71–80 of 205 posts
For me the saddest thing is not Windows Phone going away, it's Nokia not going all the way with their Qt based Linux distro, Meego. I had a Nokia N9 smartphone, the UI was amazing. It took 5 (I think?) years for iOS and Android to sort of copy the gesture based UI, badly. Damn internal corporate politics at Nokia.
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I miss Psion which ironically abandoned the market because they thought Microsoft would dominate it. Some of their ease of use has never been replicated.
I miss WebOS, which was criminally cancelled by the imbecile HP hired. It took years for any other mobile platform to catch up to the convenience of my beloved Palm Pre.
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Previous Windows Mobile kernels had their source available for download on the web. Although not MIT licensed or anything, they were radically open for the Microsoft of the time (early 2000s!) I believe Windows CE 7 also had its source available. FWIW CE7 was an amazing operating system that had a minimal OS image of around 8MB on disk. (Numbers are from memory, might be horribly wrong, it was a long time ago that I…
I think Moore's Law was always going to kill CE. It has several limitations that could not be worked around and were irrelevant 25 years ago but very relevant today. In a world where Apple just stripped down their desktop OS to make a phone OS, there is no future for something like CE. This is why Microsoft just moved to using their desktop kernel for future versions of Windows Phone -- it makes porting software so m…
CE6 and 7 were a complete ground up rewrite from the CE5 and earlier versions. They didn't have any of the limitations that previous CE versions did.
> In a world where Apple just stripped down their desktop OS to make a phone OS,
My understanding is that iOS is so seriously stripped down compared to macOS that while the kernel is the same, the entire runtime is so different that it may as well be a different OS.
And I don't think Apple hasn't tried to keep releases between the two synced up (maybe they have? No idea honestly), compared to Windows Phone which was merged closely with desktop Windows.
In all honesty, Microsoft had so many resources to throw at the problem, that keeping the teeny tiny kernel team for WinCE employed was not worth losing the entire mobile market by forcing the OS teams to merge and then rewrite everything, poorly at times, from the ground up.
Of course lots of Microsoft politics got involved, including killing Silverlight (which tl;dr is why corporate web apps are written in React now, killing Silverlight basically lost MS the entire internal LOB app market), and forcing a brand new API to be designed.
On that note, by the time WP8 released, the OS was missing key APIs, was hard to write code for, and would only fall further behind Android and iOS.
Eventually the WP platform team did get into a good release cadence, but by then the market had been lost.
IMHO at that time Microsoft didn't understand the importance of regular timely releases to keep them in the news. Apple released a new phone, and a new OS version, yearly. Around 2010 MS was still doing "big bang" OS releases with multiple year gaps in-between.
I worked at Microsoft at the time (started my career in Windows Mobile, then Windows Phone), and people kept asking me "is Windows Phone still around? I haven't heard anything about it in forever", with "forever" being more than a year.
Everyone complains about how new phones come out every year, but if a manufacturer skips a release year, everyone assumes that the phone line is going to be discontinued. Developers stop writing apps for it, and no one wants to buy a phone that was released 16 months ago. Heck after about 8 or 9 months people know that it is time to either "wait for the next model" or "wait for the big discounts".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Previous Windows Mobile kernels had their source available for download on the web. Although not MIT licensed or anything, they were radically open for the Microsoft of the time (early 2000s!) I believe Windows CE 7 also had its source available. FWIW CE7 was an amazing operating system that had a minimal OS image of around 8MB on disk. (Numbers are from memory, might be horribly wrong, it was a long time ago that I…
Microsoft thought the way you do for years after the iPhone came out. They thought they’d be fine competing using CE based systems. They completely underestimated the advantages a modern, secure, pre-emptive multitasking OS with proper process isolation, fine grained multi threading, and all the other features you get that a workstation class Unix OS bring to the table. That 8MB footprint sound great, until you consi…
Not only that, it was a brand new OS written from the ground up that was designed to be modular and battery efficient.
Sadly it never got a chance to shine, as internal politics killed it.
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If you watch the Windows UI community talks on YouTube, at least on public channels, whoever is in charge doesn't seem to grasp how much all those rewrites killed the ecosystem, and they keep asking people to invest into WinUI/WinAppSDK, which not only is yet another rewrite, the tooling is a joke versus UWP. No wonder that Windows developer community decided to ignore whatever is related to WinUI, and focus on the s…
Looking for some advice here. I’d be interested to develop simple GUI’s at work. I don’t have much experience of that. I have a license for VS2015 to maintain legacy VB and C++ but I think an upgrade could be arranged. I’m comfortable doing web dev but the browser remains limiting. In my situation, would learning native gui development be worthwhile or is it much easier to stick to websites and/or Electron?
If you want to dabble in desktop with C#, Avalonia is the best way to go nowadays. I'm having a blast with it working on a couple of projects for my assigned client, and in a couple of personal toy projects.
I really liked my windows phone. The colourful live tiles and the physical design were great. What it lacked was 3rd party apps.
Microsoft has this habit of trying to enter a new market like a bully. They toss billions of dollars around, they schmooze whoever needs schmoozing, millions in advertising, start name-calling competitors... brutes. Knuckle dragging brutes. Off the top of my head: Zune (belittling Apple), Search (remember they started name-calling Google), CompuServe (paid shills brutally attacking people online), Operating Systems (…
For me the saddest thing is not Windows Phone going away, it's Nokia not going all the way with their Qt based Linux distro, Meego. I had a Nokia N9 smartphone, the UI was amazing. It took 5 (I think?) years for iOS and Android to sort of copy the gesture based UI, badly. Damn internal corporate politics at Nokia.
Blackberry went all the way with QNX and it didn't pan out either. There just wasn't room for a third player.
It took something like four years until Apple and Android passed Nokia's market share. They had their chance to fight.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you watch the Windows UI community talks on YouTube, at least on public channels, whoever is in charge doesn't seem to grasp how much all those rewrites killed the ecosystem, and they keep asking people to invest into WinUI/WinAppSDK, which not only is yet another rewrite, the tooling is a joke versus UWP. No wonder that Windows developer community decided to ignore whatever is related to WinUI, and focus on the s…
Looking for some advice here. I’d be interested to develop simple GUI’s at work. I don’t have much experience of that. I have a license for VS2015 to maintain legacy VB and C++ but I think an upgrade could be arranged. I’m comfortable doing web dev but the browser remains limiting. In my situation, would learning native gui development be worthwhile or is it much easier to stick to websites and/or Electron?