A first look at the Windows 10 universal app platform | Hacker News Reader

A first look at the Windows 10 universal app platform

blogs.windows.com

34 pointsNamTaf16 comments

I'm curious in particular as to how they plan to deal with the UX side of things. I'd go so far as to say that such issues could make or break the entire concept.

There's been no small amount of problems with Windows' inability to adapt to the new wave of high-dpi displays. My partner got a Yoga 2 Pro with the 3200*1800 screen and for example the youtube player controls are almost impossible to interact with in some view modes (even with a mouse pointer). I can see this being similar, in that if the app determines at runtime how to display its controls then there seems to me like there will be issues, for example with reflowing text or image positions to accommodate button size changes.

I mean, the alternative is to have Mattel's My First Computer and have all UX elements touch-size by default but then why even have a high-resolution screen with more precise KBM inputs? I know that I don't really want huge icons on a 4K monitor because i want significant screen real estate.

I think that it's going to be interesting to see how they strike this balance.

I am only familiar with Ubuntu and Windows, how does OSX handle the issue? Is it just bigger controls on the site or are you saying the actual resolution of the "hit-box" for these buttons isn't specific enough?

If I understand everything correctly, this issue is handled by Apple's "retina" technology. They basically combine every 4 pixel square into one sharp composite pixel. That way you get a crisp view that's readable while getting only a quarter of the workspace. You can scale your picture up to full resolution if you don't mind the small text/icons.

> "example the youtube player controls are almost impossible to interact with in some view modes (even with a mouse pointer). "

I have a Yoga 2 Pro too and that sounds like you were trying to use Chrome. For some reason, Chrome for Windows is just horrible in high-dpi. Firefox and IE do a nice job though, I don't the problem you are reporting in youtube with either of those browsers.

Nope, it's either FF or IE, and I'm not sure if she uses it in tablet/tent mode or standard laptop mode. One of them gave ridiculously small icons in fullscreen.

When she's back I'll see if I can figure out what combination it was. But it basically rendered them @1x size and then shoved them right at the bottom of the fullscreen display.

I assume it's an updated version of WinRT which is resolution independent.

Windows universal app is a Windows Runtime (WinRT) application: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Runtime

WinRT supports multiple UI APIs:

* XAML Framework

* DirectX

* HTML5/JavaScript

Windows universal apps can run on Windows, Windows Phone and Xbox One.

It will be interesting to see if they can pull off the adaptive interface. It would be an incredible achievement if they can do it seamlessly in the first iteration. It's a big enough leap that I'll have to see it before I invest time in it. Nailing a simple To Do list demo would not suffice.

They are including the ability to specify the UI used for the platforms rather than having it done by their framework. I can see why they need to do so to satisfy cautious developers. I hope they're not doing so because the framework will have unacceptable performance in the first release.

Microsoft needs to dogfood it. By porting MS Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Outlook and Visual Studio to the WinRuntime and XAML Framework would a big step.

For example no high profile MS client product is written in C# using the dotNet Framework. All parts of Windows (kernel/user mode, shell), Office and various applications are coded in native C or C++ against the WinAPI. Visual Studio is mainly coded in C++ too, with some dotNet bindings. Some server products (outsourced to Microsoft India) use the dotNet Framework like SharePoint and Exchange.

It would show confidence in their WinRT API. WinAPI will be around for a long time and even WinRT-API is based on WinAPI/Win32 subsystem and COM.

In the windows 10 announcement they demoed a version of Office that supported the adaptive design. I don't know if they're dog fooding to get there though.

It's a slang term: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eating_your_own_dog_food

Beside that, MS Word, Excel, Powerpoint never used the native Win32 UI controls. The applications were developed in the early nineties with a custom UI library. Therefore it's highly unlikely that the full Office applications will ever be ported to another UI library. MS Word uses e.g. WinAPI "fibers" API, a rarely used WinAPI functionality that got popular again in recent years with Lua "goroutine" and Go "goroutine". The applications are based on OLE (Object Linking and Embedding) and MDI UI. The ribbon is implemented as an owner-drawn "menu" that overdraws the menubar. There are lite versions of Word, Excel, Powerpoint for WinCE that were ported to several different platforms including iPad touch version.

Office 95 italic "Microsoft" in window title: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/f5/Microsof_Offic...

Word 6.0 in Win3.1, it looked like an alien on Win95 with "-" (Win3) instead of "x" (Win95) in popup-windows: http://www.windows-nation.de/Office/Word6c.png

Word 97 running on NT 3.5 (looks like an UI alien with Win95 look&feel on Win3.1 shell): http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/3/3c/Microsoft_Offi...

Office XP - looked out of place in WinXP which got a new theme at last minute; later the Win8 theme was inspired by OfficeXP: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/ae/OfficeXP_Win8....

Stated goal number 3:

"Maximizing developer investments"

It's hard to think of a worse strategy. "Maximizing return on developer investments" is what Microsoft ought to be doing...

Seems like that's what they mean, looking at the explanation of this goal:

"Maximizing developer investments. We remain committed to helping you get the most out of your investments in training, tools, and code to continue and target our new offerings. We also recognize that many of you are looking for more ways to target a range of platforms with the same basic code or toolset with cross platform technologies."

Just a small section about HTML5 in the bottom - thank you very much! Hopefully the unreasonable and unnecessary Win.js push is over.

If they can only be distributed via the Windows app store, I don't really see universal apps taking off.

Which segment of Windows users want the OS to be turned into a walled garden like iOS? Personally, I will never make or use universal apps and I am a developer who actually like Windows.

Oh god, not again

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