78 replies to this topic

[Speereo]

I've found interesting points in the article devoted to latest gen gaming devices. And I find some of them relevant for this thread.

PCs with Vista & XP lose their positions against Xbox, PlayStation & Wii.
The list of cons'n'pros clearly resembles WM vs iPhone

Gaming consoles have strong features that PCs don't have:
1. Unified architecture, like iPhone does. No problems like "Oh, Fallout 3 won't run on High settings on my PC". No upgrade headaches every 6-8 months.
2. Single on-line system. 30 seconds to start playing on-line. No need to search for servers, install additional software e.t.c.
3. Easier content shopping, no "8 versions of 1 game" thing. No problems with drivers, compatibility e.t.c.
4. Most importantly these 3 points make DEVELOPERS choose consoles over PCs, so...
5. More and more games come to PC as "castrated" versions of console titles with poor ergonomics (different manipulators), poor graphics (they were not originally designed for PC cards) and the last but not the least poor gameplay (linear story, simple puzzles, lots of movies, but monotous kill 'em all action).

So increasing amount of people will end up buying mediocre notebook for business and console for pleasure.

My latest choice was 8710p laptop. I can work, I can play. I really like this one, but DTR is still DTR, so in 2 years, when I need true portability, I may buy 12 inch notebook + console for half the price of gaming notebook.

Windows is still the common choice to make work done, but the rules of "big" computers change when talking about portable devices.

Currently I can say that WM is good for business & iPhone is good for pleasure. But the question is... What is easier:
- to make WM more user- and developer-friendly OR
- to make good business apps for iPhone

After all, even those of you who are really addicted to gadgets will hardly keep WM device & iPhone in the briefcase simultaneously ;)

[The Guru]

I agree there completely. I'm not in to games consoles but I can see the analogy. The iPhone is definitely geared towards a more user friendly leisure type base at the moment, however one has to consider where it will be by the time WM7 (or WM6.5) comes around.

[tenohfive]

At risk of going off topic slightly, whilst I can see the point made about trying to design software for a range of different hardware being slightly applicable in gaming, theres also the other side of things - theres alot more room for flexibility and customisation with PC gaming. For instance I could choose to spend extra on a gaming keyboard or other peripherals, setup a dual screen layout etc...and for complex, in depth games that can be considered either a massive bonus or an essential, depending on your perspective.

Take for instance Eve - for those that don't know it its a space RPG that isn't frantic action all the time - alot of the time is spent doing boring things. No console will allow me to either alt-tab onto forums/news/youtube or run a second monitor with that active - a PC will.

In this instance PC's are much the same as WM - not easy for developers but will always have a strong following because they are capable of doing more.

[CiaranMurphy]

Hi guys... another developer. I was reading this and couldn't resist. Ok I'm primarily a desktop developer. In my last company I made touchscreen applications for big industrial machines in clean rooms and users had to wear latex gloves. Now when I started windows did not provide much in the way of touch functionality, in fact it still doesn't. The events are all set up for mouse/stylus interaction, there is little support for offset magnified cursors (so you can see what you're doing) the list goes on and on. So while I could do anything I wanted, it just took time. Time to develop, time to test, time to debug.

I dabbled in the .Net compact framework a few years back. It was nice to use familiar C# but the controls were crap/dull in the extreme. And to be honest the hardware wasn't up to much 4-5 years ago.

Fast forward to today. I've played around with Interface Builder in X Code before and found it nice but I've never coded in Objective C before, but it was a snap to throw together something. It felt like using VB for the first time. Very refreshing... and my test applications looked clean and slick with No effort.

No at the moment I use WPF and Silverlight on the desktop. I can achieve similar/better with these tools than I can from Apple's tools. WPF/Silverlight really is great from a UI point of view.

SilverLight 2 is out now, and MS has announced that it will be available for WinMob Q1 2009. Next is SL 3 with GPU acceleration and 3d graphics. It's a reasonably safe bet to assume that future versions of both Windows on the desktop and Windows mobile will use some form of WPF/SL as their core rendering technology.

If that is the case, be prepared for very very slick apps. I don't know when WinMob 7 will be released, but I expect the porting of our LOB apps from desktop to Mobile device to be manageable... our UI code is well separated fro business code and we've been designing with this in mind.

I'd be interested to hear what other developers think. Would you be happy with a WPF rendering core in WinMob?

[fowljr]

Thanks for the input Ciaran, interesting points made there. If Silverlight can provide the kind of UI experience that everyone wants, but remain fast and responsive, then I for one would be happy.

[The Guru]

I agree thee Jim that could make all the difference, but will the developmental tools be there - either as new entities or via libraries?

[birdiestyle]

Wow, cant believe I had missed this Thread. Very interesting.... And Alex pretty much nailed everything with his first post to try and explain it...


And Sev made a lot of good and interesting points but from a very different perspective than I would take and is a little more Apple friendly than most people are.. I agree with a lot of it, but some ideas like just throwing away the book and forget backward compatibility by Microsoft in either the desktop or mobile market is just not a good idea. Apple had an extreme advantage in that they had a tiny market share when they pulled this off. Microsoft really doesnt have nore want that advantage. There are just too many companies and consumers using specialty legacy software and periphrials that represent way too much of the upgrade market to even consider this....  Cant cut these people off as they probably represent way more market share than Apple even has, and just offering the "Classic" mode wouldnt be successful with the larger user base...

Same with Windows Mobile. It's huge advantage is it has 10K plus applications with Hundreds to Thousands that are so much more powerful productivity and enterprise applications than you will likely ever see on the current iterations of iPhone...Do you really want to force them to be re-developed from the ground up.

tonybro said:

Great points and I think I was aiming at the same thing when I stated MS need to rip up the rule book and code a core OS with a basic GUI and then leave the OEMs to develop the UI.

Doesn't this get us to kind of where we are now again. Multiple devices all with different UIs that we as developers are testing against and hoping to work with...It would be messy...

Consumer's have to realize that these shells like HTC's Touch and Sony's Panels are just applications. They go back to the beginning of the platform(like Dashboard back in the day) and are the same as Mobile Shell and the Vito stuff and others. Thats how flexible WM is... The only difference is HTC is writing it instead of SPB. So really should it be left up to the OEMS to develop the UI, when if you ask any of us, they dont always do that great of job in letting us developer's hook into their products(HTC's Touch UI is a great example of this)?

We really just need the OS overhauled but not destroyed, and give us newer APIs for Graphics, Transitions, New Controls, etc.... Clean up the core UI so that it makes sense and is easier and 'prettier' (which would happen if they start plugging in and using the new APIs and do some better usability planning). But dont kill off all existing 3rd party applications completely to get there...And maybe enforce a little higher hardware requirements while you are making the move...

The iPhone has a lot of good things, and a ton of bottlenecks and hoops... IF Microsoft plays it right, a new nice clean cool fast usable OS and an Application Store that isnt a complete mess and offers a marketplace not as restricting and offers similiar volume and a more mature user base, they can catch back up and pass everyone on all fronts... The flexibility is the key and is why Microsoft still rules the Desktop...I dont want one form factor and to be locked down and consumers really dont either... But they need to be dazzled too....

Hopefully they understand that and are getting it done....

And if not get a bunch of us 3rd party developers involved now instead of at the end, Ill take a trip to Redmond if it means you nail what you need to do to put WM on top, and I know a few others that wouldnt mind either....


Birdsoft

[alex_kac]

Birdsoft - good points. But think about it this way too - with the changes Microsoft has to make UI wise to make WinMobile competitive, we're going to have to rewrite a lot of code anyway. And from what I have heard in the pipeline...its a radical new change.

I'm of two minds about it all. I hate having to rewrite my code, but on the other hand I know that with the current graphics engine and windowing model, just adding "transitions" isn't going to cut it.

[birdiestyle]

So will it be like a 2003 to WM5 thing where the old stuff still works, or a throw it all out and just use the new stuff, which will kill a lot of the older applications still out there and pretty much wreck that advantage. And then they will have to court all of us developers to stay around and do all that work. I can handle another WM5 type jump if the APIs are that much better but we all have way too much base code that if its that big a switch we should be getting the APIs now(and all of us this time).

If we got much more powerful graphics capabilities standard and some transition/gesture type stuff, and mainly some better controls we could get to and pass iPhone level very quickly, especially by encouraging applications to follow certain UI models(and MS actually use them consistantly too), but Im afraid thats not necessarily completely where they are going to go...

If I can plug a better List Control in for my existing custom ones that actually looks good and has consistant finger friendly /dpad usage and gives me transitions and the ability to draw custom and alpha like in your examples with only a few lines, and will expand/contract based on whether it should be finger friendly or a stylus/dpad based setup... It wont take all that long for the percieved experience that iPhone has is matched over here...
But the APIs have to be good....

A lot of the biggest/best applications have gone to a list view based architecture anyway, which in most cases is what most iPhone Applications are too...

Hmmm...