“When Microsoft gave the first public demonstration of Windows 8 a week ago, the reaction from most circles was positive,” Peter Bright reports for Ars Technica.
MacDailyNews Note: Our reaction from June 1st is here: More good news for Apple: Microsoft previews Windows 8 (with video)
Bright continues, “But one aspect of the demonstration has the legions of Windows developers deeply concerned, and with good reason: they were told that all their experience, all their knowledge, and every program they have written in the past would be useless on Windows 8.”
“Key to the new Windows 8 look and feel, and instrumental to Microsoft’s bid to make Windows a viable tablet operating system, are new-style full-screen “immersive” applications. Windows 8 will include new APIs for developing these applications, and here is where the problem lies,” Bright reports. “Having new APIs isn’t itself a concern—there’s simply never been anything like this on Windows before, so obviously the existing Windows APIs won’t do the job—but what has many troubled is the way that Microsoft has said these APIs will be used. Three minutes and forty five seconds into this video, Microsoft Vice President Julie Larson-Green, in charge of the Windows Experience, briefly describes a new immersive application—a weather application—and says, specifically, that the application uses ‘our new developer platform, which is, uhh, it’s based on HTML5 and JavaScript.'”
Bright reports, “Cue much wailing and gnashing of teeth… Such a switch means discarding two decades of knowledge and expertise of Windows development—and countless hours spent learning Microsoft’s latest-and-greatest technology—and perhaps just as importantly, it means discarding rich, capable frameworks and the powerful, enormously popular Visual Studio development environment, in favor of a far more primitive, rudimentary system with substantially inferior tools… The longer the company remains silent, the more convinced people will be that the reason that Microsoft isn’t debunking the claims is because there’s nothing to debunk: HTML5 and JavaScript really could be the whole story when it comes to immersive applications. If it isn’t, the decision to say nothing is incomprehensible. Saying nothing can only hurt. Developers are losing faith in the platform today; waiting to September to set them straight is madness.
Much more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Windows is what people who don’t know any better – or who are forced by the resident IT doofus – struggle to use. Developers should be even more concerned that time and the young users have passed by Microsoft and Windows. Smart people develop for the future, not the past; they write software for OS X and iOS.