expressions,” blogged Microsoft. “The result is an immediately usable app with all the rich information, differentiated looks and purpose-specific intelligence expected of modern Windows apps.”
