This is great progress, but I remain fixed in my desire for singular running instances of my personal applications to run on an application server I control and to which I attach views from all of my devices. I want to have a singular e-mail application that I see on all of my devices. I want to have a singular web browser application that I see on all my devices. And so on.
We need to make my many devices appear as one rather than making a single device act as many devices.
Inferno is a portable and can be run on host operating systems. It would be possible to build it as an app on Windows Phone, Android, etc to access your Inferno resources on other devices.
Spin up an Azure VM, install all the apps you desire and configure it as you want.
Every other PC you own, becomes just a head display, using RDP you can use a single dedicated VM.
The overhead here becomes that you still need to have full blown OS installed on the heads, however their specs can be very limited (compared to the VM).
The closest approximation is connecting multiple web browsers via WebSocket to a self-hosted web application with a responsive user interface, and then using the WebSocket to relay all UI interaction at a fine-grained level. But if you read my blog entry about PAO, you'd recognize that as a facsimile of what I want—an effort to create PAO out of the mish-mash of technologies we have today.
The guts of what Microsoft is building here would be a key building block if something like PAO were to ever materialize. It will be necessary for applications to understand the capabilities of the view as they change. What's missing still is supporting multiple concurrent views with a singular application state and secure network transport for those views.
All you need is a monitor with a web browser. If you accept the browser as the OS, it already works, it just needs to get better. And it'll get better, it already is good enough for casual users.
I had wanted to read it again a few months ago, but my google-fu failed me. Thanks for linking it here.
Incidentally I just followed you on Github to keep in touch.
I found the demo pretty impressive.
After years of writing apps (toys), struggling with design decisions made to get java running on 2007-level hardware like: 64k method limit, components with crazy life-cycles making concurrency difficult without leaking things, frankenstein Java ecosystem, brittle and complicated build system...
Microsoft comes along and says "screw that shit", write mobile Applications as /desktop/ applications using C#, F#, or C++.
This is also masterful because, as Windows Phone market share is hovering at almost zero, many people who simply need a low-powered device like chromebook, tablet, can just get a phablet Windows Phone and presto, they are now Windows Desktop /and/ Phone users.
From an app monetization standpoint, its great because now I can make money on form factors from phone, tablet, laptop, desktop with one code base - instead of Android (phone) and which has more or less failed on tablets.
But the potential really is in the Phone->PC continuum. If I can take a beefy x86 phone (Intel seems to be inching closer to that reality) running windows and use it like phone most time and then dock it onto a big screen with keyboard and mouse - that really is a killer feature. It could change things in Microsoft's favor if they manage to get the integration and hardware parts right.
(I should say that the concept is not new - Motorola tried that with the Atrix - but it was underpowered hardware, flakey software and little integration that killed it. From the looks of it Microsoft seems to be geared to address all three rather well.)
I get that they're not really v1 concerns, loads of people will probably be served amazingly by Outlook + office - but I love the form factor and hope it's feasible for what I do one day!
On another note, there didn't seem to be any sign of a notification of chance for interaction on the desktop display when he got a text. That seems like a no brainer, like pushbullet on Android or Apple's continuity. It's much less of a context switch to reply to messages on the big screen and would be a really great addition.
Second, I'm betting Microsoft announced this before its ready in order to get out ahead of Apple and Android's mobile dominance and be seen as a leader in mobile. Though, I'd also bet that given where current technology is Apple's Continuity approach provides the better experience today. But, no doubt what Microsoft showed is the future.
Edit: I suppose this is a case of them trying to pull the conversation back to the place where they ARE an 800-lb gorilla. I just don't see them as being as dominant even on the desktop as they once were.
I would argue that the amount of SSD storage on phones is not too big of an issue. More as a learning experience than anything else, I augmented my Linux and Mac laptops with a little Windows 8.1 HP Stream 11 this year that only has a 32 gig drive (with another 32 gigs added via a memory card). With OneDrive, not having much disk space is not much of an issue. I installed git, bash, IntelliJ, Java 8, and my current writing projects with enough room to spare because a lot of what I access (infrequently) can live in the cloud and only be cached locally if needed.
Anyway, my Android Note 4 has a pretty good Java IDE, useful apps (including Office 365 and my favorite games) and really could be my primary computer with excellent docking support. Add cloud development tools like nitrous.io, web version of visual studio, etc., and we are getting close to what should end up being the future of the way most people interact with productivity and entertainment devices.
They're now basically giving google and apple time to easily catch up to what could of been a killer feature that sells windows phones.
I'm surprised this hasn't come earlier and would be further surprised if this isn't a top priority. I'm 100% sold if it remains a snappy platform running a couple of screens and heavy-ish excel files in a native environment.
I suppose, in another five years, running a desktop OS from your smartphone will be entirely feasible / practical. At the moment, it's just confined to tablets where higher power draw requirement is much more forgiving (better heat dissipation methods, and bigger battery).
Happy to see someone copied it.
http://philip.greenspun.com/business/mobile-phone-as-home-co...
It would be fairly trivial to deliver a great experience like this. In my case, I'd have 20,000 iPhone user ditching laptops.
Microsoft had all the technology already for years inbuilt in Windows and Win32 API, called Windows Terminal Server and Remote Desktop (RDP) - it works great with all Windows applications in enterprise. Yet Microsoft hasn't delivered it yet to consumer devices.
Microsoft to agree to license Citrix technology for
Windows NT Server 4.0, which resulted in Windows Terminal
Server Edition in 1998
that seems exaggerated.. Being able to hook up your phone to a monitor (projector?)/keyboard/mouse and have access to what looks like the full office suite seems quite useful for some.
Honestly I love the permission scheme of the app stores compared to my desktop. Being able to control what the app can do is massively better than the desktop system of "runs as user".
On the topic of root, I would hope we would work towards a time when it wasn't necessary rather than using it as a crutch.
https://msdn.microsoft.com/library/windows/apps/xaml/dn70623...
The concept of local data will diminish against the cloud, and the market won't have to deal with inflated prices on phones just so they can power desktop screens and TVs. Hook a ChromeBit up to your TV instead, buy a regular laptop or desktop PC as you require it, and let anyone move between them as they like.
It's also increasingly irrelevant if I carry a powerful computer with me anywhere to have it instantly available anyway. The only thing stopping your phone from having terabytes of storage today is that it's currently expensive, and not much demand for it vs. the slight extra space it would take (512GB SD cards are a thing, but apart from size - though micro-SD versions are bound to follow soon - the cost makes them prohibitive for the next year or two).
We're very rapidly approaching the point where - while there may be value in having everything synced to the cloud for backup and universal accessibility - you'll be able to store all your data on media smaller than your thumbnail. Storage density appears to grow far faster than peoples storage needs at the moment.
You can since WP8.1 GDR2.
>Why should I believe they'll let me connect "future devices" to an external display
People can connect latest Lumias with Miracast support to external display for mirroring. Sadly, 920 is not one of them.
http://www.windowsphone.com/en-us/how-to/wp8/connectivity/pr...
> mount a thumb drive in its USB port
This will be supported on future devices according to this:
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/dn...
>treat it as a USB mass storage device
This will probably be never supported because implementing it will require disconnecting storage from phone's OS and MTP is supposed to be enough.
Edit: miracast is not supported on 920.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=reDkEesnTpE&hd=1
But I'm not sure that I want wireless charging near my pocket.
A large screen is still a nice place to attach your phone to, instead of a dedicated docking station. At least it can provide a lot of electric power. Also, it's a reasonable place to put your phone's camera so that it's looking at you.
We have a tech event here in Brazil that attracts about 8k people. Its impossible to use wifi reliably during the event and sometimes even bluetooth suffers.
I would expect a docking station that charged the phone and had a built in USB port. Said docking station could hook up via USB-C and use a displayport mode to send the data across of course.
In either case though saying HDMI is for the best as it sends the signal of "works with your hardware" versus "works with hardware we will be releasing".
If it's the former (and I hope it is), non-x86 chips is probably out of the question. For me, this would be the killer feature that finally drives me away from Android and onto Windows Phone.
I'm also hopeful that eventually we'll see Hyper-V ported to mobile and be able to run alternative mobile/desktop OS's simultaneously.
Perhaps I'm wrong, but I assume it would need something like this...
Personally, my phone is full of photos. Cloud syncing allows for recent photos to be on-device and instant, while there's more than could ever fit on my phone stored just seconds away. Once Photos.app and Facebook.app are on-device, I could sign in with my cloud credentials and they automatically log me in and all my content is "just there" (this is true today). When we can log into any device, display "my" home screen with not-locally-installed YikYak.app (46MB) and run it on-demand we'll see true portability of profiles and portability of devices will begin to take a back seat.
The real problem is USB-C which would be necessary to both charge your phone and have it connect devices.
But with wireless charging + wireless data/display casting chances are it won't be that long before you won't need a wire for any of this most of the time.
To get around Threatstop, Distil, and other solutions, we see attackers having to use 100+ different source IPs during their coordinated attacks.
That includes several quite wealthy tech founders...