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Android and iOS App Porting Will Not Be Available At Windows 10 Launch
An anonymous reader writes: Arguably the biggest news out of Microsoft's Build 2015 conference was that developers will be able to bring Web apps, Windows desktop apps (Win32), as well as Android and iOS mobile apps to the Windows Store. Yet each of these work differently, and there are a lot of nuances, so we talked to Todd Brix, general manager of Windows apps and store, to get some more detail. First and foremost, upon Windows 10's launch, developers will only be able to bring Web apps to the Windows Store. The Win32, Android, and iOS app toolkits will not be ready in time. That said, with Microsoft's Windows as a service strategy, they will arrive as part of later updates
Who said "Desktop" the point is to get these onto Smartphones and Tablets. The fact that it'll also run on the desktop is sort of besides the point.
Totally underrated comment. You hit the nail on the head. I think Slashdot has a way of attracting desktop thinkers, which isn't a bad thing don't get me wrong on that point. However, I hear the same old stale arguments tossed out there about desktops every year and every year desktop sales erode just a little bit more. In my company, there are like ten to fifteen technical workers that use desktops to create online business reporting that hundreds of end users use on their iPads and Android tablets. The desktops are still there, we just need less of them because the mobile devices do 99% of the work for 90% of the employees. The crap like working with spreadsheets sent in and all of that crap, the company fired those folks because they figured out that they could automate all that crap with advanced ETL tools. What used to be Word documents that held all our company processes, has changed into someone from the engineering department passing a BPMN document into an online processor and it spitting out technical documents that people on the floor modify using their tablets. I'd say about 80% of the technical documentation is now written by a computer, the other 20% is done on a tablet. Presentations are pretty much take a bunch of photos from your phone, some charts and data taken from the BI reporting tool, and about 100 or less words dictated to the iPad, and boom you've got your quarterly meeting presentation. Again, majority of the information comes from a machine and the small amount of actual work to be done a desktop is forty billion times over qualified.
So for the guy above you who thinks all this stuff is so far off. This is something that happens today because the majority of actual work isn't done by humans anyway. The stuff doesn't have to be more capable because we fired those people who required that and automated their job. We don't need more software, sheer numbers is just a dumb figure. We don't care about usability, pretty much everything is just a computer talking to a computer, we just need to see the end result, and the people who maintain the two systems talking to each other, we need at most like three of them. Desktops are not dead and they aren't going to die off completely, but we need way fewer of them now and that trend is only going to increase.