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Wozniak Praises 'Beautiful' Windows Phone
judgecorp writes "Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak has praised the user interface of Microsoft's Windows Phone, saying that aspects of its user interface are more 'beautiful' than comparable sides to the iPhone. The comments, in a New Domain, follow on from a comment by Forrester boss George Colony who blogged that Apple would decline in the post-Jobs era. Both pieces have kicked off the kind of online argument you would expect."
Come on, that's not fair. The first poster, TechCar, has a long history of 8 posts dating all the way back to two days ago! :)
The one Windows Phone evangelist who claimed the current devices would be upgradable, quickly walked those statements back.
Source here .
If you buy one of these "beta test" phones, you will soon be stuck in a multi-year contract with a device that will not be upgradable to the current version of the OS. There is nothing beautiful about that. Do not buy before Win Phone 8 is released!
And out of his eight posts, four are negative of Google, one is negative of Linux, and three are positive about Microsoft.
You meant "Java" and "Objective C", right?
No. I meant C++. iOS and Android requires a bit of Objective-C and Java respectively, but you can write all your heavy lifting code in C++. For instance, you can write a whole C++ library and reference it in your Objective-C code, through Objective-C++.
So you can essentially share quite a bit of code between iOS and Android. As an example, OpenSceneGraph (openscenegraph.org) runs on both iOS and Android, and that is a C++ based library. I wish I had specified this in my parent post so I didn't have to clarify this.
Also, I must admit to genuine confusion (I'm not saying you're wrong here, I'm asking...): If WP7 is .NET based, can't you use a C++ compiler that compiles to the CLR? Or have they prevented that in some way?
Only Phone Manufacturers are allowed to write unmanaged code for WP7 so that excludes native c++.
And even if you can run managed C++ in the CLR, most C++ codebases can not compile this way without major changes.
You can, but you don't. The point here is not that there's some hypothetical apps out there that might be easier to port if there was a C++ compiler for WP7, it's that there are, in practice, very, very, very few, because C++ is not the recommended language of development for either iOS or Android.
Look I really wish you would just speak for yourself because you lack the knowledge to speak for the rest of us. As someone who is actually writing a cross platform OpenGL game and knows how possible what I'm saying is, I'd like to ask you how you think all those cross platform blockbuster 3d games and classic game ports came along (I love all the classic point and click adventures)? Do you really think they rewrote everything in Objective C because it's the "recommended way" hen they could just slightly adapt their existing c++ code base and write a small Objective C fronted.
I sincerely don't think you know what you're talking about when you say "not many", "a small minority", etc unless you only talk about toy apps like third party alarm clocks or "flashlights". It's not like each app says which programming language it was written in and you have provided absolutely no evidence.
Also, I must admit to genuine confusion (I'm not saying you're wrong here, I'm asking...): If WP7 is .NET based, can't you use a C++ compiler that compiles to the CLR? Or have they prevented that in some way?
Like Silverlight in the browser, WP7 only supports the subset of CIL that is verifiable (i.e. memory-safe) for third party apps. While VC++ can compile pretty much any C++ code to managed without changes to the source with /clr, the output is not verifiable (because C++ has things like pointer arithmetic), so it doesn't run on WP7. There is /clr:safe, which produces verifiable code, but it does so by restricting the use of all C++ constructs that cannot be compiled that way - which is most of the language. So it certainly won't help you take an existing C++ codebase and recompile it for WP7.
You meant "Java" and "Objective C", right? Because regular apps aren't programmed in C++ on either iOS or Android (although I believe the former supports it for regular apps, it's just most are Objective C anyway given the OPENSTEP API); yes, games on Android usually require a stub written in C++, but again, it's not the recommended way to write an app except for extreme circumstances.
Most Android games, especially 3D ones, are, in fact, written almost entirely in C++, with only a small Java stub to handle input & sound.
Portable regular apps are often programmed with Obj-C/Java for UI, and C++ on the background. This is because, right now, it's the only way to reuse code between iOS and Android, and both platforms are sufficiently popular that doing so is an explicit goal from the get go. Because WP7 does not support C++, it does not benefit from this arrangement; but if it did support it, then it would (because then porting an app to WP7 would mean only rewriting the UI in C#, not the whole thing).
In the end, I have to say I don't see what you're saying is a problem. I rather like the fact that Apple, Google, and Microsoft are doing their own thing. It's been a long time since we saw major tech companies implementing different visions of how computers should be - to me, personal computing died with the bankruptcy of Commodore, and we're finally, FINALLY, seeing a break in the idea that all platforms should be the same.
There is a big difference between platforms being the same, and code being portable between them. There's no good reason why platform-independent code (that does not use any platform-specific APIs) should not be portable.