Finally. It was a massive mistake from the get-go.
Microsoft Throws in the Towel on UWP, Elevates Win32
51–60 of 104 posts
Re: Microsoft Throws in the Towel on UWP, Elevates Win32
#52The MS app store and UWP died with the death of Windows Mobile. UWP was MS' strategy to have a united mobile and desktop experience (just like Apple is trying to do now with OSX + iOS). No mobile == no incentive to develop UWP. There were already hacks for Win32 to use the non-UI APIs from UWP (that's a lot of acronyms) so you could already do most or the UWP stuff with Win32. The new strategy starting with UWP islands is just how they are staring to integrate the UWP offerings with WPF/Winforms officially. I like the UWP UI, but developing the apps is a pain due to the sandboxing (as compared with old Win32).
Re: Microsoft Throws in the Towel on UWP, Elevates Win32
#53UWP isn’t dead??? It was demoed at build....
Re: Microsoft Throws in the Towel on UWP, Elevates Win32
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
And it's open-source now! I'm looking forward to people creating a better, more portable winforms even if we can't get it from Microsoft.
Doesn't Mono have Winforms already?
Yes, but I don't personally know how complete it is. The only company using it that I'm aware of is Plastic SCM.
Re: Microsoft Throws in the Towel on UWP, Elevates Win32
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
A lot of people, including me, do not think that "good looking" and "native looking" should be any different, and for that, Electron is a failure --- native applications use the UI of the platform and are consistent with other applications on the platform, while Electron applications obviously look different from them, and have the same look regardless of platform, completely ignoring the standard native UI it provid…
Is there really a Windows native look anymore? Every application seems to have a completely different UI style now. The old days of dialog boxes all having the same Winforms controls are gone and now they're a random mixture, even within Windows itself. The tabs in Chrome are not like the tabs in Excel which are not like the tabs in Paint3D. It's all over the place.
Yes, I believe the inconsistencies started with Vista, and has gotten worse since then, but the parts they didn't change still have the consistent normal Win32 style.
The standard tab control looks like this:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/desktop/controls/ta...
There is a (probably incomplete) list of standard controls here, I believe the documentation for each one contains screenshots of what they look like:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/desktop/controls/in...
That said, Chrome's tabs are (at least the last time I checked) actually bitmap images, Excel's tabs are also probably custom-drawn yet fortunately aren't bitmaps (just judging by how they look), and I believe Pain(t)3D is actually UWP.
Re: Microsoft Throws in the Towel on UWP, Elevates Win32
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
Electron gets a lot of stick but you can write good looking cross platform applications easily. Until someone does something better that isn’t single platform it has to be here to stay
A lot of people, including me, do not think that "good looking" and "native looking" should be any different, and for that, Electron is a failure --- native applications use the UI of the platform and are consistent with other applications on the platform, while Electron applications obviously look different from them, and have the same look regardless of platform, completely ignoring the standard native UI it provid…
The only people who ever bring this up are all on HN. Spotify is electron, vs code is electron, slack is electron. I have them open all day, and never even notice.
Re: Microsoft Throws in the Towel on UWP, Elevates Win32
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
iOS also disallows JIT’s. I’m not saying this is okay, but it is quite clearly possible to have a successful software platform without them. (Excluding the platform-holder’s own JIT’s, of course.)
iOS is not really “general-purpose computing”.
How do you define "general-purpose computing", then?
DVD players, microwaves, and even game consoles are single-purpose computing devices, designed to do one thing. I'm having a lot of trouble putting iPhones and iPads in that category. As terribly locked down as they are, they're still very much "general purpose".
And BTW, I think Microsoft's goal was quite clearly for UWP to be as locked down as iOS.
Re: Microsoft Throws in the Towel on UWP, Elevates Win32
#58Win32‘s continued popularity (vs UWP) I’m sure has at least partially to do with how it’s all plain C, which makes it simple to support with any programming language imaginable via bindings. If they were serious about pushing UWP adoption they should’ve provided plain C bindings for it so it could be used with Rust or Python or Swift or whatever. C# and C++ aren’t everybody’s cup of tea.
COM has always supported C. Go and look at any headers generated by MIDL and you’ll see a C variant of the interfaces.
I don’t see why you couldn’t write a UWP app in pure C, you’d just need a shitload of boilerplate and glue to make it sane to work with.
Though the C++ projection contains quite a bit of boilerplate itself, so... shrug
Re: Microsoft Throws in the Towel on UWP, Elevates Win32
#59I watched the videos for every session from the current Build conference I could find on this topic, but still don’t understand the strategy. Like at all. Listing the GUI toolkits that Microsoft is currently investing in, there’s UWP, WPF, React Native and also a new thing called WinUI. Not all of them will survive (by which I mean will continue to get significant new feature releases say three years from now). So it…
WinUI is just a new name for the UWP UI stack now that it is open source and decoupled from the OS, React Native is a wrapper on top of UWP/WinUI, and WPF isn't really getting significant new features other than being taken open source and ported to .net core. So really already there's just one forward-looking native UI stack, which is WinUI.
Maybe, but how does that square with the widespread assumption that UWP and the store are basically dead? Do you expect WinUI to be available in desktop apps eventually? There’s something called “XAML Islands” to integrate UWP components into desktop apps, but that’s technically ugly, incomplete, and very explicitly targeted at legacy applications. Beyond that, they didn’t announce anything as far as I can tell.
Re: Microsoft Throws in the Towel on UWP, Elevates Win32
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
Electron gets a lot of stick but you can write good looking cross platform applications easily. Until someone does something better that isn’t single platform it has to be here to stay
A lot of people, including me, do not think that "good looking" and "native looking" should be any different, and for that, Electron is a failure --- native applications use the UI of the platform and are consistent with other applications on the platform, while Electron applications obviously look different from them, and have the same look regardless of platform, completely ignoring the standard native UI it provid…
Depends on personal preferences I guess. I generally find "native" interfaces poorly suited to productivity. In fact even Microsoft agrees which is why they have UI of their Office products running on a highly contextually customized ribbon interface and visual cue based context menus which use transparency to hint at options. I similarly find Electron based apps usually focus on usability rather than throwing a million option into menus or cluttered toolbars which is the default "native" UI.