Microsoft suspends development of touch-friendly UWP Office apps for Windows
1–10 of 143 posts
Re: Microsoft suspends development of touch-friendly UWP Office apps for Windows
#2Yeah I don't see the need for a fragmentation, as they abandoned Windows RT. IMO, the Win32 Office apps already are very much touch-friendly.
And hey MS, why your OneNote is going a totally different way alone? MS killed Win32 OneNote in Office 2019. I love Win32 OneNote so much as it has more features and more stable.
Re: Microsoft suspends development of touch-friendly UWP Office apps for Windows
#3They are suspending the UWP versions. But Office is imho already fairly touch friendly if you turn "touch mode" on, in which all buttons, toolbars and menus become a little bigger. It is not that they don't want touch support (they do, thinking of the Surface family), they just don't want to invest in two parallel version of which one is mature and the other will always be lagging behind. And the customer will probably not see the difference, maybe even get confused.
Re: Microsoft suspends development of touch-friendly UWP Office apps for Windows
#4Yeah I don't see the need for a fragmentation, as they abandoned Windows RT. IMO, the Win32 Office apps already are very much touch-friendly. And hey MS, why your OneNote is going a totally different way alone? MS killed Win32 OneNote in Office 2019. I love Win32 OneNote so much as it has more features and more stable.
That's top2 issue on uservoice https://onenote.uservoice.com/forums/327186-onenote-for-wind...
Re: Microsoft suspends development of touch-friendly UWP Office apps for Windows
#5I 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.
Re: Microsoft suspends development of touch-friendly UWP Office apps for Windows
#6When I first looked at WinRT app development I thought "how are they going to sell it with these limitations and incompatibilities?" and they did not. UWP was a slightly improved version on WinRT, but it still had some of the same core issues. Luckily, Microsoft has some kind of exit strategy already - I just wonder where that leads.
That all being said: Microsoft should still invest in their desktop stack (especially WPF / .NET for desktop applications in general). Bringing the positive parts from UWP to the established frameworks would be a big win for everyone.
Re: Microsoft suspends development of touch-friendly UWP Office apps for Windows
#7I 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 right with Cocoa (nee Nextstep) - it’s something they have been gradually building on with incremental improvements, continuously forwards and upwards - whereas Microsoft has been launching new, short-lived and incompatible (and incomplete) platforms for the past 15 years: WinForms, WPF, Silverlight, Jupiter (Win 8.1), UWP (Win10), etc. The story is so bad Microsoft’s own flagship software has to build their own UI frameworks (Office has its own, Windows Media Center had some arcane prototype of WPF, even the Windows 10 Start Menu uses some UI+Graphics framework that’s not exposed to third-party developers).
Win32 needs some serious work - not least because Win32 is “infected” with GDI which has its own issues. WinRT was nice but nowhere near sufficient.
Re: Microsoft suspends development of touch-friendly UWP Office apps for Windows
#8I 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…
When Apple introduced Cocoa they also introduced Carbon however, an extension of the legacy MacOS APIs. Apple already slowly killed their Win32.
Re: Microsoft suspends development of touch-friendly UWP Office apps for Windows
#9I 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 majority had stopped at (right before) WPF it seems
> In fact, at a recent conference I was at with a large group of C# consultants. When the audience was polled on which desktop UIs their clients were using, the vast majority were WinForms, a small group was WPF, and almost no one was UWP
https://iamtimcorey.com/ask-tim-is-winforms-dead/
And many did long before WinForms
> Less than a year ago, a manager asked me if I could write a library for a client that would allow VB6 to access a RESTful API.
https://blog.submain.com/death-winforms-greatly-exaggerated/
Re: Microsoft suspends development of touch-friendly UWP Office apps for Windows
#10Ms 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 using Edge is because i like chrome and Firefox, it's impossible to install extensions from the browser.
Why can't I use the store through my browser? There's absolutely nothing stopping the store from acting as a downloader and installer in the background.
If the store worked from the browser, usage would pick up.