You can say a lot of things about windows but abandoning apis isn't one of them. Windows is the king of backwards compatibility, for better or for worse.
And in some cases, like their speech synthesis and recognition APIs, Windows has been pretty darn good about having the APIs in the first place, maintaining and improving them over more than a couple decades, with the APIs being quite rich and supporting third party components like voices, synthesizers and recognizers.
While Apple's speech APIs, for all their huff and puff and other legitimate work on accessibility, are totally lacking, way behind, locked away from third party developers, and sadly deficient for application developers who need more than the most basic off-the-shelf features.
For example, SAPI has for decades been able to a send mouth positions (visemes) synchronized with the speech, to animate the lips of the Wizard or Rover the Dog or Clippy (or whatever a paperclip uses to articulate), which is proven to improve speech understanding. But not a peep from Apple's speech API -- their lips are sealed.
DirectInput -> XInput, which dumbed down many of the advanced Force-Feedback features to the level that the simple Xbox gamepads could support, compared to the original Sidewinder line of awesome joysticks (another victim of Microsoft abandonment.)
Often not making many APIs available in their latest programming technologies like .NET/C# (at least initially.)
WPF, Silverlight, the "Metro" experiment that lasted for a single (!) version of Windows (8), and great discontinued apps like PhotoDraw, are some of the other cases that personally affected me.
WPF has had a major release not a year ago and is actively updated alongside .net framework updates[1]. It is featured prominently in all visual studio products.
For that matter even winforms is still available.
The Metro UI evolved into windows 10 UWP, and practically everything that was in Metro UI can be transferred to UWP, down to the homescreen widgets.
Silverlight and DirectInput are still available, though they are deprecated they haven't been removed. Silverlight even had security updates released as late as a year ago [2]even though it has been deprecated since 2015
They changed the name to Modern UI, some reported [1] because it clashed with their German partner Metro AG. In any case Modern UI started with Zune and you could get for the time nifty looking media player for it on XP [2]. You can still see it in newer parts of Windows 10 with its aversion to skeuomorphic design, preferring text and minimalist 1 color icons.
I was referring to that crippled subsystem with the fullscreen Start Menu/Screen and the touchscreen-compatible apps that launched from it, separate from the "full" "desktop" experience, where you had two versions of IE, Outlook, Skype etc. It was also all you could access on the now-abandoned Windows RT.
Is that dichotomy still present in Windows 10?
See, it's a confusing exercise to even figure out what their sub-platforms are supposed to be called. Apparently they are now "Universal Windows Platform (UWP) apps (formerly Windows Store apps and Metro-style apps)" [0]
Do they have access to the full feature set of DirectX etc.? Do they have support for multiple appearances, Dark Mode, etc.?
UWP is what was WinRT on Windows 8, they have just been improving it all these years.
Of course they have access to full DirectX 11 and 12.
All new APIs are UWP based, and with they learned with the Desktop Bridge for Win32, they changed their strategy and are now merging UWP and Wi32 into a single container/store model.
Some of the talks related with it were done at MSBUILD 2018, check MSIX, .NET Core 3.0 roadmap, XAML Islands, XAML Direct.
If they don't change direction, in a couple of Windows releases they will be merged, with UWP continuously taking over Win32, like Win32 did before to Win16.
As for Apple, I can quickly refer to Object Pascal, Quickdraw 3D, JavaBridge, Quickdraw Java APIs, A/UX, Dylan, Newton, MCL, Hypercard....
If this is to be a simple listout of products and services that were superseded or discontinued because it made no sense to continue them (as opposed to breaking promises or replacing them with inferior counterparts), then on the MS side we have:
Active Desktop, Briefcase, CardSpace, Meeting Space, NetMeeting, Windows Sidebar, Desktop Gadgets and Windows SideShow (which displayed gadgets in a secondary screen on laptop lids etc., kinda cool at the time but I never saw an implementation in the wild), Office Assistant (Clippy in the File Explorer), Encarta and the rest of the edutainment product line (which were actually great and often used as a selling point for PCs at the time), XP themes, HTML thumbnails, the Comic Chat IRC client (my first gateway to social interaction on the internet), the SideWinder game controllers for PC (including the Dual Strike [0] which was way ahead of its time), MSN/Live Messenger, Photo Gallery, Movie Maker, Visual Basic, FoxPro and many others... :)
One question: After being exposed to Comic Chat as your first chat client, do you now visualize everyone you chat with and your online environment as if they were drawn by Jim Woodring?
I'm sure the end of Visual Basic (before the .NET impostor) was as much of a big if not bigger deal for many people as HyperCard. :p
The discontinuation of many of those things personally affected or disappointed me at the time. I distinctly remember mourning some of them:
- Losing people who only ever used Comic Chat and didn't make the migration to other services.
- The end of offline Encarta at a time when my internet wasn't very cheap, fast or reliable.
- Owning some great PC joysticks but not being able to utilize their full haptic features with newer APIs, before the joysticks themselves went out of production, when Microsoft's console division cannibalized their PC gaming division.
- A cool vector graphics editor [0] that worked better for me than Adobe or Corel getting discontinued after 2 versions.
The point of this whole thread is developer confidence, and I have felt betrayed and abandoned by Microsoft many times but I have yet to experience that during my time on Apple platforms.
Apple's current APIs are impressive and very forward-looking, and the only times I felt that optimistic about Microsoft was just before they broke their promises.
Cool link by the way, I hadn't known of Jim Woodring before today!
Both HyperCard and VB were really great for personal computing because they made it relatively easy for people to start making their own tools.
I made my first game with HyperCard, sadly lost to time unless the floppy is still sitting in some middle-school computing lab's storage room and hasn't degraded beyond readability.
Even recently I had a hobby project where VB 1.0 for DOS was a quick and easy way to hack together a GUI.
I'm saddened by the fact that "modern" desktops are increasingly becoming consumption-only devices. Personal computing is near death and no one seems to care much.
I do a lot of freelance working with small companies / non-profits. The people there typically need what are programmatically simple tasks done: converting fields of a CSV to some other format, adjusting the appearance of only certain Excel sheets in a folder of files, etc. But they are not what today we call "programmers," and there are no good tools anymore for them to easily build things that accomplish these theoretically simple tasks.
What's worse, it's even more difficult for me to build them a solution. If these systems came with something as powerful as Hypercard was on Macs in the early 90s, I could make them something they could maintain themselves, and it would have a GUI and everything. Today I have to go through an enormous build process and all kinds of hoops just to wrap simple tasks in a usable UI. This is NOT personal computing!
I think one part of the issue is that an entire generation or two of personal computing users has now grown up with only this "consumer" mentality and they have no idea what they're missing, what was abandoned more or less in the 90s. It's a very frustrating and sad state of affairs — but also one primed for a change.
> I'm saddened by the fact that "modern" desktops are increasingly becoming consumption-only devices.
I have been lamenting the loss of the ability to code as soon as you switched on a computer, ever since I moved from a Commodore 64 to an IBM PC clone. :)
You can’t even use $500+ devices as a simple calculator without an “app.”
We need more stuff like Swift Playgrounds, preinstalled on operating systems, but would people care?
The first thing almost everyone wants to do is open a browser and log on Facebook etc.
Maybe those people are the majority of the market, but that market will be served by tablets, phones and desktop web kiosks. The market for actual personal computers still exists, it's just being ignored by everyone because it is relatively small, like it was before the web made computers interesting to the current majority user base.
Not sure if WPF is a good fit for this this discussion about abandoning APIs especially not in the way as mentioned by the OP (i.e. ditching it all together): as fas as I'm aware it is still supported in the very latest versions of the build tools and the applications built with it just run on the supported OS for those tools (didn't check recently but about a year ago I could still get a newly built WPF application running on Windows XP). Sure it's not actively being developped anymore, but it's still there and still works.
WPF has only been tweaked a little here and there since around 2010 or 2012. Then they started pushing Silverlight and WinRT. I remember distinctly the moment around 2012 when we realized that WPF is pretty much dead in the sense that nothing new will be coming..
I'm aware it was used in Visual Studio, and oh, the Expression Studio suite [0] – another discontinued line of great products, for making stuff with WPF – but that's all I can remember.
Not even Calculator or Notepad used WPF as far as I know, which would have been the simplest apps to port and could have bolstered developer confidence in the technology (the point of this whole discussion.)
Correction: Apparently most parts of Expression Studio have been assimilated into Visual Studio, but the point remains: It decreased developer confidence when it was discontinued and nothing was immediately announced as a replacement.
>You can say a lot of things about windows but abandoning apis isn't one of them.
Actually abandoning APIs is very much one of them.
While programs written in older API still work, MS is notorious for abandoning APIs (as opposed to removing them) and asking developers to support its new shiny thing even faster than Apple changes frameworks (heck, you could still compile NeXT apps 30+ years later, and the frameworks where still supported, albeit with some alterations).
MS always invents new frameworks and APIs every 2-3 years for the same thing, e.g. GUI programming (or at least used to, haven't followed for the last several years).
Compared to what? Apple or the mobile OS du jour? Most other operating systems in commercial use, and we can look both at the commercial unices and the embedded stuff, supports APIs much older than Windows itself.
Support for the Win16 API has been abysmal recently. My limited experience of old DOS and Windows applications is that they often run better under dosbox or wine than native.
