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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

#671

Post by anjc »

dtx1 wrote: post #224
itsmenotyou wrote: post #30

I was working in Microsoft about 5 years ago and Satya's not lying when they say they tried everything to incentivise app developers. It was a big focus of the company at the time. For keystone apps they tried to partner with developers doing most of the work for them. For more niche apps they ran promotions for students and independent developers giving away free phones etc. But nothing was enough to get over the pr…

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…

> at no point had even a single feature that wasn't available better on iOS and Android

Not only is this untrue for years past, it's still untrue (See Continuum + UWP)

Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

#672

Post by fdchn2016 »

chrisco255 wrote: post #609
amigoingtodie wrote: post #548

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But no 3rd party apps. That was an after thought.

> But no 3rd party apps. That was an after thought. Barely any platform had 3rd party apps. No one had a streamlined app store, SDK and monetization process like iOS came out with in 2008.

Palm Had. I was a fool not to try and develop a 3rd party app for it. I had a Palm.

Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

#673

Post by v-yadli »

chrisco255 wrote: post #610
v-yadli wrote: post #520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I partially agree with you, in that the rendering of the page is good-looking in circa 2007 standard on a mobile device. But rendering one page nicely does not prove it is full-featured. It has to go through some kind of benchmark, which reflects the general ability to process trillions of other pages out there. It loses to Opera Mobile or Symbian browser on the test I just googled (not sure about how accurate it is…

Screw mouse hover. iOS had the mind blowing pinch to zoom feature which made full page websites actually readable on mobile. They didn't even have to wait for mobile friendly. If you tried browsing the web on any phone pre-iOS it was a shit experience fraught with frustration.

Exactly. I was referring to exactly this, that it is the awesome interaction methods that made it work, not the browser itself.

Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

#674

Post by pcwalton »

pjmlp wrote: post #619
pcwalton wrote: post #558

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

Yet I would rather take all of that than dealing with Frankenstein CSS/HTML/JavaScript programming, while making sure it is pixel perfect across all browsers and not making use of the OS features and computer hardware that made me buy it in first place, e.g. WebGL 2.0 on DX 12 GPU. Most of the issues you mention are solved in .NET, WPF and UWP. COM is a breeze to use in Delphi, MFC/ATL, .NET, C++/CX. Windows is much…

> Yet I would rather take all of that than dealing with Frankenstein CSS/HTML/JavaScript programming

I wouldn't.

> Most of the issues you mention are solved in .NET, WPF and UWP.

I wasn't talking about .NET, WPF, and UWP. I was responding to the claim that Petzold-style Win32 apps are better than the Web.

> Apparently Windows event system is so bad, that the younger generation re-inventing it in the form of React.

Huh? React is not WndProc.

> Also Cocoa, UI Kit, Android and Qt are all better solutions than Web.

Disagree.

I've written the same WebGL app twice now, once in Cocoa/Objective-C and once on the Web, with a TypeScript and Webpack stack. Once I got over the initial hump of learning the technology, it was a much nicer experience than my experience with Cocoa. TypeScript is a better language for UI development than C++, Java, or Obj-C, and the fact that the browser implementation of WebGL smooths over the issues with OpenGL on Mac was a huge relief.

Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

#675

Post by pcwalton »

pjmlp wrote: post #650
oceanswave wrote: post #648

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Despite the populist mindset that programming the web is a shitshow, it’s really not. Tooling these days is pretty incredible and the ecosystem is pretty great when you are found needing - issues get fixed, PR’s get accepted. It’s a much better experience than a 20 year old environment where everything is set in stone, yet bugs and inconsistencies still exist. The tools and software for traditional windows app progra…

> Tooling these days is pretty incredible and the ecosystem is pretty great when you are found needing - issues get fixed, PR’s get accepted. It’s a much better experience than a 20 year old environment where everything is set in stone, yet bugs and inconsistencies still exist. Try to make a CRUD SPA as fast as a Delphi one, including a nice L&F by default, just with mouse clicks and setting a few properties. > Also,…

> Try to make a CRUD SPA as fast as a Delphi one, including a nice L&F by default, just with mouse clicks and setting a few properties.

Use Bootstrap for the look and feel. The browser's painting stack is far faster than Delphi's '90s style GDI, so you don't have to do anything there.

Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

#676

Post by WorldMaker »

maxxxxx wrote: post #669
WorldMaker wrote: post #668

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think .NET Standard 2.0 is about the clearest path you could get forward from WPF. > I don't understand why they even needed UWP. Why not improve WPF? The short story: 1) To first-class support more platforms/architectures (ARM). 2) To support C/C++ and other COM developers, bringing everyone COM [WinRT] [1] and Managed (.NET) to the same table. (Microsoft still has a lot of teams invested in C/C++; it shouldn't be…

That's a very charitable explanation that I find hard to accept. I think it's more that MS .Net development is organized in way that it's easy to do new stuff but hard to maintain an effort long time. In other areas they are able to make progress without breaking everything all the time. C# has stayed backwards compatible while still moving forward quickly. SQL server doesn't release a new version every 2 years that…

Keep in mind that .NET Core is almost the same .NET runtime/framework (little-f) that powers UWP. It's been a huge hurdle across the board, web and desktop alike. I'm sure if the .NET team had had a magic wand to shrink the .NET Framework (cap-f) down to a smaller size and remove all the legacy Win32 code without breaking so much compatibility they would have.

It's easy to say in hindsight that they should have tried for something like what .NET Standard 2.0 is today earlier, but I, at least, can't blame them for attempting to try to clean house and remove terrible dev experiences like AppDomains and DataTable. Those APIs are terrible and should have died.

Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

#677

Post by nunez »

anontrot wrote: post #574
nunez wrote: post #530

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Man the more comments I read the more I begin to remember. There was ONE dev who was churning out VERY high quality apps to popular platforms. I think Snapchat or Instagram was what he got known for. Instead of MS embracing his work and helping it flourish, they let him get taken down by a C&D. LOTS of people got heated when that happened.

Rudy Hyn

That’s the one

Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

#678

Post by tracker1 »

beagle3 wrote: post #410
criddell wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Microsoft's defense, they also tend to support their stuff for a long time. I work with MFC every day. It's 20+ years old and still being developed.

I stumbled over a few bugs in WPF (worked in WPF3.5, would hang in WPF4), which were, for at least 4 years, documented and "WONTFIX" with no acceptable workaround (workaround provided slows things down by a factor of 10 under some circumstances). Maybe it's fixed with the reinvigorated WPF on Win10. I don't care anymore, but I do caution anyone to ever use any MS Technology younger than 15 years.

I'd say .Net Core is worth considering, but no real UI story as of yet... pretty nice for services though.

Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

#679

Post by pjmlp »

pcwalton wrote: post #675
pjmlp wrote: post #650

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Tooling these days is pretty incredible and the ecosystem is pretty great when you are found needing - issues get fixed, PR’s get accepted. It’s a much better experience than a 20 year old environment where everything is set in stone, yet bugs and inconsistencies still exist. Try to make a CRUD SPA as fast as a Delphi one, including a nice L&F by default, just with mouse clicks and setting a few properties. > Also,…

> Try to make a CRUD SPA as fast as a Delphi one, including a nice L&F by default, just with mouse clicks and setting a few properties. Use Bootstrap for the look and feel. The browser's painting stack is far faster than Delphi's '90s style GDI, so you don't have to do anything there.

You love to use the GDI example against native devs, a Win16 technology, long superceded by better alternatives on Windows.

I only used Delphi as an example, because in 2017 the Web is yet to produce anything that approaches it, even Web Components are yet to be fully done.

A RAD tool is much more than just rendering widgets, a simple CRUD application should be doable just by clicking and setting properties, including talking to the database backend.

Speaking of WebComponents, when will Mozilla support HTML Imports?

Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

#680

Post by pjmlp »

OldSchoolJohnny wrote: post #667
pjmlp wrote: post #619

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet I would rather take all of that than dealing with Frankenstein CSS/HTML/JavaScript programming, while making sure it is pixel perfect across all browsers and not making use of the OS features and computer hardware that made me buy it in first place, e.g. WebGL 2.0 on DX 12 GPU. Most of the issues you mention are solved in .NET, WPF and UWP. COM is a breeze to use in Delphi, MFC/ATL, .NET, C++/CX. Windows is much…

You're assumptions are outdated

Please provide a link to a Delphi like tool for the Web, including components for backend comunication.
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