nower wrote:I'm a little intrigued that I haven't seen any statement or announcement about it from Runrev at all yet, so I am also curious what's their take on the issue. (Or does your post reflect Runrev's position? If that's the case I apologize because I am not completely clear about your role.)
That's a good question, Werner. Thanks for asking it. It's a new role in our community so we're all figuring it out as we go, but here's my intention:
For an open source project like LiveCode, a community manager can be useful to coordinate activities between community contributors to the project and the core dev team, and also to serve as an advocate for communicating community concerns to the core dev team.
When I convey information here that I've received from my ongoing meetings with the core dev team, I generally do my best to note that as such. Everything else is just my own personal opinion.
Regarding Win 10 "Universal" support, my personal opinion is that its future is uncertain, an uncertainty exacerbated by Microsoft's decision to deploy Skype on for Win 10 base but not "Universal".
My understanding of "Universal" is that it refers to app that is deployed for both ARM and x86 instruction sets. LiveCode currently runs well on Windows/x86, even in the Windows 10 Preview Edition, and since the Windows desktop market share remains at about 90% I don't see that changing for the foreseeable future.
Tablets and phones are a different matter, complicated by two factors: an instruction set incompatible with the rest of the Windows world, and frankly a very low market share for those devices running Windows on ARM.
Like Ubuntu, Windows is pursuing a single-OS strategy across all device types, so that in the long term ideally apps can be designed like the OS itself, to be scalable and adaptable to all computing devices regardless of their size or dimensions. After all, the only significant difference between a tablet with a docking keyboard and a laptop with a removable touch screen is that the latter has a much more powerful CPU.
Historically, ARM has enjoyed an advantage over Intel in being able to deliver reasonable performance at much lower power consumption, and of course with portable devices battery life is a key benefit.
But since the mobile era kicked off much has changed. Intel was the first CPU manufacturer to ship product made with 14 nm lithography; it took Samsung many months to catch up with their licensed ARM designs, and most other manufacturers are still stuck at 22nm. This breakthrough allowed Intel to deliver better performance than ARM at equivalent TDP, beginning to reverse the tide that had previously considered ARM the only architecture worth pursuing for mobile devices.
More recently Intel has reported significant advances in shrinking their die further, to 10nm:
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/1996 ... ad-on-10nm
No other manufacturer is expected to be able to touch that for at least a year after Intel is able to ship. And further, Intel has also announced early-stage R&D for a 7nm process, something that industry analysts have suggested may take two years or more for the ARM consortium of manufacturers to begin matching, though in all fairness at that size the whole thing approaches the boundaries of physics and it may make more sense to be pursuing completely different technologies beyond silicon.
Up to this point it was considered a given that x86 would be limited to laptops and desktop and ARM would be required for tablets and phones. But with Intel's recent advances, any claims of certainty about such things are specious.
On the software side, we have the Windows, Ubuntu, and Chrome/Android worlds all pursuing a unified-OS strategy, with Apple being the only major player still invested in a bifurcated OS strategy based on increasingly-subtle distinctions among form factors which continue to become only ever more diverse and overlapping.
Nadella has overturned Ballmer's older bifurcated OS strategy to pursue a vision of "One Windows". This is both exciting and confusing, because it doesn't mean a single version of Windows per se, while it does mean a single API and development tools - some welcome clarification is provided here:
http://www.zdnet.com/article/what-one-w ... nd-doesnt/
So what does all this mean for us LiveCoders?
Hard to say. Back when LiveCode ran their open source campaign on Kickstarter, support for "Windows Mobile" was a stretch goal, so clearly there's interest in pursuing this.
But since then the Windows world has radically changed, and along with it the relative importance of underlying chip architectures has also changed.
The only thing that hasn't changed is that the number of Windows phones remains very small, cited here as 4.2% relative to iOS and Android collectively enjoying 96.3%:
http://www.extremetech.com/mobile/19981 ... en-arrives
So today LiveCode runs well on Windows on laptop, desktops, and convertables, and will for the foreseeable future.
The remaining question is how, or whether, to pursue the Windows Phone market. And for that, in my own opinion, the team's current focus on refining support for the existing mix of OSes LiveCode supports seems a healthy priority, and I trust they'll keep an eye on market share and adjust priorities and things continue to unfold and become a bit more predictable.