Ask Paul: May 28 (Premium)

With five weeks of travel behind me, I can finally enjoy a quiet weekend at home. So let’s get it kicked off early with some great reader questions.

Best and worst, more

bschnatt asks:

What was your best travel experience? Worst?

Hm. Travel is a lot like live music, it’s rarely bad. And we’ve had so many positive travel experiences that I feel like that has kind of fed on itself and reinforced our love of travel. I was lucky as a kid to spend two summers in Washington D.C., and I think that’s what set this off for me in the first place.

I have specific stories, of course. But more generally, I think of my best (in-) travel experiences as those where everything went great, and the worst are those where everything went wrong. Getting to the airport, being at the airport, waiting to board, the whole experience until the plane actually leaves the ground is terrible for me because there is any number of things that could go wrong at any time. Every once in a while, everything is great, and very rarely I’ve had upgraded seats—business class or first class—that just makes the experience less stressful. I can’t afford to pay for that kind of thing, so it only happens every so often.

Favorite travel city? Worst?

Paris is my favorite city on earth, period, but I really like Barcelona as well. Lisbon, Berlin, London, and Washington D.C. are all high on my list as well.

I don’t really have a worst entry. I can’t say Rome was the worst, for example, though it was underwhelming compared to the other capitals of Europe, and I got pickpocketed (of almost nothing). But we still want to go back and perhaps give it a fairer shake. I guess travel is like laptop reviews: I tend to skip the things I think will be bad and agree to the ones that seem interesting.

Have you ever done any 3D modeling with the likes of Blender, Maya, etc? (I very briefly used Cinema3D(?) on the Amiga to animate a space shuttle model I bought, but then got sidetracked. I thought about going to Full Sail University to get formal training, but got sidetracked from that too. Hmmm…)

No, never.

The request: I was hoping you could do a whole series on Flutter (and I think you mentioned something about wanting to do that). Any update on that?

Not yet. I’m still trying to figure out what’s next for a programming series, and deciding on the language/framework is obviously a key part of that. Flutter is at the top of that list right now, however. And I’m thinking about JavaScript/React as well, maybe Project Reunion at some point as well, and MAUI if it shapes up nicely.

The futurist

erichk asks:

Paul, have you heard of Ray Kurzweil, and if so, what do you think of his predictions? Many of his have come true, but the ones he makes for the next several decades blow my mind, like the ones he makes about artificial intelligence.

I have heard of Ray Kurzweil, but I can’t say I’m a devotee or whatever. I have a friend who went through a “Singularity” phase, which I think is common among the tech obsessed, and he couldn’t stop blathering about this for at least half a year. I’ll be living in a compound in the woods with no technology when that comes. 🙂

Build 2021

anoldamigauser asks:

Did you see anything at Build that impressed you? I had high hopes for project reunion, but they seemed to get all excited about making Win32 calls in code for UWP apps, which just brought back memories of having to do the same at times in VB. It did not seem like progress. Blazor looks interesting, but I have thought that for a while. I should probably just dive in.

No, not really. As I wrote in The Future of Windows App Development is Getting Clearer (Premium), which, granted, literally only concerns Windows client app development, there was no big news, just milestones on the path towards .NET 6, MAUI, and Project Reunion. And I’m not super-interested in most of the other top-level topics at Build this year—Azure, cloud services, AI, etc.—so my favorite show is getting less interesting (to me) over time. It’s just the way of things, I guess.

Do you think that Windows 10X may have run into copyright issues, and would that have been one of the reasons they shelved it?

I assume you mean because it looks almost exactly like Chrome OS? I suppose that’s possible, but Chrome OS looked almost exactly like Windows 7 for several years there, and it’s not a big leap from that UI to where it is so, so Microsoft might have argued that any simplification of the Windows 7-style desktop UI could probably end up in nearly the same place anyway. They’re both working with the same basic UI bits.

Mobile vs. desktop

hrlngrv asks:

You may not be able to willing to answer this, but over the course of a typical week, do more visitors to this site access it from PCs or from phones? Just curious.

This probably confuses some people, but I had to ask to find out. I literally have no insight into any usage metrics—visitors, page views, etc.—for the site, and I really don’t even care. I just show up each day and do my thing.

But to answer your question, what I was told is that almost exactly two-thirds of visitors to Thurrott.com are on smartphones, and one-third are on desktop. A very small percentage—less than 5 percent—are on tablets.

The next thing that Microsoft never finishes

will asks:

Stop me if you have heard this before, but is there a possibility that the Sun Valley update or UI changes coming to Windows will have the tag line that “This is an evolving direction…” or something similar? Meaning this will be something Microsoft starts, has some minor updates over time, never really finishes, and in a few years moves on to the next thing?

I answered this one with “History certainly supports this possibility” in the comments because I didn’t realize it was part of Ask Paul.

I’ll leave that there, and just add that it’s reasonable to assume that Sun Valley is essentially a top-level design change and that some legacy UIs will remain after it’s done, similar to how Windows 10 looks today. It’s less likely that Microsoft will make deeper changes, and highly unlikely/impossible that it ever make Windows truly consistent. This is that corporate culture thing we talk about, where Microsoft employees are rewarded for doing something new, not for fixing something old.

New books and podcasts

j5 asks:

Paul, been a while since you’ve recommended a podcast and book. So what are some podcasts you’ve been listening to lately? And what are some books you’ve recently read? Thanks!

There’s not much new on the podcast front, as I’m pretty much jumping in when there are interesting episodes of shows I’ve been subscribed to for a long time, for the most part. I listen selectively to .NET Rocks, American Scandal, Behind the Tech with Kevin Scott, How Did This Get Made?, Rolling Stone Music Now, and Run As Radio. And I listen to a Van Halen podcast, Dave & Dave Unchained, whenever there’s a new episode. I kind of flit in and out of other podcasts to see if there’s anything interesting, but nothing else has really stuck.

My most recent audiobooks—at least the ones I finished and can recommend—are Blood, Sweat, and Pixels: The Triumphant, Turbulent Stories Behind How Video Games Are Made by Jason Schreier, A Better Life for Half the Price – 2nd Edition: How to Thrive on Less Money in the Cheapest Places to Live by Tim Leffel, Later by Stephen King, Deviant: The Shocking True Story of Ed Gein, the Original “Psycho” by Harold Schechter (and narrated by R.C. Bray!), and Goldeneye: Where Bond Was Born: Ian Fleming’s Jamaica by Matthew Parker.

My most recent Kindle ebooks (same qualifications) are 2010: Odyssey Two by Arthur C. Clark, Ringworld by Larry Niven, Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire by Brad Stone, My Little Town: A Pilgrim’s Portrait of a Uniquely Southern Place by David Tipmore and Frank C. Williams, Liberty: Life, Billy and the Pursuit of Happiness by Liberty DeVitto, and Fodor’s Inside Mexico City (Full-color Travel Guide).

Chrome OS compete

christianwilson asks:

In light of the 10X news, I have come to the realization that Windows just needs to be Windows, boring as that may be to some. Despite that, I really wanted to see a ChromeOS-like experience centered around Microsoft 365 services on the market. I know 10X was not going to be that, either. Not exactly. But it was in the ballpark.

I agree. And I also agree that Microsoft needs an effective competitor to Chrome OS. Effective, in this case, meaning something that offers the same benefits as Chrome OS—simplicity, low resource requirements, security, etc.—and, ideally, some advantages. I was never really blown away by the user interface that Microsoft came up with for Windows 10X, but I did/do still think that a “Chrome OS without the Google” is something a lot of educational institutions, businesses, and consumers might want.

I may be wrong about this, but I do feel like there is a need/want for a ChromeOS competitor. It doesn’t need to come from Microsoft, but they do have a whole suite of services to prop it up and relationships with all the top computer manufacturers to give such a product a real chance. Would Microsoft have more success making a new OS (even if it did run the Windows kernel at its core) and calling it something entirely different than Windows? I know EdgeOS has come up in the past, just to give an example.

The first Windows 10X leaks seemed to hint at an Edge OS-like system running on EdgeBooks, which I still think is an interesting idea. Honestly, the whole Windows 10X architecture—core support for UWP and web apps and Win32 apps in a container—is interesting. And why can’t that be applied to stock Windows 10 (assuming the Win32 container compatibility and performance issues are fixed), along with a simpler UI option?

Windows 10 on ARM slots into this conversation, too, I think. Even though Windows 10X was Intel-based, Microsoft was obviously also creating ARM versions of this system as well, and some future, “containerized” version of Windows 10 would make a lot of sense for a Chromebook-like system: Win32 would be optional (and handled via a container) and that system could be pretty lightweight.

The problem is that WOA has been positioned as an equal to a Core i5 or whatever when it’s not. This system would make more sense for lower-end PCs, assuming the component prices matched. Which they don’t.