6 ms·

You can say a lot of things about windows but abandoning apis isn't one of them. Windows is the king of backwards compatibility, for better or for worse.

Razengan 8y ago
DirectInput -> XInput, which dumbed down many of the advanced Force-Feedback features to the level that the simple Xbox gamepads could support, compared to the original Sidewinder line of awesome joysticks (another victim of Microsoft abandonment.) Often not making many APIs available in their latest programming technologies like .NET/C# (at least initially.) WPF, Silverlight, the "Metro" experiment that lasted for a single (!) version of Windows (8), and great discontinued apps like PhotoDraw, are some of the other cases that personally affected me.
- RaleyField 8y ago
  > (!) They changed the name to Modern UI, some reported [1] because it clashed with their German partner Metro AG. In any case Modern UI started with Zune and you could get for the time nifty looking media player for it on XP [2]. You can still see it in newer parts of Windows 10 with its aversion to skeuomorphic design, preferring text and minimalist 1 color icons. [1](https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/08/microsoft-metro-out-windows-8-style-ui-in-amid-rumors-of-a-trademark-dispute/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/08/micro...) [2] https://archive.ledfrog.com/2011/06/microsoft-zune-software-review/ https://archive.ledfrog.com/2011/06/microsoft-zune-software-...
  - Razengan 8y ago
    I was referring to that crippled subsystem with the fullscreen Start Menu/Screen and the touchscreen-compatible apps that launched from it, separate from the "full" "desktop" experience, where you had two versions of IE, Outlook, Skype etc. It was also all you could access on the now-abandoned Windows RT. Is that dichotomy still present in Windows 10? See, it's a confusing exercise to even figure out what their sub-platforms are supposed to be called. Apparently they are now "Universal Windows Platform (UWP) apps (formerly Windows Store apps and Metro-style apps)" [0] Do they have access to the full feature set of DirectX etc.? Do they have support for multiple appearances, Dark Mode, etc.? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Windows_Platform_apps https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Windows_Platform_app...
    - pjmlp 8y ago
      Win32 is kind of legacy. UWP is what was WinRT on Windows 8, they have just been improving it all these years. Of course they have access to full DirectX 11 and 12. All new APIs are UWP based, and with they learned with the Desktop Bridge for Win32, they changed their strategy and are now merging UWP and Wi32 into a single container/store model. Some of the talks related with it were done at MSBUILD 2018, check MSIX, .NET Core 3.0 roadmap, XAML Islands, XAML Direct. If they don't change direction, in a couple of Windows releases they will be merged, with UWP continuously taking over Win32, like Win32 did before to Win16. As for Apple, I can quickly refer to Object Pascal, Quickdraw 3D, JavaBridge, Quickdraw Java APIs, A/UX, Dylan, Newton, MCL, Hypercard....
      - Razengan 8y ago
        If this is to be a simple listout of products and services that were superseded or discontinued because it made no sense to continue them (as opposed to breaking promises or replacing them with inferior counterparts), then on the MS side we have: Active Desktop, Briefcase, CardSpace, Meeting Space, NetMeeting, Windows Sidebar, Desktop Gadgets and Windows SideShow (which displayed gadgets in a secondary screen on laptop lids etc., kinda cool at the time but I never saw an implementation in the wild), Office Assistant (Clippy in the File Explorer), Encarta and the rest of the edutainment product line (which were actually great and often used as a selling point for PCs at the time), XP themes, HTML thumbnails, the Comic Chat IRC client (my first gateway to social interaction on the internet), the SideWinder game controllers for PC (including the Dual Strike [0] which was way ahead of its time), MSN/Live Messenger, Photo Gallery, Movie Maker, Visual Basic, FoxPro and many others... :) [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MShp4F4cUDE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MShp4F4cUDE
        pjmlp 8y ago
        That was just a very basic sample, if you wish to play this game, I have more from Apple I could keep writing.
        DonHopkins 8y ago
        Maybe so, but none of yours (or even all of yours combined) are anywhere near as tragic as the cancelation of HyperCard. ;( (Although Comic Chat was pretty cool, with all those Jim Woodring characters and backgrounds, and the emotional pie menu.) http://www.mermeliz.com/files/mschat_summary.htm http://www.mermeliz.com/files/mschat_summary.htm One question: After being exposed to Comic Chat as your first chat client, do you now visualize everyone you chat with and your online environment as if they were drawn by Jim Woodring? http://www.jimwoodring.com/artwork/gallery http://www.jimwoodring.com/artwork/gallery You lucky bastard! http://www.jimwoodring.com/wp-content/uploads/Bastard.jpg http://www.jimwoodring.com/wp-content/uploads/Bastard.jpg
- stinos 8y ago
  Not sure if WPF is a good fit for this this discussion about abandoning APIs especially not in the way as mentioned by the OP (i.e. ditching it all together): as fas as I'm aware it is still supported in the very latest versions of the build tools and the applications built with it just run on the supported OS for those tools (didn't check recently but about a year ago I could still get a newly built WPF application running on Windows XP). Sure it's not actively being developped anymore, but it's still there and still works.
  - Razengan 8y ago
    WPF was presented and touted as the future of the Windows GUI (and beyond.) It was barely dogfooded at all by Microsoft themselves and the future we got instead was the bland, inferior “Metro” experience.
    - Illniyar 8y ago
      WPF was released in 2006, before the original iPhone. it has been actively developed and pushed for close to 10 years. WPF was used in Visual Studio.
      - Razengan 8y ago
        I'm aware it was used in Visual Studio, and oh, the Expression Studio suite [0] – another discontinued line of great products, for making stuff with WPF – but that's all I can remember. Not even Calculator or Notepad used WPF as far as I know, which would have been the simplest apps to port and could have bolstered developer confidence in the technology (the point of this whole discussion.) And why is it "was"; does VS now not use WPF? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Expression_Studio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Expression_Studio
        Razengan 8y ago
        Correction: Apparently most parts of Expression Studio have been assimilated into Visual Studio, but the point remains: It decreased developer confidence when it was discontinued and nothing was immediately announced as a replacement.
- Illniyar 8y ago
  WPF has had a major release not a year ago and is actively updated alongside .net framework updates[1]. It is featured prominently in all visual studio products. For that matter even winforms is still available. The Metro UI evolved into windows 10 UWP, and practically everything that was in Metro UI can be transferred to UWP, down to the homescreen widgets. Silverlight and DirectInput are still available, though they are deprecated they haven't been removed. Silverlight even had security updates released as late as a year ago [2]even though it has been deprecated since 2015 [1] - https://github.com/Microsoft/dotnet-framework-early-access/blob/master/release-notes/build-3621/dotnet-build-3621-changes.md#wpf https://github.com/Microsoft/dotnet-framework-early-access/b... [2] - https://www.microsoft.com/getsilverlight/locale/en-us/html/Microsoft%20Silverlight%20Release%20History.htm#SL_5_1_50907 https://www.microsoft.com/getsilverlight/locale/en-us/html/M...
xorcist 8y ago
Compared to what? Apple or the mobile OS du jour? Most other operating systems in commercial use, and we can look both at the commercial unices and the embedded stuff, supports APIs much older than Windows itself. Support for the Win16 API has been abysmal recently. My limited experience of old DOS and Windows applications is that they often run better under dosbox or wine than native.
- pjmlp 8y ago
  How much of those commercial unices and the embedded stuff older than Windows are actually still being updated beyond bug fixes?
DonHopkins 8y ago
And in some cases, like their speech synthesis and recognition APIs, Windows has been pretty darn good about having the APIs in the first place, maintaining and improving them over more than a couple decades, with the APIs being quite rich and supporting third party components like voices, synthesizers and recognizers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Speech_API https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Speech_API While Apple's speech APIs, for all their huff and puff and other legitimate work on accessibility, are totally lacking, way behind, locked away from third party developers, and sadly deficient for application developers who need more than the most basic off-the-shelf features. For example, SAPI has for decades been able to a send mouth positions (visemes) synchronized with the speech, to animate the lips of the Wizard or Rover the Dog or Clippy (or whatever a paperclip uses to articulate), which is proven to improve speech understanding. But not a peep from Apple's speech API -- their lips are sealed. https://www.codeproject.com/Articles/1609/Converting-Text-To-Speech-and-and-using-mouth-moti?msg=260302#xx260302xx https://www.codeproject.com/Articles/1609/Converting-Text-To...
coldtea 8y ago
>You can say a lot of things about windows but abandoning apis isn't one of them. Actually abandoning APIs is very much one of them. While programs written in older API still work, MS is notorious for abandoning APIs (as opposed to removing them) and asking developers to support its new shiny thing even faster than Apple changes frameworks (heck, you could still compile NeXT apps 30+ years later, and the frameworks where still supported, albeit with some alterations). MS always invents new frameworks and APIs every 2-3 years for the same thing, e.g. GUI programming (or at least used to, haven't followed for the last several years).

Razengan 8y ago

DirectInput -> XInput, which dumbed down many of the advanced Force-Feedback features to the level that the simple Xbox gamepads could support, compared to the original Sidewinder line of awesome joysticks (another victim of Microsoft abandonment.) Often not making many APIs available in their latest programming technologies like .NET/C# (at least initially.) WPF, Silverlight, the "Metro" experiment that lasted for a single (!) version of Windows (8), and great discontinued apps like PhotoDraw, are some of the other cases that personally affected me.

RaleyField 8y ago
> (!) They changed the name to Modern UI, some reported [1] because it clashed with their German partner Metro AG. In any case Modern UI started with Zune and you could get for the time nifty looking media player for it on XP [2]. You can still see it in newer parts of Windows 10 with its aversion to skeuomorphic design, preferring text and minimalist 1 color icons. [1](https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/08/microsoft-metro-out-windows-8-style-ui-in-amid-rumors-of-a-trademark-dispute/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/08/micro...) [2] https://archive.ledfrog.com/2011/06/microsoft-zune-software-review/ https://archive.ledfrog.com/2011/06/microsoft-zune-software-...
- Razengan 8y ago
  I was referring to that crippled subsystem with the fullscreen Start Menu/Screen and the touchscreen-compatible apps that launched from it, separate from the "full" "desktop" experience, where you had two versions of IE, Outlook, Skype etc. It was also all you could access on the now-abandoned Windows RT. Is that dichotomy still present in Windows 10? See, it's a confusing exercise to even figure out what their sub-platforms are supposed to be called. Apparently they are now "Universal Windows Platform (UWP) apps (formerly Windows Store apps and Metro-style apps)" [0] Do they have access to the full feature set of DirectX etc.? Do they have support for multiple appearances, Dark Mode, etc.? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Windows_Platform_apps https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Windows_Platform_app...
  - pjmlp 8y ago
    Win32 is kind of legacy. UWP is what was WinRT on Windows 8, they have just been improving it all these years. Of course they have access to full DirectX 11 and 12. All new APIs are UWP based, and with they learned with the Desktop Bridge for Win32, they changed their strategy and are now merging UWP and Wi32 into a single container/store model. Some of the talks related with it were done at MSBUILD 2018, check MSIX, .NET Core 3.0 roadmap, XAML Islands, XAML Direct. If they don't change direction, in a couple of Windows releases they will be merged, with UWP continuously taking over Win32, like Win32 did before to Win16. As for Apple, I can quickly refer to Object Pascal, Quickdraw 3D, JavaBridge, Quickdraw Java APIs, A/UX, Dylan, Newton, MCL, Hypercard....
    - Razengan 8y ago
      If this is to be a simple listout of products and services that were superseded or discontinued because it made no sense to continue them (as opposed to breaking promises or replacing them with inferior counterparts), then on the MS side we have: Active Desktop, Briefcase, CardSpace, Meeting Space, NetMeeting, Windows Sidebar, Desktop Gadgets and Windows SideShow (which displayed gadgets in a secondary screen on laptop lids etc., kinda cool at the time but I never saw an implementation in the wild), Office Assistant (Clippy in the File Explorer), Encarta and the rest of the edutainment product line (which were actually great and often used as a selling point for PCs at the time), XP themes, HTML thumbnails, the Comic Chat IRC client (my first gateway to social interaction on the internet), the SideWinder game controllers for PC (including the Dual Strike [0] which was way ahead of its time), MSN/Live Messenger, Photo Gallery, Movie Maker, Visual Basic, FoxPro and many others... :) [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MShp4F4cUDE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MShp4F4cUDE
      - pjmlp 8y ago
        That was just a very basic sample, if you wish to play this game, I have more from Apple I could keep writing.
      - DonHopkins 8y ago
        Maybe so, but none of yours (or even all of yours combined) are anywhere near as tragic as the cancelation of HyperCard. ;( (Although Comic Chat was pretty cool, with all those Jim Woodring characters and backgrounds, and the emotional pie menu.) http://www.mermeliz.com/files/mschat_summary.htm http://www.mermeliz.com/files/mschat_summary.htm One question: After being exposed to Comic Chat as your first chat client, do you now visualize everyone you chat with and your online environment as if they were drawn by Jim Woodring? http://www.jimwoodring.com/artwork/gallery http://www.jimwoodring.com/artwork/gallery You lucky bastard! http://www.jimwoodring.com/wp-content/uploads/Bastard.jpg http://www.jimwoodring.com/wp-content/uploads/Bastard.jpg
stinos 8y ago
Not sure if WPF is a good fit for this this discussion about abandoning APIs especially not in the way as mentioned by the OP (i.e. ditching it all together): as fas as I'm aware it is still supported in the very latest versions of the build tools and the applications built with it just run on the supported OS for those tools (didn't check recently but about a year ago I could still get a newly built WPF application running on Windows XP). Sure it's not actively being developped anymore, but it's still there and still works.
- Razengan 8y ago
  WPF was presented and touted as the future of the Windows GUI (and beyond.) It was barely dogfooded at all by Microsoft themselves and the future we got instead was the bland, inferior “Metro” experience.
  - Illniyar 8y ago
    WPF was released in 2006, before the original iPhone. it has been actively developed and pushed for close to 10 years. WPF was used in Visual Studio.
    - Razengan 8y ago
      I'm aware it was used in Visual Studio, and oh, the Expression Studio suite [0] – another discontinued line of great products, for making stuff with WPF – but that's all I can remember. Not even Calculator or Notepad used WPF as far as I know, which would have been the simplest apps to port and could have bolstered developer confidence in the technology (the point of this whole discussion.) And why is it "was"; does VS now not use WPF? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Expression_Studio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Expression_Studio
      - Razengan 8y ago
        Correction: Apparently most parts of Expression Studio have been assimilated into Visual Studio, but the point remains: It decreased developer confidence when it was discontinued and nothing was immediately announced as a replacement.
Illniyar 8y ago
WPF has had a major release not a year ago and is actively updated alongside .net framework updates[1]. It is featured prominently in all visual studio products. For that matter even winforms is still available. The Metro UI evolved into windows 10 UWP, and practically everything that was in Metro UI can be transferred to UWP, down to the homescreen widgets. Silverlight and DirectInput are still available, though they are deprecated they haven't been removed. Silverlight even had security updates released as late as a year ago [2]even though it has been deprecated since 2015 [1] - https://github.com/Microsoft/dotnet-framework-early-access/blob/master/release-notes/build-3621/dotnet-build-3621-changes.md#wpf https://github.com/Microsoft/dotnet-framework-early-access/b... [2] - https://www.microsoft.com/getsilverlight/locale/en-us/html/Microsoft%20Silverlight%20Release%20History.htm#SL_5_1_50907 https://www.microsoft.com/getsilverlight/locale/en-us/html/M...

xorcist 8y ago

Compared to what? Apple or the mobile OS du jour? Most other operating systems in commercial use, and we can look both at the commercial unices and the embedded stuff, supports APIs much older than Windows itself. Support for the Win16 API has been abysmal recently. My limited experience of old DOS and Windows applications is that they often run better under dosbox or wine than native.

pjmlp 8y ago
How much of those commercial unices and the embedded stuff older than Windows are actually still being updated beyond bug fixes?

DonHopkins 8y ago

And in some cases, like their speech synthesis and recognition APIs, Windows has been pretty darn good about having the APIs in the first place, maintaining and improving them over more than a couple decades, with the APIs being quite rich and supporting third party components like voices, synthesizers and recognizers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Speech_API https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Speech_API While Apple's speech APIs, for all their huff and puff and other legitimate work on accessibility, are totally lacking, way behind, locked away from third party developers, and sadly deficient for application developers who need more than the most basic off-the-shelf features. For example, SAPI has for decades been able to a send mouth positions (visemes) synchronized with the speech, to animate the lips of the Wizard or Rover the Dog or Clippy (or whatever a paperclip uses to articulate), which is proven to improve speech understanding. But not a peep from Apple's speech API -- their lips are sealed. https://www.codeproject.com/Articles/1609/Converting-Text-To-Speech-and-and-using-mouth-moti?msg=260302#xx260302xx https://www.codeproject.com/Articles/1609/Converting-Text-To...

coldtea 8y ago

>You can say a lot of things about windows but abandoning apis isn't one of them. Actually abandoning APIs is very much one of them. While programs written in older API still work, MS is notorious for abandoning APIs (as opposed to removing them) and asking developers to support its new shiny thing even faster than Apple changes frameworks (heck, you could still compile NeXT apps 30+ years later, and the frameworks where still supported, albeit with some alterations). MS always invents new frameworks and APIs every 2-3 years for the same thing, e.g. GUI programming (or at least used to, haven't followed for the last several years).