Hacker News Reader

Comment by petke | Hacker News Reader

As a developer I like what MS is doing. Fragmented platforms is a programmers hell. Universal apps and the same operating system across all devices is surely the future. Most PC developers like myself wont care enough to learn a new language and system, just to try out making a mobile app. But when we can do it all from visual studio and c++ like we are used too. Then the barrier to entry is low enough that more of us will. More programmers mean more apps.

Sooner or later PC's are going to get so small they fit in your pocket. I just hope windows phone keeps going until then. Im not sure how apple and android will cope with that future.

In the meantime, I think the Lumias are just fine. They makes calls, they takes pictures, they gets you on the internet. What else is there? I haven't noticed any apps I cant get either. Then again you don't miss what you never knew.

View on HN

Universal apps and the same operating system across all devices is surely the future.

Not until we find a UI that rules all categories. Touch apps are typically bad desktop apps, desktop apps are typically bad touch apps. As respectively shown by Windows 8 on desktops and Microsoft Office on the original Surface RT. WIMP is probably still the best paradigm for desktops.

I do agree that platform fragmentation is bad. Apple has traditionally been pretty good at this (at least it's the same language and largely the same or comparable Frameworks).

Universal apps have different UIs for different categories. You can put a phone UI, a tablet UI, and a desktop UI into one app.

"Fragmented platforms is a programmers hell. Universal apps and the same operating system across all devices is surely the future."

That's not going to happen, sorry. Windows and OSX for the desktop and Android and iOS for mobile devices is how it's going to stay for a quite some time.

Android and iOS are already trying to be better desktop OSes, and Ubuntu and Windows are trying to be better phone OSes. I don't think it's going to take that long to bridge the gap.

It's not up to the platform whether it gets marketshare or not. It's up to the market.

For Desktops and Phones the winners have already been chosen.

People get new phones every 2-4 years, and carriers are pushing people to upgrade even faster. If there's a really compelling new platform, we could see a huge shift on that time scale.

No Operating System can be that compelling to prompt such a dramatic shift in four years. People aren't really compelled by such things.

> As a developer I like what MS is doing. Fragmented platforms is a programmers hell. Universal apps and the same operating system across all devices is surely the future.

Whether it is or not (I don't think so) that's not really what Microsoft is doing. You can't just download Windows 10 software and run it on Windows 10 Mobile.

Nor should you be able to. Phone software should be written for a phone. I don't want to run a Windows desktop app on my phone any more than I want to run a phone app on my desktop PC. They are fundamentally different platforms, with different interfaces, different screen sizes and different needs.

> You can't just download Windows 10 software and run it on Windows 10 Mobile.

That's exactly what you can do, given that the app is written against UWP.

We already universal apps between phones and tablets and we use webapps everywhere. Different screen sizes, different usage scenarios, different input methods – those are all things you can adjust your interface for.

Bluetooth keyboard and mouse can handle input. So, why can't you run StarCraft II on your phone?

Is StarCraft II written against UWP?

If there trying to unify platforms then it should not need to be a UWP app. Until then there just adding a new standard. https://xkcd.com/927/

I mean the laptop / phone divide is not all that wide in terms of Ram or Gflops. So, why not just run windows on everything?

Windows does run on everything. It won't run plain old Intel Win32 binaries on everything, with good reason.

UWP is hardly a new standard. It's the continuation of the Windows Phone/Windows 8 APIs and WPF, which dates back to 2006.

I think the biggest issue is that on Win32 both code and developers are much, much more powerful. You can't make Steam for UWP, or an IDE, or something like AutoCad with its plugin support. Other than mobile support, there is little reason to use UWP over Win32 (perhaps with WPF).

A shame, because we really need to move on from Win32.

You would use techniques that are conceptually similar to responsive web design to deliver a UI that is appropriate for each of the supported devices. I assume this kind of thing has already been done for years for phone/tablet apps, this is just adding desktop as well.

Actually yes, in the latest versions of phone and desktop you can run the same exact app across both. These new phones are actually running Windows and can run any of the new style apps in theory.

> can run any of the new style apps

This is not the same thing as being able to run any Windows Desktop App.

Also it's not established whether this makes for good Desktop and/or Phone software as a result.

For me, it is - I love the fact that the News, Weather, Email, Calendar, Calculator, Timer/Stopwatch, Cortana, Office Mobile (word/excel/onenote/powerpoint), Skydrive apps on Windows Phone 10 are the same, with the same UI and funcionality that on my Windows 10 desktop. It works perfectly with touch and it works perfectly with mouse and keyboard. Now I only download an app if it is UWP because it is so much more convenient.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com