Why do a reader only for one publication? (Adobe vs. Microsoft for developers)

Windows Devs don’t have to directly cater to the Macs anyway cause Macs have parallels and other fiendish emulation technology.

Yep, WPF/E is just a small subset of the .NET 3.0 framework, ain’t it?

Robert: I think you missed one point, and that is Microsoft maturity when it comes to development tools.

http://webwebusability.wordpress.com/2007/02/23/robert-scoble-on-microsoft-vs-adobe/

@John: Uh, uh? WPF/E runs on Mac, and it has been so right from the first CTP. As the slashdotters and giggers say, RTFA:D

Yuvi, read what I wrote, not what you want to see. The WPF/E runtime runs on Macs, (not that it matters. Oooh, no content alert), but you cannot DEVELOP WPF/E *content* on anything but Windows.

This of course forces you to single source your OS and dev environment if you want to enable WPF/E. So you move all this work over to WPF/E. Then one day, Microsoft knifes WPF/E. “Blah, blah we don’t feel like it anymore”.

Well, now you’re quite properly fucked aren’t you, as if you want to STAY cross-platform, you have to completely firebomb your dev environments.

Of course, this is assuming that some “third party” writes a WPF/E runtime for Linux, which Microsoft has publicly stated they (MS) will NOT do. So if you want to reach Linux users, WPF/E isn’t an option anyway.

I’m not surprised that the Windows team is playing this line of bullshit again. What shocks me is that people still fall for it. (Okay, people who aren’t Robert, who is unable to critically analyze any damned thing, and never met a fact worth checking.)

I’ve developed services in both Flex2 and WPF and would choose the .NET stack any day.

First and foremost, XAML is a great language for scripting interactivity. You just can’t count XAML and the Expression art asset pipeline out just as it’s getting off the ground.

Second, XBAP deployment is secure and easy, has 3D accelerated support across XP and Vista, and leverages the full .NET API. In fact I can host a Flex control within my WPF window, but not vice versa.

And lastly, and most importantly, is sheer performance. A complex Flex app will make even the hardiest workstation groan, and can swell to enormous size. WPF runs crisply and quietly, rarely taxing system resources even in advanced 3D simulations and because it offloads much of the work to the runtime, downloads tend to be pretty compact.

So at the risk of alienating my non XP and Vista users, I choose to concentrate on XAML. For developers however, the competition between Adobe and Microsoft represents a win-win situation. The architectures of Flex and WPF are so similar because of the simplicity that has eveolved in developement paradigms: using an xml-based system for scripting user interaction. I just personally prefer XAML to MXML on a purely functional and aesthetic level, but I know that if a client is biased toward one or the other technology, porting an entire application will prove quite easy due to the RAD functionality built into each.

@John: Right now, developing WPF/E means you’ve to use Windows. But, if you could build the tools yourself, then you could develop anywhere.

An example is the WPF/E pad here http://www.simplegeek.com/mharsh/wpfepad/ . This allows you to build XAML for WPF/E, and works across all supported browsers/platforms. And, last time I checked, you certainly could develop JavaScript on the Mac…

My point is, you don’t have to use Windows to develop WPF/E. Period.

Yuvi, and the point isn’t “feasibility.” We aren’t supposed to be spending the time to develop the applications so that we can develop; we should be developing.

Rotor could “feasibly” work on the Mac (.Net was “supposed” to work on all platforms), but it is essentially useless. The license cripples it from commercial use. 1.0 was incomplete. 2.0 was made for XP only. Brilliant.

There is no reason we should think WPF/E is any different when the underlying platform is itself already crippled to Windows.

The sad fact is no one knows what WPF/e will actually be yet. The current CTP’s are not useful for building real apps (there are no user input controls, only javascript on client), and the MS dev team has gone ballistically silent on what they will be adding in for version 1.0 and when. So it’s a weird time to be trying to guess MS’s fat-client, contra-Flash strategy — they just aren’t saying right now. We’ll know in a year. If they do build the “best” possible WPF/e, which lets hoards of Visual Studio programmers develop fat, cross-browser XAML apps, then developer conversions to the Adobe platform is not going to be a problem for MS. I rather suspect Adobe will have something of a problem.

Robert – I have to diagree with you here. I have a perspective on this both from an end user standpoint ad well as someone who talk to a lot of developers as part of my job.

First, as an end user I think the New York Times Reader (and the new Seattle PI version) an amazing experience that makes browsing their Web site or using an RSS Reader seem incredibly lame. I’m more than happy to make the tradeoff of having to download the app to get the better experience. I think you’re in your own little reality distortion field if you think that the proverbial “my mother” wants to have ANYTHING to do with RSS Readers. I know my mother doesn’t. She does, however, to to numerous newspaper Web sites every day and complains about readability and difficulty of navigation. When I showed her the NYT Reader she was blown away.

Second, as someone who talks to a lot of developers as part of my job – a technology marketer – I think you’re also in a reality distortion field regarding the prominence of Flash. I just got back from a round the world trip where I spoke to dozens of developers in the US, UK, Germany, Japan, China and Brazil about the types of platforms they’re using for development. Guess what? Flash came up about twice and in those cases it was referred to as tools for designers not “me.” You can try to argue that we didn’t talk to the right people but all I can say is that we looked at a broad cross-section of developers who were building apps using .NET, Java, Php, Ruby etc and Flash does not come up.

>>Chris: I said Microsoft would fight back with WPF/E, not that it would win.

LayZ: almost every company’s developers I’ve been meeting with lately are going to Macs. Go watch my video of SOASTA again. They are the best case for Mac switching I’ve seen. But, either way, when a developer switches over to a Mac (SOASTA did it cause Macs can run Linux, OSX, and Windows, all on the same box) then those developers adopt approaches that’ll work cross-platform.

The teams that only have Windows machines are far more likely to adopt .NET approaches. At least in my observations. Have you visited with more than 70 startups in the past few months? Are you seeing something else?

@John: Right now, developing WPF/E means you’ve to use Windows. But, if you could build the tools yourself, then you could develop anywhere.

My point is, you don’t have to use Windows to develop WPF/E. Period.

Right. Because a text editor will let you do what a proper IDE does just as easily. Why, I can access the ENTIRE WPF FOUNDATION with Pico. Oh wait, i can’t, now can I.

Sure. You show me a non-Windows IDE that is *supported by Microsoft* so when something isn’t right, I can find out if it’s a WPF issue or an IDE issue, and one that give me the same exact level of access and support that Microsoft’s tools do.

I can write enterprise windows code with a text editor. I can also set my hand on fire. Both will hurt quite a lot.

If they do build the “best” possible WPF/e, which lets hoards of Visual Studio programmers develop fat, cross-browser XAML apps, then developer conversions to the Adobe platform is not going to be a problem for MS. I rather suspect Adobe will have something of a problem.

Right, because right now, there are hordes of VS programmers writing cross-platform code every day, using VS’s excellent cross-platform tools.

Oh wait…

http://www.simplegeek.com/mharsh/wpfepad/

Does anyone have a link to a WPF/E site that actually DOES SOMETHING besides stupid dancing baloney bullshit?

WPF/E is a Microsoft recruitment tool. Here is this works :

Phase one, until critical mass is reached, make WPF/E work equally across Mac and Windows web browsers (as of date, Microsoft has not announced support for Linux)

Phase two, make the Windows run-time perform better. Example : use DirectX to accelerate the rendering.

In fact, Microsoft is going to use for the web the same trick that they are using now to force people to move to Windows Vista. Here is how it works :

Phase one, make sure WPF uses DirectX.

Phase two, ship WPF on Windows XP and Windows Vista.

Phase three, ship a Vista-only DirectX release (i.e. DirectX 10)

Phase four, add WPF features that take advantage of DirectX 10.

When that point is reached, Windows XP users are left out of the game. And all WPF developers, and their customers, are betrayed.

+1 to both Brad and Mark Ashton. Adobe’s big, but not that big.

Apollo will surely be nice, and again, I’m personally looking forward to it, but Microsoft isn’t going anywhere kids, and you can bet that the millions of .NET developers out there who love .NET (because it’s frankly fantastic) will push much harder for the adoption of a cross-platform product if it works seamlessly with .NET, rather than diving into ActionScript. Blecch.

The difference is that the NYTimes isn’t just any other publication. They’re the New York Times.

It is and will continue to be appointment reading for many people, myself included, and reading the Times with their software is a hundred times better than reading it on their website.

I’m a huge fan of Google Reader (although I’m a holdout who’s still on the old version, because the new one has serious usability flaws). But Reader is optimized for reading short blog entries. It’s not nearly as useful for reading long scrolling entires.

The column/page metaphor of Times Reader works much better for 2,000+ word articles.

Would it be great if TR included more content than just the Times? Absolutely. I think there’s a market for an RSS reader to use similar technology and layout.

Until then, I’m hooked on Times Reader.

Chris, that’s QED. Have Microsoft stop pissing around and hand Miguel and the rest of the Mono team everything they need to make Mono 100% feature compatible with .NET on windows, and help them implement that on Linux, Solaris, Mac OS X, AIX, everywhere.

Not just source, but people. Hell, Microsoft just hired how many thousand people? Hire a hundred more and detail them out to the Mono team.

@50 John, That’s a great suggestion to MSFT

BTW, I must have missed your blog post that asks Steve Jobs to hire 100 more and open up the iPhone platform.

The iPhone’s still vapor, no one knows anything about it, so why do I care? I’m not buying one, (there went my fanboy status), because I like Sprint, they’ve been good to me, they ARE good to me, and I need things the iPhone (so far) doesn’t do. Besides, my phone works, why should I get a new one.

Secondly, Jobs has not said “no third party applications”. (Yes, I know, everyone thinks that, but alas, not true.) What he has said is that Apple needs to keep control over what goes on the phone. (He also said something stupid about a bad application taking down a cell network. Yeesh. Moron.) Let’s see, I support Treos and Windows Mobile Phones. I’ve seen bad applications force 3-4x daily soft resets of various WM5 phones, (only took new phones / massive firmware upgrades to fix. Yay), turn Treos into bricks, (okay, not hard), and generally, make the phones unusable.

If you’re trying to get me to agree that Apple should allow the same kind of buggy shit onto the iPhone that you see on Treos and WM devices, sorry, wrong tree, go bark somewhere else.

But again, it’s vapor, and no one has any useful information on it. I will say that if the browser support on it is as decent as it looks, the folks doing AJAX and other similar applications are going to be quite pleased, because lemme tell you, Pocket IE and whatever the fuck is on the Palm OS suck ass on a stick. Haven’t tried Opera yet.

It’s a phone, you’re pretty much always on the network. Web applications will work well there. So far, third party fat applications have been a continual pain in my ass. So I don’t really see a problem in limiting them.

“So I don’t really see a problem in limiting them.”

Oh cool. It’s completely justified because you think so. But its not OK when someone at MSFT decides to limit/not support something. Apparently you consider pros and cons before you decide if something is a problem while some ass sitting high up in MSFT will do it because he had a bad hair day.

Ultimately its a business. nobody is going to do anything that doesn’t directly or indirectly contribute to the bottomline(or if its Sarbanes-Oxley). But why expect just MSFT to do things based on ‘morality’?