8 ms·

The weather app was literally the only UWP application I was using of my own free will and it was because of its live tile. I liked being able to check the weat

The weather app was literally the only UWP application I was using of my own free will and it was because of its live tile. I liked being able to check the weather by opening my start menu. I hate the other UWP apps. They're slow, they lack features, they have horrible UIs and they don't integrate well with the rest of the OS. The only reason why I'm using the new "Settings" app or the new calculator is because Microsoft forced me to it. It's such a shame that Microsoft refuses to acknowledge that UWP was a mistake and keeps porting apps to it.

fultonfaknem42 7y ago
They have obstacles to overcome, and then there is just the glaring fact that they had so much momentum with Win32. My biggest gripe is that startup times are just too long. So many times I've gone to launch something like calculator only to have a beefy machine hang for almost a second, if not a full second. It's likely an engineering obstacle that can be overcome but it just makes UWP look like a bad move perf wise.
- WorldMaker 7y ago
  There was a brief period in Windows 8 where (proto) UWP apps launched smooth and fast and the Win32 desktop took several additional minutes to launch. With so many stacks living side-by-side on Windows it seems an interesting trade-off between past apps, present apps, and future wishes.
  - badsectoracula 7y ago
    I hope future wishes don't involve adding yet another stack though. They need to fix the stuff they have (without breaking them), not introduce new stuff.
    - WorldMaker 7y ago
      That's part of my sadness in seeing so many posts here talk bad about the UWP. The UWP barely had half a chance to live, and with Microsoft having to spend so much time in the Chromium codebase and working on Android code, with Electron and React Native seemingly becoming the most common development platforms for them, the future for Microsoft already doesn't seem to be UWP.
- pcwalton 7y ago
  > They have obstacles to overcome, and then there is just the glaring fact that they had so much momentum with Win32. Do you feel the same about the macOS Carbon-Cocoa transition? Nobody misses Carbon anymore, and Win32 is as old as the classic Mac Toolbox. Eventually they have to shed the old API.
  - anthk 7y ago
    Win32 is fast and reliable.
    - pjmlp 7y ago
      And frozen in a Windows XP vision of the world.
      - Shorel 7y ago
        And Wine. Don't forget Wine.
  - justin66 7y ago
    Win32 support will be there until Microsoft's desktop operating system is no longer called "Windows." The comparison between Apple and Microsoft vis-à-vis backward compatibility is illuminating, but not in the way you seem to believe it is.
  - flohofwoe 7y ago
    Cocoa was an improvement though, while UWP is a regression and a massive PITA to work with. Win32 isn't a great API either, and some corners are downright ugly, but when a successor needs more lines of code to get a window on screen but only delivers a small fraction of the features of the old system, something went seriously wrong.
  - joshuaissac 7y ago
    Major Win32-only applications like Microsoft Office, SAP and countless in-house applications written over the last 25 years are the reason that many companies use Windows. Microsoft understands that the Windows API "is so deeply embedded in the source code of many Windows apps that there is a huge switching cost to using a different operating system instead".[1] If they force companies to incur that cost by dropping Win32 support, that gives companies the chance to make their application cross-platform at a much smaller additional cost, and shed their reliance on Windows. Windows licensing fees are still quite a large chunk of Microsoft's revenues, so I think that they will not make this move any time soon. 1. https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-wed-have-been-dead-a-long-time-ago-without-windows-apis/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-wed-have-been-dead-a...
non-entity 7y ago
Tbh outside of maybe a sandboxing aspect, UWP made zero sense to me when Windows Phone fully died. Before that, the ability to have one codebase target both desktop and mobile seemed interesting at least, but now, it would seem that there are only a tiny of handful of applications that could be useful as universal between the remaining UWP targets (desktop, xbox, IoT, whatever else)
- pjmlp 7y ago
  UWP is what .NET should have been since the beginning, an improved COM, and an alternative design solution to Longhorn ideas. From that point of view it makes perfect sense. What it did not make sense was creating an incompatible .NET runtime for it, or the way it was introduced with device specific APIs (Win 8, Win 8.1), using shared code folders.
lostmsu 7y ago
Yes and no. In the days when all apps leech your data, I want the sandbox that UWP provides. Do not know if it is feasible for MS to make it work properly with "legacy" APIs.
- cptskippy 7y ago
  They would have to do some sort of virtualization since there's literally no restrictions on what APIs you can access. There's so much cruft and invalid paradigms in the old APIs it makes sense to roll new ones. I think the approach they're taking to refactoring the Control Panel into the Settings App is smart. They're dog-fooding the Frameworks they're expecting others to use, slowly migrating functionality that's relevant to a modern Windows platform, and keeping existing functionality around until they've replicated it. I also like that the apps are responsive. I use the snap feature a lot and it's nice that the Apps will adapt to the dimensions I relegate them to.
  - uxp 7y ago
    I'm a .NET developer and I can't tell you how many times I've searched for documentation and come across something that's targeting UWP which is different than WPF and entirely not the same as WinForms and it takes way too much energy trying to identify why exactly the documentation isn't what you want. I thought Microsoft was more or less sunsetting WinForms until they also announced WinForms for .NET Core a couple months ago. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/porting/winforms https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/porting/winform... I literally have no idea what Microsoft is doing anymore. Sometimes it feels like Linux was 10 years ago when I would accidentally install Konquerer on Gnome and all of a sudden I had two desktop systems installed and my root drive had doubled it's consumed harddrive space. It basically worked, but it was a terrible experience.
- robotnikman 7y ago
  The Windows 10X preview actually does this by running Win32 apps inside their own container, with their own registry, kernel, drivers, and isolated from the rest of the rest of the system.
cptskippy 7y ago
I don't have a problem with UWP and I really like the new Calculator. Being able to pin the calculator on-top and resize it so that it's touch friendly really boosts productivity for me on a laptop without a 10key. If you're not using a touchscreen then I can see the improvements not being that big of a deal but I'm not aware of any regressions in functionality.
- airstrike 7y ago
  I'm sorry, but I find the Calculator app woefully unimpressive. I can't even type a simple expression with parenthesis. There's no RPN option. There isn't a "financial" setting (only scientific and programmer, for some reason). The list goes on; I'm sure I'm not alone on this one. It is so, so, so basic it's essentially useless, I end up being forced to open Excel, run Python in the terminal, go on Wolfram Alpha or, worse yet (!!) grab pen and paper to perform basic math. I know this is unrelated to UWP, but I'd rather they focus less on improving an UI that is inevitably trivial (little boxes with numbers arranged in a grid within a bigger box) and instead added some much needed features. The fact that I am using a computer must be lost on whoever decided to green light this abomination as the default calculator in any OS ever, let alone one released in the 21st century.
  - WorldMaker 7y ago
    Feel free to try contributing if you think it that trivial to add "much needed features": https://github.com/microsoft/calculator https://github.com/microsoft/calculator
    - airstrike 7y ago
      Not my cup of tea, sorry. I don't need to provide patches to be allowed to bash software I've paid for ;-)
      - WorldMaker 7y ago
        Contributions doesn't mean just patches. Also, technically you didn't pay for Calculator, you paid for Windows and got a calculator. The fact that Calculator today is open source adds additional insight that it was always probably a "bonus" accessory, as the most interesting stuff happening to it today are from community contributions. Anyway, for instance, you could see that RPN is on the radar: https://github.com/microsoft/calculator/issues/128 https://github.com/microsoft/calculator/issues/128
wayneftw 7y ago
You can install the old calc.exe by downloading it from a reputable source or copying it from a Win7 machine.
- tryptophan 7y ago
  I use speedcrunch(open source and super fast) for my quick calculating needs. I dont see any advantage of win calculator over it.
  - pbhjpbhj 7y ago
    Looks nice, and latest version is on Chocolatey, just installed it. Thanks.
    - agumonkey 7y ago
      have you tried scoop ?
majkinetor 7y ago
I REMOVE MS Store and use Chocolatey. MS Store may also eat up 100% CPU [1] which happend to me multiple times which is funny, since I never use it. > They're slow, they lack features, they have horrible UIs and they don't integrate well with the rest of the OS. This is the case with almost all android apps too. [1]: https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows8_1-performance/windows-store-broker-problem-very-high-cpu-usage/da99a4f6-50cd-4eab-8b44-6fe159924f56 https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows8_1...
- vezycash 7y ago
  MS shot themselves in the foot with the store on PC. I don't get why I can't use the store from my browser. I want to sign in to the bloody store from any browser of my choice, click the download button and have store app do the downloads in the background. One other problem the store has is that it handles poor network horribly. Or rather, it just can't work with poor internet. Play store on the other hand is a master piece. It will open even offline (I tested it right now). It will show a cached page from last time. Even settings work offline. And finally, the play store will alert you when you're back online. MS store on the other hand will throw an incomprehensible ERROR Code at you.
mc32 7y ago
Why don’t they just have a toggle, either global or per application. Live tiles, yes/no. Then the user has a choice of high/low resource usage and “busy-ness”
- prostheticvamp 7y ago
  I think they do? I’ve definitely enabled/disabled the tiles on an individual basis. I just don’t recall whether it’s universally available to all programs, or a particular subset.
  - BenjiWiebe 7y ago
    They do. Right click the live tile, and click "Turn live tile off".

fultonfaknem42 7y ago

They have obstacles to overcome, and then there is just the glaring fact that they had so much momentum with Win32. My biggest gripe is that startup times are just too long. So many times I've gone to launch something like calculator only to have a beefy machine hang for almost a second, if not a full second. It's likely an engineering obstacle that can be overcome but it just makes UWP look like a bad move perf wise.

WorldMaker 7y ago
There was a brief period in Windows 8 where (proto) UWP apps launched smooth and fast and the Win32 desktop took several additional minutes to launch. With so many stacks living side-by-side on Windows it seems an interesting trade-off between past apps, present apps, and future wishes.
- badsectoracula 7y ago
  I hope future wishes don't involve adding yet another stack though. They need to fix the stuff they have (without breaking them), not introduce new stuff.
  - WorldMaker 7y ago
    That's part of my sadness in seeing so many posts here talk bad about the UWP. The UWP barely had half a chance to live, and with Microsoft having to spend so much time in the Chromium codebase and working on Android code, with Electron and React Native seemingly becoming the most common development platforms for them, the future for Microsoft already doesn't seem to be UWP.
pcwalton 7y ago
> They have obstacles to overcome, and then there is just the glaring fact that they had so much momentum with Win32. Do you feel the same about the macOS Carbon-Cocoa transition? Nobody misses Carbon anymore, and Win32 is as old as the classic Mac Toolbox. Eventually they have to shed the old API.
- anthk 7y ago
  Win32 is fast and reliable.
  - pjmlp 7y ago
    And frozen in a Windows XP vision of the world.
    - Shorel 7y ago
      And Wine. Don't forget Wine.
- justin66 7y ago
  Win32 support will be there until Microsoft's desktop operating system is no longer called "Windows." The comparison between Apple and Microsoft vis-à-vis backward compatibility is illuminating, but not in the way you seem to believe it is.
- flohofwoe 7y ago
  Cocoa was an improvement though, while UWP is a regression and a massive PITA to work with. Win32 isn't a great API either, and some corners are downright ugly, but when a successor needs more lines of code to get a window on screen but only delivers a small fraction of the features of the old system, something went seriously wrong.
- joshuaissac 7y ago
  Major Win32-only applications like Microsoft Office, SAP and countless in-house applications written over the last 25 years are the reason that many companies use Windows. Microsoft understands that the Windows API "is so deeply embedded in the source code of many Windows apps that there is a huge switching cost to using a different operating system instead".[1] If they force companies to incur that cost by dropping Win32 support, that gives companies the chance to make their application cross-platform at a much smaller additional cost, and shed their reliance on Windows. Windows licensing fees are still quite a large chunk of Microsoft's revenues, so I think that they will not make this move any time soon. 1. https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-wed-have-been-dead-a-long-time-ago-without-windows-apis/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-wed-have-been-dead-a...

non-entity 7y ago

Tbh outside of maybe a sandboxing aspect, UWP made zero sense to me when Windows Phone fully died. Before that, the ability to have one codebase target both desktop and mobile seemed interesting at least, but now, it would seem that there are only a tiny of handful of applications that could be useful as universal between the remaining UWP targets (desktop, xbox, IoT, whatever else)

pjmlp 7y ago
UWP is what .NET should have been since the beginning, an improved COM, and an alternative design solution to Longhorn ideas. From that point of view it makes perfect sense. What it did not make sense was creating an incompatible .NET runtime for it, or the way it was introduced with device specific APIs (Win 8, Win 8.1), using shared code folders.

lostmsu 7y ago

Yes and no. In the days when all apps leech your data, I want the sandbox that UWP provides. Do not know if it is feasible for MS to make it work properly with "legacy" APIs.

cptskippy 7y ago
They would have to do some sort of virtualization since there's literally no restrictions on what APIs you can access. There's so much cruft and invalid paradigms in the old APIs it makes sense to roll new ones. I think the approach they're taking to refactoring the Control Panel into the Settings App is smart. They're dog-fooding the Frameworks they're expecting others to use, slowly migrating functionality that's relevant to a modern Windows platform, and keeping existing functionality around until they've replicated it. I also like that the apps are responsive. I use the snap feature a lot and it's nice that the Apps will adapt to the dimensions I relegate them to.
- uxp 7y ago
  I'm a .NET developer and I can't tell you how many times I've searched for documentation and come across something that's targeting UWP which is different than WPF and entirely not the same as WinForms and it takes way too much energy trying to identify why exactly the documentation isn't what you want. I thought Microsoft was more or less sunsetting WinForms until they also announced WinForms for .NET Core a couple months ago. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/porting/winforms https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/porting/winform... I literally have no idea what Microsoft is doing anymore. Sometimes it feels like Linux was 10 years ago when I would accidentally install Konquerer on Gnome and all of a sudden I had two desktop systems installed and my root drive had doubled it's consumed harddrive space. It basically worked, but it was a terrible experience.
robotnikman 7y ago
The Windows 10X preview actually does this by running Win32 apps inside their own container, with their own registry, kernel, drivers, and isolated from the rest of the rest of the system.

cptskippy 7y ago

I don't have a problem with UWP and I really like the new Calculator. Being able to pin the calculator on-top and resize it so that it's touch friendly really boosts productivity for me on a laptop without a 10key. If you're not using a touchscreen then I can see the improvements not being that big of a deal but I'm not aware of any regressions in functionality.

airstrike 7y ago
I'm sorry, but I find the Calculator app woefully unimpressive. I can't even type a simple expression with parenthesis. There's no RPN option. There isn't a "financial" setting (only scientific and programmer, for some reason). The list goes on; I'm sure I'm not alone on this one. It is so, so, so basic it's essentially useless, I end up being forced to open Excel, run Python in the terminal, go on Wolfram Alpha or, worse yet (!!) grab pen and paper to perform basic math. I know this is unrelated to UWP, but I'd rather they focus less on improving an UI that is inevitably trivial (little boxes with numbers arranged in a grid within a bigger box) and instead added some much needed features. The fact that I am using a computer must be lost on whoever decided to green light this abomination as the default calculator in any OS ever, let alone one released in the 21st century.
- WorldMaker 7y ago
  Feel free to try contributing if you think it that trivial to add "much needed features": https://github.com/microsoft/calculator https://github.com/microsoft/calculator
  - airstrike 7y ago
    Not my cup of tea, sorry. I don't need to provide patches to be allowed to bash software I've paid for ;-)
    - WorldMaker 7y ago
      Contributions doesn't mean just patches. Also, technically you didn't pay for Calculator, you paid for Windows and got a calculator. The fact that Calculator today is open source adds additional insight that it was always probably a "bonus" accessory, as the most interesting stuff happening to it today are from community contributions. Anyway, for instance, you could see that RPN is on the radar: https://github.com/microsoft/calculator/issues/128 https://github.com/microsoft/calculator/issues/128

wayneftw 7y ago

You can install the old calc.exe by downloading it from a reputable source or copying it from a Win7 machine.

tryptophan 7y ago
I use speedcrunch(open source and super fast) for my quick calculating needs. I dont see any advantage of win calculator over it.
- pbhjpbhj 7y ago
  Looks nice, and latest version is on Chocolatey, just installed it. Thanks.
  - agumonkey 7y ago
    have you tried scoop ?

majkinetor 7y ago

I REMOVE MS Store and use Chocolatey. MS Store may also eat up 100% CPU [1] which happend to me multiple times which is funny, since I never use it. > They're slow, they lack features, they have horrible UIs and they don't integrate well with the rest of the OS. This is the case with almost all android apps too. [1]: https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows8_1-performance/windows-store-broker-problem-very-high-cpu-usage/da99a4f6-50cd-4eab-8b44-6fe159924f56 https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows8_1...

vezycash 7y ago
MS shot themselves in the foot with the store on PC. I don't get why I can't use the store from my browser. I want to sign in to the bloody store from any browser of my choice, click the download button and have store app do the downloads in the background. One other problem the store has is that it handles poor network horribly. Or rather, it just can't work with poor internet. Play store on the other hand is a master piece. It will open even offline (I tested it right now). It will show a cached page from last time. Even settings work offline. And finally, the play store will alert you when you're back online. MS store on the other hand will throw an incomprehensible ERROR Code at you.

mc32 7y ago

Why don’t they just have a toggle, either global or per application. Live tiles, yes/no. Then the user has a choice of high/low resource usage and “busy-ness”

prostheticvamp 7y ago
I think they do? I’ve definitely enabled/disabled the tiles on an individual basis. I just don’t recall whether it’s universally available to all programs, or a particular subset.
- BenjiWiebe 7y ago
  They do. Right click the live tile, and click "Turn live tile off".