As Yet Untitled

Dear Microsoft: It’s About Time

Mr. Sinofsky, I’d like to thank you. I’ve been waiting for this for a long time.

Win32 is an old warhorse. In its heyday, it was dependable, useful, and let us as developers do whatever we needed. But the world has moved on, and while development got easier and better everywhere else, Win32 stayed the same.

For good reason, mind you. Keeping backwards compatibility is hard, especially when you’re trying to release new features at the same time. And it’s not just technically hard — I’m sure people inside Microsoft have been itching to start over for a long time now.

Apple did this 10 years ago. I’m sure there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth when OSX and Cocoa were released. Apple gave their users a great platform, and their developers a new way of making things for it that was better. A hardware-accelerated UI layer. Bundles. A visual style to follow. A programming model that was designed from the ground up to support a new kind of application.

Now Microsoft is doing it, and many of the themes are the same. I hope it goes as well for them, because I want to write Metro apps, and the only way I can do that is if Windows 8 sells like hotcakes.