And yes, the stream of controlled Windows 8 leaks continues. This time around, Thurrot and Rivera have published a number of screenshots from Windows 8’s brand-new tablet user interface, and surprise surprise, its built on Metro, the same design language that underpins Windows Phone 7. Windows 8 will also include its own PDF reader, Modern Reader, which also happens to be the first application packaged in Microsoft’s new AppX format. Update: Long Zheng has some technical details on AppX, including this little tidbit: “The extensive list of properties signifies the comprehensive scope of this system to be the ideal deployment strategy for ‘applications’, in all essence of the word. In fact, the AppX format is universal enough so it appears to work for everything from native Win32 applications to framework-based applications and even *gasp* web applications. Games are also supported.”
Rivera’s WithinWindows site, which hosted shots of the new tablet user interface, has already buckled under the massive amounts of traffic. Thurrot has the shots as well, and they show a tablet variant of Internet Explorer 9, which looks a lot like the Windows Phone 7 IE, except with the IE9 rendering engine, of course. Browser history is implemented as WP7-stile tiles (like ‘tabs’ in Windows Phone 7 IE).
The PDF reader, dubbed Modern Reader, also takes a lot of cues from the Metro design language. The back button, the page scrubber – it’s instantly recognisable for a Windows Phone 7 user such as myself. This is a major step for Microsoft, and one that many of us have been longing for for a while now: a native, pre-installed PDF reader for Windows. It will be interesting to see if any anti-trust concerns pop up from Adobe, which gets the bulk of its traffic from PDF Reader downloads for Windows.
What is more interesting, perhaps, about Modern Reader than its Metro user interface is the fact that the application is built for the new AppX package format, which will allow developers to package applications for deployment among all form factors – tablets, phones, and regular computers. Microsoft intends to allow developers to easily scale their existing Windows Phone 7 applications to use AppX.
Thurrot and Rivera claim that Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 (codenamed ‘Apollo’) will both standardise on the AppX application format. That’s one fine incentive for developers – write your application, and have it scale from phones to tablets to desktops. Apple already offers something similar, of course, so Microsoft is a tad bit late to the game.
That’s one fine incentive for developers – write your application, and have it scale from phones to tablets to desktops. Apple already offers something similar, of course, so Microsoft is a tad bit late to the game.
They do? I must have missed a big announcement. Last I checked, you got to write your app once for OS X, and then rewrite the whole UI for iOS using a different framework. Sure, there’s a third-party framework in development that will let you use iOS’s UIKit APIs on OS X, but even that’s not a complete solution, and it’s not something offered by Apple.
Windows Phone 7 apps can share much more of their codebase with desktop OSes (Windows *and* Mac) via Silverlight. So Microsoft is already ahead in this area, and providing a common app distribution format will put them firmly in the lead.
Really? I guess that means I was in the RDF on that one. I thought a lot of code between Mac/iOS was shared, at least to a point where you didn’t have to do much porting.
Anything other than the user interface code can be shared, but essentially nobody writes 100% pure MVC code, which means there’s a lot of places where things need to be changed when porting from Cocoa to Cocoa Touch. A Foundation-only library can be shared if you’ve got some unique networking or data processing code, but for a lot of apps, the UI defines and deeply affects the whole structure of the application.
There are issues on Windows Phone 7 with certain base classes not being provided – sockets being a notable example – which can cause complications, but generally if you write to WP7’s requirements it’ll be easier to share code with a Silverlight app than it is to share between iOS and OS X.
I can’t see how this could be possible, regardless of platform or tools.
I simply can’t see how one could express a UI in terms that could properly scale up to 1920*1200 or down to 640*320 resolutions. Non-GUI code for OS X is actually pretty close to iOS code (as in extremely close, barring any APIs that are not available on both platforms).
If Microsoft’s AppX provides the same level of code sharing, it would be great for developers. If they do find a way to make porting UI code with minimal effort possible, I will be pleasantly surprised.
Exactly. Windows Mobile was terrible because they tried to make it easy to move desktop apps to the phone. The result was horrible user interfaces that weren’t suitable for a mobile platform.
Now we’re expected to believe that a mobile UI will work on the desktop? Not a chance. Unless they’re talking just one package with multiple UIs. That would make more sense.
Its not that bad. I’ve done it before. I really don’t know why I did, but I had time and someone told me to do it. You just have a min and max size for every element with some logic governing wrapping and what not. You might argue that it looked terrible, but in my defense it looked that way *before* I implemented the scaling logic. Nothing to screw up really.
maybe you were confusing applications that were build for iPhone automatically resizing to the iPad. Both of those are on iOS though. Developing “cross-Mac-OS” is far from easy and Apple isn’t really interested (yet) in making it easier.
In their opinion everyone should have an iPod for music, an iPad for browsing and playing games on fixed locations, an iPhone for communicating on mobile locations and of course a full blown Mac for doing all of those things and maybe even creating something at home or in the office. All of these devices have different goals, so software only has to be accessible on 1 of them?
Do not forget the Xbox. The XNA framework will work on Windows, Xbox and the WP7 at the same time (and also Zune HD, but it’s as good as dead).
I hope this transition does not become another Vista. They’re very good (UI-wise) on the desktop right now.
Did you actually read what you quoted or did you just choose a random quote to plonk at the top as to make it appear as though you read the article and Thom’s take on the matter? the quote is as follows with the part in bold that you should have focused in on:
What part of ‘similar’ don’t you understand? similar means ‘close enough’ or ‘near to it’ or ‘not exactly like it’. The appx idea is very similar to what Apple has be it Microsoft making fully portable from top to bottom rather than requiring the front end to be re-written again for a new form factor.
OK…
– so Chrome is gonna get a PDF-reader
– Apple already has a PDF-preview built into Mac OS X (probably more, I’m not an Apple user)
– Firefox 5 might get the a PDF-reader similair or the same as Chrome
– Windows 8 might get a PDF-reader
Do we really need that ?
It really is the crappiest format out there to parse and because of it, you are just asking for security bugs in all this new software:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54XYqsf4JEY
It could also be one of the many reason the others just don’t want to use the Acrobat Reader and just want something simple.
Edited 2011-04-04 23:24 UTC
Adobe Reader really is a horrible and slow program with a terrible updater and a bad security track record. Right now I use PDF-XChange Viewer on Windows and it’s quite good for a heavyweight viewer with annotation capabilities. However, for machines I set up for other people, I’d be glad to have a viewer integrated into Windows or into Firefox just to have one less program to install and one less security update cycle to think about.
Not sure about this. Adobe Reader seems reasonably fast lately. I mean, I can remember absolutely dreading PDF reader, but newer versions seem okay.
Edited 2011-04-05 00:59 UTC
Adobe Reader 10 also bumps up the security issues quite a bit by sandboxing the main viewer. However, a lot of these security ‘faults’ apply as much to the user interacting with shady PDF’s as much as Adobe’s written code
It’s not just speed but there is also bloat as well. I’ve just jumped over to Adobe.com to find out the size of Adobe Reader X (10.0.1) which weighs in at 66.44MB with the Windows version doing no batter either. I mean, this isn’t an office suite or a photo editing application, its only a viewer, a viewer shouldn’t be weighing in at 66MB nor should it be installing browser freezing plugins that do nothing to the experience other than to make things 100 times worse.
The only thing worse than Adobe Reader X (10.0.1) is probably the 300MB drivers that HP expect end users to download just to get their printers to work with Windows. I swear sometimes that these programmers who make said programmes don’t live on the same planet as everyone does, I’ve yet to come across an Adobe employee on any forum who is openly proud about working for Adobe on a said product. Is Adobe quickly becoming one of those organisations where, when people leave after working there, they’d sooner say they were unemployed for 20 years than ever admit they worked for Adobe at some point?
In comparison, Foxit Reader 2.0 is only 1.7 MB, and 4.3 is only 7.5 MB.
And the .deb package for Okular 4.6.1 is only 1 MB (granted, it uses a lot of shared libs and external libraries, so that’s not a valid comparison).
Why is PDF a crappy format? What do you use when you want to send someone a document and you want to ensure that he sees exactly what you see? Adobe’s Reader is crappy, but having a multitude of widely used readers actually negates that.
Sure it has a lot of bloat, with scripts and forms and whatnot, but if you use it just for static documents I think it’s great.
A text file
Touché
EDIT: <CR><LF> anyone?
It’s actually quite telling for the industry that there are interoperability issues on freaking text files.
Edited 2011-04-05 00:56 UTC
The deal is actually that the present version of PDF has so many interactive elements that it’s no longer “Printable Document Format”.
I liked PDF back when it was on vinyl.
Apart from PDF actually meaning ‘Portable Document Format’, you say that the current version has too many interactive elements. How many people USE all of those elements. I for one have always used it as a static document format, where everyone sees what i want them to see regardless of what OS or program they are using. thats also how most people I know use them. Occasionally I will get one that requires annotation but thats a rare occurrence.
The worst PDF I’ve ever come across is an information update request form for the provincial ministry of education. It’s a PDF, with a bunch of Forms fields you edit. Then you click a button to submit the PDF … which runs a bunch of script to create … a PDF, that is attached to an e-mail, and sent via MAPI (which means it won’t work on non-Windows systems, or even Windows systems without MS Office installed).
And it’s just a handful of text fields!!
This is the “new and improved, network-enabled” version of this form. Previously, you had to call the ministry, they’d fax you a form, you fill it out, and fax it back.
It’s things like this that just scream to be made into a web-based form, with a database behind it.
It’s things like this that give PDF a bad name.
Its also not the fault of the PDF format. PDF is one of the best document formats in the world and you shouldn’t blame it because your ministry is forcing you to use Office and Windows. Don’t blame the format just because someone used it wrong.
It might be a very useful format to many people.
But it would only be a kind of good format if someone made a specification with a small sane subset which is not completely backwardcompatible.
Have a look at the video, the format it self a horrible mess.
I most certainly can blame the format for someone using it wrong. Why are those interactive elements allowed in a PDF? Why are they needed? Is there a legitimate use-case for enabling scripting inside a document that no one can edit? Is there a legitimate use-case for having a read-only document access system libraries to send an e-mail?
PDF used to be a great document format. Then it became an interactive programming language. And now it’s just a security and usability nightmare.
Oh, and we don’t use MS Office or Windows on 95% of the desktops in our district (we’re a diskless Linux shop, from student stations, to teacher stations, to office stations).
Which is why this particular PDF document is such a pain, as there’s no MAPI on Linux, and KPDF (an infinitely better PDF Viewer than Adobe crap) chokes on this PDF.
If PDF had remained a simple document format, things would be wonderful. Even the addition of editable forms fields was okay and useful. But all the scripting, hooks into the OS, and what-not goes counter to that.
Regularly, there are forms in the university’s PDFs. That’s the only situation where I need Adobe’s reader… or foxit.
Did you watch the video?
I would like to send a file that does not have bloat, scripts, forms and whatnot. That whatnot is often the worst part because we only learn about it through exploits. It seems you can slap just about any kind of whatnot into a pdf file.
99% of pdfs are scanned images. There should be a common scanned image format that is not capable of carrying a freaking scripting language.
djvu is
Precisely.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DjVu
If has 1/4 the bloat of Adobe’s PDF reader, I’m all for it. That is one nasty piece of software.
I concur. The fuckers at Adobe had many years to clean up their shit, but apparently they’re too incompetent, lazy (or both) to implement a sound security model in their program. They got what they deserve.
Could you please provide the source for Adobe PDF reader providing bulk of traffic to Adobe.com ? I would be interested to know how their traffic breaks down by product.
Would adobe care if people stopped using their reader? They don’t make any money selling it. OS X and Linux have built in readers and Windows never included it so I can’t see them making any money on distribution rights.
Adobe makes money on the authoring tools (and maybe licensing the format; not sure about this). Having Windows being able to handle PDFs out of the box would only boost them.
At face value, that’s all fair enough.
The greater concern with Microsoft, though, would be proprietary extensions. If their PDF reader allows features to be added to PDFs that the real spec doesn’t support, and authors target their PDFs at the Windows majority (or worse, MS Office-produced PDFs don’t display properly without them), then the format has been EEEd, and the only solution is in court. But I don’t think pre-emptive legal action will be possible; Adobe will have to wait and see if Microsoft plays fair.
Isn’t it more likely that the opposite will happen; i.e. that Adobe will add non-standard extensions to PDF to push the other readers out of the market? I could be wrong here, but I assume that Adobe Acrobat is still the main tool for publishing PDFs, and if that’s the case then Adobe has a much bigger opportunity than Microsoft to push proprietary extensions.
Last time I checked the PDF standard was an OPEN one. Adobe didn’t have to do this, PDF was already used widely by the time they did it. If they had wanted to push all their competitors out then they needn’t have opened it as a standard.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_Document_Format
Portable Document Format (PDF) is an open standard for document exchange. The file format created by Adobe Systems in 1993 is used for representing documents in a manner independent of the application software, hardware, and operating system.
…
Originally a proprietary format, PDF was officially released as an open standard on July 1, 2008, and published by the International Organization for Standardization as ISO 32000-1:2008. The ISO 32000-1 allows use of some specifications, which are not standardized (e.g. Adobe XML Forms Architecture). ISO 32000-1 does not specify methods for validating the conformance of PDF files or readers.
Although it is an open standard (i.e. royalty-free, anyone may implement), it does unfortunately allow for non-standard extensions.
OpenOffice and LibreOffice both have good file format compatibility with MS Office, they both have a very good interoperable native file format (ODF), and they both have “export to PDF” functionality right there on the main toolbar.
LibreOffice (at least) also has a “PDF import” extension.
http://www.libreoffice.org/features/extensions/
“PDF Import: the PDF Import extension allows you to import and modify PDF documents. Results with 100% layout accuracy can be achieved with the “PDF/ODF hybrid file” format, which this extension also provides. A hybrid PDF/ODF file is a PDF file that contains an embedded ODF source file. Hybrid PDF/ODF files will be opened in LibreOffice as an ODF file without any layout changes.”
Most Linux desktop operating system distributions ship with a “print to PDF file” pseudo-printer installed.
Edited 2011-04-05 02:28 UTC
How widespread are those, though? I was under the impression that Acrobat was still the industry standard, especially if you want to use the more advanced features of PDF.
OpenOffice/LibreOffice has an installed base between 10% and 21%, depending on which country.
Since using it means that one has a very full-featured, work-alike free Office Suite program with better interoperability than MS Office, and which doubles as a PDF generation and edit facility as a bonus, then it is very surprising that this number is not much higher.
The features that are supported are listed here:
http://help.libreoffice.org/Common/Export_as_PDF
This is probably not everything that can be done using Adobe software, but it does seem to cover a lot of bases and should be perfectly adequate for most people and use cases.
It only has better interoperability idealogically, pragmatically the business world uses Office, and there are gotchas on anything but the most simple of documents. Most places use Office 2000 or 2003, if you are lucky they might have 2007 installed.
The vast majority of Workstations in a business will either be Mac or a Windows workstation .. the only common format for documents is either PDF or Microsoft Office formats.
You can argue the toss all you like, but this won’t change overnight.
Not everything means, that for the most basic uses it will be insufficient. Also these open source readers and free readers don’t render everything exactly the same.
I work with a system that has 10000s of PDFs and I have had calls where Foxit and Mac PDF readers are not rendering it correctly, therefore we mandate Adobe Reader since our publication team use Adobe Pro PDF tools. So to ensure compatibility I can only recommend using Adobe PDF reader.
Edited 2011-04-05 08:43 UTC
Businesses may use msoffice, but they use several different versions and compatibility between them can be quite poor for all but the simplest of documents… Someone using openoffice often doesn’t even get noticed.
But yes, PDF is the only sensible format if you want to preserve your formatting, and osx/linux actually include far better out of the box support for pdf than anything microsoft has.
ODF is also a perfectly sensible format for compatibility between different programs operating on either the same, or different platforms.
The new LibreOffice, for example, is available for a number of desktop systems:
http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/system-requirements/
and it has excellent interoperability with other Office suites, including MS Office, MS Works and Wordperfect for example.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LibreOffice#Supported_formats
http://www.excitingip.com/1342/why-you-should-implement-libre-offic…
The only Office program in common use that is hopeless at ODF interoperability is MS Office, anything else is fine. Fortunately, there is no reason at all why anyone cannot simply install Libre Office as well as (whatever version) of MS Office on the same machine. If a given machine has an older version of MS Office, installing LibreOffice alongside it would be a significant upgrade for zero cost.
Except, of course, that OpenOffice is one of the most horrible programs ever devised by man, and ever since Office 2007, the gap has only widened. Recommending OpenOffice as a valid alternative to the polished and remarkably speedy Office 2007 or 2010 is incredibly disingenuous.
Not only does OpenOffice have a horrid interface, its .doc compatibility is downright abysmal While that surely is through no fault of their own, it is a fact of life that people have to deal with. In a professional environment, where documents are (sadly) passed around in .doc format, OOo has no place whatsoever.
It works alright a lot of the time, if you can tolerate broken formatting. I use OOo quite a bit (because I use Linux most of the time), mostly for reading powerpoints, and I’ve survived so far. .
Forcing people to use OOo would have a beneficial effect on tech industry as a whole, as it would force them to create simpler documents.
I’m running LibreOffice 3.3.2 which has by now diverged somewhat from OpenOffice. A lot of the OpenOffice cruft has gone, and everything on this page marked with an asterisk is new and unique to LibreOffice:
http://www.libreoffice.org/download/new-features-and-fixes/
LibreOffice will easily meet every imaginable need of over 90% of Office Suite users at least as well as MS Office 2007 or 2010, and for some users (especially those who do not like the ribbon UI) it would be an absolute godsend. Many users would in fact call MS Office 2007 and 2010 as the suite with the horrible interface.
On my pedestrian AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 4000+ system (about six years old now), LibreOffice starts in just over 1 second. Once the Linux preload daemon has been trained to recognize it, this is cut down to less than half a second. Its .doc compatibility is excellent, and infinitely better than MS Office’s .odt compatibility. LibreOffice even supports MS Works (.wps) import, Wordperfect, Lotus-123, Quattro Pro and numerous other legacy formats. When I use the File->Open command (Ctrl-O) and I pull down the list of supported file types, I see that there are about 115 file types that can be opened. One hundred and fifteen!
I really don’t see any need to disparage it Thom. What exactly is the purpose of that?
Edited 2011-04-05 14:22 UTC
“Disparage.” Because it is deficient. Because it does a poor job at something that you’re saying it should be used for.
Because its Microsoft Office import and export are poor. I use OOo on Fedora 14 to follow my professor’s power-point lecture notes in class, and the formatting is routinely botched. Text is a larger than it should be, causing it to flow under images and be obscured, to flow over other text elements and become unreadable, or run off the page (and out of the window, occasionally). None of which are the end of the world, but each of which requires me to stop paying attention to my professor and spend time in class resizing and moving text so I can read the slide.
We also had no end of problems trying to use OOo at work. Beyond compatibility problems, the application was also extremely slow on the low-end “seat” systems, and was fairly feature-poor.
My God. I remember having to make a bunch of 3D-looking bar charts in OOo on those seats. Every time you changed the chart, it took several seconds to redraw — sometimes more than fifteen. During which time the application was non-responsive. The effect of which was to make an already tedious process much, much more frustrating.
Of all the virtues of OOo (and now LibreOffice), great MS Office compatibility is not one of them.
Which is why most Businesses make sure that everyone is running the same version of office, we only just upgraded to 2003.
Actually, between 10% and 20% of machines have an OpenOffice variant installed, depending on the country. This holds just as true for business machines as it does for personal machines.
No it won’t. The OpenOffice (or variant) installed base is creeping upwards at only about 1% or so per year. Still, at least it is going up, and the MS Office installed base, likewise, is falling.
I think you may be a little confused, the features I showed were for PDF export from LibreOffice. (LibreOffice and OpenOffice have a large team of programmers working on the project). Anyway, those are the features one may use when generating a PDF from LibreOffice.
The reader software I use is Okular:
http://kde.org/applications/graphics/okular/
Okular has fantastic PDF compatibility, I have never come across a PDF file it couldn’t render.
Unlike Adobe reader, Okular is a document viewer which supports multiple formats: PDF, PS, Tiff, CHM, DjVu, Images, DVI, XPS, ODT, Fiction Book, Comic Book, Plucker, EPub, Fax.
Some of the lesser-used supported formats do not have quite the same level of support in Okular that PDF format has.
I can’t speak for the support of single-author amateur freeware programs for Windows and Mac, but Okular has excellent support from a team of programmers.
http://okular.kde.org/team.php
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poppler_%28software%29
It only occupies about 20MB on disk, as a bonus.
http://okular.kde.org/
http://okular.kde.org/formats.php
Okular purportedly works on multiple platforms, including but not limited to Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, *BSD, etc. Perhaps you should look into it.
Enjoy.
Edited 2011-04-05 10:22 UTC
In some countries maybe, but not in mine and not in any business that I have ever worked in. They all use Microsoft Office.
Yes in some countries, but again not in mine and will be relevant easily for the next 10 years.
“Not everything that can be done using Adobe Software” is precisely why we are using it.
Reading/Producing/Exporting … doesn’t matter we use Adobe to produce and we use Adobe to read … this means we can guarantee it works, we have fewer phone calls and less time wasted.
Spending a few hundred pounds on Adobe software is worth it over the year as we would have to employ someone else for tens of thousands.
Great it works well enough for you.
But we already have a working solution that our users know how to use. It is called Adobe Reader and works on Windows, Mac and Linux. It comes installed as standard as part of our “standard” Windows XP install.
Why would I care that it takes up “only” 20mb on disk? Even my SD card in my phone is 4GB. Program size on Disk is a non-issue. I hate it how somehow this is touted as a feature … it is a pointless metric when even the average phone has gigabytes worth of storage. Maybe 15 years ago when Hardrive space was rare … but today it is pointless.
Adobe Reader works on Windows, Mac and Linux which is pretty much everyone (even as a BSD guy I accept that support is limited for my OS). For the vast majority of people Adobe Reader will work for them. Maybe you should look into that.
For the business I work in … We have Adobe at both ends this ensures compatibility and therefore we have less support calls from users.
In your country, which is somewhat behind the times, OpenOffice was measured at 9% over a year ago.
http://www.webmasterpro.de/portal/news/2010/02/05/international-ope…
However, the situation may soon improve somewhat in your country now that the UK government has embarked on a new procurement policy preferring royalty-free open standards and open source.
http://www.consortiuminfo.org/standardsblog/article.php?story=20110…
Adobe reader is very slow and bloated, it takes absolutely ages to load compared with a modern alternatives, and on Windows systems it is a huge security risk.
As to whether we are behind the time is a point of contention. Microsoft Office is a good product, whether it is based on open standards or not. It ultimately depends on on your view point.
I don’t believe all closed source software is evil and the GPL is the ultimate license.
The UK government is also just found it too expensive to move away from IE6, so doesn’t say a lot tbh. Also whether this will be implemented or not anytime soon will be a huge cost since staff will have to retrained … would this be more expensive than
How is something that doesn’t provide the features we need “more modern”?
As for security,
Regular users probably shouldn’t be using Adobe Acrobat, and inbuilt PDF reader would be good since security problems will be patched from Windows update.
However for our requirements the ActiveX object just needs to be disabled so you download the PDF rather than open it in a browser. Our system administrators have disabled this, so it is not a problem.
I’ve seen this too and I no longer recommended the alternatives, especially now that Reader is sandboxed.
Foxit renders properly 99% of the time but I saw someone almost fail a licensing exam because Foxit rendered the entire test incorrectly. There was no indication that Foxit was the problem or that Reader was required. The 1% problem can ruin someone’s day.
I’m the one who told him that he could trust Foxit so please don’t give me some spiel about alternatives. People are free to discover alternatives on their own but I’m no longer endorsing them.
Also worth mentioning is LaTeX; it’s pretty common in academic circles. I’d wager that most published articles you see in the sciences are typeset with LaTeX. The last place I worked kept extensive documentation as a massive set of PDF’s and LaTeX source files.
OS X also has a built-in PDF printer, and at least one high-quality open-source PDF virtual printer is available for Windows. (And they are incredibly handy little tools, once you discover them!)
True however I think a lot of people use Protext on Windows which requires an install of Adobe Reader.
You can’t overlook the value of having everyone see the adobe name everytime they read a pdf viewer. They think PDF == adobe. Thats some nice advertising. So when they need to create a pdf, they don’t think, but go to adobe for acrobat. It wasn’t too long ago that you *had* to get acrobat in order to convert a word file to a pdf. ( if you didn’t want to do the whole ghostscript 5 step printer hack).
I hope that this means that M$ has decided that, no, XPS will not be taking the world by storm and that if we’re going to use a standard document description format, we’re going to use the one that has healthy support everywhere, not just in Windoze Vista/7.
Why does Microsoft always go on binges? 10 years after XML is introduced, “all of our formats must be XML”, never mind that they’re shoddily implemented and don’t conform to their own blasted standard (what was the point?). The ribbon user interface is written to de-crappify M$ Office, and now *everything* must have a ribbon. So for Windows 8, everything’s going to be Metro-ified. As others have said before, good design for desktop use does not equal good design for mobile usage. I even think that Apple specifically doesn’t provide the same UI libraries in iOS because they want to force developers to develop for the target platform. And, as a developer, I have to say, more power to them. The people holding the purse strings seldom give a crap about design until it’s far too late, so forcing good design is very welcome.
Of course, maybe Silverlight truly is the be all and end all of programming toolkits and in a few years, we’ll all wonder what all the other crap was about. I won’t be holding my breath, though.
I agree that XPS should never have been born
I disagree that switching to XML as the default fileformat in Office is a bad idea. It made filesizes a lot smaller and interoperability a lot easier
and for a loooooong time (still?) the MSXML libraries were (are?) considered the fastest and most standard compliant libraries for parsing xml
I really like XPS and I use it inside our office to pass documents around. You can easily install an XPS printer on XP and on Win 7 it’s already installed. The viewer is not bloated and integrates nicely with Windows.
Agreed.
I use XPS quite a bit, such as printing web pages to XPS files.
Switching to XML did not make the filesizes smaller, in fact it made them bigger… The apparent reduction in size is due to the files being compressed.
XPS should never have existed, but neither should OOXML… Both of which are predated by existing widely standardised and superior formats.
MS Office wouldn’t help put the $ in MS if OpenOffice didn’t feel so dated in comparison.
The public doesn’t mind spending a buck twenty if it means they don’t have to stare at software that looks like it is from 1998.
I would love to see MS Office taken down to $50 but that will only happen when it gets some real competition.
Windows Server Web Edition exists because of competition from Linux. MS Office mainly competes with older versions of itself.
Edited 2011-04-05 07:12 UTC
That’s very true.
MS puts money where MS wants to put money – which is nearly any where they can put a competitor out of business, or at least severely harm a competitor. Partners are not excluded from the harm, if they are doing business in an area where MS wants to go.
So no matter how good OpenOffice may ever be, MS will still dump money into Office – even if they have entirely lost the market. That’s just how MS operates.
So? MS keeps dumping money into IE and yet Firefox is as popular as ever. Competition has been good for both.
If OpenOffice was close to Office 2007 in quality and functionality then MS would be in serious trouble. MS could dump 5 billion into Office but it wouldn’t matter since most people would go with free and good enough.
MS Office 2007 is a joke. They leveled the playing field for their customers to move to other Office Suites – transition costs (software, training, etc.) were actually lower to go to OpenOffice simply due to the retraining required for Office 2003 to Office 2007; let alone moving to other commercial products such as IBM Symphony, Sun/Oracle StarOffice, etc where at worst it was the same cost.
No, Office 2007 is not polish; and no better quality than any other Office Suite other there – including OpenOffice.
OpenOffice’s primary issue is speed, primarily due to a poor internal architecture, reliance on Java, etc. They fix that, and OpenOffice will be far better performing.
Lets not forget OpenOffice – and all the derivatives by extension – have better MS Office Document compatibility than MS Office does (e.g. Office 6 vs. 97 vs 2002 vs 2003 vs 2007), better interoperability (e.g. OOXML vs. doc vs ODF vs. WordPerfect vs. etc), etc.
A joke that every business pays for, eh? OpenOffice is not a functional equivalent to even Office 2003. Put someone who uses Excel all day in front of it and they will give you a long list of complaints. I’ve seen this first hand.
Java is not actually required to run OpenOffice.
http://download.openoffice.org/common/java.html
Your view of OpenOffice and Office is superficial and based on light use.
Most pay for it because they – or rather the corporate management – knows no better, buys into the sales from Microsoft, and don’t realize that there are actual alternatives on the market – alternatives that may well meet their needs better.
I have.
Yes, there are many complaints about little things. But far fewer complaints than those same people moving to Office 2007.
A lot of those complaints can be quelled with a little education and instruction on OpenOffice.
Actually it is. Yes, it is suppose to be only optional. But try running OpenOffice without Java installed. Major components are no longer available. Work is underway to remove a lot of that dependency, but it’ll still be a while until then.
Most don’t realize it – since they already have Java installed for other things.
No, I am quite a heavy user of OpenOffice; and have helped a number convert. It’s not for everyone – but neither is MS Office.
Ok hold on, I already have it installed.
(launches OpenOffice)
Hey look at that, works just fine. Maybe you didn’t read that page I provided:
but other programs (like Writer, Calc and Impress) only need Java for special functionality.
http://download.openoffice.org/common/java.html
Special functionality, not major components.
OpenOffice is C++ code, Java functionality was added later by Sun to boost the Java install base.
Do you just assume that everyone else fakes their knowledge as much as you do?
I’ve been following the development of OpenOffice for years. I even did a blog post a while back on how Sun was underfunding the project. Meanwhile MS has always had a massive team on Office because it is a cash cow for them. Like it or not that level of funding has translated into real world gains.
Blaming stoopid head CTOs for the lack of OO adoption doesn’t make sense when many of those same companies are running LAMP stacks and Firefox. Just because something is free does not mean that it provides economic gains.
I thought Silverlight was pretty much pronounced dead by Microsoft for anything desktop-like other than DRM-audio/video:
http://www.osnews.com/story/23966/Microsoft_Changes_Silverlight_Str…
http://www.osnews.com/story/23992/Silverlight_HTML5_and_Microsoft_s…
Or that is only true for the web ?
Edited 2011-04-05 09:23 UTC
The article says:
“It seems like the pieces of the puzzle are all falling into place: Windows NT everywhere, Silverlight/.Net everywhere.”
Microsoft is definitely forcing silverlight / wpf / xaml on you during windows 8 cycle.
I thought I had read into the article, Silverlight only for the tablet devices. But later on I changed by comment as you can see, but you posted while I was editing it I guess.
Maybe I was just confused.
Silverlight was never pushed for desktop use. It was designed as a richer alternative to Flash.
Don’t spend too much time reading Peter Bright articles since he doesn’t know half of what he pretends to. He did some Win32 programming years ago and for some reason he feels that qualifies him to write about .NET and other technologies that he doesn’t have experience with.
Silverlight has had the same problem as HTML5 which is a smaller install base when compared to Flash. Corporations have found Silverlight useful for intranet/LOB applications but it hasn’t taken off in the consumer sphere.
But XPS was more than just a “PDF Alternative” given that the scope was to be a language that was universal for all printers as to replace the current crop of GDI based printers (aka Winprinters) and without the royalty hassles associated with Postscript. The problem with it is that Microsoft never went about transforming it from a Windows/Microsoft only technology into something present on Mac and Windows so as a consequence even though it was open it was only implemented on one platform
As for the Office OpenXML, it all came back to Microsoft hell bent on having round trip perfect conversion when what they should have done was create was a one way conversion with plugins for Office 2003 when Office 2007 was first released. A simple XML format was ultimately bloated into epic proportions because of this hell bent fetish of backwards compatibility at all costs resulting in a bloated specification that even Microsoft struggles to conform to.
As for Silverlight, it is about the only shining star in the whole fiasco; its a great alternative to Adobe Air which will hopefully pay dividends when it comes to development on Windows Phone 8 and Windows 8.
Many printers interop directly with PDFs too, especially when you get into the commercial grade, print-shop level printers, or systems like what is used by various publishing houses. Microsoft was trying to displace PDF at that level; but they like PDF too much and for good reason – it was specifically designed for them.
And since when has Microsoft ever made anything they did operate on more than just the Windows platform? Even MS Office for Mac is dramatically different than any other version of MS Office, including file format support.
If Microsoft provided an integrated free download for Mac OS X it would be interesting how the situation might have changed, especially for printer vendors wishing to reduce the amount they have to pay per unit back to Adobe for any patented technology used. From what I understand Apple gets around some of the patented parts of PDF by simply not supporting some of the more esoteric features of the PDF specification.
The lack of focus has always been Microsoft’s greatest downfall.
That wouldn’t have made one bit of difference as the major print houses do not use Windows or Mac to run the printers. They printers run customized software that is able to read PostScript and PDF files, as well as some other customize file formats specific to the typesetting industry.
Mac and Windows only affect the article writers, who ultimately have to give it to their editors and the publishing departments.
A lack of focus has only been an issue since Gates stepped aside. Even then, the focus has always been on crushing competition through software that is “good enough and no better than necessary” – which yields the bug ridden, virus ridden, under-performant, bloated software that is Windows and Office that we have today.
Get out more. This in no way describes Windows 7 and Office 2010.
Win7 has come a long way – but it is still very bug ridden, under performant, and laden with viruses. The Win32 API by design is security flawed.
Office 2010 is not that much different from Office 2007.
Now compare to the competition – both are poor performing, and very problematic.
Or haven’t you been paying attention to the industry news? Even OS news posts about viruses in Win7.
Proof?
Proof?
Ah, so you’re trolling. You do realise that there hasn’t been any major outbreak of ANYTHING since the release of Vista, right? We’re obviously talking up-to-date installs, here.
decrapify?
because no one else uses the office 2000 UI for a office productivity applications?
So before the ‘Aero’ transition is complete, MS have already gotten bored and moved on to something new. Oy vey.
Aero is NOT going away, it was always just an interface designed for desktop computing. We’ve already seen how desktop interfaces fail on tablets so they have designed a new interface for tablets that can be enabled. this is so that they only have to work and two different OS’s and not three.
Right, there’s no way, no how that Metro is going to leak into the Windows desktop. It’ll be like the clearly partitioned iOS and OSX UIs… oh wait.
And I never said the Aero HIG is going away. It’ll no doubt linger in bits and pieces, in more sparsely updated apps, for a decade or so to come, like the half-dozen toolkits and fashions that preceded Vista do now.
I have no idea what this means. What different OSes? This article is about MS’ work on multiple shells and UI paradigms on a single NT foundation, across multiple architectures.
As cool as it sounds for Microsoft to be embracing multiple architectures and being free of x86 and all. It seems far fetched to think that Microsoft will get everyone to abandon native code and move to their AppX Application Model. I doubt MS would take such a risk either.
If I’m wrong then cool. It just doesn’t sound likely to me.
AppX will just be one way (among many) to deliver applications. MS takes backwards-compatibility too seriously to abandon native code.
Yeah, like with WP7
I don’t believe they are abandonnig WM6 api completely, just too much code for that already exists in various enerprises that depend on palmtops/handsets that are nearing their life time.
They just must to have something for those customers. That doesn’t necesairly mean this would reach general public.
Very true, it would cost billions to move all the existing x86 code to something else. A lot of it is black box code that was written years ago by companies that no longer exist.
MS at least has to provide some type of VM solution for legacy code. But then you can have integration issues and you risk companies staying frozen instead of upgrading.
But I don’t consider x86 to be a problem in itself. Both x86 and ARM have their costs and benefits. Windows can exist on both x86 and ARM, they don’t have to move away from x86 for the sake of it.
From what I’ve heard on AppX it just seems like writing an aplication to GTK or KDE or iOS, not just an inefective platform like Silverlight was.
AppX seems just to be a package description format, not anything with the way code gets generated:
http://www.istartedsomething.com/20110405/first-look-at-the-future-…
You’re right, and it sounds like it’ll still support Win32. I guess when I heard that it was supposed to be like Window Phone 7 application packages I interpreted it to mean like the Windows Phone Application Platform.
I hope the PDF reader is up to par with Apple’s preview. Man I love that app. Looking forward to Windows 8’s release, it’ll be interesting for sure.
In Windows 9 they’ll have to add a PDF Reader Ballot Screen
I know you’re probably joking but in fact Adobe didn’t want Microsoft to include support for PDF a while back due to Microsoft’s embrace-extend-extinguish-strategy.
So that could have been true if things had turned out differently.
Well I’d say I was semi-joking
Of course it’s kinda funny, but honestly, I’d really expect something like that to happen, because it’s indeed a threat to Adobe.
On the other hand, I never really understood why they were forced to insert a browser ballot screen. They should be allowed to ship whatever they want, why should they be forced to offer third party browsers at all? I’m an Opera user and I hate IE, but for me it’s perfectly fine if they only ship IE with Windows. Even without a ballot screen, Mozilla managed to gain 25% or so marketshare…
It is becase Microsoft were deemed to have an effective monopoly on the desktop operating system, and because Microsoft insist that the browser is an inseperable part of the operating system when clearly it isn’t, and finally because Microsoft insist on extending their browser (which is meant to interface to the public-access web) with proprietary, Windows-only extensions such as ActiveX.
Those factors combined had the potential to turn the public-access web into the Windows-only web. That is unacceptable.
IMO opinion the better solution would have been to force Microsoft to make IE compliant with open standards web technologies and to remove extended Windows-only functionality. No matter then if IE was embedded into the OS or not, as Microsoft chose. Instead Microsoft suggested, and the EU fell for, the browser ballot.
Meh. IMO it isn’t going to matter in the long run. Because of firefox mainly and more lately mobiles, tablets and handhelds, Windows-only websites are becoming very rare. The prospect of a Windows-only proprietary web is much lower now than it used to be.
Okay, I think now I actually understand the issue
thanks for clearing that up for me
Seriously though, from the example AppX test in the article it reminders me of WiX (wix.sf.net – Microsoft’s GNU GPL project!)- Windows Installer XML – in the XML form. Wonder how closely they are related; at the very least WiX would be AppX’s predecessor, if not the technology itself.
That said, WiX has been used by Microsoft internally for a long time, even on some major projects to what I understand. It compiles to MSI files; though you could just as easily use it in straight XML if the engine supported it.
Enough with the trolling already.
How can anyone have anything negative to say about Windows 7?
Virus? Wth, if you’re running anti-virus or spyware you’re a fool, there’s no need for it at all.
What’s next? Are you going to come out and tell us that Windows phone 7 is crap? Get real, seriously.