Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

bbc.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

691–700 of 724 posts

Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

#691

Post by herbst »

EpicEng wrote: post #598
herbst wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Usually Mac in my experience because nobody on their right mind would bother with Windows in a working environment.

Then I guess the vast majority of people are insane because Mac use in Enterprise is essentially non-existent.

To be fair in my limited experience it is true. I live and work and Switzerland, the majority of customers i faced with, i.e. medium to bigger companies, universities and gov agencies all used Macs. I travelled as Digitalnomad, and went to plenty meetups around Startups, Entrepreneurship and other not 100% tech things. Clear mac dominance as well.

However i work with Rails, Python and fancy things. I know if i would look into .NET/suit wearing side of things, things would look very different.

Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

#692

Post by pjmlp »

meredydd wrote: post #683
pjmlp wrote: post #680

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Allow me to present: https://anvil.works/ Visual interface editor? Check. Component-based UI model? Check. (It's all in Python, everything is an object, very Delphi-ish.) Back-end communication? Check. (One-line RPC to call functions on the server.) Database integration? Check. (The built-in datastore runs on Postgres, and lets you do things like delegate views on a table directly to the client. Mix this with data bi…

Thanks for proving me wrong, Anvil actually does look quite good.

Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

#693

Post by pjmlp »

int_19h wrote: post #684
pjmlp wrote: post #626

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe because Windows 7 lacks the sandbox features required?

That's a good argument for not having the app store on Win7, but APIs are a separate matter. If UWP API could be used to write something that is both a store app on Win10, but can also be deployed (let's say, in a manner similar to Electron apps, with the runtime packaged with the app) on Win7, I think we'd see a lot more of them. Even if you had to build it separately, so long as most of UI code could be shared, it'…

All new APIs introduced since Windows 8 are mostly UWP ones, so basically you are asking for implementing Windows 10 on top Windows 7 kernel.

Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

#694

Post by JopV »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #604
dc443 wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would Apple really drop OpenGL? They are smarter than that... They could do it, though. They could.

They are definitely not helping. They promote SceneKit and Metal over all else. Granted Metal is WAY better than OpenGL

Microsoft does the exact same thing with DirectX on desktop.

And neither Direct3D nor Metal have any real advantages over Vulkan. They exist for locking in developers.

Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

#696

Post by int_19h »

pjmlp wrote: post #693
int_19h wrote: post #684

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a good argument for not having the app store on Win7, but APIs are a separate matter. If UWP API could be used to write something that is both a store app on Win10, but can also be deployed (let's say, in a manner similar to Electron apps, with the runtime packaged with the app) on Win7, I think we'd see a lot more of them. Even if you had to build it separately, so long as most of UI code could be shared, it'…

All new APIs introduced since Windows 8 are mostly UWP ones, so basically you are asking for implementing Windows 10 on top Windows 7 kernel.

Yes.

And I know it's not an easy thing. But if e.g. the resources that went into Windows Mobile were spent there instead, I think the ecosystem would have been much further ahead, and we'd actually see more useful UWP apps.

Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

#697

Post by ChicagoDave »

roryisok wrote: post #627
ChicagoDave wrote: post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well worthless is subjective. There's some value since the camera is pretty great and it can still be used as a legit phone. And I keep tabs on if anyone has built some 3rd party tools for it to turn it into something cool. You can pester me on LinkedIn if you want: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chidave/

I still use a WP handset as my legit phone and will probably continue to do so until they're just not usable anymore for whatever reason. Would love to get my hands on a 1020, but I should probably just go buy one second hand. I'm in europe so yours probably wouldn't even work over here

It's GSM (AT&T). I'm willing to trade. Got anything interesting?

Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

#698

Post by pjmlp »

JopV wrote: post #694
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #604

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are definitely not helping. They promote SceneKit and Metal over all else. Granted Metal is WAY better than OpenGL

Microsoft does the exact same thing with DirectX on desktop. And neither Direct3D nor Metal have any real advantages over Vulkan. They exist for locking in developers.

Like Sony and Nintendo do on their consoles.

Sony did bother to offer OpenGL ES 1.0 with Cg for shaders. Hardly anyone used it.

Nintendo introduced Vulkan on Switch, while keeping their own API. Lets see how it will go.

The advantages over Vulkan from both APIs are not being C based in 2017, great graphical debuggers, a full stack experience instead of tracking down libraries for math, fonts, textures, ....

Game development culture is not about being all friends and sharing code, rather making the best money of IP and selling services, in particular porting code among gaming devices.

Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

#699

Post by zyme »

fpig wrote: post #488
windows8q wrote: post #479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Then came windows 8.1 and windows desktop 8 which was universally hated. The whole fullscreen apps debacle was just horrible and all the unnecessary restrictions on store apps for desktop made no one ever consider porting their desktop app to a store app. The whole phone and desktop app in one was a joke aswell since it was (and still is!) horrible implemented. Did I mention they broke compatibility from 8.1 to pho…

Windows 8 "metro" UI caused an uproar for many reasons, some of the biggest ones being: - the start menu covered the whole screen - applications could only run full screen, even the simplest ones. You literally couldn't have 2 applications on the screen at the same time. - it was hard to close applications - it was very difficult to find the shutdown/reset/etc options - the metro versions of "default" apps looked bad…

Personally I remember the biggest pull to windows 8 for me being Games that ran on both 7 and 8/8.1, seemed to perform alot better on 8.1; they didn't advertise that it was a preferred OS or that it was designed for it.

I suspect it was related to streamlining by removing the oldest backward compatibility features, as the only apps that broke were those that ran on windows XP, most frequently they were games that weren't programmed with Vista+ in consideration (often because it didn't exist when originally released).

I specifically remember a bunch of games capping at about 20 FPS on Windows 7 and going 60-100fps on 8 when it was new using my nVidia Quadro SLI setup at the time, and having no luck finding anyone else report this on google (likely because so many people weren't giving 8.x a chance so they didn't notice).

I actually loved 8 and thought that 8.1's gui was a step backwards, the gui was extra easy to use and originally had me going back and forth between windows 7 and 8 when the performance difference eventually won me over completely as my default environment. I still kept 7 installed on another drive for the infrequent use of incompatible apps.

Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

#700

Post by zyme »

pwdisswordfish wrote: post #206
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 loved my Lumia 920, and if only there were apps, I would not be using iPhone right now. Major things I've missed that were available on android/iOS: banking app - some other banks had an app for WP, but I didn't want to switch banks public transit route planner - there were some, iOS and android had THE app for my city with really good bus arrival estimates official public transit app - I couldn't buy tickets from…

I know the feeling; several years ago my mom bought a Windows Lumia phone for $30 new, the hardware specs were nice, but the apps were just non existent, and though it's gotten 1000 times better its still very lacking. Also the camera is surprisingly high quality and fast.

My 5S is going to cost $50 for a new battery and screen - and it's still worth a few hundred more new; however her phone's HW specs are still mostly better than mine, except I think the RAM which is the same.

A year ago I remember thinking If microsoft wanted to save windows 10 mobile's life I think they should have put a large amount of that cross-platform smartphone programming effort into trying to make Win10 Mobile capable of running some android apps, the desktop version has a linux subsystem after all. that way they could have expanded their user base and made it a more attractive platform, especially with the lower cost.

Making 10 Mobile decently Popular for any reason would have given developers a good reason to switch to xamarin for developing native apps on every platform, win-win.

Alas they didn't do anything encouraging enough to grasp that potential double benefit...

Post reply on HN