I expect most people wanting start menu wouldn't be averse to metro if it offered a functionally equivalent replacement, The problem is it doesn't.
I think a) The desktop start button must be reinstated. Something that is discoverable and people can click on. Shoving the mouse into a corner and clicking is not discoverable b) Metro should appear as an overlay over the desktop, not a seperate screen. Of if it is a different screen at least give it some context back to the desktop such showing scaled windows the way the activities screen in GNOME 3 does. c) Metro needs expanding groups and compact, vertical, sorted lists of icons to adequately reproduce the hierarchical programs / groups of Windows "classic". d) Minimize mouse travel - the UI fails if a user is forced to scroll through pages of horizontal icons, e) allow users to zoom out to a level of their choosing rather than showing arbitrarily large tiles.
Reinstating the start menu would be a lazy cop out and wouldn't fix the underlying issue.
Metro is a horrible UI mess for desktop PCs. This can be seen in the consumer preview simply by enabling administrative programs from the settings. The result is you get a messing of 15 odd drab brown admin icons stinking up metro. They consume a lot of space, are a pain to scroll through with a mouse, and are really hard to organize e.g. there is no ability to rubber band select to move them, or sort functionality, or way to group them in an expanding folder or somesuch, and the two column flow of each group means it's easier (i.e. not easy) to manually sort them in reverse order bottom to top than top to bottom. Now multiply 15 admin icons by the 100-200 that a desktop user will typically have after installing a bunch of programs and you have a big mess of indistinct icons sprawled horizontally over miles of real estate. This compared to the start menu in W7 which occupies about 1/8th of the screen. It highlights to me that metro needs a lot of work yet to function adequately on the desktop.
I think on tablets in the absence of "classic" Windows it will be perfectly adequate albeit quite bland. People will have less tiles, less apps, they'll be able to swipe/flick to scroll and so on. It'll work pretty well. So I think that Windows 8 may will debut on tablet devices and I would not be surprised if a desktop edition gets pushed out until they can fix it.
I have no idea why Android users would ever wish to have metro on tablets, but if they did then one the beauty of Android is you can swap the default launcher activity for something else and get it. That's all the likes of HTC do with their Sense UI.
One of the nifty things about Android is you can replace the default activities if you like. So if you install an activity that handles an intent you can make it the default. So why do you need to root a device to use this?
Irrelevant, and that was Sun, not Oracle. It is important that you understand 'squandering' a patent is completely irrelevant to patent cases, look at the GIF submarine patent story as a reminder.
I didn't say squandered a patent. I said they squandered J2ME. Google turned up with something which in many respects is J2ME done properly and Sun / Oracle watched their market evaporate. Why would a licensee of J2ME want to stick with some antiquated piece of crap when they could have almost J2SE levels of functionality in a full blown OS AND not pay a penny for it either?
So immediately there is an axe to grind and there is a suspicion that in doing something so close to Java / J2ME that it hits a few patents along the way. Many commentators believe that Oracle bought Sun in large part for a chance of a lawsuit against Google. People like James Gosling are on record about this. But as its transpired it's not looking too great for Oracle.
They are annoying, and in my opinion, pointless, but they are hardly spurious to the law. Remember Sun actually did win $1billion with these patents from Microsoft.
Microsoft licensed the Java system and logo under contract from Sun and then set about systematically subverting it which is the basis that they were sued. Google did not sign a contract and has never claimed Android to be compatible with Java even if they share a large degree of source code compatibility. It may be that the implementation language for most Android applications is Java source but it is converted into an incompatible format. .
So it boils down to patent claims mostly relating to compiler / VM technology and most of them have been cast out as irrelevant, spurious, obvious and so on and only a couple remain, one of them due to expire this year. Even if Oracle prevails, the amount of damages they receive are going to be a pittance compared to what they expected originally.
I think Oracle was hoping for a quick settlement, in exchange for a piece of the Android pie. Look how they squandered J2ME for years and then they go seeking damages from Google on the basis of some spurious patents. I'm sure they thought they could muscle their way in and demand a few dollars licencing fee for every activated device or similar.
Now their patents have been whittled down to a couple both of which can probably be worked around this is little more than an argument about pocket change. Even if Google were compelled to give them a hundred million bucks it would be little more than pocket change for either company.
It's obviously in development and some of the more offensively wrong issues in the metro / classic mashup are bound to be fixed. The problem I foresee is that Windows 8 is a massive project and its only 6 months from release. If its not already in feature lockdown it will be very soon. Any design flaws in the consumer preview which weren't fixed by now are probably not going to get fixed at all. If that's the case then I think MS will have to delay the desktop release although they could proceed with the Windows ARM release. Otherwise Microsoft are going to be killed by the press.
Like any large software project Windows 8 is going to be broken up by milestones with feature freezes, alpha, beta and release candidate phases. Optimistically Microsoft might have squeezed 4 months of additional development into Windows 8 / Metro after consumer preview and before feature freeze which must be soon. I really doubt that this afforded them enough time to fix the multitude of issues which were obvious in that release. It really was a usability dog's dinner for anyone using a mouse and keyboard.
Instead I think it far more likely that when Windows 8 does turn up it will be a tablets only version where they can essentially ignore the issues with running a classic desktop against metro because there won't be a classic desktop. I think the PC / x86 version will be delayed to give them time to make it work properly.
I developed in OS/2 and got accustomed to most of its strangeness, but there is no denying it was strange. Having to use the right mouse for drag and drop was pointless complexity. The property tabs of most objects on the WPS were filled with WAY too many options, arranged in a haphazard way with common stuff buried behind advanced stuff. OS/2 used IBM's CUA UI guideliness which were so perversely unintuitive that compliant apps were less usable than those that weren't. And despite being CUA compliant there was zero consistency between one application and the next. None at all. There was a never ending cycle of CSDs to fix the desktop. Apps could freeze the GUI solid just by never returning from a message handler. Even IBM's own Bonus Pak could drag the desktop to its knees. And prospective developers were frightened away by expensive developer programs and hideously slow tools like VisualAge C++.
Despite all that if you knew what you were doing it was far more superior to anything Microsoft had at the time. I'm sure Microsoft engaged in all kinds of sharp practice but it really needn't have bothered. IBM was its own worst enemy. By the time NT4.0 / W2K were appearing there was no reason at all to use OS/2.
The Raspberry Pi was bitten by the european equivalent just last week. It lacked the CE mark it requires for devices that can emit em radiation or be affected by it. I'm actually wondering if the Pi will run afoul of the FCC regs next.
I expect these devices do need a CE mark for electro magnetic radiation compliance (that it doesn't interfere with other equipment and its own performance isn't degraded by other equipment) and the companies in question are rightfully stating they're not going to start selling something which would land them in the shit if it is out of compliance. The US is no different with devices requiring FCC certification.
It's not over the top. Consoles and most tablets are closed systems. There was never a reasonable expectation by users that they should be able to install their own software on a PS Vita or PSP or that the vendor should sit idly by and allow them to do it. And if the circumvention is something they host from their own store then of course they're going to take it down until it can be fixed. It is common sense. Perhaps if you had billions riding on a platform you'd take such measures too.
Windows 7 is not a closed system and does not have its own store. The model is different. When Microsoft produce a version of Windows which is closed and locked to a store you will see exactly the same behaviour from them too. I expect when Windows for tablets appears it will be exactly this model. Do you really think Microsoft would just twiddle their thumbs while hosting some app which allowed people to jailbreak their devices? Of course they wouldn't. They'll do everything in their power to prevent the exploit from becoming more widespread.
Whether closed systems are in any way acceptable is a totally different discussion. With regard to if Sony overreacted, the answer is they didn't.
People discount Microsoft because they fail to realise that Microsoft is relentless. It's like waves of zombies. You might fight off the first wave and become a bit arrogant but before you know they're back and attacking in large numbers. Before you know it your defences are overrun, your bullets have been spent and they're eating your brains.
If hackers are saying a game is exploitable Sony would have to be insane to leave the exploit up on their store. Why would they expose themselves to an exploit? So they've taken it down presumably with the intention of fixing whatever the exploit is before putting it back up. Perhaps Everyone's Tennis does something such as peer to peer gameplay or hitting an external url which leaves it vulnerable to an exploit.
It probably is analogous. Administration effectively means appointing somebody to run the company in the best interests of the creditors. That might mean winding it up, selling it off or keeping it running as a going concern. It's too early to say what GAME's administrators will do but clearly they saw no reason to keep half of the stores open presumably because they're not making enough money or the rent is too high.
No problems? There is no multitasking at least so far as apps are concerned. When they are not in the foreground they are suspended. The only way to make them do anything in the background is through a background agent and there are a hideous set of restrictions on what they can do. I note since the last time I looked at that page that 256MB devices don't even get to run background agents AT ALL. So you can look forward to a range of "budget" WP phones which are totally gimped.
I've answered push elsewhere. As for porting iOS apps to Android, yes many have been ported, particularly games. It's relatively straightforward to write code for Android / iOS where 90% of the code is shared because there is so much commonality in the APIs they offer. Both offer OpenGL ES and OpenAL for example, the other stuff such as touch and other services can be abstracted away. The Java / ObjC can be restricted to some glue to kick off the C++ code. Even RIM's Playbook finds itself in a better place than Windows for portability because it shares those APIs.
WP7 has absolutely no commonality so it relies on people porting apps from scratch or using some kind of portability API like Phonegap, Rhodes or so on. None of these are particularly palatable options. So claiming that it's not a big deal or whatever is simply wrong. This was demonstrated just this week when Angry Birds Space was conspicuously not available on WP7. I don't doubt someone in Rovio is working on it, and maybe they even have the resources to put into backend code generation tools that work off some platform neutral format but very few other companies have. It's obviously an impediment to app development and lack of apps directly leads to lack of users.
Push notifications don't solve the problem with since you need active wifi or 3G data for them to work, i.e. if your data is down you don't get a push. The push is also restricted in what data it can send. It's literally a message that says "there's something here" instead of actually delivering it unless it is an extremely short message. I'm not saying push wouldn't be useful but it's not a replacement for letting an app do what it wants to do rather than shoehorning it through a service because it won't work any other way.
In the UK firms can't go bankrupt, they go into administration, i.e. an administrator is appointed to either wind it down, or find someone to buy it, or keep it running as a going concern. GAME is still a going concern, albeit massively downsized. It might ultimately be wound up or it may be that it carries on existing in some reduced form. Closing a bunch of stores was inevitable in any event.
GAME was a spinoff of EB Games and shared the same mentality - high retail prices and a propensity to stiff customers who traded in or bought second hand. GAME took over its main rival Gamestation and got so big in Britain that the average medium sized town / city might have 3 or 4 stores belonging to one brand or another often across the road from each other.
So you have an (over) saturation of stores in prime rent locations selling a commodity, poor customer loyalty thanks to GAME's own business practices, a recession, and increasing competition from supermarkets, online stores and digital downloads. GAME didn't bother responding in any meaningful way to any of these threats and so it lost a lot of money and went bust. It sucks for the employees but it really isn't a surprise that it happened.
Going into administration is probably the best chance it has of surviving. The creditors can cut the store down to size which might ultimately whip it into a survivable shape.
Apps are allowed to run one background activity every 30 minutes and there are strict limits on how long this activty may run for or how many are entitled to be active. You can't pretend that is even remotely adequate for any kind of IM, email or Twitter type application. And you say tradeoff on battery life but I've yet to see a Windows Phone make good on battery. It's certainly not true for my Lumia 800 which sucks power and runs down faster than a 2 year old Android handset I have.
And yes lack of C/C++ and/or Java hurts. If I have an Android or iPhone app. My choices for porting that app to WP7.5 are not pretty - either port and maintain a virtually analogous app in.NET with double the overheads or go to the lowest common denominator such as Phonegap. Windows Phone is completely the odd one out. At least if I want platform parity in Android / iPhone I can drop to C/C++ for most of the stuff and rely on OpenGL ES too. In Windows Phone you get nothing apart from some lame porting guides. If C/C++ were there at least it might allow someone to recompile Dalvik and some Android APIs to WP but not even that is a possibility.
There are numerous faults with WP7.5 but the main one is lack of multitasking. One app is active at any time. Other apps get put to sleep with EXTREMELY limited means to do background tasks like checking email. Maybe for the most part this isnt a big deal but it means any app which sits in the background, e.g. instant messaging, twitter etc. is gimped on WP7.5. For example Skype only works when its in the foreground. If you expect to be able to receive calls then tough you can't.
That's not the only issue by a long stretch but it's the most serious. I'd say the lack of a C/C++ toolchain or Java runtime for that matter is another serious impediment to developer uptake. It means if you're porting an app from another platform you're looking at writing from scratch.
Slashdot Mirror
I think a) The desktop start button must be reinstated. Something that is discoverable and people can click on. Shoving the mouse into a corner and clicking is not discoverable b) Metro should appear as an overlay over the desktop, not a seperate screen. Of if it is a different screen at least give it some context back to the desktop such showing scaled windows the way the activities screen in GNOME 3 does. c) Metro needs expanding groups and compact, vertical, sorted lists of icons to adequately reproduce the hierarchical programs / groups of Windows "classic". d) Minimize mouse travel - the UI fails if a user is forced to scroll through pages of horizontal icons, e) allow users to zoom out to a level of their choosing rather than showing arbitrarily large tiles.
Reinstating the start menu would be a lazy cop out and wouldn't fix the underlying issue.
I think on tablets in the absence of "classic" Windows it will be perfectly adequate albeit quite bland. People will have less tiles, less apps, they'll be able to swipe/flick to scroll and so on. It'll work pretty well. So I think that Windows 8 may will debut on tablet devices and I would not be surprised if a desktop edition gets pushed out until they can fix it.
I have no idea why Android users would ever wish to have metro on tablets, but if they did then one the beauty of Android is you can swap the default launcher activity for something else and get it. That's all the likes of HTC do with their Sense UI.
One of the nifty things about Android is you can replace the default activities if you like. So if you install an activity that handles an intent you can make it the default. So why do you need to root a device to use this?
Irrelevant, and that was Sun, not Oracle. It is important that you understand 'squandering' a patent is completely irrelevant to patent cases, look at the GIF submarine patent story as a reminder.
I didn't say squandered a patent. I said they squandered J2ME. Google turned up with something which in many respects is J2ME done properly and Sun / Oracle watched their market evaporate. Why would a licensee of J2ME want to stick with some antiquated piece of crap when they could have almost J2SE levels of functionality in a full blown OS AND not pay a penny for it either?
So immediately there is an axe to grind and there is a suspicion that in doing something so close to Java / J2ME that it hits a few patents along the way. Many commentators believe that Oracle bought Sun in large part for a chance of a lawsuit against Google. People like James Gosling are on record about this. But as its transpired it's not looking too great for Oracle.
They are annoying, and in my opinion, pointless, but they are hardly spurious to the law. Remember Sun actually did win $1billion with these patents from Microsoft.
Microsoft licensed the Java system and logo under contract from Sun and then set about systematically subverting it which is the basis that they were sued. Google did not sign a contract and has never claimed Android to be compatible with Java even if they share a large degree of source code compatibility. It may be that the implementation language for most Android applications is Java source but it is converted into an incompatible format. .
So it boils down to patent claims mostly relating to compiler / VM technology and most of them have been cast out as irrelevant, spurious, obvious and so on and only a couple remain, one of them due to expire this year. Even if Oracle prevails, the amount of damages they receive are going to be a pittance compared to what they expected originally.
Now their patents have been whittled down to a couple both of which can probably be worked around this is little more than an argument about pocket change. Even if Google were compelled to give them a hundred million bucks it would be little more than pocket change for either company.
It's obviously in development and some of the more offensively wrong issues in the metro / classic mashup are bound to be fixed. The problem I foresee is that Windows 8 is a massive project and its only 6 months from release. If its not already in feature lockdown it will be very soon. Any design flaws in the consumer preview which weren't fixed by now are probably not going to get fixed at all. If that's the case then I think MS will have to delay the desktop release although they could proceed with the Windows ARM release. Otherwise Microsoft are going to be killed by the press.
Instead I think it far more likely that when Windows 8 does turn up it will be a tablets only version where they can essentially ignore the issues with running a classic desktop against metro because there won't be a classic desktop. I think the PC / x86 version will be delayed to give them time to make it work properly.
Despite all that if you knew what you were doing it was far more superior to anything Microsoft had at the time. I'm sure Microsoft engaged in all kinds of sharp practice but it really needn't have bothered. IBM was its own worst enemy. By the time NT4.0 / W2K were appearing there was no reason at all to use OS/2.
The Raspberry Pi was bitten by the european equivalent just last week. It lacked the CE mark it requires for devices that can emit em radiation or be affected by it. I'm actually wondering if the Pi will run afoul of the FCC regs next.
Force Apple (and an increasing number of other manufacturers) to stop sealing batteries into their devices and allow users to service them.
I expect these devices do need a CE mark for electro magnetic radiation compliance (that it doesn't interfere with other equipment and its own performance isn't degraded by other equipment) and the companies in question are rightfully stating they're not going to start selling something which would land them in the shit if it is out of compliance. The US is no different with devices requiring FCC certification.
Windows 7 is not a closed system and does not have its own store. The model is different. When Microsoft produce a version of Windows which is closed and locked to a store you will see exactly the same behaviour from them too. I expect when Windows for tablets appears it will be exactly this model. Do you really think Microsoft would just twiddle their thumbs while hosting some app which allowed people to jailbreak their devices? Of course they wouldn't. They'll do everything in their power to prevent the exploit from becoming more widespread.
Whether closed systems are in any way acceptable is a totally different discussion. With regard to if Sony overreacted, the answer is they didn't.
People discount Microsoft because they fail to realise that Microsoft is relentless. It's like waves of zombies. You might fight off the first wave and become a bit arrogant but before you know they're back and attacking in large numbers. Before you know it your defences are overrun, your bullets have been spent and they're eating your brains.
I like my HTTP protocols to be a little bit kinky.
And have Sony remotely killed all games? No they haven't. Your comparison falls flat on its face and is ludicrous to boot.
If hackers are saying a game is exploitable Sony would have to be insane to leave the exploit up on their store. Why would they expose themselves to an exploit? So they've taken it down presumably with the intention of fixing whatever the exploit is before putting it back up. Perhaps Everyone's Tennis does something such as peer to peer gameplay or hitting an external url which leaves it vulnerable to an exploit.
It probably is analogous. Administration effectively means appointing somebody to run the company in the best interests of the creditors. That might mean winding it up, selling it off or keeping it running as a going concern. It's too early to say what GAME's administrators will do but clearly they saw no reason to keep half of the stores open presumably because they're not making enough money or the rent is too high.
No problems? There is no multitasking at least so far as apps are concerned. When they are not in the foreground they are suspended. The only way to make them do anything in the background is through a background agent and there are a hideous set of restrictions on what they can do. I note since the last time I looked at that page that 256MB devices don't even get to run background agents AT ALL. So you can look forward to a range of "budget" WP phones which are totally gimped.
WP7 has absolutely no commonality so it relies on people porting apps from scratch or using some kind of portability API like Phonegap, Rhodes or so on. None of these are particularly palatable options. So claiming that it's not a big deal or whatever is simply wrong. This was demonstrated just this week when Angry Birds Space was conspicuously not available on WP7. I don't doubt someone in Rovio is working on it, and maybe they even have the resources to put into backend code generation tools that work off some platform neutral format but very few other companies have. It's obviously an impediment to app development and lack of apps directly leads to lack of users.
Push notifications don't solve the problem with since you need active wifi or 3G data for them to work, i.e. if your data is down you don't get a push. The push is also restricted in what data it can send. It's literally a message that says "there's something here" instead of actually delivering it unless it is an extremely short message. I'm not saying push wouldn't be useful but it's not a replacement for letting an app do what it wants to do rather than shoehorning it through a service because it won't work any other way.
In the UK firms can't go bankrupt, they go into administration, i.e. an administrator is appointed to either wind it down, or find someone to buy it, or keep it running as a going concern. GAME is still a going concern, albeit massively downsized. It might ultimately be wound up or it may be that it carries on existing in some reduced form. Closing a bunch of stores was inevitable in any event.
So you have an (over) saturation of stores in prime rent locations selling a commodity, poor customer loyalty thanks to GAME's own business practices, a recession, and increasing competition from supermarkets, online stores and digital downloads. GAME didn't bother responding in any meaningful way to any of these threats and so it lost a lot of money and went bust. It sucks for the employees but it really isn't a surprise that it happened.
Going into administration is probably the best chance it has of surviving. The creditors can cut the store down to size which might ultimately whip it into a survivable shape.
And yes lack of C/C++ and/or Java hurts. If I have an Android or iPhone app. My choices for porting that app to WP7.5 are not pretty - either port and maintain a virtually analogous app in .NET with double the overheads or go to the lowest common denominator such as Phonegap. Windows Phone is completely the odd one out. At least if I want platform parity in Android / iPhone I can drop to C/C++ for most of the stuff and rely on OpenGL ES too. In Windows Phone you get nothing apart from some lame porting guides. If C/C++ were there at least it might allow someone to recompile Dalvik and some Android APIs to WP but not even that is a possibility.
Skype calls? No you can't unless something has changed in the beta released a week ago and now.
That's not the only issue by a long stretch but it's the most serious. I'd say the lack of a C/C++ toolchain or Java runtime for that matter is another serious impediment to developer uptake. It means if you're porting an app from another platform you're looking at writing from scratch.