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Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

#551

Post by amigoingtodie »

philliphaydon wrote: post #237
Gaelan wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Didn't the iPhone launch US-only?

It doesn’t matter. Subsequent iPhones are launched globally. Microsoft does not launch subsequent products globally. The surface takes many many months to reach many parts of Asia. Surface studio is only in a hand full of countries. Surface laptop is only in a handful of countries. Surface book is almost non existent. The only thing Microsoft makes that it launches well is the Xbox.

I am going to leave this here:

http://www.businessinsider.com/red-ring-of-death-recall-2016...

Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

#552

Post by awad »

mpweiher wrote: post #400
limeblack wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> that at no point had even a single feature that wasn't available better on iOS and Android According to the dates[0] I found online says Windows was the first to have a feature that would automatically connect to your cellular connection if the Wifi didn't work. Most consumers don't care but it is something I was surprised iPhones[1] and Android[2] didn't have at least at the time. In addition continuum is unique/b…

> first to have a feature that would automatically connect to your cellular connection if the Wifi didn't work. Huh? Maybe my memory if failing me, but that's how networking on iOS always worked.

Perhaps he is referring to the long-standing habit of iOS to NOT drop the wifi until way out of range which would lead to an awkward hang. I think they fixed that in the last year or two, but it was pretty damn annoying.

Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

#553

Post by bartread »

narrator wrote: post #244
dtx1 wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked 3 years as a windows phone dev and i'm sorry to say but Microsofts efforts were ... almost insultingly bad. It started with windows phone 8 and the Metro UI. Bad Idea. The UI was too far away from Android/iPhone to be easily ported and adding corporate design to it was hard as it was too different. Silverlight and XAML was okay for the time. Then came windows 8.1 and windows desktop 8 which was universally h…

The thing about the MS platforms that has always been an issue is that they change the developer APIs around all the time. Every year they come out with the latest greatest way to access a database or whatever and it really isn't that much better than what they had last year, but it still requires a rewrite.

I do get where you're coming from but I have a more moderate perspective.

I mean we can certainly point to examples where that's the case: Silverlight's a classic here, if that term's even appropriate, and then of course there's WP7, 8, and 10, as mentioned by the grandparent. And these are clearly not trivial examples.

Nevertheless, I must point out that large bodies of code I wrote in the mid-noughties are still running substantially unmodified today. What's perhaps interesting is that these codebases are desktop tools, where it can be argued that Microsoft have achieved true mastery (after WPF came out everything notably settled down, and unlike MFC and WinForms it really hasn't been replaced).

It tends to be other areas where the worst of the churn has occurred: web, mobile, database access (how many versions of EF to get it right?). Of course, these are areas that have seen significant growth over the past few years.

Still, even in their worst period Microsoft did not begin to approach the lunacy of framework churn in the JavaScript world.

Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

#554

Post by s73ver_ »

nova22033 wrote: post #65
nathantotten wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a stretch IMO. I was working there too at the time and the focus on apps was never as strong as it should have been. Yes, they paid out lots of money to get devs to build apps, but they never really dedicated the resources to building quality apps. The prime example was Facebook. This was an app built by Microsoft with FBs blessing, but it was always far behind in terms of features and quality. Developement o…

>Had Microsoft put quality dev teams on building high quality third-party apps I think the chances of success would have greatly improved. For one app? For an app they would have to give away for free? For an app that would always be behind the FB built ios/android apps?

Not just one app. They would need Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, and a number of other staple apps.

Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

#557

Post by orbitingpluto »

WorldMaker wrote: post #510
emodendroket wrote: post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That may be so, but WinRT comes with a bunch of limitations, so there isn't really a no-brainer choice for application development, and also, considering how deeply it's associated with the unpopular Windows Store app and Windows phone, who wants to throw in their lot with it? Frankly it hasn't seemed worth investing that much time into any of them and I pretty much just end up reaching for yet another WinForms MVP a…

Limitations change as API priorities shift. The platform has grown over time. Some inherent limitations are useful (to be a medium to creativity, to the user's control over their system overriding a developer's narcissism, to the idea that security and reliability are worth engineering for), and yes, unlikely to disappear entirely. I can't dispute the unpopularity of Windows Phone, but from what I hear the Windows St…

One of the key issues for me purchasing on the Windows Store is that my purchases my disappear at any moment. I have had half of my purchased apps disappear.

And it is next to impossible to get a refund.

Last week I noticed that my purchased music on Groove has disappeared ahead of the end of year termination of service.

Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

#558

Post by pcwalton »

cjsuk wrote: post #515
bnolsen wrote: post #466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, imagine someone trying to make this statement 15 years ago...things have sure changed.

Indeed. 15 years ago I kind of enjoyed it. Win32/winforms is still less horrible than the web these days.

Win32 is in no way less horrible than the Web. Win32 doesn't have any device-independent layout, at all. Forget about handling HiDPI sensibly. RegisterClassEx/CreateWindowEx are incredibly verbose. WndProcs are a mess compared to individual event handlers. The mishmash of COM and inconsistently named C APIs is terrible. COM involves a monstrous amount of boilerplate. COM requires you to deal with apartment threading, legacy that exists primarily for compatibility with Visual Basic 6, which is of course no longer supported but still saddles the platform. Creating an OpenGL context with WGL, with the "false context" stuff, is a nightmare compared to WebGL. Memory management is a giant pain to deal with. The GDI APIs are archaic and slow. I could go on…

Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

#559

Post by kuschku »

limeblack wrote: post #390
dtx1 wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked 3 years as a windows phone dev and i'm sorry to say but Microsofts efforts were ... almost insultingly bad. It started with windows phone 8 and the Metro UI. Bad Idea. The UI was too far away from Android/iPhone to be easily ported and adding corporate design to it was hard as it was too different. Silverlight and XAML was okay for the time. Then came windows 8.1 and windows desktop 8 which was universally h…

> that at no point had even a single feature that wasn't available better on iOS and Android According to the dates[0] I found online says Windows was the first to have a feature that would automatically connect to your cellular connection if the Wifi didn't work. Most consumers don't care but it is something I was surprised iPhones[1] and Android[2] didn't have at least at the time. In addition continuum is unique/b…

> According to the dates[0] I found online says Windows was the first to have a feature that would automatically connect to your cellular connection if the Wifi didn't work.

This is the most infuriating feature ever. Google implemented it in 2014 in Android, and you couldn't properly disable it. Not even today.

I frequently need to connect to intranets where Google services are blocked for security reasons, and it's infuriating to fight hundreds of times with the settings so you can get the WiFi to work.

Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

#560

Post by kuschku »

raydev wrote: post #511
stillsut wrote: post #464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it finally looked like the UWP Plattform might do the trick. Well nope. The SDK is garbage. Scaling from phone to desktop is hidiously bad and afaik still not solved. A lot people tell me Xcode is garbage, Eclipse is a nightmare, but these apps keep getting cranked out. The Android / iOS language and platform api's are SNAFU, but people get still get into the IDE and start making, without any promise for a set of c…

> A lot people tell me Xcode is garbage, Eclipse is a nightmare Xcode is absolutely sits at the bottom of the IDE rankings, but Eclipse shouldn't even be a concern for Android devs. Android Studio is a very nice IDE and no Android dev should touch Eclipse ever again. It's a shame it's tied to the Android platform, honestly. I'd kill to have Android Studio's functionality when developing for iOS. (And no, AppCode does…

> It's a shame it's tied to the Android platform, honestly.

It's not, it also supports Java, C++/C/ObjC, Go, Python, PHP, JS, and many more. Find the other Jetbrains IDEs at https://www.jetbrains.com/

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