Windows Mobile, C#, and especially the .NET framework are all known for being slow.
WinMo.. yes.
.NET framework.. that's dependent upon what you're using it for, what it's running on, etc.
C#.. absolutely NOT! At my previous job we upgraded a ton of code to C# and on average it ran 10 times faster. You can hate M$ all you want, but C# is a very nice and efficient language that is not hard to pick up if you're familiar with Java or other common languages.
.NET framework.. that's dependent upon what you're using it for, what it's running on, etc.
C#.. absolutely NOT! At my previous job we upgraded a ton of code to C# and on average it ran 10 times faster. You can hate M$ all you want, but C# is a very nice and efficient language that is not hard to pick up if you're familiar with Java or other common languages.
As I said, that's an actual quote from the MSDN article. No M$ hating here...
As far as supporting "all the versions" of WM: It's not as hard as you think. Some of the new stuff with 6.5 might not easily be backward compatible with 6.1 or 6.0, but what I've found is if it works on 6.1, it tends to work all the way back to 5.0. I've never had an issue running something designed for 5.0 on 6.1.
I can tell you this is not the case on the Motorola Q, I know for a fact that MS has various version of their releases to support variations in hardware manufactures depending on the mobile processor they are using and the graphic and screen drives on the phone. Also, depending on the firmware level of the hardware newer versions of MS Mobile do not work.
This is the nightmare any developer will be faced on supporting apps for MS mobile. I can tell you one app I ran into this with, Trapster, they make it for all platforms, iphone, Android, Java and MS Mobile. Their support for iphone is great and the other platform is not so great and they make had two version for the MS mobile one worked, kinda of the new one does not and they can not figure it out since they do not have Moto Q with my specific firmware and MS software release.
What's cracks me up, is that Microsoft don't even use C# to build their own OS. They promotion Visual Studio and .NET but don't fully embrace .NET.
Don't get me wrong .NET and managed code is very handy and powerful to work with. On the other hand Apple have being using Objective C for well over 10+ years. Also Apple gives you the IDE XCode for free on the OSX disc, while Microsoft's IDE isn't free or cheap.
Microsoft forever playing catch up or just simply late to the party as always. Only recently they start promoting the Model / View / Controller method used by Objective C, Ruby, etc...
They are simply too proud to admit that someone else might be doing something better than themselves.
Also Apple gives you the IDE XCode for free on the OSX disc, while Microsoft's IDE isn't free or cheap.
Look at it all in perspective though. The IDE XCode isn't even close to free when you consider the extra couple $1000 you paid for the Apple hardware. On the surface it seems like a good deal, but break it down and I can buy a PC, Windows and Visual Studio for far less than a Mac with "free" XCode. I'm not arguing which one is better, etc.. just saying the price argument is flawed.
If you write in C#, the hardware should be abstracted, as in .NET, so the same code can run on different hardware.
640x480 - when apps don't run in a scaleable window you need to know the screen res for starters. So unless all Win mobile devices have the same aspect ratio it is probably going to squish the interface - very ugly indeed. And that is just the obvious flaw in your generalization.
Addressing the hardware differences is always going to be a major issue when porting code to a new device. The Win mobile environment is very fragmented where iPhone is quite consistent across the various models.
Trying make it sound simple to port apps is just a smoke screen. The whole memory management, file system, security, and OS integration is going to make the process very tedious indeed.
Look at it all in perspective though. The IDE XCode isn't even close to free when you consider the extra couple $1000 you paid for the Apple hardware. On the surface it seems like a good deal, but break it down and I can buy a PC, Windows and Visual Studio for far less than a Mac with "free" XCode. I'm not arguing which one is better, etc.. just saying the price argument is flawed.
Extra couple thousand? Dunno where you shop, but the last time I compared a Mac Pro to an equivalent PC, the price difference was a couple hundred dollars tops:
Looks like the same price to me. And you still have to buy Visual Studio for the PC.
Even if you build a DIY PC, if you build it to those exact specs, you're only going to save about $750 (and have no tech support). Go ahead, price out the components on TigerDirect and see. Make sure to include the price of the software.
Extra couple thousand? Dunno where you shop, but the last time I compared a Mac Pro to an equivalent PC, the price difference was a couple hundred dollars tops:
Looks like the same price to me. And you still have to buy Visual Studio for the PC.
Even if you build a DIY PC, if you build it to those exact specs, you're only going to save about $750 (and have no tech support). Go ahead, price out the components on TigerDirect and see. Make sure to include the price of the software.
I can develop just fine on my $499 Dell Latitude that came with Vista. Add VS to that and you're way under the price of the cheapest Macbook. Just because there are PC's that are more expensive doesn't mean that's required to develop in VS. For Apple though it is required because they don't offer any affordable models.
"So, in 6.5, let's just pick an example, you'll see our browsing experience get dramatically better," Bach said. "So, you will have a very rich browsing experience on 6.5 devices that will give you access to more Web sites than you will be able to get to on an iPhone, that will work actively and work well. It really is a much better experience. We will have to continue to enhance that because the browser world is advancing very quickly. But, that's an experience people expect to work and that's just one example of many experiences that we're building to expand in that area, so choice in selection, great end-to-end experiences."
You think the PR guy/gal sent him out with the advice: "Hey, Robbie, make sure to talk about the Windows experience."
I can develop just fine on my $499 Dell Latitude that came with Vista. Add VS to that and you're way under the price of the cheapest Macbook. Just because there are PC's that are more expensive doesn't mean that's required to develop in VS. For Apple though it is required because they don't offer any affordable models.
I can develop just fine on my $599 Mac Mini using a monitor left over from defenestration. Just because there are MacBooks that are more expensive doesn't mean that's required to develop in Xcode.
Its sad when microsoft has to rely on the apple library of applications when obviously they can't write their own. They're a software company, one of the largest I might add, and yet they are relying on the catalog of a smaller competitor to bolster their own.
I find this to be quite ironic, its like their admitting they do not have a compelling product and pretty much have to outsource from apple directly. Microsoft is quite sad indeed.
This guy Bach is the worst salesman on earth. All this rambling about web browser experience is so incoherent. Actually he has nothing to say except "web browser experience". That's very encouraging. How about the EXPERIENCE of their SDK? How many hundreds of phones will this porting be for.
Microsoft will continue to lose market share until smartphone market is totally out of their hand. They have nothing to offer today as competition, and will not have anything different to offer tomorrow.
There is no web browser on any smartphone platform better than iPhone! Microsoft should have a developer conference for their smartphone, not incoherent talk at financial analyst conference. This guys are so disorganized. Who are they kidding?
What's cracks me up, is that Microsoft don't even use C# to build their own OS. They promotion Visual Studio and .NET but don't fully embrace .NET.
As a developer I can say that most of what an OS needs to in no way falls in the "managed code" category. Plus, the overhead of handling managed code (garbage collection etc.) doesn't really make it the best choice for an OS.
Quote:
Originally Posted by i386
Microsoft forever playing catch up or just simply late to the party as always. Only recently they start promoting the Model / View / Controller method used by Objective C, Ruby, etc...
Yes, I found it amusing that Microsoft picked up MVC almost 20 years after NeXT started using it in the late 1980's.
The only thing that Apple could do is allow third parties to sell outside of the 'app store', so that anything they don't want to be seen accepting can still be installed.
there is a valid reason for the restriction on a technical front. this is why those non app store apps are warranty voids. because any issue could be part of how the item was installed. at least if you are using their installer they can isolate the problem better.
yes it sucks when apps are approved and removed, not approved etc. particularly when the developers want to try the case in the media and make Apple look bad and we see that on the surface things don't make sense. but there are a myriad of factors and players we don't have the details on. we don't know what the contract with ATT says and now it might disallow certain apps, we don't know how the whole conflict of interest issue might have been a factor with Google, we don't know what kind of outcries took place when blatant porno apps were broached as possible, or when naughty uses for allegedly innocent apps were discovered. we only know what the media reports and it is always one sided and rarely in favor of the big bad corporation
One thing Microsoft forgot to mention was that you're going to have a heck of a time trying to port the look and feel of your iPhone app over to WinMo.
Sure the underlying functionality might be fairly straightforward to port, but you're probably going to have to redesign the entire work flow of the app to match whatever user interface elements are available on WinMo. That's no small task.
The porting example I see on their website is for an application which has a completely custom interface (no standard iPhone UI elements like tables or navbars). That's certainly not the norm for most of the iPhone apps I use.
I guess this press release will be enough to convince non-technical folks. However, once they see the effort (cost) involved in one or two app ports (or how horrible the ports are if done on a shoestring budget without any input from people with technical knowledge), they'll quickly come to see this for what it is: a marketing ploy.
If you write in C#, the hardware should be abstracted, as in .NET, so the same code can run on different hardware.
If you are writing software that doesn't care about size or resolution of the screen, presence or absence of a keyboard, accelerometer or any other hardware feature, than what you say may be true. Of course that guarantees the shitiest imaginable software, which is precisely why people have migrated in droves from WinMo to the iPhone.
The only way ANY developer will re-write their iPhone App for WinMo is if Microsoft bribes/pays them.
You do realize that WinMo has a much larger market share than the iPhone OS right? The iPhone OS is growing at a faster rate and it dominates the web traffic category, but WinMo is still crushing it in overall market share.
I'm not a M$ fanboy and I have an iPhone 3GS, but ignoring the true market share numbers is just stupid.
Well there is market share and installed base. The latest installed base numbers for the platforms by their respective owners, that is users that can use the applications stores (that's what the article is about), are:
I would not say that either platform is "crushing" the other, I leave it to your judgement.
But when it comes to a unified platform where a developer can sell an app unchanged to all users, iPhone OS beats Windows Mobile hands down (even when the "Windows Marketplace for Mobile" would be open today, which it is not)
Comments
Windows Mobile, C#, and especially the .NET framework are all known for being slow.
WinMo.. yes.
.NET framework.. that's dependent upon what you're using it for, what it's running on, etc.
C#.. absolutely NOT! At my previous job we upgraded a ton of code to C# and on average it ran 10 times faster. You can hate M$ all you want, but C# is a very nice and efficient language that is not hard to pick up if you're familiar with Java or other common languages.
WinMo.. yes.
.NET framework.. that's dependent upon what you're using it for, what it's running on, etc.
C#.. absolutely NOT! At my previous job we upgraded a ton of code to C# and on average it ran 10 times faster. You can hate M$ all you want, but C# is a very nice and efficient language that is not hard to pick up if you're familiar with Java or other common languages.
As I said, that's an actual quote from the MSDN article. No M$ hating here...
As far as supporting "all the versions" of WM: It's not as hard as you think. Some of the new stuff with 6.5 might not easily be backward compatible with 6.1 or 6.0, but what I've found is if it works on 6.1, it tends to work all the way back to 5.0. I've never had an issue running something designed for 5.0 on 6.1.
I can tell you this is not the case on the Motorola Q, I know for a fact that MS has various version of their releases to support variations in hardware manufactures depending on the mobile processor they are using and the graphic and screen drives on the phone. Also, depending on the firmware level of the hardware newer versions of MS Mobile do not work.
This is the nightmare any developer will be faced on supporting apps for MS mobile. I can tell you one app I ran into this with, Trapster, they make it for all platforms, iphone, Android, Java and MS Mobile. Their support for iphone is great and the other platform is not so great and they make had two version for the MS mobile one worked, kinda of the new one does not and they can not figure it out since they do not have Moto Q with my specific firmware and MS software release.
Don't get me wrong .NET and managed code is very handy and powerful to work with. On the other hand Apple have being using Objective C for well over 10+ years. Also Apple gives you the IDE XCode for free on the OSX disc, while Microsoft's IDE isn't free or cheap.
Microsoft forever playing catch up or just simply late to the party as always. Only recently they start promoting the Model / View / Controller method used by Objective C, Ruby, etc...
They are simply too proud to admit that someone else might be doing something better than themselves.
Apple have being using Objective C for well over 10+ years.
Actually, Apple, nee NeXT, have been using Objective-C for 20+ years.
Also Apple gives you the IDE XCode for free on the OSX disc, while Microsoft's IDE isn't free or cheap.
Look at it all in perspective though. The IDE XCode isn't even close to free when you consider the extra couple $1000 you paid for the Apple hardware. On the surface it seems like a good deal, but break it down and I can buy a PC, Windows and Visual Studio for far less than a Mac with "free" XCode. I'm not arguing which one is better, etc.. just saying the price argument is flawed.
If you write in C#, the hardware should be abstracted, as in .NET, so the same code can run on different hardware.
640x480 - when apps don't run in a scaleable window you need to know the screen res for starters. So unless all Win mobile devices have the same aspect ratio it is probably going to squish the interface - very ugly indeed. And that is just the obvious flaw in your generalization.
Addressing the hardware differences is always going to be a major issue when porting code to a new device. The Win mobile environment is very fragmented where iPhone is quite consistent across the various models.
Trying make it sound simple to port apps is just a smoke screen. The whole memory management, file system, security, and OS integration is going to make the process very tedious indeed.
Look at it all in perspective though. The IDE XCode isn't even close to free when you consider the extra couple $1000 you paid for the Apple hardware. On the surface it seems like a good deal, but break it down and I can buy a PC, Windows and Visual Studio for far less than a Mac with "free" XCode. I'm not arguing which one is better, etc.. just saying the price argument is flawed.
Extra couple thousand? Dunno where you shop, but the last time I compared a Mac Pro to an equivalent PC, the price difference was a couple hundred dollars tops:
Dell Precision T7500
Mac Pro
Looks like the same price to me. And you still have to buy Visual Studio for the PC.
Even if you build a DIY PC, if you build it to those exact specs, you're only going to save about $750 (and have no tech support). Go ahead, price out the components on TigerDirect and see. Make sure to include the price of the software.
Extra couple thousand? Dunno where you shop, but the last time I compared a Mac Pro to an equivalent PC, the price difference was a couple hundred dollars tops:
Dell Precision T7500
Mac Pro
Looks like the same price to me. And you still have to buy Visual Studio for the PC.
Even if you build a DIY PC, if you build it to those exact specs, you're only going to save about $750 (and have no tech support). Go ahead, price out the components on TigerDirect and see. Make sure to include the price of the software.
I can develop just fine on my $499 Dell Latitude that came with Vista. Add VS to that and you're way under the price of the cheapest Macbook. Just because there are PC's that are more expensive doesn't mean that's required to develop in VS. For Apple though it is required because they don't offer any affordable models.
"So, in 6.5, let's just pick an example, you'll see our browsing experience get dramatically better," Bach said. "So, you will have a very rich browsing experience on 6.5 devices that will give you access to more Web sites than you will be able to get to on an iPhone, that will work actively and work well. It really is a much better experience. We will have to continue to enhance that because the browser world is advancing very quickly. But, that's an experience people expect to work and that's just one example of many experiences that we're building to expand in that area, so choice in selection, great end-to-end experiences."
You think the PR guy/gal sent him out with the advice: "Hey, Robbie, make sure to talk about the Windows experience."
they don't offer any affordable models.
Affordable for whom?
I can develop just fine on my $499 Dell Latitude that came with Vista. Add VS to that and you're way under the price of the cheapest Macbook. Just because there are PC's that are more expensive doesn't mean that's required to develop in VS. For Apple though it is required because they don't offer any affordable models.
I can develop just fine on my $599 Mac Mini using a monitor left over from defenestration. Just because there are MacBooks that are more expensive doesn't mean that's required to develop in Xcode.
Affordable for whom?
People who realize it makes no sense to pay 2x more for a macbook when they could get a PC that does everything they need.
I find this to be quite ironic, its like their admitting they do not have a compelling product and pretty much have to outsource from apple directly. Microsoft is quite sad indeed.
Microsoft will continue to lose market share until smartphone market is totally out of their hand. They have nothing to offer today as competition, and will not have anything different to offer tomorrow.
There is no web browser on any smartphone platform better than iPhone! Microsoft should have a developer conference for their smartphone, not incoherent talk at financial analyst conference. This guys are so disorganized. Who are they kidding?
What's cracks me up, is that Microsoft don't even use C# to build their own OS. They promotion Visual Studio and .NET but don't fully embrace .NET.
As a developer I can say that most of what an OS needs to in no way falls in the "managed code" category. Plus, the overhead of handling managed code (garbage collection etc.) doesn't really make it the best choice for an OS.
Microsoft forever playing catch up or just simply late to the party as always. Only recently they start promoting the Model / View / Controller method used by Objective C, Ruby, etc...
Yes, I found it amusing that Microsoft picked up MVC almost 20 years after NeXT started using it in the late 1980's.
The only thing that Apple could do is allow third parties to sell outside of the 'app store', so that anything they don't want to be seen accepting can still be installed.
there is a valid reason for the restriction on a technical front. this is why those non app store apps are warranty voids. because any issue could be part of how the item was installed. at least if you are using their installer they can isolate the problem better.
yes it sucks when apps are approved and removed, not approved etc. particularly when the developers want to try the case in the media and make Apple look bad and we see that on the surface things don't make sense. but there are a myriad of factors and players we don't have the details on. we don't know what the contract with ATT says and now it might disallow certain apps, we don't know how the whole conflict of interest issue might have been a factor with Google, we don't know what kind of outcries took place when blatant porno apps were broached as possible, or when naughty uses for allegedly innocent apps were discovered. we only know what the media reports and it is always one sided and rarely in favor of the big bad corporation
Sure the underlying functionality might be fairly straightforward to port, but you're probably going to have to redesign the entire work flow of the app to match whatever user interface elements are available on WinMo. That's no small task.
The porting example I see on their website is for an application which has a completely custom interface (no standard iPhone UI elements like tables or navbars). That's certainly not the norm for most of the iPhone apps I use.
I guess this press release will be enough to convince non-technical folks. However, once they see the effort (cost) involved in one or two app ports (or how horrible the ports are if done on a shoestring budget without any input from people with technical knowledge), they'll quickly come to see this for what it is: a marketing ploy.
If you write in C#, the hardware should be abstracted, as in .NET, so the same code can run on different hardware.
If you are writing software that doesn't care about size or resolution of the screen, presence or absence of a keyboard, accelerometer or any other hardware feature, than what you say may be true. Of course that guarantees the shitiest imaginable software, which is precisely why people have migrated in droves from WinMo to the iPhone.
The only way ANY developer will re-write their iPhone App for WinMo is if Microsoft bribes/pays them.
You do realize that WinMo has a much larger market share than the iPhone OS right? The iPhone OS is growing at a faster rate and it dominates the web traffic category, but WinMo is still crushing it in overall market share.
I'm not a M$ fanboy and I have an iPhone 3GS, but ignoring the true market share numbers is just stupid.
Well there is market share and installed base. The latest installed base numbers for the platforms by their respective owners, that is users that can use the applications stores (that's what the article is about), are:
Windows Mobile (6.0+6.1): 30 million (http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/e...09WPC2009.mspx)
iPhone OS: 45 million (ca. 26 million iPhones, 19 million iPod Touches) (http://www.theiphoneblog.com/2009/07...nference-call/)
When it comes to market share of devices sold in a period, Windows Mobile held 11.8% through 2008, the iPhone 8.2% (that is not counting iPod Touch units). (http://www.engadget.com/2009/03/13/g...bers-for-2008/)
For Q1 2009 Gartner names Apple as no. 3 smartphone os vendor after Symbian and BlackBerry OS (http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=985912), again, excluding iPod Touches.
I would not say that either platform is "crushing" the other, I leave it to your judgement.
But when it comes to a unified platform where a developer can sell an app unchanged to all users, iPhone OS beats Windows Mobile hands down (even when the "Windows Marketplace for Mobile" would be open today, which it is not)
just saying
Ciao, Alex