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>"with possibility to write one application that works on all" I'm not sure this is such a good thing. Maybe I'm in the minority but my phone and my desktop OS

>"with possibility to write one application that works on all" I'm not sure this is such a good thing. Maybe I'm in the minority but my phone and my desktop OS have vastly different use cases and I'd expect apps running on each of them to be different. I'm not interested in a converging UI. I want a user experience tailored to the platform I'm running the app on. I'd rather a solid desktop experience then having to put up with trade off's the developers decided to make because they wanted a "one size fits all experience". I've seen it in the Linux world where toolkits/desktop environments tried to chase the idea of converging UI's and we ended up with the worst of both worlds - miserable to use apps on a phone/tablet and miserable Desktop Apps.

dragontamer 10y ago
> I'm not sure this is such a good thing. Maybe I'm in the minority but my phone and my desktop OS have vastly different use cases and I'd expect apps running on each of them to be different. But why should they be programmed different? You can create XAML forms that are optimized for each platform. But why would you want to rewrite your code to adapt to the different GUIs? Won't it just be easier, as a developer, to create a singular platform with two XAML (one for small screens, one for large screens) that share the same codebase?
- bad_user 10y ago
  Your assumptions hold for OS X and iOS even though they are not the same OS and never claimed to be. > Won't it just be easier, as a developer, to create a singular platform with two XAML (one for small screens, one for large screens) that share the same codebase? In theory yes, in practice changing the UI isn't the only problem. The problem is that a phone is much more limited, both in hardware and in what it is allowed to do. Just as a simple example, on the desktop you can have storage that's shared between apps (at least for now), hence if you want your app's settings to be synchronized with Dropbox, you only need to detect Dropbox's folder and save your stuff in it, whereas on a mobile, you need to integrate with Dropbox's API. Plus on the desktop you usually have a lot of storage space, like my 5 year old desktop has 1 TB of storage, whereas my phones only have 32 GB and 64 GB respectively and these are high-end phones. So clearly storage is a bottleneck on mobile phone, but not on desktops. Another simple example: battery life. Mobile developers have to worry about battery life, the big and forever bottleneck of mobile devices, whereas desktop developers have never been concerned about it. For example I avoided to install Skype on my Android for two years because it was sucking my battery dry in only 2-3 hours. And now mobile Skype is so aggressive in cutting down on background chat that I cannot rely on it to deliver chat messages on time. And you want to hear the worst part? Moore's law doesn't apply well to batteries, so unless major breakthroughs happen, this will only get worse ;-) And if universal apps on the desktop are as limited as their phone counterparts, that would turn out quite ironic for Microsoft to have turned your powerful desktop into a dumb phone just to have the same experience everywhere. Of course, them and others will try and turn this around as being for the senile grandmas everywhere that are unable to use their laptops, but many of us will have known the truth about that one.
  - pavlov 10y ago
    For a lot of people, "desktop" really means laptop these days. Laptops are much closer to mobile than the traditional desktop PC you describe. Limited storage and battery life are important considerations on a MacBook just as on an iPad. Also the Mac desktop software environment is more like iOS these days, if you want to go through the Apple-sanctioned route of using the Mac App Store. For example direct folder access is not possible, so the Mac desktop app in your example would have to use the Dropbox API too.
    - bad_user 10y ago
      > Limited storage and battery life are important considerations on a MacBook just as on an iPad. No, I don't believe that's true. Laptops are bigger, so they can afford bigger batteries. My Macbook Pro's battery holds without problems for 4 to 6 hours of intense work, which is not something I can say about my phone and I'm talking about working on and compiling Scala code and few things are more intensive than that. Also, most of the time, laptops are used while sitting on desks for actual work. Oh, I know, you might pull your laptop at your coffeeshop to write an email or write comments on HN, or you might need it for work during a flight, which is cool, but overall laptops do get used pretty near an electrical outlet. But the biggest difference is one of expectations. Phones are still communication devices which we rely on. If my laptop's battery goes out during a flight, I don't care because I do not need my laptop to make phone calls or to orient myself using maps or to call a cab or to open my travel documents or whatever. Whereas I do really need my phone. So the Scala compiler running on my laptop doesn't need to be battery efficient. But my phone needs to last for 12 hours while traveling, otherwise I'm fucked. > Mac desktop software environment is more like iOS these days, if you want to go through the Apple-sanctioned route of using the Mac App Store ... the Mac desktop app in your example would have to use the Dropbox API too Oh, I don't know about that and the reason is the Mac App Store is a wasteland and I can't think of a single app I installed from it. Also, the Mac App Store isn't the "Apple sanctioned" way and they know it's a wasteland too, it's not like they are blind. No, the Apple sanctioned way is to sign your app. Signing apps needs an Apple developer account, which is fairly costly for open-source devs, but at least I can see the benefit to it. And as long as your app is signed, OS X gives you no problem in letting it be installed.
realusername 10y ago
As a good example of this problem, I remember the new Metro (or whatever it's called now) calculator taking a whole screen on a 22". Yes it worked, but it looked really terrible and unusable.
- userbinator 10y ago
  Apparently it's also extremely slow, to the point that it needs a loading screen: https://www.reddit.com/r/windows/comments/3ng3f4/windows_10_calculator_is_one_hell_of_a_step_down/ https://www.reddit.com/r/windows/comments/3ng3f4/windows_10_...
  - MLR 10y ago
    UWP apps (excluding the start menu) all just have a splash screen when you launch them, it doesn't have anything to do with 'speed'.
    - Dylan16807 10y ago
      > it doesn't have anything to do with 'speed'. Even then, that means it has to do with speed but in an even worse way. An artificial slowdown added to everything.
0xFFC 10y ago
>I've seen it in the Linux world where toolkits/desktop environments tried to chase the idea of converging UI's and we ended up with the worst of both worlds - miserable to use apps on a phone/tablet and miserable Desktop Apps. I abandoned Linux just because of this. Some people just don't get it. I don't want mobile UI in my double 1080p monitors which I do development on them.But people like gnome developers just don't get it.they push for various kind of animation without properly optimization and at the end we have gnome 3 debacle. I am not against animation or touch UI.But if you want develop touch UI do it simultaneously with desktop branch, not by ruining desktop. After so much debate just look at ridiculous ui for classic shell in recent gnomes. Are they fucking kidding people? Is that notification and tray icon for real? (I know there is extensions,but I am talking more broadly,about core developers mind sets.)
- pessimizer 10y ago
  Don't ditch Linux because of Gnome 3 or Unity. You can install Cinnamon, MATE, XFCE or KDE in five minutes.

dragontamer 10y ago

> I'm not sure this is such a good thing. Maybe I'm in the minority but my phone and my desktop OS have vastly different use cases and I'd expect apps running on each of them to be different. But why should they be programmed different? You can create XAML forms that are optimized for each platform. But why would you want to rewrite your code to adapt to the different GUIs? Won't it just be easier, as a developer, to create a singular platform with two XAML (one for small screens, one for large screens) that share the same codebase?

bad_user 10y ago
Your assumptions hold for OS X and iOS even though they are not the same OS and never claimed to be. > Won't it just be easier, as a developer, to create a singular platform with two XAML (one for small screens, one for large screens) that share the same codebase? In theory yes, in practice changing the UI isn't the only problem. The problem is that a phone is much more limited, both in hardware and in what it is allowed to do. Just as a simple example, on the desktop you can have storage that's shared between apps (at least for now), hence if you want your app's settings to be synchronized with Dropbox, you only need to detect Dropbox's folder and save your stuff in it, whereas on a mobile, you need to integrate with Dropbox's API. Plus on the desktop you usually have a lot of storage space, like my 5 year old desktop has 1 TB of storage, whereas my phones only have 32 GB and 64 GB respectively and these are high-end phones. So clearly storage is a bottleneck on mobile phone, but not on desktops. Another simple example: battery life. Mobile developers have to worry about battery life, the big and forever bottleneck of mobile devices, whereas desktop developers have never been concerned about it. For example I avoided to install Skype on my Android for two years because it was sucking my battery dry in only 2-3 hours. And now mobile Skype is so aggressive in cutting down on background chat that I cannot rely on it to deliver chat messages on time. And you want to hear the worst part? Moore's law doesn't apply well to batteries, so unless major breakthroughs happen, this will only get worse ;-) And if universal apps on the desktop are as limited as their phone counterparts, that would turn out quite ironic for Microsoft to have turned your powerful desktop into a dumb phone just to have the same experience everywhere. Of course, them and others will try and turn this around as being for the senile grandmas everywhere that are unable to use their laptops, but many of us will have known the truth about that one.
- pavlov 10y ago
  For a lot of people, "desktop" really means laptop these days. Laptops are much closer to mobile than the traditional desktop PC you describe. Limited storage and battery life are important considerations on a MacBook just as on an iPad. Also the Mac desktop software environment is more like iOS these days, if you want to go through the Apple-sanctioned route of using the Mac App Store. For example direct folder access is not possible, so the Mac desktop app in your example would have to use the Dropbox API too.
  - bad_user 10y ago
    > Limited storage and battery life are important considerations on a MacBook just as on an iPad. No, I don't believe that's true. Laptops are bigger, so they can afford bigger batteries. My Macbook Pro's battery holds without problems for 4 to 6 hours of intense work, which is not something I can say about my phone and I'm talking about working on and compiling Scala code and few things are more intensive than that. Also, most of the time, laptops are used while sitting on desks for actual work. Oh, I know, you might pull your laptop at your coffeeshop to write an email or write comments on HN, or you might need it for work during a flight, which is cool, but overall laptops do get used pretty near an electrical outlet. But the biggest difference is one of expectations. Phones are still communication devices which we rely on. If my laptop's battery goes out during a flight, I don't care because I do not need my laptop to make phone calls or to orient myself using maps or to call a cab or to open my travel documents or whatever. Whereas I do really need my phone. So the Scala compiler running on my laptop doesn't need to be battery efficient. But my phone needs to last for 12 hours while traveling, otherwise I'm fucked. > Mac desktop software environment is more like iOS these days, if you want to go through the Apple-sanctioned route of using the Mac App Store ... the Mac desktop app in your example would have to use the Dropbox API too Oh, I don't know about that and the reason is the Mac App Store is a wasteland and I can't think of a single app I installed from it. Also, the Mac App Store isn't the "Apple sanctioned" way and they know it's a wasteland too, it's not like they are blind. No, the Apple sanctioned way is to sign your app. Signing apps needs an Apple developer account, which is fairly costly for open-source devs, but at least I can see the benefit to it. And as long as your app is signed, OS X gives you no problem in letting it be installed.

realusername 10y ago

As a good example of this problem, I remember the new Metro (or whatever it's called now) calculator taking a whole screen on a 22". Yes it worked, but it looked really terrible and unusable.

userbinator 10y ago
Apparently it's also extremely slow, to the point that it needs a loading screen: https://www.reddit.com/r/windows/comments/3ng3f4/windows_10_calculator_is_one_hell_of_a_step_down/ https://www.reddit.com/r/windows/comments/3ng3f4/windows_10_...
- MLR 10y ago
  UWP apps (excluding the start menu) all just have a splash screen when you launch them, it doesn't have anything to do with 'speed'.
  - Dylan16807 10y ago
    > it doesn't have anything to do with 'speed'. Even then, that means it has to do with speed but in an even worse way. An artificial slowdown added to everything.

0xFFC 10y ago

>I've seen it in the Linux world where toolkits/desktop environments tried to chase the idea of converging UI's and we ended up with the worst of both worlds - miserable to use apps on a phone/tablet and miserable Desktop Apps. I abandoned Linux just because of this. Some people just don't get it. I don't want mobile UI in my double 1080p monitors which I do development on them.But people like gnome developers just don't get it.they push for various kind of animation without properly optimization and at the end we have gnome 3 debacle. I am not against animation or touch UI.But if you want develop touch UI do it simultaneously with desktop branch, not by ruining desktop. After so much debate just look at ridiculous ui for classic shell in recent gnomes. Are they fucking kidding people? Is that notification and tray icon for real? (I know there is extensions,but I am talking more broadly,about core developers mind sets.)

pessimizer 10y ago
Don't ditch Linux because of Gnome 3 or Unity. You can install Cinnamon, MATE, XFCE or KDE in five minutes.