381–390 of 604 posts
To quote Steve Jobs: "The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste. And I don't mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way, in the sense that they don't think of original ideas, and they don't bring much culture into their products. "
2 things Microsoft failed to do in the last 15 years are: 1) They abandoned their mobile phone, tablet, and wearable strategy. So, today if you develop a native Windows application, it will only work on desktops and laptops. That is it. It is not attractive for a developer to learn a whole new UI framework just to target a single form factor. And I don't know if there is any solution for this at this point, they shou…
They had great devices before iOS/Android and then again after. That Lumia phone was awesome. They had one of the best cameras. Their live tiles they had on the phone & desktop OS were really good. Even Windows 8 had a cool CRM app in its infancy that tried to link all your social media & email accounts together.
They killed all of that even with multiple chances to win people over. It seemed they wanted to win the new markets in less than a year.
For as much flack as Google gets for short lived awesome products, Microsoft is right up there. Which is why when they've announced new things like Blazor, MAUI, etc., no one expects them to live long enough to trust their apps on.
I also strongly question their enterprise MOAT when most kids are growing up on Apple & Google devices the past decade. Microsoft seems to lack long term strategy.
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A notable example I remember from around 2010 was when Evernote dropped WPF, supposedly due to blurry text issues but probably also performance (remember when we called it EverBloat?) Can't find the original blog post about it but here's a couple mentions of it: - https://www.edandersen.com/p/evernote-has-no-patience-drops-... - https://www.reddit.com/r/csharp/comments/x0nu7h/comment/im9k...
Blurry fonts was my main issue with WPF. I get headaches from blurry text and the colour bleeding from ClearType just makes the headache worse. Fortunately for me, I had mostly switched to Linux by that time already, where it was at the time relatively easy to just enable grey scale AA with full hinting. In recent years this has gotten worse again with modern software incorrectly assuming everyone has a High DPI moni…
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It's very amusing to see Sinofsky of all people all but dumping on .NET and (still?!) not understanding why developers so proactively jumped ship from Win32 & MFC hell to WinForms. Or why the HTML/JS app model in Win8 never really took off. I was in DevDiv during his great WinRT push and the overall feeling I remember was that the guys in Windows had zero clue as to what the devs actually wanted, but were hell bent o…
It seems Windows division has too much power and they used it to break their things. Also, Windows division is shipping a subpar product now. In a sane world developer division and Windows division would think things together, developer division would produce the tools and the same tools would be used by Windows, other Microsoft products such as Office and third party developers. Why that doesn't happen at Microsoft,…
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What does "GPU" mean here? Previous uses of the term seemed to imply "dedicated hardware for improving rendering performance" which the SVGA stuff would seem to fall squarely under.
The term GPU was first coined by Sony for the PlayStation with its 3D capabilities, and has been associated with 3D rendering since. In some products it stood for Geometry Processing Unit, again referring to 3D. Purely 2D graphics coprocessors generally don’t fall under what is considered a GPU.
[1] Maybe I've just been blindly ignorant for 30 years, but as far as I could tell, 'GPU' seemed to emerge as a more Huffman-efficient encoding for the same thing we were calling a 'video card'
Desktop, especially Windows, is such a mess. It's 2026. We're running 8+ cores and 32gb ram as standard. We can run super realistic video games at high frame-rates. Yet on the same machine, resizing a window with rectangles in it is laggy on every platform except macOS (where there's a chance it's not laggy).
Sorry but neither Linux or Windows lag to resize windows in any of my 4 machines. They range from old laptops to a Ryzen 7 9800X3D workstation. Just yesterday a friend's father needed help setting up their second-hand old laptop with an old i5 processor. I slapped KDE and there was no lag to be seen. Bonus point that Windows and some Linux distros have sane, intuitive window management. Whereas with macOS I keep seei…
I am also baffled by the multiple control points. I can log in to mail in 3 places. Settings have 3 with different uis....it is gross.
What I find must puzzling is that everyone seems to just be violating basic rules that had been in place for ages. Things like: - If you can't respond to a UI event wait until you can - Menus should be tree structures - Pressing alt should underline the hotkeys you need to access anything clickable As well as just basic responsiveness or predictability. A 2000 era windows application may not have been pretty, and may…
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Your post is touching on a key question: why write a Windows-specific app? I'm a developer who has built and published several apps. I want the biggest possible audience for those apps. Why would I limit those apps to Windows? (Or even to any single platform/OS?) Web apps work everywhere. The web has grown increasingly powerful and capable. Why would I invest in a technology that can only run on a single OS? Doesn't…
> Web apps work everywhere. The web has grown increasingly powerful and capable. Why would I invest in a technology that can only run on a single OS? Doesn't make sense. You mean the hypertext platform that has been shoehorned into Java's paradigm, suffering from the same boof-o-rama as Windows, and whose lowest common denominator to support must be Safari for iOS?
Sure it is a hassle to get notifications working, but my take on that for years as a desktop user was "I need another source of spam about as much as I need to get raped". For years I had bottom of the line Android Tracfones and wondered "how is it people get so excited about apps?" because they just didn't work but once I got an iPhone I started to appreciate that the McDonald's app would send me a notification when my food was ready. Recently it was pointed out to me that the application behind these cards
https://mastodon.social/@UP8/116086491667959840
really would benefit from notifications ("your photos are ready!") and I am looking at the hurdles I can jump through and it looks possible but weird. Like why would I want people to install my app on the homescreen where it will get lost on page after page of twisty little app icons that all look alike?
Then there is that PWA boondoggle, there is another app in that system that I can use to register those cards and it is a clear case where I might want to do it outside of cell coverage (say I was in the woods) save a form submission and upload when I get back in range.
What can I say? That service worker system is insane, something like Kubernetes that only Google could subject us to. I mean, Google could have worked out the math for synchronizing a local database to a remote database, by then the Lotus Notes patents were mostly expired, we could have gotten something good. Or Google could have added an API to control the behavior of the browser cache. Instead we got something half baked and barely reliable and then Apple went out and made something a little bit worse. Had it been a good standard to begin with the outcome could have been entirely different.
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The evergreen question of "how do you go back and/or close an app on IOS?"
I feel that some people are just too old to get used to the swipe based ui. I mean friends of mine who just keep buying the only phones with (screen based) back and home buttons.
Why change what works fine? Maybe that's the definition of being too old, can't be bothered to change to new things.
2 things Microsoft failed to do in the last 15 years are: 1) They abandoned their mobile phone, tablet, and wearable strategy. So, today if you develop a native Windows application, it will only work on desktops and laptops. That is it. It is not attractive for a developer to learn a whole new UI framework just to target a single form factor. And I don't know if there is any solution for this at this point, they shou…