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New Microsoft Garage Site Invites Public To Test a Wide Range of App Ideas
An anonymous reader writes Microsoft today launched a new section on its website: The Microsoft Garage is designed to give the public early access to various projects the company is testing right now. The team is kicking off with a total of 16 free consumer-facing apps, spanning Android, Android Wear, iOS, Windows Phone, Windows, and even the Xbox One. Microsoft Garage is still going to be everything it has been so far, but Microsoft has simply decided it's time for the public to get involved too: You can now test the wild projects the company's employees dream up.
Except not shut down yet.
"Microsoft Garage is still going to be everything it has been so far,"
You mean nothing, as it's being launched today?
Could someone tell me why we would want to do unpaid labour for Microsoft?
I'm quite prepared to test and help support Linux and open source projects. Microsoft? Not so much....
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
That's a bit dumb, make an app and then see if there's a market for it?
For example:
"Collaborate - This app lets you host or join sessions on canvases made up of text cards and images. You and multiple other users can draw on the canvas to organize content, or manipulate the text and images using pinch, drag, and rotate gestures."
WTF? Like finger painting for management consultants? Don't they have whiteboards for this? Why would they switch their huge whiteboards for small screens. Presumably for distance communications? So its integrated into some sort of VOIP and video app too?...no?
"Floatz - This is an app designed to let you float an idea out to the people around you to see what they think. You can join nearby Floatz conversations as well as start your own with a question, an idea, or an image that you share anonymously."
Now why would people whose opinion you want be required to download the 'Floatz' app for you to communicate with them? Why would they bother to use this?
"Journeys & Notes - This is a social app meant for the space between an origin and a destination: It connects you to a community of people who have traveled the same path that you’re on. Whether you’re taking the bus to work or jet-setting across the globe, you can both leave behind notes for others to discover and read what others have shared."
If I'm in Barcelona and want to know about Barcelona, what does it matter what my source point was and my destination point? Is a restaurant different in flavour if I arrived at it North to South than East to West? Does it make great tapas if I came down from Girona, but not if I drove up from Sitges?
Look, it appears that a lot of fluffy management types got together to think up app ideas, and they came up with some fluffy ideas that are really not of much use.
Awesome, can I leave a giant oil stain in the driveway?
Another article about M$ and another and another. I come here lately only to read about this shitty OS. WTF is going on?
M$ has got to be joking. Fuck them.
Unless microsoft goes back to developing a better OS based off of win 2k or win xp - I'm more likely to tell MS to fuck off and just hope I can port all my games to Linux someday instead.
Vista Sucked - Win 7 slowed searches and locks up if you have a bad cd - win 8 was just a - well failure isn't anything but kind - so no, not interested in Microsoft wank stuff.
OS that works. That's what the focus should be. Unfortunately, Micrsoft jumped off the Star Trek movie Mantra after XP. Every other release sucked until after XP - then they all sucked.
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
Can someone explain to me the point of an unlocked lock screen? Take a look at their Next Lock Screen app. It basically bypasses the whole point of a lock screen by letting you launch apps, send emails, and auto-connect calls. What's the point of locking anymore if random users still have access to everything? Their app isn't the only one that does this.
I understand showing the time, accepting a phone call, and maybe showing upcoming events. But everything else? WTF.
The post appears to be a paid advertisement.
Please confirm, Slashdot. Open up, come clean. Transparency is good for a news aggregation site.
... you indenture your first born to Microsoft in exchange for using their apps.
Also, you are liable for patent fees.
I apologize for the lack of a signature.
I wouldn't try any of their lame products if they paid me to try them. The trick to wooing developers [developers developers] is source code, evangelism, and community. Until you offer that, stay in your garage.
Killer app: Classic theme restorer for Windows 8.x, Office 2013 and Visual Studio. That app would restore the "classic" UI for the MS applications and make them again usable without wasting time googling what mouse gesture or ribbon has replaced the old menus. The Firefox is nowadays quite good after getting the CTR extension, which undoes most of the fashionable yet completely pointless "experience" screw-ups. I am sure people and companies could even pay for such app, as it would likely be cheaper for them than wasting work time for re-learning things and smaller productivity due to features which were removed or hidden.
But they've been on the Windows Vista/7 driver interface for at least 4-5 years now and between lack of ntfs support, their crappy bootloader, inability to boot on REAL 440FX hardware and their constantly moving targets (rather than sticking with 2k/xp and stating they'll design with future support as it makes sense), ReactOS is just a fubar mess. And I say this as somebody who has been following the project on and off for 15 fucking years.
On the other hand it HAS helped wine add in most of the apps needed to 'boot into a windows desktop' on top of X/Linux, so it hasn't been a complete waste of time :)
That said: If they targetted the actual XP/XP x86_64 releases, added both xp and 7/8 driver models (Vista only supported 1 display device and deserves to die) and then rolled out 7/8 features as XP support reached bugfix status while keeping the default memory usage in early '00s level, then it might be worth another look. The only things XP really needs to be useful still would be SSD trim support and maybe some power management fixes, neither of which couldn't be done with the XP driver model and some developer time.
That said, like most bubble economy open source projects, it's become byzantine and creeped far beyond it's original mission statement, and not in a good way.
I'm doing that right now.
They call it Windows 8.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
"You can now test the wild projects the company's employees dream up."
..
Microsoft was never cool, and never will be, besides which, even if you think up an original idea, it'll be sure to turn up in the next iteration of Windows
Inb4 all the 6 figure making high level programmers of the internet come to tell us why Microsoft Garage is stupid, terrible, and why Microsoft sucks.
PS Windows 8.1 is perfectly functional and is actually faster than 7. Get over it.
...then where does it go?
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.