Rick's World

Link: https://blogs.msdn.com/windowsmobile/archive/2009/03/11/windows-marketplace-for-mobile-developer-strategy-announced.aspx

Amazing

Yesterday, Microsoft announced the rules for how developers can develop applications for the Windows Marketplace for Mobile. The only problem is, the way these rules are currently written, Microsoft has no prayer of ever beating Apple's iPhone App Store.

Microsoft's developer agreement starts off the same as Apple's iPhone App Store agreement. In both cases a developer pays $99 per year for access to the program. The other place where the Microsoft plan is identical to the Apple plan is that in both cases, the developer gets a 70% cut of the profits and Microsoft/Apple gets the other 30%. However these are the only things that are the same. There are two very key differences, however, that are going to destroy this service and give Apple an automatic victory in the mobile application market.

The first big difference is that the Microsoft plan limits a developer to selling only 5 apps per year. The Apple plan has no limit of how many apps a developer can sell per year. This limitation will cripple innovation in the Microsoft 'App Store'. Why would a developer risk one of those precious five apps on some kind of experimental app? They won't. This means that interesting 'experiments' won't show up on the Microsoft store. Apple, on the other hand, has no limit. This means lots of experimental (and admittedly lots of crappy) apps will be released. Yeah, some apps will be garbage, but still, if the developer can make money on a crap app, where's the harm? The Apple App Store is much more likely to see lots of apps if there's no limit on how many you can sell.

The second big difference is related to the first. If you do go past that 5 app per year limit, they charge you $100 to list every app after the fifth one. This includes free apps! This means that noone is going to release free apps. Why would you PAY $100 to release an app for free. It makes no sense.

Once again, Microsoft seems to be clueless in how to complete with Apple. If I were Microsoft, I would have offered all the development tools for free, allowed free registration in their App Store, and allowed unlimited apps - similar to the Android way.

This is a test of posting to my blog from Windows Live Writer.

Thanks to my friend Dave for pointing this out to me.

Hmm, it partially works.  It can post articles, but I can't find any way to set blog categories.

*sigh* Even when I have legal copies of Windows XP, it still seems to enjoy aggravating the hell out of me.

I use a Mac Pro at home. I've written in the past about how great it was and how I could run Windows XP in a virtual machine so well that I never needed a separate PC anymore. I'd been running XP happily in the virtual machine for several months, using a legal, registered copy of Windows XP, that I bought just for this purpose. I never had a problem with this setup. A couple of days ago, I decided to take the next step. That's when the fun began.

The next step that I decided to take was to use Boot Camp to install Windows XP on a separate hard drive. This would allow me to reboot into full Windows XP whenever I need to, and have full access to all the computer's resources in XP. VMWare Fusion has the ability to take a BootCamp partition and run it as if it was a virtual machine from inside OS X. I figured this would give me the best of both worlds. I could run full blown Windows in Boot Camp if I needed more power, and I could run that same copy of windows in VMWare Fusion whenever I just needed to do something quickly.

I ran the BootCamp Assistant and was able to easily install Windows XP to the spare hard drive. Leopard's install DVD even contains a program that autoinstalls Windows drivers for all the hardware on the Mac Pro. Windows XP is up and running perfectly. I then spent the rest of the evening reactivating that copy of XP (to replace the one I had activated in the virtual machine), installing updates, installing software etc. I spent hours setting this thing up. It was running perfectly.

Last night I decided to try running the BootCamp partition in VMWare Fusion. Here is where XP ruined my day. XP's activation system is based on doing an inventory of the hardware on your machine. If a lot of hardware changes, it decided you must have changed computers or perhaps installed a second copy on another computer. If it detects too many changes, it deactivates your copy of Windows and gives you three days to reactivate. This is exactly what happened to me when I ran it in BootCamp for the first time. XP's activation system noticed I was running in 'different hardware' now (i.e. VMWare) so it deactivated itself and told me I have to reactivate. This reactivation is a slow, annoying process you need to do over the phone.

So assuming I reactivate XP in VMWare, then it will work. The problem is, as soon as I go back to running it in Boot Camp, it will detect hardware changes again and deactivate itself again! In other words, everytime I switch between running it in Boot Camp and running it in VMWare, I'll have to reactivate it again!

Screw this crap! I'm going back to my VMWare virtual machine I had before and wiping that hard drive! ARGH!

My friend Dave, wrote a post about an interesting development with Microsoft's Silverlight web browser plugin. He talks about how Silverlight provides the ability to essentially script a web page using C#, instead of Javascript.

Silverlight is certainly a very interesting technology from Microsoft. It is a browser plugin that allows you to do a lot of 'Flash-like' things on your web pages. It's Microsoft's 'Flash killer'. The technology is impressive and I have to applaud Microsoft for making it available on Firefox and on Safari. This means it works on all the major browsers on both Windows and OS X. It's great to see Microsoft finally acknowledging that Internet Explorer is not the only browser out there and that Windows is not the only operating system out there. That said, I don't see C# scripting of web sites as going anywhere, unless Microsoft makes some very different moves.

The problem with using C# to script a web site is that you need Silverlight installed in order to do it. If Microsoft could convince Mozilla to bundle Silverlight in Firefox (unlikely) and Apple to bundle Silverlight in Safari (again unlikely), I just don't see Silverlight going anywhere. The only way I can see Mozilla or Apple to ever agree to including Silverlight in their browsers by default would be one of two ways.

The first way would be for Microsoft to open source C# and provide a complete open sourced implementation of C# scripting for all the browsers to include. This would need to be either GPL or LGPL licensed. Not another one of Microsoft's pseudo-open source licenses. I could actually see this happening. Microsoft has already submitted and got C# approved as an ECMA standard, so all they would need to do is provide the open sourced implementation of the scripting layer.

The second, and I think much less likely way for Microsoft to get C# web scripting standard would be to open source the entire Silverlight itself. I doubt this will happen though.

Don't get me wrong. I think Silverlight is a very interesting technology and I think C# is an excellent programming language. I just don't see this C# web scripting thing as being practical anytime soon.

Link: https://www.microsoft.com/surface/

Today, Microsoft demo'd a very interesting hardware and software package called Surface. Surface is this tabletop computer that uses a 'multi-touch' interface to allow you to 'grab' things, move them around, stretch them etc. all on the table. The demo showed a pile of photos scattered around on the table. You can then grab a photo on the screen, rotate it, stretch it out, shrink it down, etc. You can put a digital camera on the table and the tabletop computer instantly recognizes it and pulls all the photos out of the camera, 'tossing' them onto the table along with the rest. You can then manipulate those photos and drag them back onto the camera. They even had this incredibly cool effect where it looks like you are looking down into a pool of water. You see all these different color stones at the bottom of the pool of water and you can tap the surface of the 'water' and it leaves little waves.

What did I think of this? I had a couple thoughts. Admittingly my first thought was the conspiracy theory thought. "Oh look. They are demoing a multi-touch product as an attempt to beat Apple to the punch." Apple is releasing the iPhone next month and it will contain a multi-touch interface very similar to what was demoed here. The difference is the iPhone is actually a real product! You will be able to buy it next month. What about Microsoft Surface? It costs $5,000 and consumers will NOT be able to buy it. It will be mostly targeted at deep pocketed businesses.

Once again Microsoft demos a technology that consumers can't get. When is Microsoft going to stop screwing their consumers in favor of business customers? Yes, you can make a lot of money selling to businesses, but there are an awful lot of consumers out there who would love this technology. As soon as I saw this technology, my first thought was that this would be a VERY cool technology to have on a Tablet PC. Microsoft hasn't had much luck selling Tablet PCs. This could have very easily given them a way to sell A LOT more tablet PCs. Hell, that water effect alone would be so cool, it would sell Tablet PCs.

I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if Apple includes real multi-touch functionality in Leopard. Once again, Microsoft over-promises but under-delivers. And Apple, no doubt will as usual under-promise but over-deliver

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*Sigh* Microsoft, I really want to like your products, but you seem to have a gift for making that not happen.