goodintentions
Active Member
- Joined
- Aug 2, 2013
You know how people have been complaining that quality apps are few in numbers in the windows 8 winstore? Well, I've been trying to help MS out by porting some of my quality apps over to windows 8.
I've recently ported one of my more useful apps into the metro interface. The app itself is used by both students and professional chemists. A big part of it is it has to be able to print. So, no biggie, right?
Over in the desktop version of it, the printing protocol takes 4 lines of code. That's it. I started earlier today thinking it would be somewhat comparable if not the same. Nope. Nothing from the desktop side worked with the metro codes. So, I began to search online for tutorials on how to write a simple printing protocol. Seems like every developer has been complaining about this. It's too damn hard! MS's sample app on printing is extremely confusing and pretty much useless to me. I finally found a blogger that made enough sense for me to follow. His way to do printing in a metro app took 130 lines of code!
After I successfully get it to print, I realized that his code only worked with 1 page. If there are more than 1 page, the app would crash. So, I had to change his codes and put in an extra subroutine. The result was a whopping 200 lines of code.
200 lines of code to print out a damn document. The desktop version took 4 lines of code to do the same.
That took me a total of 5 hours to add a simple printing protocol to my metro app. I was kinda pissed by this point, so I went online to see if other people have complained about this. Yup, there are plenty of developers who just simply gave up because it would take too much time to do something so simple.
Now, you guys know why there aren't as many quality apps in the MS winstore as there should be. 200 lines of codes just to print out a document without the app crashing.
If MS wants more quality apps in the winstore, they need to remove these stumbling blocks for us developers. That's 5 hours I could have spent on adding more features to my metro app.
I've recently ported one of my more useful apps into the metro interface. The app itself is used by both students and professional chemists. A big part of it is it has to be able to print. So, no biggie, right?
Over in the desktop version of it, the printing protocol takes 4 lines of code. That's it. I started earlier today thinking it would be somewhat comparable if not the same. Nope. Nothing from the desktop side worked with the metro codes. So, I began to search online for tutorials on how to write a simple printing protocol. Seems like every developer has been complaining about this. It's too damn hard! MS's sample app on printing is extremely confusing and pretty much useless to me. I finally found a blogger that made enough sense for me to follow. His way to do printing in a metro app took 130 lines of code!
After I successfully get it to print, I realized that his code only worked with 1 page. If there are more than 1 page, the app would crash. So, I had to change his codes and put in an extra subroutine. The result was a whopping 200 lines of code.
200 lines of code to print out a damn document. The desktop version took 4 lines of code to do the same.
That took me a total of 5 hours to add a simple printing protocol to my metro app. I was kinda pissed by this point, so I went online to see if other people have complained about this. Yup, there are plenty of developers who just simply gave up because it would take too much time to do something so simple.
Now, you guys know why there aren't as many quality apps in the MS winstore as there should be. 200 lines of codes just to print out a document without the app crashing.
If MS wants more quality apps in the winstore, they need to remove these stumbling blocks for us developers. That's 5 hours I could have spent on adding more features to my metro app.