Making Sense of Our First Look at Windows 8
allthingsd.com
allthingsd.com
HTML+JS calling into Windows APIs, is more likely what this is, rendering rich widgets ala ASP.NET controls. I'm willing to bet money on it.
And at that point, who cares? Different development toolset. Same lock-in.
And let me know when the day arrives when you can develop and run platform-neutral apps in Mac,iOS or in fact Linux. Don't be unreasonable. Thanks.
I didn't say it wouldn't be developer friendly. I'm saying that it really makes no difference that they are using HTML+JS if, like WebOS, they have tight coupling to the native OS API.
Also, I didn't say they would use ASP.NET controls, but something similar - rich controls backed specifically by the OS.
My point stands: Different developer toolset - same vendor lock-in.
Forget rumors that Microsoft is going to buy Nokia or RIM. Looks like MS is going to buy Palm from HP.
I haven't been this excited about a windows release in a long long while ... I hope Microsoft doesn't botch this
It remains to be seen if the other benefits of JavaScript carry over to Windows 8 enough that it's worth using it to code desktop apps. As for botching it, I suspect that Windows 8 will be a not-very-good «experimental» thing like Vista and Windows 9 will be what Windows 8 should have been in the first place.
I hope they have a tooling story around HTML5. I wonder if that chart in the demo was done in canvas or photoshop.
After almost two decades of Win32 being the best way to write apps across the Windows platform, that has been upended in a year or so. That's a big deal. But we now have two competing stacks on the phone vs tablets/PCs which can't be a good place to be.
Disclaimer - I know no inside details of Win8 UI/development platform plans from my time at MSFT.
You're RIGHT though, it's just the examples aren't so good. In recent memory: WPF, Windows Forms, MFC, .NET Remoting, DCOM...
They actually had a session at a recent dev conference (I saw the video) where they told you all about the underwhelming list of new features coming in WPF. The main message: WPF isn't dead! But it made things pretty obvious.
The trouble with a company the size of Microsoft is that there are so many people creating so much STUFF that it's nearly impossible for them all to work together. It may be better for them, as a company, to allow their various branches to function independently while exposing an inconsistent API story to the outside world. The alternative would be to make everybody talk to everybody else, causing all work to come to a grinding halt.
If they're going for lowest common denominator apis like HTML/JS, then you get subpar LCD applications that Apple can blow away via better support in native apps and Apple OS specific APIs for Objective-C/XCode. Windows devs will then feel like they can do better than HTML/JS and move over to Objective-C/XCode and Apple.
In fact I'm strongly considering moving to the Apple camp after being a long time staunch MS supporter for my entire career.
This is a fantastic way to present information. it's beautiful. I would love this on a tv, or a bunch of displays in my house. especially with an epaper non light generating kind of display.
But... but... how do you make stuff? how do you design a house? how do you write code? It seems so very very consumer.
Microsoft is showing off Windows 8 this year and is going to release it next year.
Nonetheless, this near-overlap happened around the time of Win 7 and Snow Leopard too (both released late summer 2009).
The elephant in the room is Office. How is Office going to make the transition to a Windows 8, touch-based UI and still be usable to the dozens of millions of current users?
The age-old desktop vs. touchscreen conundrum arises. Apple has two versions of it's OS: OSX for desktops, which is (currently) not a touch-based UI, and iOS for it's small and large tablet devices which is touch-based.
http://www.redmondpie.com/microsoft-office-15-leaked-photos-...
Is Microsoft just seeing to see how people react to this, leaving room to backpedal if necessary?
Looks like Microsoft are gonna go ahead and do it anyway.
Windows users will not switch to Linux (but it's the year of Linux on the desktop!) because of the usual issues, but serious (non-VS-using) developers will never use Windows either. As for OSX, Apple hipsters aren't going to spontaneously start using Windows, and Windows users aren't going to start spending 2x as much on their computers any time soon.