41–50 of 142 posts
I must have missed something because last time I checked it was still on the desktop, a failed phone platform and a game console with an installed base of less than 30 million. Meanwhile Android is everywhere from phones, tablets, desktops, cars, TV's and numerous IoT devices.
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As a long-time Win32 programmer (over a decade), I can safely say that the vast majority of existing applications still remain (for the time being) forward-compatible. Here's some examples: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JOj-bAZBhnE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mRfn4M5DXTE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqFWuNmWbHk The reasons people hold off on "upgrading" Windows versions is not mainly because of compatibility…
That's great! I didn't know about it. Would anyone happen to know how does it compare with the applications on Linux? Are they similarly forward compatible?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>"with possibility to write one application that works on all" I'm not sure this is such a good thing. Maybe I'm in the minority but my phone and my desktop OS have vastly different use cases and I'd expect apps running on each of them to be different. I'm not interested in a converging UI. I want a user experience tailored to the platform I'm running the app on. I'd rather a solid desktop experience then having to p…
> I'm not sure this is such a good thing. Maybe I'm in the minority but my phone and my desktop OS have vastly different use cases and I'd expect apps running on each of them to be different. But why should they be programmed different? You can create XAML forms that are optimized for each platform. But why would you want to rewrite your code to adapt to the different GUIs? Won't it just be easier, as a developer, to…
> Won't it just be easier, as a developer, to create a singular platform with two XAML (one for small screens, one for large screens) that share the same codebase?
In theory yes, in practice changing the UI isn't the only problem. The problem is that a phone is much more limited, both in hardware and in what it is allowed to do.
Just as a simple example, on the desktop you can have storage that's shared between apps (at least for now), hence if you want your app's settings to be synchronized with Dropbox, you only need to detect Dropbox's folder and save your stuff in it, whereas on a mobile, you need to integrate with Dropbox's API. Plus on the desktop you usually have a lot of storage space, like my 5 year old desktop has 1 TB of storage, whereas my phones only have 32 GB and 64 GB respectively and these are high-end phones. So clearly storage is a bottleneck on mobile phone, but not on desktops. Another simple example: battery life. Mobile developers have to worry about battery life, the big and forever bottleneck of mobile devices, whereas desktop developers have never been concerned about it. For example I avoided to install Skype on my Android for two years because it was sucking my battery dry in only 2-3 hours. And now mobile Skype is so aggressive in cutting down on background chat that I cannot rely on it to deliver chat messages on time. And you want to hear the worst part? Moore's law doesn't apply well to batteries, so unless major breakthroughs happen, this will only get worse ;-)
And if universal apps on the desktop are as limited as their phone counterparts, that would turn out quite ironic for Microsoft to have turned your powerful desktop into a dumb phone just to have the same experience everywhere. Of course, them and others will try and turn this around as being for the senile grandmas everywhere that are unable to use their laptops, but many of us will have known the truth about that one.
Operation successful, patient dead... It's kind of tragic that much of this effort may never pay off: in the process of merging platforms and restructuring API's (that started with Vista and is still going) Microsoft lost the connection to many of its developers, who went to build Web, iOS and Android apps. WPF, Silverlight, WinRT, XAML, UWP: there were too many changes, rewrites and deprecations. Windows Phone, bril…
Operation successful, patient dead... It's kind of tragic that much of this effort may never pay off: in the process of merging platforms and restructuring API's (that started with Vista and is still going) Microsoft lost the connection to many of its developers, who went to build Web, iOS and Android apps. WPF, Silverlight, WinRT, XAML, UWP: there were too many changes, rewrites and deprecations. Windows Phone, bril…
You mean like the "Framework of the day" on web land?
Or the "rewrite your app with each Android version" that you cannot get?
Or "your language just got replaced" on iOS land?
What are the substantial benefits of getting onboard the UWP rain ? Will the platform code work faster.. will the deployment be faster ? what about the knowledge devs have gathered for decades. will the new way of doing things produce a more efficient and better running application ?
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That's great! I didn't know about it. Would anyone happen to know how does it compare with the applications on Linux? Are they similarly forward compatible?
Oh, in no way, shape, or form, unless the application was statically linked, which is uncommon.
> Microsoft has still arguably achieved something that its competitors have not. Rumors that Google will somehow merge ChromeOS and Android have been circulating for some time, but it hasn't happened just yet Uhhh.. ChromeOS and Android are both Linux. This is just as merged as running a stripped down Windows kernel.
I'd call linux a direct competitor of MS. There may be no single entity who as done as much with linux, but linux as software is certainly more pervasive than windows.
I cannot run GNU/Linux applications on Android/Linux nor on ChromeOS/Linux.
> Microsoft promised developers that Windows would run anywhere. This summer, it finally will. Bullshit. Versions of Windows that are all labeled Windows 10 are running in a lot of devices, and you can write applications that in theory can run on all of them (though practically writing one application that runs well on all of them may be somewhat harder if you want your application to be useful in any way.) But that…
Now it is near impossible to ask a sales person "will software X run on this new machine i am thinking of buying".
One now needs to ask what sort of processor is it has "Windows 10" tells you nothing about what software it can run.
fxxking stupid