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Microsoft Confirms UWP Is Not the Future of Windows Apps

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Re: Microsoft Confirms UWP Is Not the Future of Windows Apps

#41

Post by Paraesthetic »

crispinb wrote: post #28
techntoke wrote: post #21

Xamarin isn't either. It really is whatever open source cross-platform UI leads the pack. I am really impressed by Qt Apps, but I also am not happy with their licensing. I would like to see something new with Vulkan desktop integration. I think Microsoft really needs to reconsider what is important, and I believe them working on open source will have to be a better commitment. They should pay some of their Kubernetes…

> I see more and more great apps for Linux Bit of an aside here, but what for example? I'm using Linux these days as the least-worst option, but I wouldn't have claimed app quality as one of its advantages. It has the best terminals (matched perhaps by iTerm on mac), and most of the important cross-platform apps are perfectly fine (VS Code, IntelliJ, Firefox, Chrome etc). Could you list some of the linux-specific app…

How does it compare to the new Windows Terminal?

Re: Microsoft Confirms UWP Is Not the Future of Windows Apps

#42

Post by crispinb »

techntoke wrote: post #32
crispinb wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I see more and more great apps for Linux Bit of an aside here, but what for example? I'm using Linux these days as the least-worst option, but I wouldn't have claimed app quality as one of its advantages. It has the best terminals (matched perhaps by iTerm on mac), and most of the important cross-platform apps are perfectly fine (VS Code, IntelliJ, Firefox, Chrome etc). Could you list some of the linux-specific app…

Telegram works great, Slack works fine as does Discord. LibreOffice is descent, there are a few Money Manager apps. I'm not a huge fan of GTK or KDE-based apps, but ones developed in React Native and Qt with static binaries, then I really enjoy the quality and having the latest version integrated into my package manager. It is much cleaner to install and remove overall. Containers would help isolate this even more. I…

You're adding to my list of cross-platform apps. I agree that most of the important ones are fine under Linux, but I still haven't seen many (any?) great linux-specific ones.

There are obviously reasons to use Linux (I do), I just don't think unique (end-user, GUI) app availability is amongst them.

Re: Microsoft Confirms UWP Is Not the Future of Windows Apps

#43

Post by userbinator »

As a long-time Win32 (and Win16) developer, I am very pleased. Win32 is basically "Microsoft's POSIX" --- it might not have all the new-fangled trendy object-oriented best-practices fluff of the newer APIs, but being a simple C API means that it's not tied to any newer and "faster-moving" (i.e. faster-deprecating) technologies and also makes it more portable. Some of you may remember Windows CE, which is basically a subset of the Win32 API.

I don't know if the newer MSVC compilers can be configured to do it, but it's definitely possible to create a single self-contained binary for a GUI app that will run on everything Win95 and newer, and which uses a fraction of the resources of newer UI frameworks. A lot of developers these days are used to even simple apps taking over 1MB of disk, and when shown a native Win32 one will be astonished at how small and fast it is; what they often don't realise is that all apps used to be like that.

Win32 is the past, the present, and the future.

Re: Microsoft Confirms UWP Is Not the Future of Windows Apps

#44

Post by rayiner »

What the hell is wrong with Microsoft? Everyone is excited about WSL, but Microsoft is failing miserably at their core competencies. They killed off Win32 OneNote to create UWP OneNote (which offers a fraction of the features), and then kills UWP? Every new Microsoft app somehow does less than the version you were using when Win2k came out.

Re: Microsoft Confirms UWP Is Not the Future of Windows Apps

#45

Post by youdontknowtho »

contextfree wrote: post #3

I think from a developer perspective this is pretty misleading because all the "new" stuff in Windows development is just repackagings of UWP subsystems to work with Win32 apps. WinUI is the UWP UI stack, MSIX is the UWP package format, etc. So even if they aren't really pushing the UWP "brand" anymore, if you have a UWP app you are already using all of the "new" stuff.

yeah, they are really just opening all of that stuff up so that existing apps can use it more easily. WinUI is one of those things that I just never thought would happen...but there it is. They are open sourcing the entire UI stack. It's crazy.

Re: Microsoft Confirms UWP Is Not the Future of Windows Apps

#46

Post by Spooky23 »

amanzi wrote: post #24
zaat wrote: post #13

I'll be really happy if UWP will die. I don't care for the visual side it offers at all, and the UX is simply terrible compared to the good old Win32. Maybe I'm missing something, but the feeling I got regarding UWP is that it is an effort to unify the UX across all platforms and devices by aiming to lowest common denominator of all platforms. It meant that simple and useful utility like calc became a visually bloate…

> Isn't it obvious that mobile apps UI/UX is poor... Isn't this the direction that MacOS is going too? I hear complaints of "iOS apps" becoming default on macOS too.

Microsoft figured out that the only way to scale mobile apps up across platforms is to dumb the apps down.

That’s an artifact of dealing with the real estate challenges on the phone and the side effect of this era where apps need to hustle users for marginal dollars first and do something useful second. That said, they failed on mobile, and the tablets are more like laptops than iPads. And the market likes that!

I think the younger developers are doing to flip to Chromebooks and Windows, as the Unix tool sets are there, and both vendors take their vision of PC seriously.

Re: Microsoft Confirms UWP Is Not the Future of Windows Apps

#47

Post by userbinator »

zaat wrote: post #13

I'll be really happy if UWP will die. I don't care for the visual side it offers at all, and the UX is simply terrible compared to the good old Win32. Maybe I'm missing something, but the feeling I got regarding UWP is that it is an effort to unify the UX across all platforms and devices by aiming to lowest common denominator of all platforms. It meant that simple and useful utility like calc became a visually bloate…

It meant that simple and useful utility like calc became a visually bloated app with sluggish UX.

That's an excellent example. A calculator does not need a loading screen, nor should it take over a second to start on any remotely modern machine. Fortunately MS have released the source, so you can see for yourself just how much bloat there is:

https://github.com/Microsoft/calculator

To compare, you can also see the source of the old "classic" calculator from Windows 2000 here:

https://github.com/pustladi/Windows-2000/tree/661d000d50637e...

That said, Windows CE was an attempt "to unify the UX", being basically a subset of Win32, and that didn't cause anywhere near the same level of disgust, so I'd attribute the bloat more to the cruft of "modern practices" than anything else.

Re: Microsoft Confirms UWP Is Not the Future of Windows Apps

#48

Post by techntoke »

Paraesthetic wrote: post #41
crispinb wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I see more and more great apps for Linux Bit of an aside here, but what for example? I'm using Linux these days as the least-worst option, but I wouldn't have claimed app quality as one of its advantages. It has the best terminals (matched perhaps by iTerm on mac), and most of the important cross-platform apps are perfectly fine (VS Code, IntelliJ, Firefox, Chrome etc). Could you list some of the linux-specific app…

How does it compare to the new Windows Terminal?

Based on what I've seen, the new Windows Terminal is far from being close to anything on Linux.

Re: Microsoft Confirms UWP Is Not the Future of Windows Apps

#49

Post by userbinator »

tasdev wrote: post #31

The comments on this post really make me wonder how many people have actually written a UWP app or tried using the API? I have experience across a heap of stacks... Cocoa, Cocoa Touch, Android, Win32/WinForms/WPF, Web, Xamarin Forms etc... I love UWP. It was pretty ordinary in the first few releases but it has matured well, has great documentation and the UI framework is developed in the open on GitHub. I am by no me…

actually try the framework, you might be pleasantly surprised

Enough people have used UWP apps and been repulsed enough by the experience to not want to inflict the same upon the users of apps they themselves write.

But UWP is an excellent choice for probably 70-90% of desktop applications

No. It's a massive failure even for something as simple as the Windows calculator, which is one of the apps that MS rewrote so you can actually compare the Win32 and UWP versions.

Re: Microsoft Confirms UWP Is Not the Future of Windows Apps

#50

Post by userbinator »

chrisseaton wrote: post #19

What is the current recommended API if you want to build a big new desktop GUI application for Windows today? Something demanding like a CAD application, perhaps. Something you'd have built using MFC or pure Window API in the past.

I still recommend Win32, there's nothing that beats it for efficiency or compatibility.
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