Still no Windows Phone 8 SDK
extremetech.com
extremetech.com
Agreed, but if MS shares with the right 'limited audience', it could work out OK. If they have Facebook, Twitter, Instagram (still looks doubtful), a few more big names and a few major games, >80% of users will be fine. Us techies won't be, of course.
Don't get me wrong- this still seems like a weird move from MS. But I don't think it leaves them "teetering on the edge of failure".
While with the PCs, if you don't have some applications(like say AAA games, Office, Autocad etc.), it cuts away more of the potential audience than on a phone.
I don't think that the two are in any way comparable. Linux has never had huge resources, marketing and dedicated developer outreach.
"Teetering on the edge of failure" far from being overly pessimistic, is actually far too generous. By any reasonable business measure (marketshare, mindshare, profitability) WP7/7.5 has been a dramatic, obvious failure. If not for the enormous will (read: $$ reserves) of MS, it would have died a well-deserved (from a business perspective) death.
NOTE: I am not commenting on WP7/8's technical or aesthetic merits, nor on the overall consumer benefits of having a robust third competitor to iOS/Android. In all of those regards, WP8 should definitely stick around; but we could have said the same of WebOS (and many did).
This schedule rules out any chance for developers to catch these bugs and report them.
This is pretty bad.
I dont think I've ever heard of a Microsoft launch like this.
"If you were expecting Windows Phone 8′s app ecosystem to be one of its main selling points, think again."
Windows app ecosystem has never been one of its strongest setlling points. At no time has its app store even come close to competing with Apple or Android. Its main selling point is the integration with its existing platform. Bing maps, Skydrive, Outlook, etc. I have no idea why this guy thought it should be a major selling point now.
"A multitude of pundits have weighed in, and the consensus from them is that Microsoft might just be buying time because the platform isn’t quite done yet."
After Apple completely bungled their recent release, I would've thought there was going to be some praise following this paragraph. The funny thing is, I'm wondering if this guy even reads the articles on his own site. Just last week this article was on their front page:
"Microsoft promises major Windows 8 app improvements before Oct 26 launch" http://www.extremetech.com/computing/137469-microsoft-promis...
"Microsoft is letting marketing dictate the deployment of software instead of what’s really best for the product"
FALSE. I would instead give them credit for seeing the failures of Apple's release and the backlash which ensued. Can you fault them for making sure their product is ready when it hits the stores?
"Almost any other company on the planet would have washed its hands of Windows Phone after a second unsuccessful holiday season."
Yes, because supporting a handset manufacturer who just lost a multi-billion dollar patent infringement case is so much safer right?
There's more, but these are the ones that stuck out at me.
So the "two weeks away, still no SDK" is just trolling for page hits, and unfortunately getting them.
Yes, there is a new native layer called "Windows Phone Runtime", which is a partial, semi-overlapping subset of the Windows Runtime found in Windows 8.
However, it's partial and incomplete, and mostly targeted at game developers - to access most of the features of Windows Phone 8, you need to write your apps in a managed language, accessing the .NET API for Windows Phone, which is pretty much the same as it's always been, with a few minor incompatibilities, even in so-called "compatibility mode" for WP7 apps.
EDIT: That was a hideous run-on sentence, but I kinda like it.
I had meant dev tools as in the API and SDK code written by Microsoft. There is no big change in the app developer facing dev tools, but internally the kernel has shifted, thus Microsoft developers needed to port the same API to a different kernel, so that's what I meant by a big change.
I've seen the current state of the SDK and API, and while I understand porting to a new kernel was probably a lot of work for them, it makes even less sense considering that most of the WinRT APIs available in Win8 are not there in WP8 - it leaves me wondering what, exactly, they hoped to gain; so far it doesn't seem like a win for developers, and you can't write a full-featured native app for WP8. Maybe you'll be able to for WP9 (if the platform survives that long).
That assumes a lot from non-technical users.
Not sure why you brought up skeuomorphism. It's poor aesthetic taste but it doesn't necessarily make the UI difficult to use.
"It's not your mother's phone"
It's a nauseating commercial IMO... which isn't to say it isn't effective.
(2) I think you are biasing your opinion too much toward the first-use of an application. Yes, associating icons and labels does aid in learning and first-use, but has little effect on usability long term for regularly used applications. With that said, the in-app icons you are referring to are typically straight forward (add, search, remove, etc) and, in my opinion, are understandable on first use as well. There are occasionally poorly designed third party apps that do have obscure in-app icons. But, this is not typical of the platform.
So...I'd say ease of use is high as long as you only want what is on your home icons, but not so much after that.
I strongly disagree that color aiding in use points to a larger accessibility problem — perhaps you just mean that if color is necessary for use you've got a problem (which I'd certainly agree with), but while I could get by in my everyday world with monochrome vision, I'm glad I have color cues all around me that aid me in distinguishing amongst objects quickly and with minimal effort.
What do you find so objectively appalling about Metro?