Christopher wrote:
> I'm not a MS basher...in fact, I prefer WinXp to just about=20
> any OS...but WinCE (PocketPC) is HORRIBLE and slow. It is=20
> AMAZINGLY counter-intuitive...it's like MS did tremendous=20
> market research to find out how people do their everyday=20
> tasks and then instructed their software engineers to do the=20
> exact opposite.
It does seem that way, doesn't it. I don't have a lot of
experience with WinCE 3.0, but I used to program on WinCE 2.0 so I'm
familiar with a lot of the internals and design philosophy. As far as I
can figure, the WinCE folks wanted a personal document viewer that
supports limited editing. The default apps you get are oriented towards
syncing documents (MS Office documents, that is), syncing email, and
mobile web browsing. You can edit your documents, but it's painful
enough that you can tell no one expected people to actually do this. The
whole rich suite of organizational and note taking apps that we're used
to on the Newton just aren't there in the way we expect. It's a
different device oriented towards a different sort of user.
It's kind of sad, really. Underneath all of that is a fairly
decent little OS with a nice database-like "filesystem" reminiscent of
the Newtons storage system. It's just all covered up with this crap.
It is possible to write fast WinCE applications, by the way. The
slowness comes from either the scale of the application (Word on a SH3
processor with 16MB of RAM?), or the fat libraries they link to (you can
get WinCE versions of the MFC and VB DLLs. Tell me those aren't going to
bloat out a WinCE application...). If an application writer makes an
attempt to stay small, and sticks with the Win32 API, they can turn out
a fast application. I ported a full HP48 emulator to WinCE 2.0, and it
ran like a champ.
Jim Anderson
Evil Overlord Rule 190:
If my mad scientist/wizard tells me he has almost perfected my
Superweapon but it still needs more testing, I will wait for him to
complete the tests. No one ever conquered the world using a beta
version.
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