[Heavy images and content. See "Recap" for lighter version] Microsoft BUILD Event - Day1 Keynote

[AxelRantila]

Only following via my Twitter feed and this thread but holy balls this is some amazing announcements 

[tangra]

WOW! This is better than the coverage you get on most websites...

[LAwLz]

Not that impressed to be honest.

 

The "spotlight" on the lock screen is just ads. Thanks Microsoft but the last thing I want is ads embedded in my OS. (Edit: Just saw that it can be turned off so it's not terrible news.)

 

Yes it will feature Aero glass effects on the start menu and task bar, but still not in the title bar like people have been asking for. Only implementing 66% of what users are asking for is kind of like giving everyone the middle finger.

 

The Android and iOS porting sounds nice BUT it's not just copy/paste the code, you still have to modify it. AMD said the same thing about Mantle and we saw how that went... A ton of issues implementing it. I doubt it will be as easy as 1 person copy/pasting the code, changing a few lines in the middle of his lunch break and then it works. Chances are a lot of things will stop working (functions that use iOS and Android specific APIs) and it still won't use Windows functions (such as the deep search demoed with Viber) without specifically coding for Windows.

It sounds good when a presenter talks about it but in practice the end result will probably be pretty mediocre. Chances are the process will add a bunch of overhead as well.

 

 

The Microsoft Edge news sounds promising but they are basically playing catch-up to Chrome and Firefox. I mean, it's nice that they are finally catching up but it's not worth creaming your pants over.

I like that they showed Visual Studio running on Ubuntu and OS X. I think it shows a good change in Microsoft's mentality compared to when Ballmer was the CEO.

[Dabombinable]

The holo lens is a good concept, but it looks bad when worn.

[AlexGoesHigh]

Not that impressed to be honest.

 

The "spotlight" on the lock screen is just ads. Thanks Microsoft but the last thing I want is ads embedded in my OS. (Edit: Just saw that it can be turned off so it's not terrible news.)

 

Yes it will feature Aero glass effects on the start menu and task bar, but still not in the title bar like people have been asking for. Only implementing 66% of what users are asking for is kind of like giving everyone the middle finger.

 

The Android and iOS porting sounds nice BUT it's not just copy/paste the code, you still have to modify it. AMD said the same thing about Mantle and we saw how that went... A ton of issues implementing it. I doubt it will be as easy as 1 person copy/pasting the code, changing a few lines in the middle of his lunch break and then it works. Chances are a lot of things will stop working (functions that use iOS and Android specific APIs) and it still won't use Windows functions (such as the deep search demoed with Viber) without specifically coding for Windows.

It sounds good when a presenter talks about it but in practice the end result will probably be pretty mediocre. Chances are the process will add a bunch of overhead as well.

 

 

The Microsoft Edge news sounds promising but they are basically playing catch-up to Chrome and Firefox. I mean, it's nice that they are finally catching up but it's not worth creaming your pants over.

I like that they showed Visual Studio running on Ubuntu and OS X. I think it shows a good change in Microsoft's mentality compared to when Ballmer was the CEO.

well developers are recompiling the apps, not emulating the code inside windows, so that compiler has to be really good

[GoodBytes]

The "spotlight" on the lock screen is just ads. Thanks Microsoft but the last thing I want is ads embedded in my OS.

 

Hehe, yea. I thought about this. Hopefully you can disable it. But then again, someone has to pay the license fees for the pretty pictures. Hopefully we can disable the ads. I know you can disable the rotating lock screen pictures, you can put your own picture. We will see how it works.

The Android and iOS porting sounds nice BUT:

1) It's not just copy/paste the code, you still have to modify it. AMD said the same thing about Mantle and we saw how that went... A ton of issues implementing. I doubt it will be as easy as 1 person copy/pasting the code, changing a few lines in the middle of his lunch break and then it works. Chances are a lot of things will stop working (functions that use iOS and Android specific APIs) and it still won't use Windows functions (such as the deep search demoed with Viber) without specifically coding for Windows.

It sounds good when a presenter talks about it but in practice the end result will probably be pretty mediocre. Chances are the process will add a bunch of overhead as well.

Yes, but instead of restarting everything from scratch, now all you do is debugging, and adding a few features, if you want/need to.

The Microsoft Edge news sounds promising but they are basically playing catch-up to Chrome and Firefox. I mean, it's nice that they are finally catching up but it's not worth creaming your pants over.

I like that they showed Visual Studio running on Ubuntu and OS X. I think it shows a good change in Microsoft's mentality compared to when Ballmer was the CEO.

Actually it has been a while that Mozilla and Google are sleeping on their web browser. Both are completely ignorant or simply ignore the fact that now, most people are on laptop,s and now most new systems have high DPI displays and touch, not to mention the popularizations of convertible devices like the Surface Pro (and I guess now Surface 3, potentially) which has made other developers adapt their software. Adobe has already started to release updated versions of their software to eb high-DPI friendly.

Mozilla and Chrome both don't have high-DPI support, aren't multi-touch support, let alone touch support. Scrolling isn't as smooth and responsive as IE11. Forget zooming, especially in Firefox. If you use touch to zoom.. oh boy. Flash has problems handling Flash with touch. IE11 and Chrome is fine, for it's not a Flash problem. It does things liek, you touch a video to go full screen, and the hole thing freezes until you move the mouse with a muse or touch pad, then iit unfreeze and everything is normal, and your video is now full screen. Bug that was never fixed.

Chrome is too resource and power hungry, and no big advancement is done on that front. Google is too busy pushing Google services to Chrome users, and Mozilla is too busy with FirefoxOS.

now Microsoft is serious about their web browser, scrap everything and restart from scratch with what it seams to be a very motivated team, and so far it has all the ups of IE11, and now will fix all the big issues of IE, including proper web standard support, and increase performance to some level (I don't expect mass improvement at release, might still be slowest, but it is faster than before.). Plus now add-ons. So what is not like? I am willing to sacrifice a bit of performance if it means all the ups over Firefox.

[AlexGoesHigh]

this comment on the verge summarizes the second half of the presentation

 

Microsoft just reverse-Wined the whole industry. Insane hack.

[Victorious Secret]

I don't know if someone mentioned it here, but I think the recent actions (Android apps on Windows, investing in Cyanogenmod) could mean that Microsoft tries to create a replacement for Google Play Services. 

 

The biggest problem of non-Google app stores (like Amazon) is a lack of apps because many apps rely on Google Play Services (Google Cloud Messaging for push notifications, Google login, app data sync, Google Maps integration and so on). On a device without Play Services (pure CM or other custom roms without GApps, Windows, Amazon Fire devices) those apps don't work. So when Microsoft recreates the APIs but with their own services, they could make all those apps work, ship it with Windows and CM and have users use their services instead the ones from Google. This would be Embrace. 

 

Extend would be offering additional features through their service framework (maybe exchange, more business integration) that app devs include. Now apps have additional features running on Windows or CM devices that they don't have on Google Android devices. 

 

Extinguish would be that those additional features drive more and more customers (and businesses) to use the Microsoft framework and away from Google. 

 

CM said they want to take Android away from Google, this (IMHO) necessarily requires a replacement for Play Services because those are a very important part of Google Android. People on XDA already tried to recreate an open source framework with varying success. Maybe Microsoft will help CM achieve this. 

 

Later Microsoft could offer a way to flash their framework onto other Android devices or even sue Google for anticompetitive behaviour for including only their framework with Android (especially in the EU where Google and Android have a quasi monopoly).

 

 

MS knows it'll be harder to pull an EEE on iOS, because iOS doesn't have disgruntled software makers or hardware makers because Apple is the only hardware and software maker for iOS. They answer to themselves to don't need to worry. 

 

But Android? Android has all sorts of contributors, some who think they can do a better job than Google at managing it and others who have shown that Google doesn't always know what its doing. 

 

MS could undo Googles monopoly on Android without ever needing to directly attack Google at all. Bloody brilliant. 

[GoodBytes]

[GoodBytes]

More videos:

[Master Disaster]

Microsoft are fast becoming the old google while new google fast becomes old Microsoft.

Holo lens looks amazing, real future tech.

[dalekphalm]

All I want to know: Where the PINEAPPLE can I get a dock for my Lumia 830!?

 

 

@GoodBytes Nice edit sir

Edited April 29, 2015 by dalekphalm

[LAwLz]

Hehe, yea. I thought about this. Hopefully you can disable it. But then again, someone has to pay the license fees for the pretty pictures. Hopefully we can disable the ads. I know you can disable the rotating lock screen pictures, you can put your own picture. We will see how it works.

Yep it can be disabled. From The Verge's live blog:

"We call this feature the Windows Spotlight, and it's optional. Any user can turn it on."

 

 

Yes, but instead of restarting everything from scratch, now all you do is debugging, and adding a few features, if you want/need to.

Well yeah it's better than starting from scratch, but some people are already talking about how the developers are bad people if they don't port their iOS and Android apps now.

*Cough*

If by the end of the year the top android and ios apps arent in the win store devs are assholes

*Cough*

 

I will keep my expectations low until I see just how complicated it is to port apps, and what drawbacks it will have (performance and features).

 

 

As for Microsoft Edge, it still has some of the same issues I've had since forever with IE. Behind in supported standards, lack of extensions (like with Android apps, Chrome extensions needs to be modified in order to work in Edge so we will see how that goes), closed source and still fragmented (not all versions of Windows gets the same updates, unless they change that and release Edge for Windows XP too).

 

 

 

 

MS could undo Googles monopoly on Android without ever needing to directly attack Google at all. Bloody brilliant. 

Brilliant and disgusting. EEE is such an immoral thing to use. I hate it.

In before "you just hate it because Microsoft uses it!". No I hate it when Google uses it too, like for example when they used it for OAuth.

The extend and extinguish phases are horrible to everyone but the company doing it. It strangles competitors and lock users into one specific vendor.

[niofalpha]

Windows 10 Looks nice. Can't wait for it!

[GoodBytes]

The keynote recording is online.

You can watch it here or download it right here:

https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Build/2015/KEY01

[GoodBytes]

@GoodBytes Nice edit sir

[AlexGoesHigh]

As for Microsoft Edge, it still has some of the same issues I've had since forever with IE. Behind in supported standards, lack of extensions (like with Android apps, Chrome extensions needs to be modified in order to work in Edge so we will see how that goes), closed source and still fragmented (not all versions of Windows gets the same updates, unless they change that and release Edge for Windows XP too).

how do you know edge is behind on standards, the last time i saw benchmarks of it, it was running circles vs IE, and it even was bit faster that chrome, and had better support for HTML5 (that the first time egeHTML was benchmarked when it was only available in IE), and lately they have talked a bit about their asm.js implementation, something that neither other browser has, at least on their stable releases. yes, benches aren't representative of real world but i think that saying this is as naive as saying it will be the best damn thing ever, especially when all of it is on beta and won't be out of it until a couple of months later, your criticisms would be more valid if what we have in our hands is the final build, which is nowhere near it, i'm fine with ripping them a new one, if this problems persist in the RTM build

 

as for the fragmentation part, well i'm sure they learned their lesson with XP, which no one should use now, google is gonna kill chrome support for it around november and i think a recent itunes update broken the framework to be usable under XP, idk if they fixed it, but if they didn't, i don't think is that bad, the more people and devs abandon that OS, the better, though i do agree that they should support edge to be the same thing well after 10 being replaced (unless microsoft goes full apple and give free .1 updates up to the point the hardware is fully obsolete)

[Kherm]

wow, 10/10 news post, love it!

[Swndlr]

this is beyond amazing

also, you may wanna embed those images when you get the chance

[LlamaDom]

Fantastic post! All the info I needed. So excited for the future of Windows. The whole android apps running on Windows phones might even make me switch back to Windows Phone.

[GoodBytes]

The new build of Windows 10 showed at the event will be soon available.

Also Microsoft says that some features will come after Windows 10 is release.

Source: http://blogs.windows.com/bloggingwindows/2015/04/29/welcoming-developers-to-windows-10/

[AlexGoesHigh]

NEW BUILD: http://blogs.windows.com/bloggingwindows/2015/04/29/new-windows-10-insider-preview-build-10074-now-available/

 

The new build of Windows 10 showed at the event will be soon available.
Also Microsoft says that some features will come after Windows 10 is release.
Source: http://blogs.windows.com/bloggingwindows/2015/04/29/welcoming-developers-to-windows-10/

not soon, now!!!

[GoodBytes]

Fantastic post! All the info I needed. So excited for the future of Windows. The whole android apps running on Windows phones might even make me switch back to Windows Phone.

I think the Android apps needs to be recompiled. Basically same story as iOS. You load it in Visual Studio Code, and you compile it for Windows, and most of the work will be done. for the developer.

[atrash]

All I want to know: Where the PINEAPPLE can I get a dock for my Lumia 830!?

 

 

@GoodBytes Nice edit sir

 

Save your money and get the upcoming flagship W10 phone that will work with Continuum. I'm giggling like a girl now..

[AlexGoesHigh]

i like the new addition to cortana, the instant answer feature should be like having google search in the task bar, i wonder what kind of response will give to "tell me a joke"