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Desktop Apps Make Their Way Into the Windows Store (arstechnica.com)
With Windows 8, Microsoft introduced Windows Store, which consisted of "Metro / Modern UI" apps which worked best on touch capable devices. Since the release of Windows 8, many users complained that they wanted traditional apps -- the applications they had grown accustomed to -- to be included in Windows Store. This would have come in handy to especially Windows RT users, who couldn't easily get traditional applications installed on their devices. Well, guess, what, that's changing now. Though only for Windows 10 users who have gotten the Anniversary Update -- and guess what, many haven't and might not for another month and a half. At any rate, ArsTechnica elaborates: Until now, applications built for and sold through the Windows Store in Windows 10 have been built for the Universal Windows Platform (UWP), the common set of APIs that spans Windows 10 across all the many devices it supports. This has left one major category of application, the traditional desktop application built using the Win32 API, behind. Announced at Build 2015, codename Project Centennial -- now officially titled the Desktop App Converter -- is Microsoft's solution to this problem. It allows developers to repackage existing Win32 applications with few or no changes and sell them through the store. Applications packaged this way aren't subject to all the sandbox restrictions that UWP applications are, ensuring that most will work unmodified. But they are also given the same kind of clean installation, upgrading, and uninstallation that we've all come to expect from Store-delivered software. Centennial is designed to provide not just a way of bringing Win32 apps into the store; it also provides a transition path so that developers can add UWP-based functionality to their old applications on a piecemeal basis. Evernote, one of the launch applications, uses UWP APIs to include support for Live Tiles and Windows' notification system. In this way, developers can create applications that work better on Windows 10 but without having to rewrite them entirely for Windows 10.
Strike that... I won't look in the Windows Store at all.
Is this submission by app appers guy, because it reads like one.
A few I'd like to see:
Win Dir Stat or Tree Size
VLC
PeaZip or 7Zip
Audacity
Chrome
FireFox
Pale Moon
Opera or whatever that one browser from that Opera guy is called
A file hash calculator with right-click menu extension built in
SnagIt, GreenShot
A FOSS Bit Torrent client
Various NirSoft Utilities
This could prove to be quite an amusing turn of events. App stores require isolation to protect users from seedy nature of majority of apps available for free or purchase from the store. Without isolation these platforms would fall apart.
Providing an avenue that allows apps to run as normal software would have provided for some very interesting headlines had anyone actually used Microsoft's store.. Since nobody cares it is a moot point yet still quite interesting Microsoft is crazy enough to even contemplate such madness.
It hasn't been a cake-walk converting Zoom Player (http://zoomplayer.com) to the AppX model.
The 'Desktop Bridge' conversion tool breaks the Executable/AppData folder model introduced in Windows Vista and is completely incompatible with the Windows XP admin access model.
By this I mean that the app can't write any file to the installation folder.
And any files installed to the local AppData folder by the Win32 installer are non-accessible after the conversion to AppX (they are installed in a read-only folder where no API can be used to find the folder's path).
The work-around is to install everything to a single folder and then copy the required files to the local AppData folder on the initial run.
There are other issues dealing with the App's icon in various places, it seems they changed the model and it's impossible (as far as I can tell and as far as my questions get non-answers on the microsoft UWP forum) to present the same icon as a desktop app on the start menu, task bar and elsewhere.
I also found that some 3rd party components (DirectShow filters) don't always work in the virtualized environment, but it's something I'm trying to resolve with the authors.
And finally, there is no clear process to get a store listing for the App.
We filled in the form, got no reply that it was even received, later follow-ups on the MS forum resulting in this:
https://social.msdn.microsoft....
Hopefully they will streamline the process soon.
Zoom Player Lead Dev.
Your app writes to the install directory for your app seems like a dumb thing to do. Even more so if each app is per user. So each per user app as data in both the app folder and some user home folder.
Please don't put any apps on the Windows store. That will only make Microsoft more invested in the idea that the store should be the ONLY way to get apps on Windows. MS big dream is to make that happen and have a 30% cut off all software sales.
Don't facilitate that by putting anything on their store.. just don't.
I have a local login for my Windows 10 machine
I remembered that I actually still have a subscription to the MLB tv app. Ok I thought, I guess I should use the app store thing which required logging into my Windows account, ok, no problem.
Had to reboot for some patch install a few days later... long story short they change your login profile from local to Windows without telling you
I was able to set it back up but I absolutely do not trust the Windows store at all now, that kind of garbage is NOT acceptable.
They would have an app store doing all the updating and marketing previously unknown programs.
That was called Windows 3.x, and it worked very well. Every program had one (or a set) of *.ini files that governed the settings for that program. Need to start fresh? Delete the .ini file. Want to preserve your settings when a new version of a program comes out? Copy the .ini sections that mattered back into place. The registry hides SO much... and if it gets fucked up, pray you have a recent system restore point. If you combine all the advances in crypto with a decent revision control system like Git, .ini's could be secure and easy to work with in todays world. The UNIX world has had individual text based config files for 40+ years, and we keep improving things there. I feel like the change from config files to registry was about stopping "t3h p1rat3s!", and it didn't stop them at all..
/* * pope1 */
I thought that died with metro, and the icon in win10 was just for people that needed to re-download past purchasing mistakes.
Since the release of Windows 8, many users complained that they wanted traditional apps -- the applications they had grown accustomed to -- to be included in Windows Store.
I'd like to meet one of these users. I support Windows machines, and I've never had a customer mention the Windows store. Mostly they just want me to show them how to turn off the creepy stalking crap in Windows 10.
Imagine that, ANOTHER feature Linux had 20 years ago that Windows is only now getting.
Don't our Linux package managers actually have applications and useful stuff in them?
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Adobe bought Cool Edit Pro, renamed it Audition, and put it behind a $240/year Creative Cloud subscription (source).
I don't think being able to sell them through the store would be likely to convince any developers to go to the trouble of reworking and recompiling for Arm
I disagree. There are plenty of Android NDK apps that have both ARM and Atom (x86) versions. And do you already forget the transition of macOS from 68K to PowerPC to Intel?
The MacOS that went from 68k to PPC was not the same OS that went from PPC to Intel. The one that went from 68k to PPC was System 7.x, while OS-X was parallelly developed on PPC and x86.
No. Many of the apps were developed on previous versions, like Windows 7, and would automatically be x86 only. Not just that, they would be things where you'd either need a CD/DVD/USB or go to their website. None via the app store. Heck, you can't even have MS Office via the app store: the store directs you back to the web site. Windows RT bombed b'cos it couldn't run Windows 7 applications the way Windows 8 could. Only b'cos of the ISA difference.
Also, it's nothing like the Mac apps: they had to recompile for x86, or get left out of all new Macs sold in the market. Vendors who didn't compile for RT just missed a small part of the Surface market, and the Windows Phone market
Who cares if they are metro or classic windowed applications? The only apps I can ascertain that the Windows 10 store sells are various poker, or video lottery terminal applications.... and a Facebook app for people who haven't yet determined the purpose of a web browser. How many Windows users are gambling addicts, and how many of those people owe it all to Microsoft's online store?