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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Speech_API
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.
https://www.codeproject.com/Articles/1609/Converting-Text-To...
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.
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.
[1](https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/08/micro...) [2] https://archive.ledfrog.com/2011/06/microsoft-zune-software-...
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.?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Windows_Platform_app...
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....
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... :)
(Although Comic Chat was pretty cool, with all those Jim Woodring characters and backgrounds, and the emotional pie menu.)
http://www.mermeliz.com/files/mschat_summary.htm
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?
http://www.jimwoodring.com/artwork/gallery
You lucky bastard!
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!
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 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.
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.
QuickTime Wired Sprites.
http://www.itg.yale.edu/2008/03/28/quicktime-media-skins-and...
ScriptX.
Apple Media Tool.
Sk8.
Gestalt Manager.
Code Fragment Manager.
Now where did I put those Abandoned Apple API BINGO cards???
The best that could be said for most of Apple's file systems is that at least they didn't murder your wife.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Comparison_of_fil...
It was barely dogfooded at all by Microsoft themselves and the future we got instead was the bland, inferior “Metro” experience.
WPF was used in Visual Studio.
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.)
And why is it "was"; does VS now not use WPF?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Expression_Studio
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
[1] - https://github.com/Microsoft/dotnet-framework-early-access/b...
[2] - https://www.microsoft.com/getsilverlight/locale/en-us/html/M...
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).
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.