Microsoft’s big promise with Windows 10 is its ability to run apps across the entire platform. The framework for these universal apps hasn’t been described in much detail, but a post on the Windows Blog gives a bit more insight under the hood. Redmond’s calling these “mobile experiences,” meaning apps you can use across many different devices; the software is mobile, not the gizmo you’re using it on. Cortana moving from smart phone to desktop and the Xbox One’s Game DVR tool being available on your gaming PC are but a few examples. The idea is to offer a set of standards across the Windows 10 platform so everything remains familiar regardless of what piece of hardware you’re accessing the application from. That means everything should have, in Microsoft’s words, an adaptive user experience with natural inputs; calls for cloud-based services including Cortana integration and the action center and one design language across the board.
Let’s break that down a bit, shall we? “Adaptive user experience” means that the app will, well, adapt to the size or resolution screen you’re using without skipping a beat in terms of inputs, menus and interface. This is where it gets interesting:
“Because Windows handles all of these inputs, we free you from needing to worry about how to parse the input for meaning – you only need to worry about which inputs are appropriate for your app and we’ll determine if they are present and parse the intent for you.”
Microsoft wants applications to take advantage of inputs that makes sense based on the device you’re using them on. So, touch input for OneNote on phones, a pen input with Surface Hub or a tablet, voice and eye tracking for desktop software. Another example Redmond gives is if you tap an icon with your finger, it’ll automatically get bigger than if a mouse-click is detected. This design philosophy will apparently travel across every Win10 device — including HoloLens and internet-of-things gadgets like the Raspberry Pi 2.
Developers will have access to the tools that Microsoft’s internal teams do, too, with the blog post specifically name dropping animations, APIs and controls. What does that mean for you, dear reader? Well, hopefully that apps keep up a consistent look and feel with Redmond’s internal projects like the Spartan browser, such as. Windows 10 is still on track for release sometime later this year, and the post promises even more detail come the software giant’s Build event in April.
It was back in January that Microsoft showed off its long-awaited replacement for Internet Explorer, currently named “Project Spartan.” The new browser is designed to be light, nimble and secure, with the company stressing how deeply Cortana, Microsoft’s virtual assistant, is baked into the software. Now, thanks to WinBeta, we’ve gotten the first sense of how that’ll work out in the real world. For instance, visit the homepage of a restaurant and the blue circle in the address bar will bounce to advise you that more information is available. In addition, you can highlight and right-click a word to define it, and typing in keywords in the address bar — such as weather — will bring up relevant information. The video is short, but you can expect plenty more like that when the previews of Windows 10 (with Spartan) arrive at the end of the month.
It’s a good day for proponents of an open internet: The Federal Communications Commission just approved its long-awaited network neutrality plan, which reclassifies broadband internet as a Title II public utility and gives the agency more regulatory power in the process. And unlike the FCC’s last stab at net neutrality in 2010, today’s new rules also apply to mobile broadband. FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler laid out the basic gist of the plan earlier this month — it’ll ban things like paid prioritization, a tactic some ISPs used to get additional fees from bandwidth-heavy companies like Netflix, as well as the slowdown of “lawful content.” But now Wheeler’s vision is more than just rhetoric; it’s something the FCC can actively enforce.
“It [the internet] is our printing press; it is our town square; it is our individual soap box and our shared platform for opportunity,” said FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel during today’s open commission meeting. “That is why open internet policies matter. That is why I support network neutrality.”
Updated 14th July 2022. And again 15th July 2022 and well, a few more times 🙂
It seems we have come along way in what seems a short amount of time. Actually its a lot longer than I care to think about. Now a days I spend my time knee-deep in databases and data entry forms and lets not forget, reports. Data, data, data. But there was a time when such things were the last thing on my mind. Dare I say it something much more frivolous and fun. Games. Back when people were writing software in their bedrooms (we weren’t called developers then) and games weren’t multi-million pound productions with hundreds of people working on them. For the record I didn’t have my first computer in the bedroom. It was for the whole family and used the TV in the front room. It was a Commodore VIC-20. Which later was upgraded to a Commodore 64 and then an Amiga 1000.
Writing My First Game
But writing code has always been fun and I had to have a go at my favourite arcade game of the time, Donkey Kong. I never got very far playing on it. It’s still pretty damn hard when I try playing it with MAME. But its only got 4 levels so they’re not going to let you do it quickly. I had already got one game coded on the VIC-20. A breakout clone. Even managed to sell a copy of it to a friend. Actually he wanted to buy it. There was definitely a shortage of good quality games at the time. If I remember correctly it would only get every brick if I allowed the ball to go through a wall once or twice. Certainly made it interesting to play.
Wanting to do better next time I aimed higher. This time I had designed a new font for the game. This was essential for a VIC-20 game as custom fonts were used to display graphics. The Mario like character, the Kong character, platform, everything, was a character in a font or made of several characters. That meant I could use that font designer we typed in from a listing in Compute magazine. Of course we typed it in. There was no Internet, we couldn’t download it. There was nowhere to download it from. Program source code was printed in magazines and people had to type it in. Of course they had to make sure they typed it in correctly, or they would be playing an entirely different kind of game. A bug hunting one. A lot more frustrating and not nearly as much fun. Some of those listings were hexadecimal assembly code. They even had special software to make typing that in that bit easier. But you had to type those in first of course.
Just as Much Fun Designing It
I liked the designing graphics part. That was definitely fun for me, and it made the creation of the code to make them move about the screen more interesting. After all what would you rather watch, a funny little man running around the screen or the letters “A” and “B”. As we were moving characters or symbols around the screen this wasn’t smooth pixel movement. This was move a graphic 8 pixels a time for every step. But hey those were the days. Moving graphics around the screen a pixel at a time was more complicated for the old VIC-20. It could be done but that meant manipulating the custom font in real-time to map a graphic to a set number of characters. This meant some very clever code in assembler.
I wasn’t quiet at the stage yet. But I didn’t let it stop me from going ahead and coding my version of Donkey Kong. Of course I couldn’t call it that. So I came up with the name Logger. After all those do look like logs rolling down the platforms. It didn’t seem long at all before I had a working game written in BASIC that only had one screen and only one log-rolling at once. But it worked and it was only my second attempt at coding. So I was quite proud.
Around this time a new magazine had started to be published in the UK called “Computer and Video Games“. Or C&VG for short. As there weren’t a great deal of games to review they, like other magazines, published the source code of games for the readers to type in and, cross their fingers and, hope it worked. I thought why not send mine in. A month or so later I received a copy of the magazine in the post and a cheque for 10 pounds. Much boasting to my college friends followed. Can’t remember if they were impressed or not.
Why this trip down a very long memory lane? The guilty confession is something that you are probably guilty of. Googling yourself. You haven’t done that? Really? Of course not. Lower down my search results was something I hadn’t seen for sometime. Site’s have catalogued nearly every game you can think of. This particular site (GB64) had not found “Logger” in the magazine, but in a book. As apparently it had been collected with many others and reprinted. They even had a screenshot. How about that. You can even download it from here. Well, it saves you from having to type it in.
Update. I have since found another link to the listing as featured in Computer & Video Games magazine. It can be found at VIC-20 listings. The issue they state that Logger was in Issue 18 (Apr 1983), pages 64-67. They even have a link to a download and a screen capture of the original VIC-20 version. Also it reminded me that a 3KB memory expansion card was necessary. Must be all those custom graphics.
Doing it the old fashioned way!
Update!
Seems that Logger made it onto the TRS-80. As the this link shows. Taken from the same code as the C64 version but with the font data removed. It would be interesting to see how that looks as there are no screen pictures in the book. The publisher is Haynes which I think must be connected with the published of “Getting Ahead: Fantastic Games for the Vic 20” which also published “Logger”. I wasn’t notified about it being published in either book at any time and received no payments for this. But at least they did leave my name attached.
Another Update
Then in another search another Logger video appears. This time it is from Youtuber Jim Gerrie. Who seems to have typed in the code and made a video from the game. It is in wonderful ASCII animation. Whoever it was that did this conversion did a very good job of it, added some nice little touches too. They should have their name attached to this as well. See the video below. Please Jim a like and subscribe to his channel (I have) for his hard work and dedication.
Microsoft Garage is an initiative at Microsoft that works like an internal accelerator, taking ideas that employees have outside of their ordinary day jobs and turning them into real apps. The first batch broke cover last October, and now there are nine new projects making their official debut today.
These include a mobile app that lets software engineers check in on Visual Studio Online projects in a secure way without having to be on the company intranet on their notebook; a weather app designed for use in China that offers air quality reports customised for each user; and a conference call management app that can pull meeting ID and pins from invites and automatically enter the details to connect you to your call with a simple tap or voice command.
DevSpace, Your Weather and Join Conference are the apps Microsoft highlighted in a blog post announcing the new slate, but a few that might be even more useful for some users include Keyboard for Excel, which replaces your software keyboard with something specific to Excel, for optimal input of figures and formulas. The SquadWatch app, another Garage production, provides real-time location on friends and family who agree to take part, much like a Find My Friends for Windows Phone.
Other new apps that have already broken cover but that are re-launching with new features or updates in this batch include Mouse without Borders, which allows you to control multiple computers with a single mouse and keyboard; Developer Assistant, which offers a way to browse and re-use code snippets and samples from Visual Studio; Picturesque Lock Screen, which puts Bing home page pictures on your Android lock screen, as well as direct search and call/text notifications; and finally Torque, which gets updates that let you define Android shake behaviour to trigger a range of actions, including voice search, calls, dictation or app launching.
Microsoft’s Garage is producing some of the most interesting software to come out of Redmond or any of the MS satellite offices in years, and this collection is no exception. Fostering innovation in an organisation that size, which in many ways depends on stability and an innate conservatism is no small feat. Garage has managed to produce some interesting stuff you probably wouldn’t see come out of Microsoft’s main businesses, so it’s definitely helping to reduce the risks associated with large, slow-moving corporate entities.
