First WPF/SL and now Windows Gadgets

Oh sure you can still use Windows gadgets but... http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows/downloads/looking-for-gadgets

Here's a little more background: http://www.neowin.net/news/microsoft-shuts-down-windows-live-gallery

It would be one thing if Windows 8/WinRT/Metro was a proven quantity but it's no where near shipping and they are already trying to groom people to be assimilated. What has happened inside Microsoft? The 4th Reich? I see a lot of people leaving; married with this kind of tactics it's pretty clear the tune is "my way or the highway".

First WPF/SL? So you mean they pretend to take out Gadgets and later say, "hey, we now have a new consolidate store for it"?

The sad thing is that Windows Gadgets with WinRT behind them would be a much better fit for the desktop than Metro "live tiles" are.

1 hour ago, magicalclick wrote

First WPF/SL? So you mean they pretend to take out Gadgets and later say, "hey, we now have a new consolidate store for it"?

New consolidate store? Wha?

3 minutes ago, DeathBy​VisualStudio wrote

*snip*

New consolidate store? Wha?

What is "wha"? If you are confused, it is a speculation that the new store will have consolidate IE9 Plugins, Gadgets, and Metro. Just like the speculation that XAML will be big in Win8.

Does anyone really care?

Gadgets were practically a stillborn technology, a leftover relic of the original Longhorn Sidebar concept that were stripped back until barely any of the original vision existed. I honestly think the only reason they ever made it into a production release was because every screenshot of Longhorn made such a big deal of the sidebar and it'd been embarrasing for Vista to have come out without it entirely.

The fact that the "best of" gadgets page can barely scrape 29 gadgets is a sign of how useless they were, especially given the included ones like Amazon search which is just as easy to do directly within the a broswer itself.

Frankly it's better that Microsoft has come straight out and admitted they were a failure and discouraging people from wasting any more time looking into developing them. It's a far better approach than letting people believe they're still a worthwhile option right up until the point you drop them or keeping an essentially useless tech about just for the sake of it.

12 hours ago, DCMonkey wrote

The sad thing is that Windows Gadgets with WinRT behind them would be a much better fit for the desktop than Metro "live tiles" are.

Live Tiles aren't supposed to be anything like Gadgets. I think this is one of the biggest failings of letting interns do all the dev preview apps, because that's now confusing people because things like the Weather and Headlines apps are the equivalent of the old gadgets.

Live Tiles are more like a mashup of Taskbar Buttons, balloon notifications and 'tray' notification icons. I kind of wish they'd done something like iA Writer, because then people might have started to take notice of how real applications could embrace Metro style, rather than just dismissing them as gadget replacements.

10 minutes ago, AndyC wrote

*snip*

I kind of wish they'd done something like iA Writer, because then people might have started to take notice of how real applications could embrace Metro style, rather than just dismissing them as gadget replacements.

wow, I have never seen that application before but that's awesome! I love notepad++ but it's cluttered to say the least. 

13 hours ago, magicalclick wrote

*snip*

What is "wha"? If you are confused, it is a speculation that the new store will have consolidate IE9 Plugins, Gadgets, and Metro. Just like the speculation that XAML will be big in Win8.

Just like the speculation that the new installation technology was going to support "legacy" SL/WPF apps -- not. It's pretty clear with Microsoft these days it's go Metro or go home, form over function, no chrome even if it hurts.

LOL! Plugins that won't run under Metro IE...

Please no ribbon. Notepad++ should do what paint.net did, or just get usage data and not have every setting available

7 minutes ago, vesuvius wrote

Please no ribbon. Notepad++ should do what paint.net did, or just get usage data and not have every setting available

Did you look at the iA writer site? It's a Mac app so you're kind of limited to drooling over the video but it's an extremely cool idea and almost completely chrome-less. It's what a Metro text editor could and should look like.

The video is well made, but the iA app looks completely useless to me.

@AndyC: Distraction-free text editors have been around for a while now (e.g. http://they.misled.us/dark-room is a .NET 2.0 implementation of the OSX WhiteRoom editor).

iA adds Markdown, though, which is quite good.

Herbie

@Dr Herbie:Yeah, but it's not just the Markdown. I really like the way you can have other sentences just fade out and even navigate by sentence. I've not seen that in any other text editor.

It looks neat, but really, are there that many people that get -that- distracted by sentences other than the ones they are working on?

10 minutes ago, Bas wrote

It looks neat, but really, are there that many people that get -that- distracted by sentences other than the ones they are working on?

Something like that application will never work for me. I always like to re-read the previous few sentences along with the current sentence to check the flow. I don't really need the editor to highlight the current sentence that I'm reading as though I'm singing karaoke.