lucid00

I think this campaign is aimed at the wrong company.

If this is true. I saw this coming.

The story of Gary McKinnon gave me this feeling.

Also the constant Chinese hacker issue and reports from the Obama administration on how low-tech the White House is added to that feeling.

CNET claimed that they have an insider that stated that the XBox One has a publishing environment similar to the XBox 360 where only large companies can submit apps.

Hopefully this is changed before the Build conference comes around.

"so if you want to release your app on four platforms you need to test it four times."

Wouldn't submitting 4 separate apps require the same amount of attention (if not more)?

"Announce Windows Phone 7. No multitasking despite all competitors having it, no application fast resume. No major applications that competitors have. No turn by turn directions. No front-facing camera."

Honestly I think Windows Phone 7 was a case of blatantly copying Apple. It came out at the end of the iPhone 3GS' life which had exactly "No multitasking despite all competitors having it, no application fast resume" and "No front-facing camera". Windows Phone 7 even threw away the ability to sideload apps which was a staple of Windows Mobile in favor of an app store only approach.

I think Microsoft made the mistake of thinking that they could pull off what Apple did with iOS, which is silly as Apple spent years building this unique position through the iPod. As a sort-of new entrant, Microsoft can't afford to start off with something that isn't ahead of the competition by a significant margin, no company in the mobile space other than Apple or Google can do this right now.

There also seems to be a lack in ubiquity across their products and platforms.

I remember when they had Windows Live Mesh, Windows Live SkyDrive and Windows Live Sync only to later merge them all into SkyDrive, then they had Silverlight for Windows, Mac and Moonlight for Linux along with Windows Phone 7's flavor of Silverlight and the XBox 360s flavor of Silverlight (used in ads) only later to can everything and now Windows 8, Windows Phone 8 and the XBox One all run the new Windows Runtime but don't have the same app store nor can they run the same apps for no apparent reason.

I think the silliest thing Microsoft did with the XBox One (and Windows Phone 8) was give it a separate app store from Windows 8.

In technology, it runs a version of Windows 8 under the hood for apps Microsoft pretty much admitted this, and opening up that platform to Windows 8 developers would help justify the XBox One more for consumers.

At the end of the day we don't know why we want apps or an OS on our TV and for most use-cases it's a dumb idea and because of that Microsoft should open up the platform for developers to think of solutions for the few use-cases that do make sense or even invent brand new ones that haven't been thought of yet.

Instead the XBox One is limited to companies that already have business models in place and goals to follow, instead of companies that would dare to take a risk and try to invent something new.

The same goes for games as it doesn't have any self publishing system for indie developers. So if someone were to invent the next Minecraft, it would probably be done on a different platform.

Also more on topic with this article, isn't the Oculus Rift a PC accessory? With games on Steam supporting it? (Team Fortress 2) And why does the author think that Call of Duty will just suddenly become a better game when played on an Oculus Rift? After a while you'll just get used to the thing and the game will just feel like regular old Call of Duty.

The thing that bothers me the most about this is that Microsoft pretty much confirmed yesterday that the XBox One is running some form of the Windows Runtime.

(Source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/05/21/xbox-one-runs-three-opera...)

So if I want to make an app work across Windows RT, Windows 8, Windows Phone 8 and the XBox One, I have to submit three separate apps that are all coded the same way, to three different app stores.

Why couldn't Microsoft just bring the Windows 8 marketplace to XBox One and Windows Phone 8? That alone would fix the indie self-publishing problem and in turn make the XBox One more appealing.

They enabled federation months after Google Talk came out actually.

I think it'd be cool as long as it doesn't reduce the amount of money that the video uploaders can make off of it.

It'd just be more cash to fuel game development.

"Although Google Keep is a cool web application, and offers a native Android app as well, it lacks text formatting feature and the simplicity of Scratchpad. Keep is not a perfect replacement for the Scratchpad."

I can't say we really lost much seeing as Scratchpad is just an app that uses the Google Drive API, I'm sure someone could make a replacement if needed.

Hopefully Google will make Scratchpad open source if they haven't already for the people that prefer it over Keep.

I've been wondering why this hasn't been done yet.

Their game being coded in Java should make it easy to port to many different platforms seeing as there's a library or framework for almost anything Java.

I don't play RuneScape but I'm happy to see this, this should help bring the game to other platforms like Android, Firefox OS and hopefully iOS (they could make a native app for iOS).

I see it more likely being a fork of Firefox OS or something new that takes the same route.

All Facebook should need is a browser for their OS, if they provide a browser as good as or better than Chrome for Android they should be fine. The Facebook apps we use on desktop are just browser apps, and it'd be very easy to win developers over that way, plus the App Center is already there serving web apps.

And going with the web should help them stay away from competing with partners like Apple and Microsoft.

All in all their bottom line is Facebook as a service, all they need is to provide something that brings users to using Facebook more and to see more ads.

They've likely even thought of this themselves but are waiting it out to see the web mature more.

Android provides this for some features but not all.

The problem is if an app requests too many permissions it gets messy to just show a pop-up dialog for each and every one.

This is the reason why Google Chrome and Firefox started working on web apps that essentially are just fancy bookmarks those bookmarks provide permissions before hand for the web app so that they don't need to be requested later.

They could store music locally using the File System API and Encrypted Media Extensions (to make the labels happy), but seeing as no one has done this before it probably won't happen for a while.

Some Chrome apps aren't just a few specific browser features though, they're literally full packages that you download that have the ability to go through your files, run native code, access to bluetooth, USB, the ability to embed a WebView (like with Android), access to everything extensions can do and more.

Even some of the "bookmarks" add extra functionality to a site that wouldn't have been able to be granted otherwise, like unlimited storage, access to the clipboard and the ability to run in the background.

This article misses one interesting point. Tizen, Firefox OS, Ubuntu Linux and Open WebOS are all HTML5 based OSes, most if not all of the apps are web apps.

I doubt that companies with large investments in browser technology like Google, Apple and Microsoft could just fall overnight when the potential threat is something they help create.

Google most of all as they already have an HTML5 focus OS, how difficult would it be for them to make a mobile version or add compatibility with it's apps into Android?

I think the problem with Linux was that it has no argument for it.

Everything is just "it's just like Windows and Mac OS, except it's not" and not always equates to "free, open source, no cost, no licence fees, customizable, faster, etc..." but never anything that was a true blue selling point.

To the users that have the know how to switch to Linux, all it sounds like is a slight upgrade over their existing setup with less software support.

I think Chrome OS is slowly getting attention because it gets out of your way completely. No setup, no worries about losing files, extremely low risk of viruses or malware, you already understand it, and it's the easiest to leave in case you don't like it.

A funny thing about that notion.

Blackberry OS, Ubuntu and Samsung Tizen all treat web apps as first class citizens providing JavaScript APIs to access native functions.

(Chrome OS, WebOS, Firefox OS, and Windows 8 also do this and I think Windows Phone 8 does too)