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How Windows Everywhere finally happened

arstechnica.com

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Re: How Windows Everywhere finally happened

#81

Post by pjmlp »

taneq wrote: post #59
pjmlp wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Microsoft really needs to stop introducing "upgrades" that require application rewrites in Windows for the next 3-5 years, and focus on getting the Windows Store going. You mean like the "Framework of the day" on web land? Or the "rewrite your app with each Android version" that you cannot get? Or "your language just got replaced" on iOS land?

It wasn't always like this. The Windows API was fairly stable from the mid-late 90s for at least a decade. They decided to start breaking that compatibility in the name of 'progress' at around the time they started trying to squidge together their touchscreen and desktop interfaces, but this API stability used to be one of the huge drawcards of the Windows platform.

My Windows coding experience goes back to Windows 3.0 and I am looking forward to the day Win32 and Hungary notation are nothing more than plain maintenance coding, replaced by a proper type safe OO ABI like WinRT.

Re: How Windows Everywhere finally happened

#82

Post by pessimizer »

0xFFC wrote: post #63
bigger_cheese wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"with possibility to write one application that works on all" I'm not sure this is such a good thing. Maybe I'm in the minority but my phone and my desktop OS have vastly different use cases and I'd expect apps running on each of them to be different. I'm not interested in a converging UI. I want a user experience tailored to the platform I'm running the app on. I'd rather a solid desktop experience then having to p…

>I've seen it in the Linux world where toolkits/desktop environments tried to chase the idea of converging UI's and we ended up with the worst of both worlds - miserable to use apps on a phone/tablet and miserable Desktop Apps. I abandoned Linux just because of this. Some people just don't get it. I don't want mobile UI in my double 1080p monitors which I do development on them.But people like gnome developers just d…

Don't ditch Linux because of Gnome 3 or Unity. You can install Cinnamon, MATE, XFCE or KDE in five minutes.

Re: How Windows Everywhere finally happened

#83

Post by LionessLover »

joosters wrote: post #77
LionessLover wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm just curious because I really don't know more than my own sample-of-1 experience: Don't you have to agree to "Terms and conditions" before the Windows 10 installation actually starts? I actually re-enabled the Windows 10 upgrade warnings on my Windows 7 desktop, because I intend to upgrade in the last week of the upgrade being free. My desktop (Dell XPS 8500 from 2012) is not supported with Windows 10 (the first…

I honestly don't know, I didn't get to see what dialogs appeared. Bear in mind that computers often get us to accept terms and conditions, and virtually no-one reads them before clicking OK. There's no way I could blame my parents if that's what they did. Hell, most of my security advice to them is explaining what is a 'legitimate' message box is and what isn't (Quick test: try describing it yourself, the many varied…

I know the feeling. My mother's approach to computing is infuriating: If she would just READ the often perfectly simple message on the screen she could solve 90% of her problems. For the same reason as your parents ending up with Windows 10 my mother managed to install the pay-version of the free anti-virus software I had installed - when it asked here if she wanted to upgrade to the non-free version she clicked on "Yes" and then didn't dare to cancel the process...

It seems that in some people anything unexpected happening on the screen causes some of their inhibitory neurons to fire action potentials (only 10% of neurons in the brain, but an inhibitory signal has a much stronger effect than an excitatory one) - blocking entire brain circuits from contributing their output. It's probably an ancient fear response.

So the best solution isn't to educate them - that's mostly unnecessary, since their intellectual capacity is not really the problem. One would have to get them to relax, so that unexpected things happening on their computer screen don't trigger the blocking of all reason.

Re: How Windows Everywhere finally happened

#84

Post by Const-me »

EdSharkey wrote: post #43

The article doesn't discuss it, but I thought the Kin was the forerunner to a lot UX of the Windows Phone 7. Was the Kin also a forerunner to the Windows RT platform change, or was it just a re-skinned Windows CE?

Zune HD was released before Kin, and I think that was the first WP7-like touch-oriented UX.

Kin and WP7 all run CE. The platform for WP7 was Silverlight 3, designed long before the RT.

Re: How Windows Everywhere finally happened

#85

Post by 0x6c6f6c »

douche wrote: post #74
dingo_bat wrote: post #27

I don't like the Universal apps or whatever they're calling them this month. They are limited, slow, crashy and buggy. They regularly just disappear after a sleep and wake. I have been left questioning my sanity wondering if I closed Messenger. Also, they are clunky and slow. For example, switch to a desktop with a universal app open and for the duration of the desktop slide animation, the app window will be complete…

Windows Forms is the ironborn of Microsoft APIs - What is dead may never die... But you do have to pray to a bizarre and Cthulhu-like old god (Win32).

To this day still have coworkers learning WinForms and Visual Basic.

I just don't understand.

Re: How Windows Everywhere finally happened

#86

Post by 0x6c6f6c »

dvdcxn wrote: post #76
StevePerkins wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. I WANT to push back against the recent trend of using Electron to build desktop apps with HTML and JavaScript, as they "don't look and feel native". Then Microsoft goes and develops a native desktop framework that looks and feels like Electron apps.

I disagree with that, HTML/CSS/Js is by far the most widely understood paradigm for building user interfaces. There's nothing stopping apps built with these technologies looking native other than the stylistic choices of the designers.

Someone should have created a Windows.css framework for easy native design..

Re: How Windows Everywhere finally happened

#87

Post by tkubacki »

ebbv wrote: post #21

> Microsoft promised developers that Windows would run anywhere. This summer, it finally will. Bullshit. Versions of Windows that are all labeled Windows 10 are running in a lot of devices, and you can write applications that in theory can run on all of them (though practically writing one application that runs well on all of them may be somewhat harder if you want your application to be useful in any way.) But that…

>This article might as well have been written by Microsoft's PR department. Totally not grounded in reality at all.

Well, Peter Bright loves MS tech and has bias against Google. IMO you should take his articles with a grain of salt.

Re: How Windows Everywhere finally happened

#88

Post by osullivj »

0x6c6f6c wrote: post #85
douche wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows Forms is the ironborn of Microsoft APIs - What is dead may never die... But you do have to pray to a bizarre and Cthulhu-like old god (Win32).

To this day still have coworkers learning WinForms and Visual Basic. I just don't understand.

An awful lot of software has been built and deployed with VB, WinForms, MFC etc. It needs to be maintained just like other legacy tech eg mainframes.

Re: How Windows Everywhere finally happened

#89

Post by userbinator »

realusername wrote: post #53
bigger_cheese wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"with possibility to write one application that works on all" I'm not sure this is such a good thing. Maybe I'm in the minority but my phone and my desktop OS have vastly different use cases and I'd expect apps running on each of them to be different. I'm not interested in a converging UI. I want a user experience tailored to the platform I'm running the app on. I'd rather a solid desktop experience then having to p…

As a good example of this problem, I remember the new Metro (or whatever it's called now) calculator taking a whole screen on a 22". Yes it worked, but it looked really terrible and unusable.

Apparently it's also extremely slow, to the point that it needs a loading screen:

https://www.reddit.com/r/windows/comments/3ng3f4/windows_10_...

Re: How Windows Everywhere finally happened

#90

Post by simonh »

> Apple and Google will probably do something similar with their various operating systems, but Microsoft has managed it first.

I thought all of Apple's OS variants these days were based on the Darwin kernel and variously intersecting sets of the same unix components and APIs. Every now and then I see someone complaining that a new Apple device contains 'an entirely new OS' like Apple TV OS, but isn't that just a variant of iOS? It seems to me it's precisely because Apple have been determinedly pursuing this common core stragety ever since the first iPhone OS that they've been so successful, compared to Microsoft's strategy at the time of having completely different code bases across product categories.

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