Build Windows - Livestream | Hacker News Reader

Build Windows - Livestream

buildwindows.com

59 pointsicey32 comments

Looking at the demo, I could not help but think Microsoft is really doing a phenomenal job here - even to the extent that their competitors have something to worry about Microsoft after a long time.

a) Cross platform - A sizable number of modern apps for Windows are going to be Metro based and thus totally cross platform - ARM/x86_64. Now Android does this already but purely from Windows standpoint - this is a great way to start addressing real cross platform apps. The killer deal here is that people needing legacy x86 Windows apps are not going to miss out on the fun.

b) Backwards compatibility - no explanation required. They continue to do great in that department.

c) Very close hardware/software integration - Across vendors, SOCs and what not - they are really taking steps toward making hardware irrelevant from a user standpoint. If one wanted legacy apps and multiple monitors, they can still buy the Samsung Core i5 tablet with the USB and HDMI port without looking funny - it looks and works as sleek as your ARM tablet.

d) Real usability improvements - Like for example Refresh and Reset your PC, Windows Update made very subtle, Task bar can just span across monitors or can be two or more independent task bars showing only the apps on its own monitor.

The only unconvincing part of the demo was Windows Live - I wasn't sure how much traction that would gain.

Great stuff.

The cool part of the Windows Live integration, to me, happens when you share computers or tablets. When you hand off that tablet to your wife or your guest, and they log on with their Live ID, they have their e-mail, contacts, calendar, bookmarks, app settings in front of them as if they were using their own dedicated device. Yet when they hand it back and you log on with your own profile, it's all your stuff again.

This is a big pain with current tablets and phones to me. When someone wants to borrow my devices, I'm handing out my personal e-mail and photos and files, and they're not easily able to access their things. A friend of mine wanted to check out my Android phone and I lost all my app icons and widgets because she wanted to try a different theme. And when I borrow my dad's tablet, I have no easy way to access my e-mail, since I don't use gmail or something else with a convenient webmail site.

Excellent point - I somehow missed that part (probably my extreme prejudice against Hotmail set in :). That to me again falls under usability improvements and certainly if people exercise the sharing part often (arguable as these are personalized devices more than a PC ever was but on the other hand given the PC roots it is possible people will like it) Windows Live might see more traction.

Also the Skydrive integration. It's like moving the registry to the cloud. Of course it'll take a while before apps would use that feature, but imagine not having to worry about backing up settings or moving from one machine to another.

I'm usually frustrated with their decisions, but after seeing the keynote, for the first time in a while I got the hint that maybe, just maybe, they woke up -- or rather forced to. The amount of changes they made, at least from this side, looks impressive.

I really like I see so far (in the tools demo currently).

- The Metro tile UI is fundamentally different from any other tablet UI out there. The lock screen password gestures to unlock, the live tiles, etc are all pretty new and different.

- I really like the 'docking' and running multiple apps on the same screen at the same time

- Really like every app being able to act as a data source through a standard API, act as a search provider, as a share provider (through those 'charms'), etc.

- Watching the tools demo, like the common Windows API across JS, XAML+.NET, etc. Haven't seen anyone else do this.

This is the first conference from MSFT I'm watching from the outside for a long time - and I really like what I see.

If you don't have Silverlight, this stream should work: http://mfile.akamai.com/125013/live/reflector:52976.asx

Didn't work for me (Ubuntu).

Probably requires WMV codecs?

Edit:

  sudo apt-get install gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg

Don't let the names scare you, they refer to the licenses not the quality of the code. Normally these would be detected and installed automatically, but there's a bug that prevents mms:// content from being autodetected.

edit2: fixed codecs, sorry

The asx file is a xml file. Pick out the URL from it, and use mplayer with it.

mplayer mms://a977.l12501352976.c125013.g.lm.akamaistream.net/D/977/125013/v0001/reflector:52976

I'm not really interested in live streams of events like these (I'll just read the summaries, thanks) but the scant details I'm seeing about Windows 8 really do look pretty good.

I've played around with Windows Phone, and I intend my next phone to be running it- if you haven't, you owe it to yourself to try out the UI, it's really something else. Integration with the Zune Pass is a killer feature for me, too.

The unanswered question is fitting Windows 8 into tablet form and keeping it running at a good speed. That remains to be seen.

Unfortunately it's browser is unusable, in my opinion. Until someone ports webkit or gecko to WP7, I'm staying away. And then only if it allows you to change the browser default.

IE10 really isn't a bad browser at all.

But as a web dev, I agree that there's something deep set within me that makes me uncomfortable about using IE for day to day browsing. I'm not even sure what MS can do about that.

I was referring to the mobile version, which as I understand it is based on IE8, which is archaic compared to every other mobile browser on the market.

Win Phone 7 Mango (should be released later this month, can get it now if you know where to look) has an IE9 based browser that supports html 5 etc

Have you used IE9 Mobile ?

The initial version of (pre Mango) of mobile internet explorer was pretty poor (though I wouldn't call it unusable) but the Mango update comes with IE9 and it is quite good.

Edit: Still can't set any other browser as default however.

Yes, I was referring to the version that is out in the market, not the upcoming version which I haven't tried. The IE8 version doesn't even support @media queries which makes it unusable in my book; you cannot see mobile optimized sites unless the dev uses a user-agent hack (which is bad practice).

It has by far the worst html5 compatibility of any mobile browser: http://mobilehtml5.org/

I think WP7 is pretty slick, but the browser is the most important app on a phone and IE is a deal-breaker to me.

the browser that shipped with WP7 initially is based on IE7 and doesnt have any HTML5 features. the one with mango is based on IE9 with a lot more HTML5 support.

There's a new version in the Mango release.

What part of the browser did you find unusable? I am running mango developer build and it runs damn fast. As good as safari on my iphone.

> please install Microsoft Silverlight

Nah, I'll pass...

In fact it seems that it's impossible to install by clicking on the link

"One moment, please, while the current Silverlight installation status is determined... Microsoft Silverlight may not be supported on your computer's hardware or operating system."

As an alternative, try pretending to be an iPad.

Anyone else experiencing deJobs vu here? The demo world has been forever changed by that man. Impressive looking stuff, though.

They have the same first name. Steven Sinofsky/Steve Jobs.

"Your Silverlight plug-in has crashed."

I closed the page as soon as i saw the "Sliverlight required" screen. I am on Linux with Firefox 6.0.2. Microsoft really needs to get rid of silverlight to cover more audience (at least people like me)

Why the hell in every Microsoft's website, video is always automatically loaded and played without the user intent to watch!!it's such a stupid thing

It's a live feed, not a Youtube video.

yeah, of course it is, but same is the case with many of other Microsoft related websites. In fact, I will try to put up a list.

This is the post "Delivering fast boot times in Windows 8" in windows blog http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2011/09/08/delivering-fas... You can see that the video(in Silverlight) at bottom loads without you having to click on it. It eats up bandwidth.This is the latest Microsoft webpage that I remember in which the video gets loaded automatically.

It doesn't load automatically for me.

Win 7 using Chrome 13

It's a plain HTML5 <video> tag with nothing saying to autostart. It'll work however your browser is configured to handle video tags. It doesn't autostart in any of mine.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com