Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday October 11 2017, @03:08PM   Printer-friendly
from the playing-taps dept.

Windows Phone will not receive new features, and there will be no new Windows Phone hardware. The initial release was on October 21, 2010:

During the weekend, Microsoft's Joe Belfiore tweeted confirmation of something that has been suspected for many months: Microsoft is no longer developing new features or new hardware for Windows Mobile. Existing supported phones will receive bug fixes and security updates, but the platform is essentially now in maintenance mode.

Microsoft's difficulties in the mobile market are no secret, but for a time the company looked as if it was keeping Windows Mobile as a going concern regardless. Through 2016, Microsoft produced new builds for the Windows Insider program and added new features to Windows Mobile. At around the time of release of the Windows 10 Creators Update in April this year, that development largely ground to a halt. Windows Mobile, which already lacked certain features that were delivered to Windows on the PC, had its development forked. PC Windows development continued on the "Redstone 3" branch (which will culminate in the release of the Fall Creators Update later this month); Windows Mobile languished on a branch named "feature2."

[...] We might well wonder why Microsoft didn't say so sooner and instead strung along not only the platform's fans but even OEM partners; it's hard to imagine that HP would have built its Elite x3 phone had Microsoft been clearer about mobile.

Even with this announcement, there's still speculation that Microsoft is going to bring out a new device—something phone-like but not a phone—that'll compete, somehow, in the mobile space. For all the rumors about a "Surface Phone," though, it's unclear precisely what this device would do that is meaningfully different from anything else on the market or if it will be compelling enough to reverse the company's mobile fortunes. For now, all we can do is mourn: the best mobile platform isn't under active development any more, and the prospects of new hardware to run it on are slim to non-existent.

They should release an app that runs full Windows on an external display when an Android smartphone is docked. Put those 8-10 cores to good use.


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by Gaaark on Wednesday October 11 2017, @03:31PM (17 children)

    by Gaaark (41) on Wednesday October 11 2017, @03:31PM (#580513) Journal

    I was coming to say essentially the same thing.

    Why mourn when you can cheer: turn that frown upside down! :)

    Wish the same would happen to Windows and MS

    --
    --- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
    Starting Score:    1  point
    Moderation   +3  
       Insightful=3, Total=3
    Extra 'Insightful' Modifier   0  
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   5  
  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Wednesday October 11 2017, @04:24PM (16 children)

    by Grishnakh (2831) on Wednesday October 11 2017, @04:24PM (#580551)

    I'd love to see Windows go belly-up, but at the same time I'd like to see Apple go bust too. Holy shit, I just had to use a Mac at a hotel just to try to print some tickets, and it was an awful experience. Where the fuck is the right button for bringing up a context menu? (And no, there's no obvious place to click to bring up a context menu either.) I determined that there was actually *no* discoverable way of printing within the Safari browser; luckily, I was able to guess that Command-P would bring up a print dialog, but I though Apple touted that its shitty software was "user friendly". Sorry, having to remember cryptic OS-specific key combinations is not "user friendly" (luckily, P for print isn't that hard, after remembering that Macs use the "Command" key for stuff instead of Control, but what if I was trying to do something else like look at the history or cookies or saved passwords or something?). Hotkeys are supposed to be shortcuts for experienced users who've taken the time to learn them, not the only way to to something.

    • (Score: 5, Informative) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday October 11 2017, @05:29PM

      by Phoenix666 (552) on Wednesday October 11 2017, @05:29PM (#580601) Journal

      Knowing a little about the Mac user experience (*shudder*), the answer is probably something like click and drag the document to the printer icon. You essentially have to regress to the technical sophistication of a toddler in order to get how to work with Macs.

      --
      Washington DC delenda est.
    • (Score: 3, Funny) by Gaaark on Wednesday October 11 2017, @06:02PM (1 child)

      by Gaaark (41) on Wednesday October 11 2017, @06:02PM (#580639) Journal

      My wife was having trouble printing an image from windows (she was yelling from another room) so i told her "Ctrl + P".

      Next thing i know, she's trying to tell her mother the same thing: her mother, who clicks "Print" 500 times because the printer doesn't start printing right away, until her print queue is so full nothing will print and who keeps "Losing facebook" on her windows 10 laptop.

      Funny how my wife thinks her mother will learn and remember Ctrl + P when she can't even print from a dialog.

      --
      --- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
      • (Score: 3, Interesting) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Wednesday October 11 2017, @07:44PM

        by MichaelDavidCrawford (2339) Subscriber Badge <mdcrawford@gmail.com> on Wednesday October 11 2017, @07:44PM (#580739) Homepage Journal

        Mom saves everything she ever cared about on the Desktop of her Mac. Should a document somehow go into the Documents folder, she will never find it again.

        One day she asked me "If I keep saving my email, will I run out of gigabytes?"

        "No you have so many gigabytes that you will never run out." Actually she has eighty of them.

        One day I showed her how to do a Cleanup By Name of her desktop.

        How did she react?

        "How do you put it back?" Meaning she wanted to know how to put all of her documents in little piles.

        The next time I visited her Desktop had lots of little piles of documents."

        She drops me at Starbucks. "Come in Mom and I'll treat you to a Frappucino"

        "I've got to go grocery shopping."

        But now I speak Mom's special dialect of English:

        "All work and no play makes Patty a dull girl."

        Mom thought her Frappucino was the best thing since sliced bread.

        --
        Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
    • (Score: 4, Insightful) by KiloByte on Wednesday October 11 2017, @06:54PM (4 children)

      by KiloByte (375) on Wednesday October 11 2017, @06:54PM (#580689)

      Try GNOME's user interface. That's horror show.

      And this on an operating system type that has 10 or so desktop environments and north of 50 window managers, many if not most of them far better than GNOME, to choose from.

      --
      Ceterum censeo systemd esse delendam.
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 11 2017, @08:01PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 11 2017, @08:01PM (#580751)

        Witness the power of (company backed) code churn...

      • (Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Wednesday October 11 2017, @09:13PM (1 child)

        by Grishnakh (2831) on Wednesday October 11 2017, @09:13PM (#580796)

        I have to disagree to an extent. Windows's UI is horribly ugly, just looking at it. Gnome actually looks kinda nice, but that's the only thing good about it (it has too much wasted space, but at least they pick some non-objectionable colors and try to make it somewhat pretty). Gnome's problems are with user interaction: lack of features, ever-changing API, reliance on extensions to do anything useful but these break with every release, etc. Windows is a mixed bag; some parts haven't changed in a very long time, other parts (the Metro stuff mainly) is new and awful, and it's an inconsistent mish-mash of the two, plus the whole problem with forced updates, ads on the start menu, etc. But at first glance, Gnome at least looks better; Windows is just SOOOOO ugly.

        • (Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Wednesday October 11 2017, @09:15PM

          by Grishnakh (2831) on Wednesday October 11 2017, @09:15PM (#580797)

          Oh whoops, I guess I should have looked at the context more, I thought we were talking about something else. I actually haven't tried printing from Gnome. You probably need to memorize a hotkey combination to do it, considering their idiotic bent on minimalism.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 12 2017, @10:16AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 12 2017, @10:16AM (#581065)

        Try GNOME's user interface. That's horror show.

        Do you mean Great Gnome (aka Gnome 1), Acceptable Gnome (aka Gnome 2) or Despicable Gnome (aka Gnome 3)?

    • (Score: 2) by damnbunni on Thursday October 12 2017, @01:28AM (2 children)

      by damnbunni (704) on Thursday October 12 2017, @01:28AM (#580900) Journal

      Print in Safari is in the exact same place it is in Firefox and Internet Explorer, and only one place off from where it is in Chrome.

      It's in the menus. In the 'File' menu, specifically.

      (Chrome has it in the top-level menu.)

      You don't need a 'cryptic OS-specifc key combination'.

      • (Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Thursday October 12 2017, @03:45AM (1 child)

        by Grishnakh (2831) on Thursday October 12 2017, @03:45AM (#580960)

        Ok, and where the fuck is this elusive menu? I was looking for the menu; it wasn't there.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 12 2017, @05:45AM

          by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 12 2017, @05:45AM (#580993)

          Macs are weird, they use a global menu location in the upper left that changes with your window focus. So you probably think it is the OS menu but its a combo menu for OS and application.

    • (Score: 2) by quacking duck on Thursday October 12 2017, @01:28AM (2 children)

      by quacking duck (1395) on Thursday October 12 2017, @01:28AM (#580901)

      File menu > Print. Where it's been since literally 1984, over a year before Windows v1.0 was a thing.

      Granted, maybe you didn't see a menubar at all, due to a recent and IMHO frustrating feature that Apple's introduced, the full-screen mode. In this mode the menubar disappears entirely unless you move the mouse to the top of the screen.

      Disabling full-screen mode is one of the first things do when I set up a new Mac for myself. My girlfriend moved to Mac from Windows and wanted the full-screen mode but it's not at all like Windows, and there are a number of other serious UX issues with it.

      • (Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Thursday October 12 2017, @03:44AM (1 child)

        by Grishnakh (2831) on Thursday October 12 2017, @03:44AM (#580958)

        I didn't see a menu at all, and the browser wasn't in full-screen mode: I could still see their dumb "chooser" thing at the bottom, and some extra wasted space on either side of that. Maybe they still call that "full-screen mode", but when I hit F11 in Firefox on Windows or Linux, it really does take over the entire screen. I was certainly looking for a menu, but it wasn't anywhere to be found.

        • (Score: 2) by quacking duck on Thursday October 12 2017, @03:38PM

          by quacking duck (1395) on Thursday October 12 2017, @03:38PM (#581171)

          I presume you mean the Dock at the bottom, which predates the Windows Taskbar due to modern Mac's NeXT roots. If you saw the Dock though then it definitely wasn't in Fullscreen mode.

          I found out newer versions of macOS (since late 2015) have an option to hide the menu bar [tekrevue.com], but like fullscreen mode, shoving the mouse to the top of the screen would reveal it again. Someone (hotel staff? prankster?) had to change this setting though, as hiding the menubar is not default for very obvious reasons.

    • (Score: 2) by davester666 on Thursday October 12 2017, @07:08AM (1 child)

      by davester666 (155) on Thursday October 12 2017, @07:08AM (#581013)

      The is that crazy thing called a "menu bar", running along the top of the screen. In it, there are a number of menu's, each of which contain menu items.

      In pretty much every Mac application that supports printing, in the File menu, there is a "Print" menu item.

      That is the "discoverable" method for finding the print menu item.

      I suppose if the location has set the safari browser window to full-screen, then the menu bar gets hidden, and most people wouldn't know to make the menu bar visible by moving the mouse to the top of the screen...

      • (Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Thursday October 12 2017, @02:30PM

        by Grishnakh (2831) on Thursday October 12 2017, @02:30PM (#581142)

        I didn't see a menu bar at the top of the screen, and I was looking all over, so it must have been in some sort of full-screen mode. So no, it really wasn't discoverable. Just like mobile devices (esp. Android with the pull-down menu) expecting you to just somehow know that particular swipes do particular things, Macs apparently require the same sort of secret knowledge. That's fine if your system is designed for experienced users, but I haven't even touched a Mac in over a decade. They cannot rightfully claim to be "easy to use" if basic functions are not discoverable by completely inexperienced users.