Quote:
Originally Posted by addabox
I guess what I'm thinking about is that if (and it does seem this way to me) touch is the future, someone is going to have to be very, very smart about how to do the kind of fine grained stuff we take for granted in a big range of desktop apps.
|
Sure — but think back 30 years. I wasn't quite alive just yet, but supposedly, GUIs were mocked as toys. And yet, today, nobody would suggest that GUIs can't be very powerful. The move to touch UIs like iOS and Metro is somewhat analogous.
The Mac originally had no proper multitasking (DAs aside), didn't have any command-line shell, didn't have networking, and so on. iOS is on a somewhat similar trajectory of slowly evolving more features. We have yet to see this happening in Metro, as Windows Phone 7 is very young, but presumably, there's more to come.
Quote:
Originally Posted by addabox
It looks to me like Apple is going to have the edge here, because they are developing iOS as an environment in its own right, whereas MS is trying to have it both ways. If Metro coexists with Windows 8 desktop stuff, and the desktop stuff can do a good job of handling the heavy lifting, there's little incentive to figure out how to Metro-fy, say, Photoshop.
|
I, too, am doubtful of Windows 8's success as a tablet platform. But as for desktop apps, Microsoft is doing less and less to drive APIs forward. The argument can be made that they've matured sufficiently, but as a professional Windows desktop programmer, I'd vehemently disagree (WinForms is a poor wrapper around Win32, WPF, while somewhat improved in 4.0, still feels largely dead on arrival, and Silverlight, too, doesn't appear to have any future; meanwhile, Apple keeps churning out one great Cocoa improvement after another). Somehow, Apple has not only figured out what appears to be a better delineation between the devices (desktop/laptop vs. tablet/smartphone rather than desktop/laptop/tablet vs. smartphone), but also at the same time found a path to, mostly, share what's best about the two (e.g., Core Video eventually coming to iOS; now, Notification Center coming to OS X) and keep what doesn't belong separate (though they have misstepped at times).