More features:
* You won’t power these things off. Windows On ARM PCs will be like other smartphones and tablets — the screen will go dark and it will enter a low-power mode. But you’ll probably never turn it off.
* There will be ways for developers to write for both platforms at once. This is complicated, and gets into developer-speak, but basically if you’re using an abstracted or “high-level” programming language, such as C#, Visual Basic, XAML (all Microsoft-specific) or JavaScript and HTML5 (common Web-standard languages), then you can write one “Metro” style program and have it automatically work on both ARM-based devices and traditional PCs. If you want to write more directly to the hardware using C or C++, you’ll have to do some extra work.
* It will not be possible to port existing Windows apps to the new platform. It’s a total rewrite.
* It will ship around the same time as regular Windows 8. That is the “collective goal” of Microsoft and its hardware partners.
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Will it kill it the same way the Zune killed the iPod? Or the same way the Windows 8 phone killed the iPhone?
“* It will not be possible to port existing Windows apps to the new platform. It’s a total rewrite.”
That’s too bad because the biggest advantage of Windows is all the software that’s available for it.
“If you want to write more directly to the hardware using C or C++, you’ll have to do some extra work.”
This has always been the case.
“It will not be possible to port existing Windows apps to the new platform. It’s a total rewrite”
If the app in question is highly dependent on the Win32
event model and/or makes use of huge amounts of resources
(memory and/or pagefile) that is probably the case. This should not be a shock to anyone who considers the differences between hand held and desktop systems.
After spending an entire overnight at work battling Comcraptastic service - it went out at 12:40AM and was still out except for cable TV when I left at 7AM I can say my back up Android experince wasn’t a walk in the park.
All of my desktops were out as well as our news wires. The engineer for some reason turned off my back up wireless. And - admittedly my fault - I never learned how to find and move saved files on my tablet to machines that lined to a printer once I did get a wireless network up.
With deadlines looming I did contact someone coming in at 4:30 so he could bring in an old and and slow HP laptop and three radio stations ran off that and my Edge tablet until things were resolved.
What a night and a reminder for me to learn Linux and Android!
““It will not be possible to port existing Windows apps to the new platform. It’s a total rewrite””
We do it every day. A single code base that supports dozens of platforms and hundreds of hardware devices platform known to man. Ya just gotta know what yer doin’!