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Microsoft introduces Universal Windows apps

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Re: Microsoft introduces Universal Windows apps

#111

Post by gagaga »

0x006A wrote: post #39
gagaga wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess Google and Apple also live in a bubble? Not really sure what your point is. Is your expectation that Microsoft Universal apps also run on Android and Google? On Web browsers? Would you like them to use a different term?

Its fine if they only target Microsoft Products as a Platform, calling it Universal was confusing to me. Of cause Google and Apple also have there bubbles too, they seam to be more aware of the universe they live in to not brand themselves as the universe.

So you are aware that Apple also calls apps that run on both iPhone and iPad as Universal apps?

Re: Microsoft introduces Universal Windows apps

#112

Post by chokolad »

taiki wrote: post #105
r00fus wrote: post #42

Beware Apple, Google: Microsoft is starting to get it .

What about the internals? Is it still kind of a mess under the hood? I heard they rebuilt the TCP/IP stack so it's not user land 32 bit driver anymore. Any ideas if/when they'll modernize NTFS? Right now it's a race to the bottom to who has the worse FS, HFS+ or NTFS. WinFS or ZFS on OS X would be a godsend. What about the registry? Any idea if they'll make that easier to manage for regular people? Am I still fucked…

> Any ideas if/when they'll modernize NTFS? Right now it's a race to the bottom to who has the worse FS, HFS+ or NTFS. WinFS or ZFS on OS X would be a godsend.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2012/01/16/building-the-n...

Re: Microsoft introduces Universal Windows apps

#113

Post by bananas »

taiki wrote: post #105
r00fus wrote: post #42

Beware Apple, Google: Microsoft is starting to get it .

What about the internals? Is it still kind of a mess under the hood? I heard they rebuilt the TCP/IP stack so it's not user land 32 bit driver anymore. Any ideas if/when they'll modernize NTFS? Right now it's a race to the bottom to who has the worse FS, HFS+ or NTFS. WinFS or ZFS on OS X would be a godsend. What about the registry? Any idea if they'll make that easier to manage for regular people? Am I still fucked…

No it's rock solid underneath.

The TCP stack hasn't been a 32-bit driver since XP.

NTFS has been modernised already: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReFS

The registry is fine - it's people pissing around in it that break it.

Win32 - haven't touched it for years. Driver model: not my problem.

Mavericks is a crime compared to windows 8.1. I use both, regularly. It's virtually impossible to use efficiently with a keyboard unless you have twisted mutilated hands to hit meta keys galore and half the apps don't actually survive more than 2 minutes without crashing.

Re: Microsoft introduces Universal Windows apps

#114

Post by sandyarmstrong »

dmix wrote: post #51
gum_ina_package wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mono! Lots of ASP.Net projects (like Nancyfx or SignalR) are actually built on Mono. I think there's some hope that web dev on Windows isn't dead.

I tried Keepass2 with mono on Linux and it's pretty slow and unnatural UX experience. Much like running Wine. On OSX Keepass2 mono just froze constantly and looked weird. I've had similar experience with other cross-platform apps. Total cross-platform is a pipe dream. Just like Java or more recently HTML5/JS cross-platform mobile apps, they are almost always a half-baked solution compared to proper native OS apps. Th…

KeePass is a bad example. It's a Windows Forms app. If they wanted to properly support Linux, they could continue to share most of their C# code, but write a tailored UI using something like GTK#.

Nobody is truly advocating "write once, run anywhere".

Re: Microsoft introduces Universal Windows apps

#115

Post by Zigurd »

emeraldd wrote: post #93
Zigurd wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could say the same for a 4.3 inch phone vs. a 10 inch 2.5k, and, soon, 12 inch 4k Android tablet. And if you want radically different capabilities, phones have SIMs that are assumed to be single-owner while most Android tablets are multi-user. Processors range from 800Mhz single-processor with mediocre bus performance, to quad-core 2.3 Ghz. There really isn't any interactive software you wouldn't run on a mobile…

What about things like Keyboard and Mouse vs. Touch? Network Quality (Persistent highspeed connection vs. intermittent limited quality)? Available storage space (You can consider most desktop machines (1/4 terrabyte or better) unlimited in comparison to mobile devices? Multiple Large displays (not on all I know) vs. single small display? There's alot more there than numeric computation abilities alone to take into co…

There are reasons to sit in front of a couple large non-touch displays attached to an uncompromising $5000+ computer. But that's for the The other 95% will benefit from being freed from their veal cubicles and looking up at human faces while walking around.

As for mouse vs touch etc. I agree, I think. Microsoft should have made a touch OS that isn't Windows. They might get Windows fully evolved to span that gap about the time Android takes away the enterprise business.

Re: Microsoft introduces Universal Windows apps

#116

Post by hayksaakian »

_random_ wrote: post #101
shashwatak wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chrome, and thereby all Google webapps, run on every major OS.

What about their tablet and phone OS - Android? Is there an app-store for those 'webapps' (not the Chrome app store)?

coming soon TM

so far they've been working with phonegap to allow porting packaged apps to phonegap (to then package for specific platforms)

http://phonegap.com/blog/2013/11/21/chrome-apps-pgdayeu/

Re: Microsoft introduces Universal Windows apps

#117

Post by taiki »

chokolad wrote: post #112
taiki wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about the internals? Is it still kind of a mess under the hood? I heard they rebuilt the TCP/IP stack so it's not user land 32 bit driver anymore. Any ideas if/when they'll modernize NTFS? Right now it's a race to the bottom to who has the worse FS, HFS+ or NTFS. WinFS or ZFS on OS X would be a godsend. What about the registry? Any idea if they'll make that easier to manage for regular people? Am I still fucked…

> Any ideas if/when they'll modernize NTFS? Right now it's a race to the bottom to who has the worse FS, HFS+ or NTFS. WinFS or ZFS on OS X would be a godsend. http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2012/01/16/building-the-n...

You mean like WinFS?

I'll believe it when they ship it.

EDIT:

Retracted. Looks like it's actually going to ship with Win8.1

Re: Microsoft introduces Universal Windows apps

#118

Post by makomk »

sdkmvx wrote: post #92
dragontamer wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you point out is an _abstraction_ that compilers include as part of their kits. You claim to be a low-level programmer who understands C. The truth is right in front of you. Decompile those programs, look at their symbol tables. Notice, every Win32 program starts at WinMain, called with the arguments that I listed above. Come back when you've done this simple exercise. Realize, WinMain is the _true_ starting poi…

Show me where in the ANSI standard it says this is illegal. Implementation details do not matter. The Microsoft C compiler will compile a ANSI C89-conforming program into a runnable executable on Windows. The rest is undefined. And while we're on implementation details, please note that most UNIX platforms do not start at main either. Most platforms include some soft of crt0 that must be linked which contains the rea…

Come to think of it, I don't think I've used any platform where main() is the real entry point to the executable. On Linux the real entry point is _start, all of the bare-metal embedded stuff I've touched does a whole bunch of hardware setup in crt0 before it calls main(), etc...

Re: Microsoft introduces Universal Windows apps

#119

Post by taiki »

bananas wrote: post #113
taiki wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about the internals? Is it still kind of a mess under the hood? I heard they rebuilt the TCP/IP stack so it's not user land 32 bit driver anymore. Any ideas if/when they'll modernize NTFS? Right now it's a race to the bottom to who has the worse FS, HFS+ or NTFS. WinFS or ZFS on OS X would be a godsend. What about the registry? Any idea if they'll make that easier to manage for regular people? Am I still fucked…

No it's rock solid underneath. The TCP stack hasn't been a 32-bit driver since XP. NTFS has been modernised already: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReFS The registry is fine - it's people pissing around in it that break it. Win32 - haven't touched it for years. Driver model: not my problem. Mavericks is a crime compared to windows 8.1. I use both, regularly. It's virtually impossible to use efficiently with a keyboard…

I should've been way more clear about my gripe with the Windows TCP/IP stack. Why the hell does the TCP/IP stack eat itself? No other OS I've ever used has the nuttiness that is

netsh winsock reset

as a regular troubleshooting step when diagnosing network connectivity issues. I was long under the impression that the reason why that kept happening was that the NT kernel didn't have a robust TCP/IP stack of its own and was reimplementing the BSD sockets via a translation layer that was easily hooked into by godawful apps that felt like putting whatever it wanted there.

ReFS wasn't on my radar, and that's my fault.

The registry isn't fine. As of Windows 8 it can still hose a machine by going corrupt. The concept of having a centralized application database for application state and other metadata isn't a bad one, the current implementation absolutely sucks. It goes corrupt and the entire machine is rendered useless. Granted, the current solution is to just back it up and hope none of the backups corrupt either. Corruption doesn't happen from just people manually messing with it, corruption happens from a lot of apps reading and writing from it at the same time. A lot of apps not even bothering with good practices in how to handle it either.

As far as Win32 and the driver model not being your problem... When crappy apps written in 20 year old APIs and devices using crappy drivers crash your machine, then it absolutely IS your problem.

I can't speak to your use of OSX with a keyboard. However, given my choices, I'll take weird metakey combos over, "Is my TCP/IP stack going to eat itself this week?" Besides, emacs uses nothing but crappy and bizarre meta key combos and it's still a thing. So.

Re: Microsoft introduces Universal Windows apps

#120

Post by pistle »

emeraldd wrote: post #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 com…

You aren't quite seeing the full picture and including some interesting additional bits. The 'experience' of an app across devices - like WhatsApp portable (and then some) - is feasible with what they put in the keynote and what the lesser Scotts did later. It's never been a better time to be a .net/C# dev.

They put on display some pretty great tooling for sharing common code across platforms and tuning the experience per UI. With decent cloud integration, there's a smoother on ramp for C# devs to get to wide audience apps with less dev resource than most any other dev env I can think of.

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