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Microsoft introduces Universal Windows apps

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21–30 of 187 posts

Re: Microsoft introduces Universal Windows apps

#21
I'm still trying to figure out how/why this makes sense as a goal. Building an application that runs across multiple platforms in congruent spaces makes sense: iOS and Android and Windows Phone. When you move to running the same application across Laptop vs. Phone style platforms, even on modern hardware, you're looking at capabilities and resources that are radically different. I can see wanting to share certain common code, but a library system ala npm, bundler, cpan, etc., would handle that better than sharing a common code base/project. What am I missing?

Re: Microsoft introduces Universal Windows apps

#22
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They've just announced they are making WinJS cross-platform and open source (under Apache license). Now I haven't used WinJS, I haven't ever developed a WinRT app (just a few for the Phone), but doesn't WinJS have a ton of quality components, even more so than WinRT XAML? This seems pretty awesome.

I missed the cross platform part, I've been bouncing between the live stream and work this morning. So the claim is iOS apps with WinJS as if it had been built in Obj C with XIBs and not just a web view hosted in a native harness? If true that would be pretty amazing (it would probably also cause Xamarin to shit a brick)

No, definitely just a WebView. Still having a set of quality cross-platform MVVM-aware components for HTML5 is nice.

Re: Microsoft introduces Universal Windows apps

#23
post #2

This is imho the best news ever from microsoft. Now I can target serverside, frontend, windows8 devices and windowsphone all with one language (javascript for me). Not bad at all update: I have to add other news just announced. With winJS now we can target also xboxone, ios and android device And also the full framework is opensource under apache license update2: winJS on github https://github.com/winjs/winjs

Couldn't you do this with javscript before and also get MacOS, Linux, and Android? Anything with a web-browser?

Re: Microsoft introduces Universal Windows apps

#25

I'm still trying to figure out how/why this makes sense as a goal. Building an application that runs across multiple platforms in congruent spaces makes sense: iOS and Android and Windows Phone. When you move to running the same application across Laptop vs. Phone style platforms, even on modern hardware, you're looking at capabilities and resources that are radically different. I can see wanting to share certain com…

Microsoft has NuGet, which can do that. Common base is stuff for REST Interfaces, Entities etc

Re: Microsoft introduces Universal Windows apps

#26

I'm still trying to figure out how/why this makes sense as a goal. Building an application that runs across multiple platforms in congruent spaces makes sense: iOS and Android and Windows Phone. When you move to running the same application across Laptop vs. Phone style platforms, even on modern hardware, you're looking at capabilities and resources that are radically different. I can see wanting to share certain com…

[deleted]

Re: Microsoft introduces Universal Windows apps

#27

I'm still trying to figure out how/why this makes sense as a goal. Building an application that runs across multiple platforms in congruent spaces makes sense: iOS and Android and Windows Phone. When you move to running the same application across Laptop vs. Phone style platforms, even on modern hardware, you're looking at capabilities and resources that are radically different. I can see wanting to share certain com…

The real key here is sharing business logic.

Microsoft apps are written using the MVVM (Model View, View-Model) framework. The idea here is that you would share almost all of your model code, and really only rewrite the view layer (XAML) per platform. You're also allowed to share the exact same views across platforms, but it's unlikely that will be a good experience for users, given the differences: screen sizes, input modalities, etc.

Re: Microsoft introduces Universal Windows apps

#28

I'm still trying to figure out how/why this makes sense as a goal. Building an application that runs across multiple platforms in congruent spaces makes sense: iOS and Android and Windows Phone. When you move to running the same application across Laptop vs. Phone style platforms, even on modern hardware, you're looking at capabilities and resources that are radically different. I can see wanting to share certain com…

Think of the set of applications that can also be implemented as responsive web applications.

Now you'll be able to implement them with a native experience, without significantly increasing your costs.

What about games? I've got a load of games on the iPad, why can't I play them on my (hypothetical) touch-enabled MacBook Pro?

Why do I have to pay twice for everything?

This is just what Sony have done with Cross-Play - customers love being able to buy a game once and then be able to play it on their PS3, PS4 and Vita.

Re: Microsoft introduces Universal Windows apps

#29
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I missed the cross platform part, I've been bouncing between the live stream and work this morning. So the claim is iOS apps with WinJS as if it had been built in Obj C with XIBs and not just a web view hosted in a native harness? If true that would be pretty amazing (it would probably also cause Xamarin to shit a brick)

No, definitely just a WebView. Still having a set of quality cross-platform MVVM-aware components for HTML5 is nice.

Oh, I misunderstood what the implications were for "cross platform" then in this context. I would never think that javascript wasn't cross platform, I'll have to look into the MVVM components but JS already has that with libraries like Knockout so obviously I need to go back and watch the keynote again.

Thanks for the clarification.

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