back to article One Win 8 to rule them all: Microsoft talks up 'universal apps' for PCs, slabs and mobes

Eight months after launching its pushbutton App Studio GUI development kit for Windows Phone, Microsoft has extended the tool to include support for building apps for Windows 8, too. The latest beta version of the web-based tool formerly known as Windows Phone App Studio, announced at Microsoft's Build developer conference on …

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  1. Nathan 13

    Universally SHIT

    MS have come up with a SHIT operating system, a SHIT mobile operating system, and a SHIT touchscreen operating system.

    Oh sorry, they are all the same SHIT!!!!!

    1. dogged
      Trollface

      Re: Universally SHIT

      u mad bro?

  2. Anonymous Bullard

    "developers of all skill levels"

    that says it all

    1. asdf

      Re: "developers of all skill levels"

      Comment of the week.

  3. Gray
    Trollface

    Black, brown, green, or yellow

    Microsoft produces something for all. Coprophagia is an obsession with them.

  4. cambsukguy

    A drop in the bucket

    Would suggest a tiny, tiny percentage, buckets are huge compared to drops.

    150000 vs a a million is a significant fraction.

    Moreover, the Windows Store is for PC apps. PCs can also install any standard PC app, which are countless in number. I presume OSX apps are not included in the Apple store so the comparison is flawed in any case.

    And, it would be nice to know how many, noticeably different, apps are available in the various stores and specifically figures that removed all the drossy, rubbishy, copy-of-a-copy type apps that abound. The Windows Phone store has markedly fewer of these because they are scam like in nature and therefore attack the larger user base - not to mention that it is harder to get these things past MS than into Google Play for instance.

    1. Anonymous Bullard

      Re: A drop in the bucket

      all the drossy, rubbishy, copy-of-a-copy type apps that abound. The Windows Phone store has markedly fewer of these

      According to the article, there are atleast 20000 of these in the Windows Store, thanks to the Windows app studio. Prepare for more.

      1. Phil_Evans

        Re: A drop in the bucket

        "all the drossy, rubbishy, copy-of-a-copy type apps that abound. The Windows Phone store has markedly fewer of these"

        That's right - just copies of apps that are already successful on the other 2 non-Disney platforms which some onanistic snerk decided would be 'cool' to do on WINDOWS. No humans use these.

        "According to the article, there are atleast 20000 of these in the Windows Store, thanks to the Windows app studio. Prepare for more."

        That's also (probably) right - equivalent to 20,000 leagues under the sea, to lend the metaphor used of the Titanic earlier. Prepare to ignore.

    2. Tim99 Silver badge
      Boffin

      Re: A drop in the bucket

      A drop can vary in size by about an order of magnitude, but a standard laboratory drop is 0.05 mL, so you get 20 of them in a mL or 20,000 in a litre. Assuming that you have a standard old imperial 2 gallon bucket (~9 L) that would be one part in ~180,000 or ~5.5 parts in a million....

  5. SVV

    Go to the last link in the article to discover how much of the world this is going to shake....

    Supported Operating System

    Windows 8.1

    Wow, with a market share that huge, every developer in the world is goimg to drop their current job and plans for the future and adopt this instead in order to reap the huge rewards available from the "Windows Store" by selling apps for the tablets they dumped for peanuts when nobody bought them at full price......

    1. Mikel

      8.1

      And of that only people who buy apps for TIFKAM. So, essentially nobody at all.

  6. Joe Greer

    the ship is sinking....

    I am sure on the Titanic there were some that thought the ship would never totally sink even when it was listing and breaking apart... There are some that have to get wet before they think the ship will sink...

    No developer I know cares about the windows desktop, even in the enterprise we are focused on web apps that use JAVA and database backends. No more damn desktop apps. Fat clients are DEAD!

    My phone and tablet run IOS and Android and work with almost everything and the apps work perfect. I have no need to spend money on the legacy Microsoft product line.

  7. Mikel

    Universal?

    >Windows 8, Windows Phone, Windows RT, and eventually even Xbox.

    Ah, universal for the universe of the most recent fragment of the Microsoft Ecosystem, 19 months old and 200 million devices strong. Or about the last two months worth of Android devices or four months worth of Apple devices, for comparison. And of those Windows users, only the ones who get Apps in TIFKAM, which is essentially nobody. In the Everett-Wheeler hypothesis this is a tiny, closed, tightly curved recursive universe. It may still be in its "hot dense state" and may never achieve inflation.

    Here I thought "Universal" might mean "runs on all versions of Microsoft OS". But of course that would be as silly as expecting "cross platform" to mean more than "runs on Windows 8 And 8.1".

    1. Steve Davies 3 Silver badge

      Re: Universal?

      Quote

      Here I thought "Universal" might mean "runs on all versions of Microsoft OS". But of course that would be as silly as expecting "cross platform" to mean more than "runs on Windows 8 And 8.1".

      For 99% of the people who line in Microsoft La-la land Universal applies ONLY to Windows. For them there is no life, the universe or anything outside of 'Windows'. Rather sad really.

      The 1% who don't are those who develop Office for iOS and OSX.

    2. Daniel von Asmuth
      Windows

      Re: Universal?

      I guess developers will get one Visual Studio on which to build apps for four different platforms and build 32-bit and 64-bit software too, but users would get a binary for their platform only.

      Maybe this unification will make MSDN even harder to use.

    3. Robert Grant

      Re: Universal?

      Universal here having a similar meaning to Apple's universal binaries, which only run on any copy of OSX, whose market share is apparently a little less than that of Windows 8.

      I'm no MS fan, but some of you guys say and upvote such rubbish.

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Universal Apps

    Universal Malware

  9. Mage Silver badge
    Mushroom

    For Fart Apps

    and pointless widgets.

    You can't write a serious GUI application for every platform without differences in design.

    I hate to bang on about this AGAIN

    But this is garbage and always has been except for trivial widgets:

    " Finally, at long last, developers can use "90 per cent" (its figure) of the same code base to create Universal Windows apps for Windows Phone, RT, desktop Windows and now Xbox."

    No you need DIFFERENT GUI and UI strategies for

    1: small phone/screen

    2: big phone

    3: tablet

    4: Desktop / laptop etc

    5: TV with only a remote

    6: Games console with game pad etc/

    7: Server, even if GUI as it has to be bandwidth / Remote Access friendly

    Underlying non UI related code could be the same in some cases. But writing the SAME non-trivial application for these is fantasy. The same GUI dehydrated death no matter if old idea of miniaturising Win9x for WinCE 320 x 240 or expanding Zune GUI ported to phone up to a desktop.

    Sinfofsky was doubly mad forcing one tile GUI yet different APIs.

    Obviously APIs to access storage / files / draw primitives / print / communication etc should be the same. But even if EVERY API was identically compatible for the 7 platforms there you'd be moron to port say the same 3D modelling or accounts package with no GUI or design changes. I'd guess a trivial thing like an eBay sniping tool could be a little "widget" the same on all.

    1. Brewster's Angle Grinder Silver badge

      Re: For Fart Apps

      I broadly agree, although I'm not sure that a big phone is different to a tablet. Nevertheless, I think it is possible.

      Our app allows swiping between screens but also has icons that allow you to move between screens at a tap. This neither-fish-nor-fowl strategy wasn't my choice but it works quite well. Even on phones ~50% of people tap the icon and ~50% people swipe. And on the PC you just click the tabs.The app may qualify as "trivial" since its mainly data display. However I'm now addding serious data input and I don't think it will be a problem. It's certainly harder; every time you add an element you have to think "How will this work on PC? How will it work on a phone?" But with care and consideration it's possible to come up with a UI that feels natural on each device without feeling compromised. And provided you set out to do that, it'll be fine. However scaling down or scaling up a UI will fail every time.

    2. Robert Grant

      Re: For Fart Apps

      1) Everyone does this. Apple, Android and now Windows allow you to keep the same app but have multiple screen definitions for different resolutions.

      2) Most apps are not serious GUI applications, and don't need to be. They're frontends to servers. They aren't 3D modelling tools or accounts packages.

      But you beat that straw man. Straw kudos to you.

    3. MacGyver

      Re: Sinfofsky

      Sinfofsky, he's that bastard that basically broke Microsoft. He broke every design he touched and the fact that his ego wouldn't allow him to think he could ever do anything wrong caused the GUI nightmares were are all still dealing with.

  10. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    One friggin small universe I'm sure.

    In the past Nvidia never dared to produce Linux 3D drivers. So as not to displease Microsoft I'm sure.

    This universe is all about anti innovation yet again. Web apps are 'the universe' but they will stuff up the web like others do.

    BLACK HOLE APPROACHING !

    1. John Tserkezis

      Re: One friggin small universe I'm sure.

      "Web apps are 'the universe' but they will stuff up the web like others do."

      I'm not sure it's that bad, but it's not that good either. I'm working on a fairly substatial application now that will be mostly internal. If it were web based, it would solve a few of my problems, but it would create more. There are inherent limitations that alone are dealbreakers, but worst still, it can't be made portable. I'm not talking cellphone portable, I mean copy it on a USB flash drive and run "anywhere", including non-Internet accessable locations.

      Worst of all, (and I've said this before) Joe Bloggs can't develop free applications using free compliers for a free market and not get away with paying Microsoft (or Apple for that matter) fees for the "priveledge" of doing so.

      1. Steve Davies 3 Silver badge

        Re: One friggin small universe I'm sure.

        Quote

        Worst of all, (and I've said this before) Joe Bloggs can't develop free applications using free compliers for a free market and not get away with paying Microsoft (or Apple for that matter) fees for the "priveledge" of doing so.

        Citation Please?

        If I start selling an application from my web-site how do I end up paying Microsoft or Apple for the sale?

        Plese enlighten me because I have obviously been doing something wrong for the past 10years.

      2. Daniel von Asmuth
        Windows

        Re: One friggin small universe I'm sure.

        Joe Bloggs can develop applications with free-as-in-free-beer compilers, it's just that he will have to pay to upload the software to the App Store and then buy it from the App Store before being able to run it.

        1. Robert Grant

          Re: One friggin small universe I'm sure.

          No, Joe can sideload on a dev-enabled device.

          He pays a small fee for dev registration, but that's about it. I think I paid about 20 quid for a year's registration. I'm not even sure if you need to pay that for sideloading. Visual Studio for Windows Phone is free to download for 30 days, and then free to register after that.

        2. dogged

          Re: One friggin small universe I'm sure.

          > it's just that he will have to pay to upload the software to the App Store and then buy it from the App Store before being able to run it.

          Well, no. You can side-load your own code. You can also make your app free (in which case MS get 30% of jack shit). But yeah, I think a dev license currently costs something like $19 for a year, or as I like to think of it "one medium sized pizza".

          /shrug

  11. Anonymous Coward
    FAIL

    Nope

    Still not buying it...

    1. dogged

      Re: Nope

      Thanks, dude. I don't know how we could have survived without that vital information.

  12. MacGyver

    So, we can expect Java-like sadness.

    Everything runs so much better when it's not written to run on specific hardware. I like to run Windows programs with Wine on my Linux OS running in Hyper-V on my Windows OS because of the wonderful speed increases virtualizing brings. Assembly language is slow. Java is great and faster than natively compiled code (plus it works better and uses less memory).

    //end of alternate bizaro universe rant

    So I expect that any "Hello world" program written for their unified system with end up being 200mb once the dependent libraries are compiled in. Would you expect anything less from the company that brought us "Touchscreen Server 2012"?

  13. This post has been deleted by its author

  14. dogged

    Titanic.

    Doomed.

    Irrelevant.

    UTTER SHIT.

    Switch to linux

    It's remarkable how often we see all this stuff advocating that (according to stats) 90.75 of all desktops are just plain wrong and should be immediately and irrevocably switched to reflect the preferences of users of The Register's comment boards with their clearly far superior 1.49% of all desktop installs worldwide.

    I mean, that just makes absolute sense.

    Everyone knows that the majority system is always wrong, except in phones where it is always right (except if it's one you don't like, such as Symbian).

    I would very much like to see a breakdown of user-agents published by the Register of all browsers and devices used to read this site.

    Because it strikes me that given the stats above and the probabilities involved, most of these loyal partisan forum warriors are lying like marketing.

  15. This post has been deleted by its author

  16. pirithous

    Why can't this be done with the Windows desktop? Is Microsoft going to force people to wait for Windows 9 to do something as simple as this, that is, if they insist on continuing to foist tiles on desktop users?

    http://regmedia.co.uk/2014/04/04/winpho_tile_backgrounds.jpg

  17. pirithous

    Build 2014 Was Depressing

    Build 2014 was like a MLM brainwashing meeting. I thought 2013 was bad, but 2014 was awful. I watched a bit of the unenthusiastic and scripted shills read off teleprompters followed by the incessant claps of tepid sheep. After a few minutes I had all I could take. I can't believe people actually paid over two grand to attend this meeting, but hey, they all went home with a free Xbox One so they could be spied on. Now, that's an investment!

    The focus was on Windows Phone 8.1, and very little on the desktop. Why focus on their desktop when it's a total feudalistic piece of shit? One of the problems with Phone 8.1 is that it's integrated with Bing, and nobody I know uses Bing. Another problem is that the user has a large amount of flexibility when it comes to Android devices in terms of installing a custom OS such as CyanogenMod. Not so with the locked down Windows phone. And don't even get me started on the infantilizing tiles. I don't understand the whole 4-bit color tile campaign that MS is stuck in. Everyone I know dislikes tiles; they think they're annoying and useless -- the way they're square, flat, and flash annoying shit in your face. That's what web browsers are for. 4-bit color tiles are fucking ugly on any device. Tiles are right up there with Zune and Active desktop. Microsoft should be very nervous. They are becoming an irrelvant company that's becoming more and more isolated from reality. History does indeed repeat itself.

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