windows 8 and tablets and arm and such
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ok, so windows 8 is following the path of iOS and such. I gueeeeess i get that. But wouldn't it be quicker to just give plain old windows7 a new "touchscreen" input device? Am I missing something in this equation?? I don't care if a device is run on an arm or an 8086. The only thing a tablet has that a laptop doesn't is a touchscreen input device, right? (well, ok, accelerometer and gps, too - but those are easy, i would think) Why is MS building a whole new os and gui based on a whole new cpu? Are they not capable of adding a touchscreen device to windows 7? They've added graphics pen pad tablets and tons of varieties of wierd mice and keyboards and trackballs. building a whole new os and gui on a new cpu... why...? :~
What others said with this addition. Win 7 is built on Win32 still. This library is archaic and can do alot but few no how to do anything. And if they do they must gather some chickens for the nightly sacrifice to appease the OS gods or the appocolypes (BSOD) shall come. Have you not ever supportted something that became so bulky and convoluted that you begged your manager for a rewrite/port (choose your name carefully)? I am glad they take this opportunity. Sure the OS may belly flop for everyone to see and we will all laugh and the big red belly of MS. But when they get back up on that high dive again and pull off a perfect swan dive the nay sayers will be singing different tunes.
Computers have been intelligent for a long time now. It just so happens that the program writers are about as effective as a room full of monkeys trying to crank out a copy of Hamlet.
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so right now, all devices are ARM because why? just due to them being light on chewing power? i'd think the x86s would have that licked in a year, eh? And I really can't imagine laptops doing anything but get smaller, use less power and have touchscreens before long... hardware changes happen fast. software changes happen slow. So my real question i guess is... Are you guys betting on the "right now" arm/iOS/metro or the "destined" x86/win32? I'm (totally) guessing the arm/linux will hold out in phones only. Wouldn't you guys think that the laptops will evolve into ipad++s (with x86,touchscreen,win32) I mean, going from mouse centric to touch screen centric is just making the dang buttons bigger, eh?
stephen.hazel wrote:
all devices are ARM because why
Cheaper. Lower power consumption.
*pre-emptive celebratory nipple tassle jiggle* - Sean Ewington
"Mind bleach! Send me mind bleach!" - Nagy Vilmos
CodeStash - Online Snippet Management | My blog | MoXAML PowerToys | Mole 2010 - debugging made easier
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What others said with this addition. Win 7 is built on Win32 still. This library is archaic and can do alot but few no how to do anything. And if they do they must gather some chickens for the nightly sacrifice to appease the OS gods or the appocolypes (BSOD) shall come. Have you not ever supportted something that became so bulky and convoluted that you begged your manager for a rewrite/port (choose your name carefully)? I am glad they take this opportunity. Sure the OS may belly flop for everyone to see and we will all laugh and the big red belly of MS. But when they get back up on that high dive again and pull off a perfect swan dive the nay sayers will be singing different tunes.
Computers have been intelligent for a long time now. It just so happens that the program writers are about as effective as a room full of monkeys trying to crank out a copy of Hamlet.
I've never had to support anything THAT big - that's for sure. But, yeah, I've done/do maintenance :) You really think MS can pull off an os,gui rewrite? I remember how long it took em to get win95-98-ME-2000 right. Their core os wasn't too bad all along. But their GUI - I think that's what took the time. Only diff btw a desktop app with a touchscreen and teeny phone app is the theme. I'd say the devil they know would be a better investment than rebuilding on a new cpu,os,gui :~ Oh well, I guess if i was ms, it couldn't HURT to go down that road. You'ld learn stuff. And, in the end, hardware will probably prop up our beloved win32. (once again:)) Honestly, which would you prefer - win32 laptop with touchscreen,gps,accel - ipad I know which one =I= want.
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ok, so windows 8 is following the path of iOS and such. I gueeeeess i get that. But wouldn't it be quicker to just give plain old windows7 a new "touchscreen" input device? Am I missing something in this equation?? I don't care if a device is run on an arm or an 8086. The only thing a tablet has that a laptop doesn't is a touchscreen input device, right? (well, ok, accelerometer and gps, too - but those are easy, i would think) Why is MS building a whole new os and gui based on a whole new cpu? Are they not capable of adding a touchscreen device to windows 7? They've added graphics pen pad tablets and tons of varieties of wierd mice and keyboards and trackballs. building a whole new os and gui on a new cpu... why...? :~
stephen.hazel wrote:
But wouldn't it be quicker to just give plain old windows7 a new "touchscreen" input device?
NO. touch input (finger) is completely different than pointing input (mouse, ... ). The complete UI framework must be redone and "rethinked" (:confused:).
Watched code never compiles.
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ok, so windows 8 is following the path of iOS and such. I gueeeeess i get that. But wouldn't it be quicker to just give plain old windows7 a new "touchscreen" input device? Am I missing something in this equation?? I don't care if a device is run on an arm or an 8086. The only thing a tablet has that a laptop doesn't is a touchscreen input device, right? (well, ok, accelerometer and gps, too - but those are easy, i would think) Why is MS building a whole new os and gui based on a whole new cpu? Are they not capable of adding a touchscreen device to windows 7? They've added graphics pen pad tablets and tons of varieties of wierd mice and keyboards and trackballs. building a whole new os and gui on a new cpu... why...? :~
They aren't. They're producing a new version of their OS that's well suited to touch devices (including PC's). The OS runs on Intel. The Arm version is a port of the OS to that architecture
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so right now, all devices are ARM because why? just due to them being light on chewing power? i'd think the x86s would have that licked in a year, eh? And I really can't imagine laptops doing anything but get smaller, use less power and have touchscreens before long... hardware changes happen fast. software changes happen slow. So my real question i guess is... Are you guys betting on the "right now" arm/iOS/metro or the "destined" x86/win32? I'm (totally) guessing the arm/linux will hold out in phones only. Wouldn't you guys think that the laptops will evolve into ipad++s (with x86,touchscreen,win32) I mean, going from mouse centric to touch screen centric is just making the dang buttons bigger, eh?
ARM_BatteryLife > Intel_BatteryLife (for now)... is the dominant factor, imho. Lower cost per unit of CPU ? : I'm not sure on that one. Perhaps some newly announced breakthroughs in producing special forms of lithium related to hybrid electric vehicles (far yet from production ?) will make a difference ? See: [^] best, Bill
"The greatest mystery is not that we have been flung at random between the profusion of matter and of the stars, but that within this prison we can draw from ourselves images powerful enough to deny our nothingness." Andre Malraux
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They aren't. They're producing a new version of their OS that's well suited to touch devices (including PC's). The OS runs on Intel. The Arm version is a port of the OS to that architecture
Hi Marc, While I "buy into" your major premise, the requirement of legacy app support, imho, remains (and has always been) a dominant constraint on how "new" any OS can be. Microsoft's enormous revenue stream from the Enterprise side, and server side ... cannot be threatened, either ? best, Bill
"The greatest mystery is not that we have been flung at random between the profusion of matter and of the stars, but that within this prison we can draw from ourselves images powerful enough to deny our nothingness." Andre Malraux
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I've never had to support anything THAT big - that's for sure. But, yeah, I've done/do maintenance :) You really think MS can pull off an os,gui rewrite? I remember how long it took em to get win95-98-ME-2000 right. Their core os wasn't too bad all along. But their GUI - I think that's what took the time. Only diff btw a desktop app with a touchscreen and teeny phone app is the theme. I'd say the devil they know would be a better investment than rebuilding on a new cpu,os,gui :~ Oh well, I guess if i was ms, it couldn't HURT to go down that road. You'ld learn stuff. And, in the end, hardware will probably prop up our beloved win32. (once again:)) Honestly, which would you prefer - win32 laptop with touchscreen,gps,accel - ipad I know which one =I= want.
I think they can pull it off given time.. And they actually have that despite what analysts say. The reason I believe this is their backing from other revenue (enterprises, XBox, Developer Lic. etc. etc.) Microsoft can not really be compared to google although many try. Google itself is also very secured for different reasons. Microsoft is better compared against only apple, which will likely end up hurting in the long run. Apple in a way has all of their eggs in just a couple baskets. If any of those baskets gets dropped they will be scramling (pun intended) to make up the losses or suffer defeat. Microsoft can dump billions in this pool and not squint. They are doing it just to get a foot hold. That is apparent to most. But what is not apparent is they can afford to keep dumping billions to maintain a small foothold. That small foothold eats at Apple. In the end when their foothold is accepted, then the enterprise will buy in to the technology. Low and behold we will have another OS. Accepted by both conumers and enterprises. ---------------- I have an iPad. er correction my wife has an iPad. I like it. I have played with Win7 touch screens and they are not too bad. I have played with Win 8 non touch and the OS again is not too bad. In fact it is growing on me. In the end it is often about content. Apple is out the gate and has been for a while so they are wayyy ahead on content. But MS tools are slick and so is their marketing strategy. I think in a year the numbers will be showing us that MS has rapid growth on mobile app development which will they will then use for a secondary campaign.
Computers have been intelligent for a long time now. It just so happens that the program writers are about as effective as a room full of monkeys trying to crank out a copy of Hamlet.
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ok, so windows 8 is following the path of iOS and such. I gueeeeess i get that. But wouldn't it be quicker to just give plain old windows7 a new "touchscreen" input device? Am I missing something in this equation?? I don't care if a device is run on an arm or an 8086. The only thing a tablet has that a laptop doesn't is a touchscreen input device, right? (well, ok, accelerometer and gps, too - but those are easy, i would think) Why is MS building a whole new os and gui based on a whole new cpu? Are they not capable of adding a touchscreen device to windows 7? They've added graphics pen pad tablets and tons of varieties of wierd mice and keyboards and trackballs. building a whole new os and gui on a new cpu... why...? :~
I think the majority of the reason is that they want to create a whole new ecosystem with the Windows Store and the locked-down environment. So they are not just creating new code, but a whole new way of doing things.
The difficult we do right away... ...the impossible takes slightly longer.
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stephen.hazel wrote:
But wouldn't it be quicker to just give plain old windows7 a new "touchscreen" input device?
NO. touch input (finger) is completely different than pointing input (mouse, ... ). The complete UI framework must be redone and "rethinked" (:confused:).
Watched code never compiles.
why? come to think of it, i HAVE used a touch screen windows xp. sure, it's clunky in that a mouse can grab teeny little lines and dots where a finger is too big. But that's my app's fault and I could fix it pretty easy. (At a big cost to productivity of the user.) Why should that be the OS's job? Instead of rebuilding on a new cpu,os,gui, tweak the windows shell to handle touch. (A very difficult job, of course, but less so at least). And they'll have to do that eventually ANYway. I really can't imagine laptops not having touchscreens within a year.
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This is based off an actual conversation I had with some Microsofties. I was kicking them for alienating my customers and they told me that I should Metroify my software for my clients - unfortunately, they tend to need 8 or 9 applications running spread out over 3 28" monitors (I do target a very specialist audience), and Metro limits to 1 application, so I'd have 1 Metro and 8 desktop apps and they wouldn't be able to communicate.
*pre-emptive celebratory nipple tassle jiggle* - Sean Ewington
"Mind bleach! Send me mind bleach!" - Nagy Vilmos
CodeStash - Online Snippet Management | My blog | MoXAML PowerToys | Mole 2010 - debugging made easier
Pete O'Hanlon wrote:
so I'd have 1 Metro and 8 desktop apps and they wouldn't be able to communicate.
~Edit #1: I forgot to include an important assumption inherent in the question I raise here: This question assumes a non-ARM, i.e., Intel machine, capable of running both Metro and the Win 8 Desktop. Sorry, about that. ! end Edit1~ Hi Pete, errr ... mmmm ... I do believe that is exactly the issue I have tried to "draw you out on" a few times, here on CP. And, I remain deeply puzzled: why couldn't there be high-speed communication by some means between a Metro app(s), and Win 8 app(s) running simultaneously: what actual technical issue or constraint prevents that ? Given you supposedly can have two windows, one Metro, one Win 8, open at the same time (on different monitors, or on one monitor: I'm not clear on that): where's the sticking-point ? Hardware (with multi-core CPU's I find that hard to imagine) ? best, Bill
"The greatest mystery is not that we have been flung at random between the profusion of matter and of the stars, but that within this prison we can draw from ourselves images powerful enough to deny our nothingness." Andre Malraux
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I think they can pull it off given time.. And they actually have that despite what analysts say. The reason I believe this is their backing from other revenue (enterprises, XBox, Developer Lic. etc. etc.) Microsoft can not really be compared to google although many try. Google itself is also very secured for different reasons. Microsoft is better compared against only apple, which will likely end up hurting in the long run. Apple in a way has all of their eggs in just a couple baskets. If any of those baskets gets dropped they will be scramling (pun intended) to make up the losses or suffer defeat. Microsoft can dump billions in this pool and not squint. They are doing it just to get a foot hold. That is apparent to most. But what is not apparent is they can afford to keep dumping billions to maintain a small foothold. That small foothold eats at Apple. In the end when their foothold is accepted, then the enterprise will buy in to the technology. Low and behold we will have another OS. Accepted by both conumers and enterprises. ---------------- I have an iPad. er correction my wife has an iPad. I like it. I have played with Win7 touch screens and they are not too bad. I have played with Win 8 non touch and the OS again is not too bad. In fact it is growing on me. In the end it is often about content. Apple is out the gate and has been for a while so they are wayyy ahead on content. But MS tools are slick and so is their marketing strategy. I think in a year the numbers will be showing us that MS has rapid growth on mobile app development which will they will then use for a secondary campaign.
Computers have been intelligent for a long time now. It just so happens that the program writers are about as effective as a room full of monkeys trying to crank out a copy of Hamlet.
very good points. yeah, it does seem like there's no real reason to "conserve" their resources. they've got the ability to grow so there's nothing to do but win even if there are some minor setbacks along the way. so i guess the question NOW is since ms has 2 dang OSs, which will be better? hmmm, that's an easy one to answer... metro in the long run, win32 in the short run. But I'm not hoppin into metro until it'll do mice too. Eh, it probably already can. or can it? Actually, i should probably try it out...:~:~ Damn you microsoft, you're just like oracle. ALLLLLL the time with the chaaanges... Ok, thanks everyone. I think i've got my head screwed on straight again.
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why? come to think of it, i HAVE used a touch screen windows xp. sure, it's clunky in that a mouse can grab teeny little lines and dots where a finger is too big. But that's my app's fault and I could fix it pretty easy. (At a big cost to productivity of the user.) Why should that be the OS's job? Instead of rebuilding on a new cpu,os,gui, tweak the windows shell to handle touch. (A very difficult job, of course, but less so at least). And they'll have to do that eventually ANYway. I really can't imagine laptops not having touchscreens within a year.
If it was that easy it would have been done a long time ago. All attempts to use a classic OS User Interface on a touch screen failed miserably (look at all the POS touchscreens P.O.S. systems) Laptops will not have touchscreens, have you ever tries "simulating" one with your current laptop ? it's hard to have you arm in the air all of the time. Laptops will have multi-touch trackpads instead.
Watched code never compiles.
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very good points. yeah, it does seem like there's no real reason to "conserve" their resources. they've got the ability to grow so there's nothing to do but win even if there are some minor setbacks along the way. so i guess the question NOW is since ms has 2 dang OSs, which will be better? hmmm, that's an easy one to answer... metro in the long run, win32 in the short run. But I'm not hoppin into metro until it'll do mice too. Eh, it probably already can. or can it? Actually, i should probably try it out...:~:~ Damn you microsoft, you're just like oracle. ALLLLLL the time with the chaaanges... Ok, thanks everyone. I think i've got my head screwed on straight again.
It works fine with mice. I will just wait as I did in the past with consoles. When there is something I want to play/use on my computer that requires (or even is optimized for) Win 8 I will switch. Between play and use it is basically home and work. I have work resources (even for side business) and I have home resources, for gaming etc. I never upgrade just to upgrade. I do it because something I want or need mandates it. An OS is just shell. It doesn't provide anything other than a gateway to your actual needs and wants. As a developer though there is something else to it. I am taking a personal interest in Metro because the active Microsoft campaigns allow one to develop on it cheaper than other environments. So I use it for a possibility of making the next "Instagram".
Computers have been intelligent for a long time now. It just so happens that the program writers are about as effective as a room full of monkeys trying to crank out a copy of Hamlet.
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Pete O'Hanlon wrote:
so I'd have 1 Metro and 8 desktop apps and they wouldn't be able to communicate.
~Edit #1: I forgot to include an important assumption inherent in the question I raise here: This question assumes a non-ARM, i.e., Intel machine, capable of running both Metro and the Win 8 Desktop. Sorry, about that. ! end Edit1~ Hi Pete, errr ... mmmm ... I do believe that is exactly the issue I have tried to "draw you out on" a few times, here on CP. And, I remain deeply puzzled: why couldn't there be high-speed communication by some means between a Metro app(s), and Win 8 app(s) running simultaneously: what actual technical issue or constraint prevents that ? Given you supposedly can have two windows, one Metro, one Win 8, open at the same time (on different monitors, or on one monitor: I'm not clear on that): where's the sticking-point ? Hardware (with multi-core CPU's I find that hard to imagine) ? best, Bill
"The greatest mystery is not that we have been flung at random between the profusion of matter and of the stars, but that within this prison we can draw from ourselves images powerful enough to deny our nothingness." Andre Malraux
Okay - I thought I'd answered this one for you a while back, but that's obviously my memory being faulty. Well, the issue about communicating out is that a Metro app cannot rely on a desktop app being present (or loaded if present), so you have to use workarounds. Now given that we make extensive use of MMFs, this is a huge problem for us because our apps have to have high speed visibility of data which can be changed by any of the sources.
*pre-emptive celebratory nipple tassle jiggle* - Sean Ewington
"Mind bleach! Send me mind bleach!" - Nagy Vilmos
CodeStash - Online Snippet Management | My blog | MoXAML PowerToys | Mole 2010 - debugging made easier
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If it was that easy it would have been done a long time ago. All attempts to use a classic OS User Interface on a touch screen failed miserably (look at all the POS touchscreens P.O.S. systems) Laptops will not have touchscreens, have you ever tries "simulating" one with your current laptop ? it's hard to have you arm in the air all of the time. Laptops will have multi-touch trackpads instead.
Watched code never compiles.
true. good points. Although those touchscreen POS systems are ok for niche apps (like POS:)), your gramma wouldn't want one. So i guess ms needs a gui rewrite (especially in the windows shell area) to do touchscreen right. You're right. And I guess the arm,os rewrite is purely for the phone market. But they're doin' both in win8 as a first stab at it all. thanks for fillin' me in - 'preciate it.
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Hi Marc, While I "buy into" your major premise, the requirement of legacy app support, imho, remains (and has always been) a dominant constraint on how "new" any OS can be. Microsoft's enormous revenue stream from the Enterprise side, and server side ... cannot be threatened, either ? best, Bill
"The greatest mystery is not that we have been flung at random between the profusion of matter and of the stars, but that within this prison we can draw from ourselves images powerful enough to deny our nothingness." Andre Malraux
But on the ARM processor (Windows RT) it's a consumer oriented device. There is no "legacy". I bet a lot of software will just need to be recompiled.
If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader." - John Quincy Adams
You must accept one of two basic premises: Either we are alone in the universe, or we are not alone in the universe. And either way, the implications are staggering” - Wernher von Braun -
I think the majority of the reason is that they want to create a whole new ecosystem with the Windows Store and the locked-down environment. So they are not just creating new code, but a whole new way of doing things.
The difficult we do right away... ...the impossible takes slightly longer.
Richard Andrew x64 wrote:
but a whole new way of doing controlling things.
I fixed your typo...
".45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly" - JSOP, 2010
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You can never have too much ammo - unless you're swimming, or on fire. - JSOP, 2010
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"Why don't you tie a kerosene-soaked rag around your ankles so the ants won't climb up and eat your candy ass." - Dale Earnhardt, 1997 -
ok, so windows 8 is following the path of iOS and such. I gueeeeess i get that. But wouldn't it be quicker to just give plain old windows7 a new "touchscreen" input device? Am I missing something in this equation?? I don't care if a device is run on an arm or an 8086. The only thing a tablet has that a laptop doesn't is a touchscreen input device, right? (well, ok, accelerometer and gps, too - but those are easy, i would think) Why is MS building a whole new os and gui based on a whole new cpu? Are they not capable of adding a touchscreen device to windows 7? They've added graphics pen pad tablets and tons of varieties of wierd mice and keyboards and trackballs. building a whole new os and gui on a new cpu... why...? :~
Windows 8 has its own foundation, with much more experience than iOS has. iOS in terms of security is a bad joke, while Windows 8 will be the most secure OS when it is released, not to mention things like hardware management, etc. To say that Windows 8 follows the path of iOS is completely wrong.
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Okay - I thought I'd answered this one for you a while back, but that's obviously my memory being faulty. Well, the issue about communicating out is that a Metro app cannot rely on a desktop app being present (or loaded if present), so you have to use workarounds. Now given that we make extensive use of MMFs, this is a huge problem for us because our apps have to have high speed visibility of data which can be changed by any of the sources.
*pre-emptive celebratory nipple tassle jiggle* - Sean Ewington
"Mind bleach! Send me mind bleach!" - Nagy Vilmos
CodeStash - Online Snippet Management | My blog | MoXAML PowerToys | Mole 2010 - debugging made easier
Thanks for your patient responses to my several questions around this issue, Pete ! I edited my post above to include that I am assuming a scenario where you have an Intel based machine, that can run both Metro, and other apps written in WinForms, WPF, whatever; it excludes ARM based machines on which, at this point, I believe, you can only run WinRT and Metro based apps. I interpret "MMF" to mean "memory-mapped files:" correct ? My hope is that sometime in the near future someone of your quality will write, on CP, a mini-monograph on what's possible, and not possible, in terms of interaction between Metro and Win 8 desktop apps created using .NET. For example: could I, through some API voodoo, cause the launching of a Win 8 desktop app to simultaneously launch a Metro App, or vicea-versa. Can a Win 8 desktop app (through API voodoo ?) create a memory area it can share with Metro (your comment about no-can-do MMF makes me doubt this is possible) ? What I am looking for is a very clear picture of what the possible "symbiosis" between Metro and Win 8 desktop is, now, and in the future (if anyone can guess, or knows what might be in the future, from the churning bowels of Sauron of Redmond). As of right now, all I have gleaned is that the only way Metro and Win 8 desktop apps can interact is through each of them setting a "folder-watcher," and getting a notification a file has changed, and then, of course, each will have to parse the file, and do whatever: an obviously time-intensive process. And I read something about you can have a Win 8 desktop app running on one monitor, and a Metro app running on another. I envision a scenario where some MS sales rep trying to up-sell a Net Administrator at a major company that has several thousand PC's, and who's just gotten over the trauma of the transition from XP=>Vista=>Win 7 ... to get on the Metro/Win8 bandwagon ... Hears, from said Net Admin, something like: "fine: we want our field-reps using Win based tablets or phones with a Metro front-end to interact at blazing speed with our network custom corporate apps, via both public (internet) and private (internal network) with high security: how do we do that ?" thanks, Bill
"The greatest mystery is not that we have been flung at random between the profusion of matter and of the stars, but that within this prison we can draw from ourselves images powerful enough to deny our nothingness." Andre Malraux
