Daring Fireball Repost of Ovi app store failure.
So, imagine being a mobile app developer and having to target anything in “Step 2″.
All attitudes need balance, especially mine.
Peter Bright, my personal hero, weighs in on the Silverlight, HTML5 controversy.
In this context, Microsoft’s decision to downplay Silverlight is baffling. It might be the right thing to do in a few years, but right now, today? No. It’s crazy talk. Even the World Wide Web Consortium, the group behind the HTML5 standardization effort, is suggesting that developers hold off on using HTML5, at least until the middle of next year when the specification should be reasonably nailed down.
On the desktop, Microsoft needs to make a decision. Is the future of desktop application development Win32 (with or without Direct2D), is it Silverlight, is it WPF, or is it something else entirely? Because the current approach—three different ways of writing desktop applications, each with their own unique features—stinks. If Silverlight or WPF are the future, then OK: get them running on Direct2D so that they’re fast and look identical to other Direct2D applications. But if they’re not the future, the company needs to tell developers now, rather than stringing them along.
Do you know that kid who is really bright but is just a little disorganized; has a good attitude but keeps showing up late.
That kid is Microsoft.
I have been struggling with my love / hate relationship with Microsoft for a while now. I make my living doing about 80% development in .NET with WPF and WinForms. However, my other 20% is on iOS especially iPad.
When you look at the work of the 2 companies, the style and craftsmanship differences between the programming frameworks are striking.
Apple has truly created a supporting framework where accomplishing a programming task is seemingly effortless. There is overhead in achieving the mindset present in Apple’s Objective-C, but once you have achieved Cocoa nirvana the world opens up.
Microsoft has created a platform that you have to constantly fight against to be successful. Many developers just rolled their eyes, but please hear me out. Microsoft .NET, especially WPF, is the best way to mask the complexity if the underlying Windows system while still providing a rich API that can accommodate a large variety of application types. However, every line of code you write maps to some call in a legacy framework in order to accomplish a task. The unfortunate thing is that these frameworks are the 20 year old Win32 API and/or the 15 year old DirectX API. Like it or not there are times where you have to understand the API logic and API sequence to properly use a very high level API. This legacy thinking leads to a bad end user experience, apps which are full of noticeable kludges, and apps which cannot be extended into the new worlds of tablet and mobile.
The need to use the Win32 API and DirectX framework, no matter how well wrapped, is holding Microsoft back from achieving great things.
One interesting case study of the inability to create great things with Windows is Microsoft Surface.
The underlying concepts that Microsoft Surface exposes hold so much promise. Unfortunately Surface seems to be locked forever on 6 year old hardware (Radeon 9200 ? Really ?), Vista 32-bit, and an end table form factor that has to be large enough to contain an entire PC. All this legacy specialty will cost you $12,000. All of this legacy specialty is needed because the Surface team had to find a way to lock down Vista 32-bit, WPF, .NET, and other frameworks in a way which allowed them to ship something stable that ends up being an entire platform for Surface.
Imagine if the Microsoft Surface team could have picked different platforms, frameworks, and hardware? Imagine if they were able to spread the Surface concept up and out of the shell that they had to contain it in. Microsoft Surface is a case of Microsoft having to limit itself in order to maintain their own platform.
To summarize: Microsoft is an amazing company, with amazing people, that is held back by its own management, weight, and history. I can only hope that the senior management at Microsoft can realize this very soon and find ways to break out of these shackles that they have put upon themselves.
As a developer I never thought I would see this day. IE 9 tops HTML5 conformance tests. Is it chilly in here?
Microsoft has truly put their money where their mouth is. Great work!
Check out EcoMotors.
Bill Gates has given these guys seed money. Bill doesn’t bet on losers and these guys seem solid. Time to dig up more info about this company.
In classic Microsoft style there is a non-denial denial from Bob Muglia regarding his comments on Silverlight use via the web plugin.
I interpret this to mean: “If you have a project underway, go ahead, we will keep Silverlight around and keep supporting it. Otherwise, you probably want to be on HTML5. We can’t win on Android and iOS so you have to target HTML5 to keep using Visual Studio to develop for those platforms.”
My recommendation: If you haven’t shipped anything using Silverlight yet, don’t, and swap immediately to HTML5.
Based on my experience out at MIX10 there are some really good people doing Silverlight verification and testing for Windows Phone 7. The shifting of Microsoft resources to full time Silverlight for mobile, especially Karen Corby (scorbs), and Seema Ramchandani, and Oren Nachman is a great move and will only make Windows Phone 7 much better, much faster.
Personally, I can’t wait for Peter Bright from ArsTechnica to weigh in on this one.
Source: Bloomberg
Earlier entries in this blog are starting to be reinforced by the heads of Google and other high end CEOs.
The self policing of the amount of time entered here makes this a highly inaccurate count. However I applaud the sentiment and the outlet for frustration regarding IE and the lack of standards compliance and just plain goofiness with the handling of HTML + CSS + JScript.
Originally found via the Smashing Magazine Twitter feed (@smashingmag)
Update: a companion piece from Howtogeek on how to crash IE using just HTML and CSS
Normally I think Cracked is a little too raw, but this one struck a chord.
Original link from New York Times was off of Daring Fireball.
Be sure to watch the video.
It is things like this that make everyone realize the stuff that we do does make lives better in ways we just didn’t know when we started.
Wow, just wow.