Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Microsoft suspends development of touch-friendly UWP Office apps for Windows

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 143 posts

Re: Microsoft suspends development of touch-friendly UWP Office apps for Windows

#11

Post by harryf »

vezycash wrote: post #10

Ms is my favorite tech company. They, however are their own worst enemy. They produce many awesome but crippled stuff - like honey stained with drops of bird shit. UWP's appx format is awesome - one click installation, sandbox, clean uninstallation, potential for diff updates. All these have nothing to do with portability. But they crippled it by making it store only until recently... Too late. One reason I hate usin…

> like honey stained with drops of bird shit.

That is a very specific image that I've never encountered in real life. Is it something that only beekeepers get to witness or is there some bird that homes in on honey pots?

Re: Microsoft suspends development of touch-friendly UWP Office apps for Windows

#12

Post by setquk »

hfdgiutdryg wrote: post #5

I wonder what the overall adoption rates are for UWP. As someone who's written Windows software since the 90s, I can't shake the feeling that Microsoft just churns out completely new development stacks every few years.

Very very very low.

Win32 is a lower portability risk than UWP. Genuinely that’s what I’ve heard people say. Most of the UI and event stuff can be moved to wx or equivalent in a few months and deployed on other platforms.

UWP and you’re up shit creek.

Most companies are on the fence with running away from windows. It moved too fast, costs too much money to keep up with and has too much friction.

Take a look on the windows store for the massive uptake. Not. Half of it is still win32 and the rest is written by MSFT, crapware or abandoned.

Everything is in a right state despite the marketing to the contrary.

Re: Microsoft suspends development of touch-friendly UWP Office apps for Windows

#13

Post by simongray »

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #8
DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly what is holding back Win32: there has not been any serious development of the desktop developer story since WPF in 2005 (WPF only received token updates since then, the last major update was in 2010 when they finally added a DataGrid control, lol) - but WPF is not well-suited for many types of software which have to fall-back on “pure” Win32 and the story there is nothing but depressing. Apple got it…

When Apple introduced Cocoa they also introduced Carbon however, an extension of the legacy MacOS APIs. Apple already slowly killed their Win32.

It's actually kind of impressive how much transitional stuff Apple has introduced and then removed with Mac OS X and how right many of their decisions turned out. I guess Cocoa itself was an extension of the legacy NextStep API too. They also had Classic for running old Mac apps directly in OSX and later Rosetta for running PowerPC binaries on Intel (I guess the same tech was used for the 32->64 bit transition). So many technologies have been smoothly deprecated and removed over the years by Apple.

Re: Microsoft suspends development of touch-friendly UWP Office apps for Windows

#14

Post by threeseed »

hfdgiutdryg wrote: post #5

I wonder what the overall adoption rates are for UWP. As someone who's written Windows software since the 90s, I can't shake the feeling that Microsoft just churns out completely new development stacks every few years.

There is also Electron/Javascript.

Skype/Teams are developed in it and they have invested a lot of effort into TypeScript.

Re: Microsoft suspends development of touch-friendly UWP Office apps for Windows

#16

Post by pjc50 »

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #7
hfdgiutdryg wrote: post #5

I wonder what the overall adoption rates are for UWP. As someone who's written Windows software since the 90s, I can't shake the feeling that Microsoft just churns out completely new development stacks every few years.

This is exactly what is holding back Win32: there has not been any serious development of the desktop developer story since WPF in 2005 (WPF only received token updates since then, the last major update was in 2010 when they finally added a DataGrid control, lol) - but WPF is not well-suited for many types of software which have to fall-back on “pure” Win32 and the story there is nothing but depressing. Apple got it…

> The story is so bad Microsoft’s own flagship software has to build their own UI frameworks

I think this might be the other way round: if they're not eating their own dogfood, it's much easier for the UI framework to come adrift from actual use cases.

It's really telling that in Windows 8/10 they "modernised" some, but not all, of the control panel UI. It's basically random as to whether a setting you need will be in a Metro-flavoured window or a Win32-flavoured one.

To me, the trouble with everything after WinForms is that it lacks a really compelling reason to upgrade. It's not easier to develop for and it's not nicer to use, and on many desktop systems the font rendering is much uglier in the new system. It does perform better at high DPI, but (catch-22) few people use high DPI windows systems because it's not well supported by even the OS let alone the applications.

Re: Microsoft suspends development of touch-friendly UWP Office apps for Windows

#18

Post by pjmlp »

simongray wrote: post #13
TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When Apple introduced Cocoa they also introduced Carbon however, an extension of the legacy MacOS APIs. Apple already slowly killed their Win32.

It's actually kind of impressive how much transitional stuff Apple has introduced and then removed with Mac OS X and how right many of their decisions turned out. I guess Cocoa itself was an extension of the legacy NextStep API too. They also had Classic for running old Mac apps directly in OSX and later Rosetta for running PowerPC binaries on Intel (I guess the same tech was used for the 32->64 bit transition). So m…

Because Apple does the "take it our way or leave" approach.

Which is also a reason why they hardly have a meaningful market share across the enterprise world.

Re: Microsoft suspends development of touch-friendly UWP Office apps for Windows

#19

Post by pjmlp »

kyberias wrote: post #17

The first Excel was packaged with Windows because install-base of Windows wasn't large enough. Maybe they should integrate UWP in Office?

Most UWP improvements coming up in FluentUI were originally developed by the Office team, as shown on Build 2018, so this decision is kind of weird.

Re: Microsoft suspends development of touch-friendly UWP Office apps for Windows

#20

Post by MichaelMoser123 »

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #7
hfdgiutdryg wrote: post #5

I wonder what the overall adoption rates are for UWP. As someone who's written Windows software since the 90s, I can't shake the feeling that Microsoft just churns out completely new development stacks every few years.

This is exactly what is holding back Win32: there has not been any serious development of the desktop developer story since WPF in 2005 (WPF only received token updates since then, the last major update was in 2010 when they finally added a DataGrid control, lol) - but WPF is not well-suited for many types of software which have to fall-back on “pure” Win32 and the story there is nothing but depressing. Apple got it…

What's bad about GDI? (I used to do windows but have not been following, I remember that you need to do GetDC and ReleaseDC on a window handle to get the device context and then to release it - in pairs, else...)
Post reply on HN