"HyperCard for Windows 8" rather: It's a Windows 8 application for making Windows 8 applications (which can use the network). Which makes this much less interesting to me.
Ha, I read the page for a moments thinking "What is this?... a cooking app?". Definitely a gold star in the incomprehensible awards. Thanks for the link.
Looks nice. The problem with M$ is that over the years they've always offered simple tools for creating software, and then abandoning it somewhere along the way. Access is a great example.
the one where non-Microsoft users (or maybe rather, Microsft-haters) still want to express how they feel about Microsoft in every single sentence they use on the subject.. It's been around for a long time, and probably will still be used for a long time. Just ignore it and hope they eventually get over their slightly childish behaviour.
I don't know why you were voted down. Had I invested heavily in learning Silverlight a couple of years ago, I would find myself with my thumb squarely secured up my own ass.
I can't imagine spending so much time and effort learning how to use a framework only to have it discontinued in it's infancy. Silverlight dying was a good thing and ultimately it's a win for everybody as HTML is more open, but still - I feel for the devs out there who waste their time.
Edit: On the plus it does use HTML and JS, instead of something much more closed. :)
>I don't know why you were voted down. Had I invested heavily in learning Silverlight a couple of years ago, I would find myself with my thumb squarely secured up my own ass.
Not really, as someone who specialised in WPF since it's latter beta stages, I still am finding plenty of work at a very good rate. Same thing goes with silverlight, even in a discontinued state, it still is going to have years and years of bug fixes. Just no new functionality.
The fact is, even today with all the frustrations I have with WPF been 'unfinished' it is still a lot more pleasurable than HTML/Knockout or something that tries to make HTML palatable.
A quick search in London on your favourite job site shows that learning WPF hasn't been a waste of time, my skills are not in a vacuum, I also have strong OOP skills, whilst knowing how to run software projects. Plus learning something is never bad. Obviously I wouldn't recommend someone learning it now. But compare it with whichever flavour of the month framework people are loving right now, people who've learn say Ruby on Rails aren't as fashionable as say Node.js is right now. But just do a quick jobs search in London and you'll see that you'd be better off on average doing WPF/Silverlight than RoR.
It's better than that - WPF and Silverlight skills are directly transferrable to Windows Phone and Windows RT. Yes, there are differences, limitations and in some cases more complete features, but the jump is negligible, with a herd of good resources on MSDN, StackOverflow and so on.
It's better than that. I find WPF to be the most flexible/powerful UI toolkit I've ever worked with (disclaimer: I work for Microsoft). If you ignore anything more complex than Canvas, Label, Rectangle, Image, you can cook up anything you want fairly easily (e.g. a tablet-based programming environment, a live programming editor), and actually have it look nice.
Don't blame Microsoft for the death of Silverlight, blame Apple. After the iPhone's release it didn't have a future. Is there a company that better supports its old technologies than Microsoft?
Don't be unfair. Microsoft still uses Silverlight. If, for instance, you go for the "Learn More" link, you'll be greeted by a "Silverlight required" block.
Lets not forget how they treated those that invested in Performance Point Server, most found out about its killing off via articles in the mainstream media!
Access is a horrible example (they still sell it, and it still works), and you have so many better ones to choose from. WinForms, Silverlight, and..., hmm that's all that really come to mind. Maybe FoxPro, but MSFT didn't create it and everyone expected them to kill it when they bought it (they kept it around for over ten years after).
And "M$"? Am I going to have to go find the link to that Penny Arcade cartoon?
and then abandoning it somewhere along the way. Access is a great example.
Why do you think these tools aren't being used. I know a small company using Access to deliver business management applications and they are turning a $100k/year profit. And that's in a random, small, and crappy city in a third-world country.
I think Microsoft's issue is that it tries to do too much under one umbrella. If MS were multiple companies, the fact that these very same projects lived and died wouldn't be notable.
This sort of stuff happens in the FOSS world all the time: projects grow, live, and die over the course of time. There is the argument that FOSS means "The Community" can take it over and maintain it if it wants, but consumers are not necessarily cut from the same cloth as producers, the skills don't necessarily translate.
I would actually like to see MS do it more often, release more things to the public at much earlier stages, because I think it's their primary differentiator over a company like Apple. Apple has dug themselves into an extremely R&D-intensive process that requires products be sprung fully formed from the head of Zeus. Let's talk about the Newton, the Pippin, the iTunes Phone, the Apple TV, etc. When MS tries to do this (Zune, Windows Phone), they get mocked and people ignore their products, even though in many cases they are technically superior products. MS needs to understand that the tech culture views them as unhip and should stop spending money on trying to change that perception.
The anti-MS sentiment also seems to suggest a scenario in which a programmer would learn a particular programming language once, then live off of that for the rest of his life. We have an excellent example of where that leads, and it's called COBOL. I don't think it's at all unreasonable to expect programmers to learn how to learn. A particular MS or FOSS tech stalling out and dying is not going to be a huge impact on you if you're not betting the farm on one thing.
MS writes good software. You can't keep blaming the size and breadth of the company on anti-competitive behavior from the early 90s that they had already curbed by the time the DOJ tagged them for it. You can arm-chair quarterback and say that a particular example sucks compared to another particular thing, but in most of those cases it's missing the ecosystem and context of the times. Windows was the best home desktop operating system; it had its problems but every OS had problems back then. Internet Explorer really was better than Netscape Navigator (when IE6 was released in 2001, for the times it was good. The five year resting-on-laurels period was the mistake). At any period in time, regardless of how bad the latest version of Visual Studio has been, not comparing it against itself, it has been the best full-featured development IDE on the market (even the first VS.NET in 2002 was better than any non-VS product).
Then someone hired Ballmer to take over and he treated the company like a Detroit manufacturing behemoth. Any successes post-Ballmer were a result of R&D efforts that started before he took over that were too obviously going to succeed for even Ballmer to give them the axe.
I don't have a critique of this on technical merits, and obviously, an initiative that helps all users better manage information is step forward. And this isn't a critique of Microsoft specifically, but the descriptive copy for it follows a trend that bugs me:
> View and download sample apps, learn best practices, and see how other app builders are using Project Siena to build visually stunning interactive apps today.
Why does everything have to be "visually stunning" these days? No, I don't mean in actuality, but described as such? A service that can build useful apps that improve our lives should be associated with adjectives like "powerful", "flexible", "intuitive"...And no, I don't endorse the use of adjectives in general, I'm just saying I wish copywriters, their managers, their product designers, etc. would not worry so much about "beauty" especially when "beautiful" is something that can be seen and should speak for itself.
I guess it's not the copywriters' fault as so much as just writing what the public likes to see...I wish the public would expand their concept of what good software is, how "beauty" is great, but not at all the primary requirement for the domain of something like the OP.
And of course Microsoft is not alone at fault. If anything, Apple probably inspired it, and who can blame Apple considering their success? Look at how their copy for a spreadsheet application:
> Numbers helps you make spreadsheets more insightful — and more beautiful. Drop your data into a stunning, Apple-designed template. Or start with a blank canvas. Add in some quick calculations. Then visualize the numbers with a dramatic interactive chart. Suddenly, you see what it all means. How beautiful is that?
(I'll be the first to admit, I do like having nice typography in my Terminal, though)
"a new technology for business experts, business analysts, consultants, and other app imagineers. Now, without any programming, you can create powerful apps for the device-first and cloud-connected world, with the potential to transform today’s business processes."
This has the potential to be awesome. Looks like a Windows RT-ready stripped-down MS Access. Something that allows e.g. sales people to create fancy presentations slash catalogues.
I'm not on the Windows platform and have no need to move there, but it's good to see some innovation coming from them.
This product is aimed at fledgling entrepreneurs with an interest in accruing the benefits of technology, but without the expertise or in-house resources to leverage the FOSS chain.
Remember: From our perspective, MS is a bunch of evil-empire joykills: lock-in, licensing, lucifier. But for most businesspeople, especially the non-startup bootstrappers, they are promethean, stealing fire from the mandarins of software engineering and bestowing it on worthy dreamers. FOSS is hard; cross-platform is hard; Siena is easy.
Personal context: I flinch instinctively when I see or hear MS' products. However, I'm responsible for ops at my job and I know damned well that there are several generations of small businesses for whom 'business management' is spelled 'A-C-C-E-S-S'. You can criticize this, you can complain about this, you can pay a bunch of bright young things to rewrite it Node or whatever, but you are never going to convince the businessowner that Access is a bad idea.
That same businessowner started one day in his garage with an empty Access database and remembers both it and those days with justified fondness. He's still just getting over not being able to 'improve' your schema on his laptop on lunch break so it 'makes more sense'.
I predict in ten years there will be a huge market for consultants getting businessses OFF this thing. But there will also be a huge pool of new businesses it helped create, so on balance, let me be the first to say: Hello World, Siena, and welcome.
Right. Which is why my first advice to a non-tech person starting a business is still 'go out and get Access'. Because I can pitch as hard as I like for Node and Angular, I'm never going to make callback-passing and dependency injection as intuitive as 'New Access Database Wizard'.
Come to think of it, 'use Access' is pretty good advice for businessy techies, too. It's a lot harder to rabbit-hole when the earth is actually molded plastic. :)
Unfortunately, it's not just small business. There are some very, very large players that still use Access that I'm aware of. Every thing you said still applies though.
I'm aware of this too -- there is a standing wave of businesses with technical debt from their smaller days. Much of the North American economy is underpinned by a volatile mixture of Act! ~2006, MS Access ~2003, and QuickBooks. None of these products like each other, and they are all obsolete.
This is at least a big a deal as, e.g, South Korea's eternal love affair with Windows XP. It shapes the whole technoeconomic apparatus.
I have a relative who is still making very good money writing one-off custom applications for all sorts of local businesses. He works entirely in Visual Basic with an Access back-end. He doesn't even use .Net, it's all old-school VB.
With social tech sites like HN and /r/programming, we tend to forget that the business needs that drove the RAD CRUD-type apps of the 1990s never went away, it's just not interesting to talk about anymore.
Just played around with it for an hour or so. I really like the UI, it's very basic yet quite powerful. I like how they used Win8 UX concepts for a complex app, it works much better than I would've expected. I find myself using my laptop's touch screen as a matter of course.
It's quite powerful even without the using the function reference, because common actions have dedicated UI, and all fields have great autocomplete. I also realized that a modern HyperCard is really just all I wanted, and it seems that this may be it.
That said, it really lacks on the documentation side. The function reference is a start, but without understanding the concepts, getting something real to work feels a little impossible. (Example: `Remove` removes an "item", but how is an "item" identified? Does a screen have a "current item"? How does this work?)
Still, a very nice start. I hope this gets better fast and then I'll want to be a power user.
I also hope they won't start charging Access-style prices for it.
56 comments
[ 1.9 ms ] story [ 26.7 ms ] threadA reasonable summary of what they're trying to build here is "HyperCard for the internet", which is actually a pretty cool idea.
This article had the best short summary in my opinion: http://www.theverge.com/2013/12/19/5227140/microsoft-project...
I think you can export the project at the end so it can be massaged into a distributable app using VB/etc.
That sounds very much like what the VPRI people have been doing all along.
http://html9responsiveboilerstrapjs.com/
Also haven't we all tired of the hole 'M$' thing?
I can't imagine spending so much time and effort learning how to use a framework only to have it discontinued in it's infancy. Silverlight dying was a good thing and ultimately it's a win for everybody as HTML is more open, but still - I feel for the devs out there who waste their time.
Edit: On the plus it does use HTML and JS, instead of something much more closed. :)
Not really, as someone who specialised in WPF since it's latter beta stages, I still am finding plenty of work at a very good rate. Same thing goes with silverlight, even in a discontinued state, it still is going to have years and years of bug fixes. Just no new functionality.
The fact is, even today with all the frustrations I have with WPF been 'unfinished' it is still a lot more pleasurable than HTML/Knockout or something that tries to make HTML palatable.
A quick search in London on your favourite job site shows that learning WPF hasn't been a waste of time, my skills are not in a vacuum, I also have strong OOP skills, whilst knowing how to run software projects. Plus learning something is never bad. Obviously I wouldn't recommend someone learning it now. But compare it with whichever flavour of the month framework people are loving right now, people who've learn say Ruby on Rails aren't as fashionable as say Node.js is right now. But just do a quick jobs search in London and you'll see that you'd be better off on average doing WPF/Silverlight than RoR.
Because even if he was right, using the "M$" abbreviation is bad form when other people are trying to have meaningful conversations.
Probably because they had to go out of their way to describe them as M$. Googl€, App£e and ¥ahoo work just as well, but are never used.
Possibly because access is a lousy example being hat it remains after 20+ years.
Silverlight would have been a much better example.
And "M$"? Am I going to have to go find the link to that Penny Arcade cartoon?
XNA, WinRT, ...
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2002/07/22
Why do you think these tools aren't being used. I know a small company using Access to deliver business management applications and they are turning a $100k/year profit. And that's in a random, small, and crappy city in a third-world country.
This sort of stuff happens in the FOSS world all the time: projects grow, live, and die over the course of time. There is the argument that FOSS means "The Community" can take it over and maintain it if it wants, but consumers are not necessarily cut from the same cloth as producers, the skills don't necessarily translate.
I would actually like to see MS do it more often, release more things to the public at much earlier stages, because I think it's their primary differentiator over a company like Apple. Apple has dug themselves into an extremely R&D-intensive process that requires products be sprung fully formed from the head of Zeus. Let's talk about the Newton, the Pippin, the iTunes Phone, the Apple TV, etc. When MS tries to do this (Zune, Windows Phone), they get mocked and people ignore their products, even though in many cases they are technically superior products. MS needs to understand that the tech culture views them as unhip and should stop spending money on trying to change that perception.
The anti-MS sentiment also seems to suggest a scenario in which a programmer would learn a particular programming language once, then live off of that for the rest of his life. We have an excellent example of where that leads, and it's called COBOL. I don't think it's at all unreasonable to expect programmers to learn how to learn. A particular MS or FOSS tech stalling out and dying is not going to be a huge impact on you if you're not betting the farm on one thing.
MS writes good software. You can't keep blaming the size and breadth of the company on anti-competitive behavior from the early 90s that they had already curbed by the time the DOJ tagged them for it. You can arm-chair quarterback and say that a particular example sucks compared to another particular thing, but in most of those cases it's missing the ecosystem and context of the times. Windows was the best home desktop operating system; it had its problems but every OS had problems back then. Internet Explorer really was better than Netscape Navigator (when IE6 was released in 2001, for the times it was good. The five year resting-on-laurels period was the mistake). At any period in time, regardless of how bad the latest version of Visual Studio has been, not comparing it against itself, it has been the best full-featured development IDE on the market (even the first VS.NET in 2002 was better than any non-VS product).
Then someone hired Ballmer to take over and he treated the company like a Detroit manufacturing behemoth. Any successes post-Ballmer were a result of R&D efforts that started before he took over that were too obviously going to succeed for even Ballmer to give them the axe.
> View and download sample apps, learn best practices, and see how other app builders are using Project Siena to build visually stunning interactive apps today.
Why does everything have to be "visually stunning" these days? No, I don't mean in actuality, but described as such? A service that can build useful apps that improve our lives should be associated with adjectives like "powerful", "flexible", "intuitive"...And no, I don't endorse the use of adjectives in general, I'm just saying I wish copywriters, their managers, their product designers, etc. would not worry so much about "beauty" especially when "beautiful" is something that can be seen and should speak for itself.
I guess it's not the copywriters' fault as so much as just writing what the public likes to see...I wish the public would expand their concept of what good software is, how "beauty" is great, but not at all the primary requirement for the domain of something like the OP.
And of course Microsoft is not alone at fault. If anything, Apple probably inspired it, and who can blame Apple considering their success? Look at how their copy for a spreadsheet application:
http://www.apple.com/creativity-apps/mac/
> Numbers helps you make spreadsheets more insightful — and more beautiful. Drop your data into a stunning, Apple-designed template. Or start with a blank canvas. Add in some quick calculations. Then visualize the numbers with a dramatic interactive chart. Suddenly, you see what it all means. How beautiful is that?
(I'll be the first to admit, I do like having nice typography in my Terminal, though)
"a new technology for business experts, business analysts, consultants, and other app imagineers. Now, without any programming, you can create powerful apps for the device-first and cloud-connected world, with the potential to transform today’s business processes."
Is LightSwitch being de-emphasized (put on life support) because it doesn't fully encourage WinRT?
I'm not on the Windows platform and have no need to move there, but it's good to see some innovation coming from them.
Remember: From our perspective, MS is a bunch of evil-empire joykills: lock-in, licensing, lucifier. But for most businesspeople, especially the non-startup bootstrappers, they are promethean, stealing fire from the mandarins of software engineering and bestowing it on worthy dreamers. FOSS is hard; cross-platform is hard; Siena is easy.
Personal context: I flinch instinctively when I see or hear MS' products. However, I'm responsible for ops at my job and I know damned well that there are several generations of small businesses for whom 'business management' is spelled 'A-C-C-E-S-S'. You can criticize this, you can complain about this, you can pay a bunch of bright young things to rewrite it Node or whatever, but you are never going to convince the businessowner that Access is a bad idea.
That same businessowner started one day in his garage with an empty Access database and remembers both it and those days with justified fondness. He's still just getting over not being able to 'improve' your schema on his laptop on lunch break so it 'makes more sense'.
I predict in ten years there will be a huge market for consultants getting businessses OFF this thing. But there will also be a huge pool of new businesses it helped create, so on balance, let me be the first to say: Hello World, Siena, and welcome.
Come to think of it, 'use Access' is pretty good advice for businessy techies, too. It's a lot harder to rabbit-hole when the earth is actually molded plastic. :)
This is at least a big a deal as, e.g, South Korea's eternal love affair with Windows XP. It shapes the whole technoeconomic apparatus.
With social tech sites like HN and /r/programming, we tend to forget that the business needs that drove the RAD CRUD-type apps of the 1990s never went away, it's just not interesting to talk about anymore.
It's quite powerful even without the using the function reference, because common actions have dedicated UI, and all fields have great autocomplete. I also realized that a modern HyperCard is really just all I wanted, and it seems that this may be it.
That said, it really lacks on the documentation side. The function reference is a start, but without understanding the concepts, getting something real to work feels a little impossible. (Example: `Remove` removes an "item", but how is an "item" identified? Does a screen have a "current item"? How does this work?)
Still, a very nice start. I hope this gets better fast and then I'll want to be a power user.
I also hope they won't start charging Access-style prices for it.
Skip to 23:00 for the demo of Steve Jobs building a database app in a few minutes. Yes, this is stuff we should have.
[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gveTy4EmNyk
I liked at the 21:00 minute mark how he was telling us how awesome faxes were. Surely iOS could do more with faxes.