Will WP7 phones sync out-of-the-box with Macs?
Microsoft Launches Windows Phone 7 But Does Anyone Care?
51–60 of 70 posts
Re: Microsoft Launches Windows Phone 7 But Does Anyone Care?
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
If anything I think that's the move they needed most - to toss everything out and start new. See for example: OS9 vs. OSX The problem with MS, constantly, is that they have prioritized backwards compatibility over just about everything else - often usability, stability, and functionality. This has kept their platforms technologically backwards and their usability an infamous joke. It's about time that MS started fres…
I think that's the move they needed most - to toss everything out and start new. I wholeheartedly agree, and from everything that I've seen of WP7, I'm impressed. MS has rethought the entire UI, and frankly, rebuilding from scratch was the only thing they could do to become relevant again in the consumer mobile space. They've done away with the desktop metaphor, menu bars and contextual menus, and yet they managed no…
Re backwards compat... I think MS did the right thing here making the applications have to be managed. The WP7 managed stack seems really well-tuned (especially for a mobile device).
Removing native code from 3rd party apps gives them several things:
1) Reduces incidence of memory leaks.
2) Less buggy apps w/ better type safety than C/C++.
3) Improved security. No buffer overruns or out of range subscript class of vulns.
4) Can more easily statically analyze to determine resource usage and inappropriate usage.
5) Can change the underlying HW platform and apps continue to run.
The only real issue I've seen with managed code in the past is perf. And from the game demos I've seen, I think they may have fixed that issue.
Re: Microsoft Launches Windows Phone 7 But Does Anyone Care?
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the fear for Windows being "late to the game" isn't that MS will have a hard time getting mindshare, but I think they are going to have a hard time getting "developer share". Basically if I'm going to develop my hip new mobile app that's ready to take over the world I'm going to start with Android and iPhone and wait and see what OS I'm going to tackle next, and the way I'm going to figure that out is by sale…
>I think the fear for Windows being "late to the game" isn't that MS will have a hard time getting mindshare, but I think they are going to have a hard time getting "developer share". Microsoft already have huge developer mindshare. All they have to do is get developers that already use their platforms to use yet another of their platforms.
Hmm.. I should have been more clear. My, not very well put, point wasn't with respect to developers available. Its allocation of developer resources. If I'm going to develop a mobile application I'm going to start with the platforms with the greatest reach.
Android, iOS, Blackberry, etc.
Re: Microsoft Launches Windows Phone 7 But Does Anyone Care?
#54I'm currently working on several applications for WP7. The development experience for WP7 is a million-billion times better than it was for past Windows Mobile operating systems. - The emulator is snappy and you don't need to mess around with ActiveSync. - I'm not a huge fan of the XAML (the Silverlight/WPF markup language), but that is not an issue. I put a XAML place holder element in place and add controls in C# -…
My limited number of contacts at MS tell me that an Enterprise deployment solution is coming, but they couldn't get it done in time for the initial release. I hope it's better than Apple's solution.
What problems do you have with Apple's Enterprise deployment solution?
Re: Microsoft Launches Windows Phone 7 But Does Anyone Care?
#55One aspect of the Windows phone that may be a big hit in corporations and governments is whole device encryption. PGP (now owned by Symantec) can deploy strong encryption to these Windows phones. Apple has always been difficult to develop for in this area (lots of frequent changes ISP can't keep up) and they tend to advertise to home users and I'm not sure about Android's whole device encryption ability.
Re: Microsoft Launches Windows Phone 7 But Does Anyone Care?
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
That may not be a safe assumption.
But it's a correct one. Razzle is used internally for building the kernel and drivers, but the majority (I believe?) of the userspace is done using VS.
I heard from a former Windows team member that Source Insight was popular a few years ago, but things have probably changed.
Re: Microsoft Launches Windows Phone 7 But Does Anyone Care?
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
Many game companies can target this platform much more easily than the iPhone/Android handsets as it also works off XNA. Seems like its lack of OpenGL offsets that a good bit... yes, a lot of Xbox/Windows games will be easy to port, but it seems like more ports will likely to be coming from iPhone/Android.
Following up to myself here: this could have some interesting benefits for Microsoft, too — iPhone has the most/best games right now, but Android is selling a ton of units so lots of folks are thinking about porting their iPhone games to Android. If WP7 was the inverse of what it is (if it had OpenGL and no XNA), it'd be seen as the third platform, something to maybe, possibly consider porting to once you'd ported to…
Android is a pretty horrible platform for gaming. Hardware acceleration is largely absent.
Re: Microsoft Launches Windows Phone 7 But Does Anyone Care?
#58I've heard WP7 has no compatibility whatsoever (so it's unable to run even WM5/6 apps)? If that's true — am I understanding properly that MS is introducing almost completely empty platform, which requires software to be written yet? I don't know whenever they will succeed or not, but it seems to be a hard task to enter the market when all rivals already have quite strong positions (including lots of software).
Having seen the cf that was Window 6, et al, they couldn't have made a smarter move.
Re: Microsoft Launches Windows Phone 7 But Does Anyone Care?
#59Tons of people prefer the Microsoft environment. Neither Google nor Apple have offered many of these people what they want in a dev environment. Apple's required an odd language up until very recently, and even the C# language you can write to doesn't do many of the things they're used to doing C# in. Android's development resources are capable, but Eclipse is a far cry from Visual Studio... I assume tons of people w…
The tools don't matter, it might be nice, but even though "tons of people prefer the Microsoft environment" I can't recall the last time they produced a product having superior user experience thanks to those tools. I can't name a single website/webapp/desktop app that I enjoy using on a daily base made with visual studio. I know a lot of the game companies use visual studio (c++) to produce parts of their games, but…
StackOverflow.com?
Re: Microsoft Launches Windows Phone 7 But Does Anyone Care?
#60Tons of people prefer the Microsoft environment. Neither Google nor Apple have offered many of these people what they want in a dev environment. Apple's required an odd language up until very recently, and even the C# language you can write to doesn't do many of the things they're used to doing C# in. Android's development resources are capable, but Eclipse is a far cry from Visual Studio... I assume tons of people w…
The tools don't matter, it might be nice, but even though "tons of people prefer the Microsoft environment" I can't recall the last time they produced a product having superior user experience thanks to those tools. I can't name a single website/webapp/desktop app that I enjoy using on a daily base made with visual studio. I know a lot of the game companies use visual studio (c++) to produce parts of their games, but…
That's the thing. Even if ObjC/Xcode is in fact inferior to C#/VS, it hasn't stopped talented iPhone and Mac developers from creating great apps.