26 ms·
Microsoft suspends development of touch-friendly UWP Office apps for Windows
- kbumsik 8y agoYeah I don't see the need for a fragmentation, as they abandoned Windows RT. IMO, the Win32 Office apps already are very much touch-friendly. And hey MS, why your OneNote is going a totally different way alone? MS killed Win32 OneNote in Office 2019. I love Win32 OneNote so much as it has more features and more stable.
- snaky 8y agoThat's top2 issue on uservoice https://onenote.uservoice.com/forums/327186-onenote-for-windows/filters/top https://onenote.uservoice.com/forums/327186-onenote-for-wind...
- sebazzz 8y agoThey are suspending the UWP versions. But Office is imho already fairly touch friendly if you turn "touch mode" on, in which all buttons, toolbars and menus become a little bigger. It is not that they don't want touch support (they do, thinking of the Surface family), they just don't want to invest in two parallel version of which one is mature and the other will always be lagging behind. And the customer will probably not see the difference, maybe even get confused.
- hfdgiutdryg 8y agoI wonder what the overall adoption rates are for UWP. As someone who's written Windows software since the 90s, I can't shake the feeling that Microsoft just churns out completely new development stacks every few years.
- DaiPlusPlus 8y agoThis is exactly what is holding back Win32: there has not been any serious development of the desktop developer story since WPF in 2005 (WPF only received token updates since then, the last major update was in 2010 when they finally added a DataGrid control, lol) - but WPF is not well-suited for many types of software which have to fall-back on “pure” Win32 and the story there is nothing but depressing. Apple got it right with Cocoa (nee Nextstep) - it’s something they have been gradually building on with incremental improvements, continuously forwards and upwards - whereas Microsoft has been launching new, short-lived and incompatible (and incomplete) platforms for the past 15 years: WinForms, WPF, Silverlight, Jupiter (Win 8.1), UWP (Win10), etc. The story is so bad Microsoft’s own flagship software has to build their own UI frameworks (Office has its own, Windows Media Center had some arcane prototype of WPF, even the Windows 10 Start Menu uses some UI+Graphics framework that’s not exposed to third-party developers). Win32 needs some serious work - not least because Win32 is “infected” with GDI which has its own issues. WinRT was nice but nowhere near sufficient.
- TazeTSchnitzel 8y agoWhen Apple introduced Cocoa they also introduced Carbon however, an extension of the legacy MacOS APIs. Apple already slowly killed their Win32.
- simongray 8y agoIt's actually kind of impressive how much transitional stuff Apple has introduced and then removed with Mac OS X and how right many of their decisions turned out. I guess Cocoa itself was an extension of the legacy NextStep API too. They also had Classic for running old Mac apps directly in OSX and later Rosetta for running PowerPC binaries on Intel (I guess the same tech was used for the 32->64 bit transition). So many technologies have been smoothly deprecated and removed over the years by Apple.
- pjmlp 8y agoBecause Apple does the "take it our way or leave" approach. Which is also a reason why they hardly have a meaningful market share across the enterprise world.
- scarface74 8y agoSure they do. It’s on mobile. While MS isn’t going anywhere in the Enterprise, anyone who is focused on the desktop when it comes to MS development instead of web, cloud, or even cross platform mobile development is headed down a dead end.
- pjmlp 8y agoA little secret, laptops and 2-1 convertibles are desktops as well, while being mobile.
- scarface74 8y agoIf we want to be pedantic, a desktop could be considered mobile too since you can pick it up. But in the real world when people talk about “mobile software” everyone knows that people are talking about iOS and Android. No one is chasing after the Windows software market, it’s been a diminishing platform for the past decade.
- setquk 8y agoVery very very low. Win32 is a lower portability risk than UWP. Genuinely that’s what I’ve heard people say. Most of the UI and event stuff can be moved to wx or equivalent in a few months and deployed on other platforms. UWP and you’re up shit creek. Most companies are on the fence with running away from windows. It moved too fast, costs too much money to keep up with and has too much friction. Take a look on the windows store for the massive uptake. Not. Half of it is still win32 and the rest is written by MSFT, crapware or abandoned. Everything is in a right state despite the marketing to the contrary.
- threeseed 8y agoThere is also Electron/Javascript. Skype/Teams are developed in it and they have invested a lot of effort into TypeScript.
- vardump 8y agoSkype has become so clunky and slow lately, so I find myself avoiding it whenever possible. Could this be the reason behind the worse quality?
- jcelerier 8y agoThere's also Qt which they used for OneDrive
- pknopf 8y agoYup, and you don't even need to touch C++ these days. All C# and QML! https://github.com/qmlnet/qmlnet https://github.com/qmlnet/qmlnet (I'm the author)
- tinus_hn 8y agoI’m not sure if it’s true but it seems to me like they replaced their own client with an alternative one they bought from another company, which has parts written in Qt.
- maxxxxx 8y agoHonestly, if I had to develop a new desktop app for Windows I would seriously think about Electron. It's frustrating that there is no premier desktop app framework for Windows anymore. UWP is too limited, WPF is pretty much deprecated. Win32 has a huge learning curve and finding devs would be very difficult. Pretty sad situation. Maybe their secret plan is to push people into writing web apps with ASP.NET? Event that doesn't work because a lot of people will use Node instead.
- pknopf 8y agoWhy not Qt?
- pjmlp 8y agoLike everyone else, the biggest difference is that Microsoft keeps the old tech around, while most other companies are willing to loose customers that don't want to move into the new stacks. On one side it is a big reason why they have achieved their market size on the desktop, on the other side we reach this kind of situations where new tech improved tech like Singularity, Midori, Longhorn or now UWP gets thrown into the garbage can in the name of backwards compatibility. Quite sad.
- maxsilver 8y agoMicrosoft shot themselves in the foot with UWP. It's actually pretty nice to write apps with it (in my personal opinion, anyway). But UWP only supports Windows 10. Very few commercial products are able to drop Windows 7 support (and like, literally zero enterprise products can drop Windows 7 support). So, no matter how nice UWP gets, most companies that would still be willing to write a native Windows app are 5+ years out from being allowed to adopt it, entirely because of how Microsoft chose to release it.
- ColinWielga 8y agoYeah, UWP not supporting win7 pretty much killed it. Might not be an issue in 5 years, by then MS will probably has a new new framework .
- opencl 8y agoUWP doesn't even support Windows 8, it is strictly Windows 10. Not that 8 is very relevant.
- maxsilver 8y agoOops, sorry, you are correct, I got it mixed up with the 8/8.1 SDK. Fixed.
- maxxxxx 8y ago"Very few commercial products are able to drop Windows 7 support (and like, literally zero enterprise products can drop Windows 7 support)." You would be suicidial if you based any product you want to sell to business on UWP. Not only doesn't it Win 7 or 8 but I don't see in what way UWP is better than WPF.
- mrweasel 8y agoWinForms will out live UWP, WFP and pretty much everything else Microsoft develops in terms of GUI frameworks. It works for the vast majority of programs that businesses need, it's easy to use and so far it's been the best investment in terms of learning a "framework". If Microsoft want's to move forward, they need to consider moving new stuff into WinForms and expand that with the features of UWP, WPF, XAML and other technologies they've tried to introduce over the years.
- maxxxxx 8y ago"If Microsoft want's to move forward, they need to consider moving new stuff into WinForms and expand that with the features of UWP, WPF, XAML and other technologies they've tried to introduce over the years. " They could have done this 10-15 years ago. It's too late now.
- vbezhenar 8y agoI don't even know how to use UWP. I'm learning Rust and writing some applications using WinAPI is my plan. WinAPI usage seems to be fairly straightforward. But I have no idea how to write UWP application with Rust.
- SyneRyder 8y ago> As someone who's written Windows software since the 90s, I can't shake the feeling that Microsoft just churns out completely new development stacks every few years. That's the theme behind one of Joel Spolsky's old essays, Fire And Motion: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/01/06/fire-and-motion/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/01/06/fire-and-motion/ "Think of the history of data access strategies to come out of Microsoft. ODBC, RDO, DAO, ADO, OLEDB, now ADO.NET – All New! Are these technological imperatives? The result of an incompetent design group that needs to reinvent data access every goddamn year? (That’s probably it, actually.) But the end result is just cover fire. The competition has no choice but to spend all their time porting and keeping up, time that they can’t spend writing new features. Look closely at the software landscape. The companies that do well are the ones who rely least on big companies and don’t have to spend all their cycles catching up and reimplementing and fixing bugs that crop up only on Windows XP. The companies who stumble are the ones who spend too much time reading tea leaves to figure out the future direction of Microsoft."
- FlorianRappl 8y agoWhen I first looked at WinRT app development I thought "how are they going to sell it with these limitations and incompatibilities?" and they did not. UWP was a slightly improved version on WinRT, but it still had some of the same core issues. Luckily, Microsoft has some kind of exit strategy already - I just wonder where that leads. That all being said: Microsoft should still invest in their desktop stack (especially WPF / .NET for desktop applications in general). Bringing the positive parts from UWP to the established frameworks would be a big win for everyone.
- rpeden 8y agoIt's nice that they're at least bringing WinForms and WPF to .NET Core. I'm looking forward to using UWP components in WPF apps, though I imagine that'll only work on Windows 10.
- vezycash 8y agoMs is my favorite tech company. They, however are their own worst enemy. They produce many awesome but crippled stuff - like honey stained with drops of bird shit. UWP's appx format is awesome - one click installation, sandbox, clean uninstallation, potential for diff updates. All these have nothing to do with portability. But they crippled it by making it store only until recently... Too late. One reason I hate using Edge is because i like chrome and Firefox, it's impossible to install extensions from the browser. Why can't I use the store through my browser? There's absolutely nothing stopping the store from acting as a downloader and installer in the background. If the store worked from the browser, usage would pick up.
- harryf 8y ago> like honey stained with drops of bird shit. That is a very specific image that I've never encountered in real life. Is it something that only beekeepers get to witness or is there some bird that homes in on honey pots?
- vezycash 8y agoI'm not a beekeeper. I used to write professionally but quit. The honey/bird poo imagery was simply the most striking I could think of.
- DCoder 8y agoFWIW, here in Eastern Europe we have a similar saying that "A spoonful of tar ruins a whole cask of honey" .
- andyonthewings 8y agoWe also have something similar in Chinese (Cantonese only?) - one bit of mouse shit ruins the whole pot of congee (一粒老鼠屎，壞了一鍋粥).
- pjmlp 8y agoIt is also one of my favorite ones, I think the continuous throw away of technology like Singularity, Midori, XNA, Longhorn, UWP,... is the usual outcome of the internal politics between WinDev, DevTools and Marketing divisions. It was supposed to get better after the reorganization, but apparently it hardly changed.
- pawelmurias 8y agoTouch centered desktop uis need to die
- mrweasel 8y agoOne of the features I specifically look for in a laptop is "NO TOUCH SCREEN". I really don't understand it. Why would I want touch on a laptop or desktop PC?
- mirkules 8y agoI sometimes use touch on my XPS. I realized it's only when I'm showing stuff to others, and because the touchpad is inadequate (like broken side scrolling). But I'm a "don't leave smudge marks on my screen" type of person.
- ZanyProgrammer 8y agoGiven how smudgy my iPad looks from just reading a book or watching Netflix...my laptop would be a literal mess after not very long.
- spiritcat 8y agofor doing mobile development obv
- cesarb 8y agoStory time. At a previous company, we had an annoying crash bug - it crashed on some of the client's computers, but never on any of ours. Finally the client lent us the personal laptop of one of their workers, which reliably reproduced the crash, and we debugged it while sitting on one of the client's meeting rooms and found the cause. It was a crash deep in the obsolete framework we were using, which manifested when receiving a particular kind of accessibility message, which came from one of the components for Microsoft's touch screen system. The reason we could never reproduce the crash before was that, being techies, none of us had any modern laptop, personal or not, with a touch screen. The client, being less technical, had some of their workers with touch screen laptops and the then-recent touch-focused version of Windows (which we also tended to avoid).
- kyberias 8y agoThe first Excel was packaged with Windows because install-base of Windows wasn't large enough. Maybe they should integrate UWP in Office?
- pjmlp 8y agoMost UWP improvements coming up in FluentUI were originally developed by the Office team, as shown on Build 2018, so this decision is kind of weird.
- wslh 8y agoAs a 2 in 1 Wundows 10 notebook user (XPS 13) it is obvious that the touch "mode" is completely unfinished. Simple things like not displaying the keyboard when you select a textbox make difficult to choose the tavlet mode except for basic reading. I think the vision of multi-factor OS is right but the execution doesn't pass a basic UX test.
- kgwxd 8y agoTouch input is perfect for consuming, horrible for creating.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- 013a 8y agoJust 4 months ago they announced they were suspending development of OneNote Win32 in favor of just the UWP version [1] Moreover, they have (had?) an entire multi-year roadmap planned around UWP, including the eventual release of a version of windows which was supposed to substantially reduce day-to-day reliance on Win32 for lower powered devices, codenamed Project Polaris [2], in an attempt to compete with Chromebook-like devices. This is a massive destruction of confidence in the UWP platform. If Microsoft can't even release their marquee apps on it, why should anyone else feel confident in developing on the platform? [1] https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/18/17252312/microsoft-office-2019-onenote-windows-10-app https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/18/17252312/microsoft-office... [2] https://www.windowscentral.com/understanding-windows-core-os-and-polaris https://www.windowscentral.com/understanding-windows-core-os...
- hawski 8y agoAs I understand it UWP is still the official and canonical API. However knowing how many other APIs had such a status it's not saying much. How does the Xamarin.Forms look between other APIs? It's getting Linux and macOS support. I started to wonder if it will be the next official and canonical API. Or maybe something in the direction of their Electron, as they use it already with their Typescript. But I don't really know anything about Windows development beyond Win32, so maybe it doesn't make sense at all.
- walterbell 8y agoWhat will happen to Win32 when Windows 7 stops being security supported in 15 months?
- bhauer 8y agoThe headline is misleading. Microsoft is suspending development of the UWP Office applications, which happen to be touch-friendly. However, the headline implies that the remaining Win32 versions do not have a touch-friendly mode, which is false. The Win32 versions can be switched between "mouse" and "touch" modes. In touch mode, the pointing targets are all much larger. But as with most user interfaces on modern Windows, even in mouse mode, the Office user interface can be used by touch. Running in mouse mode doesn't remove the helpful pop-up action bar when you've selected text, for example, it just makes the UI elements render more tightly. For the several years I've used a Surface device with a touch screen, I've never used the UWP versions of the Office applications because they never reached feature parity with the Win32 versions. The UWP versions had a subset of functionality; not the same subset but similar in limitations to the web versions. But that doesn't mean I don't use a touch-friendly application suite—I simply use the Win32 versions in both mouse and touch modes.
- dang 8y agoOk, we've squeezed in UWP above.
- stephengillie 8y agoI've only seen UWP versions of Microsoft products. Really, it's a way of keeping a foot in both mobile and desktop, when mobile-first has been embraced so widely.
- pjmlp 8y agoJust as additional information, Win32 touch APIs were introduced in Windows 7, and are part of the Hilo C++ sample application.
- kartickv 8y agoDoes Office in touch mode work as well as on the iPad Pro, say? Do I have to go around telling each app that supports touch mode to go to touch mode, or is there a way I can configure it centrally?
- jarjoura 8y agoWow, the comments make it seem like this has anything to do with Windows UWP platform. So much misunderstanding here and the OP is even quite a bit misleading. 1) UWP is the branding behind many technologies, but most commonly thought of as the containerization and sandboxed subset of the Win32 API available to the application. This would have been great had it not poorly abstracted a lot of very common I/O APIs. The first version didn't allow normal socket API, you had to use the HTTP or some janky intern's first project streaming socket API. Another annoyance, none of the file system APIs that had 20 years of software written around worked anymore, instead you had to rewrite on top of a completely different API that was in no way compatible with the previous API set. Contrast that with Apple's iOS sandbox story, the entire Foundation and Core Foundation library, including all of the expected POSIX (BSD variant) code continued to be available. Developers early in the platform's life could take their previous work and just recompile it for the phone and build a new mobile UI on top of it. iOS in the very beginning had its fans but also only one or two developers who were eager to convince management they should write software for it. Whereas Microsoft's vision for requiring you to rewrite the majority of your software from the bottom to the top on this container system meant serious up front investment. For a new platform, the chicken and egg problem meant even Microsoft couldn't justify the cost. 2) Over time Microsoft has changed course and re-enabled a lot of the Win32 restrictions they engineered in place to write containerized applications. It's still not 100% there and I think they probably gave up trying to make it work. Instead they decided just to allow Win32 software in its entirety to run on the sandbox through another marketing platform, "Desktop Bridge." This brought a flood of 3rd party apps to the Microsoft Store since it was finally easy to port software over. It's definitely not the same though, because UI (xaml) is still locked behind the container system. Yet all the work the Windows UI team is investing in is in this new container XAML UI. It's a nice UI surface, because you get a lot for free now, High-DPI and scaling just works and animations that don't look like garbage. Unfortunately you cannot have both. You cannot have the newest UI framework and continue to have access to the entire platform API in a sandbox. Microsoft enabled a bunch of super hacks to try to allow you to write containerized UI but it's not straightforward and you're better off picking one platform or the other. .. So thiiiiis is where I see the demise of Mobile Office. Desktop Bridge will allow Win32 Office to continue to work on all tablets and desktops. Even the ARM variant will run them, and Win32 Office already has an ARM port, so it's not likely that will change. They won't get access to the containerized UI, but Office has always been its on custom UI beast. So I doubt they need to suffer the limitations of the containerized API subset, get full access in the Win32 API and unify the teams. It makes perfect sense to me and if I were the PMs in charge of this, I would have done this a while ago.