MS really isn't making it easy for developers sometimes

[oion]

Haha, it's impossible to print in iOS. iOS is so locked down, you can't do anything that's real productive in there. The only reason iOS is so popular is because of the apple brand and Apple has spent a billion dollars training people to think of tablets as for fun and games only.

I'm a field engineer managing constructions. We used to have to carry very large 3,000+ page documents around with us for references. Every agency has their own rules and regulations. Nowadays, I just carry around my windows tablet. The other engineers are catching up. They're doing the same thing. But when other people look at us, they just assume we're carrying those tablets around for fun and games. Because of Apple's campaign against mobile productivity, people can't imagine a tablet being good for anything else but fun and games.

Android is better because you can "share" your documents with something like printer-share. There used to be a lack of drivers for the printer-share app. It's a lot better now. I haven't had a problem with it. so, when I want my android app to print, all I gotta do is add a share feature to it and the user can point it to printer-share. Simple.

Windows 8 metro is, of course, the most complete. But again, it is so complete that the development behind the apps are geared toward large companies while leaving indie devs like myself out in the cold. That's why indie devs are hesitating to come over to windows 8 development. MS needs to realize that if they want more quality apps in the winstore and not just crap-apps, they need to make it easier for us indie devs to write out quality apps for them. And making the print protocol 200+ lines long is not easier.

Per bolded, that reminds me of a very critical editorial against Surface. The argument was that "tablets are for media consumption, duh." ...Uh, because previous tablets were not created for productivity, ergo that's all they were good for, but that doesn't mean tablets can't be manufactured for productivity in various sectors. (That was a pretty stupid author.)

According to this article, you can print from any Metro app using the charm. That sounds like an end-user solution; does there really have to be a lot of dev intervention?

 

[ChemCat]

According to this article, you can print from any Metro app using the charm. That sounds like an end-user solution; does there really have to be a lot of dev intervention?

You have no idea. Never ever use cnet or any other tech media articles for programming references. Let me be blunt. These tech media people are programming dummies. They don't know anything about it.

The 200+ lines of code I was telling you about to print, that's what it takes to pass the info over to the charms bar to print. To reiterate, it takes 200+ lines of code to pass a string of "hello world" text to the print option in the charms bar to print "hello world". There is no way around it.

So, yes, it's not as simple as swiping from the right. Lots of dev intervention to make it work.

 

[ChemCat]

By the way, did you read the comments on the article you linked to? Plenty of people complaining about not being able to print properly with their apps. Like one person complained that he/she couldn't print multiple pages off of her cook book. Only the first page.

See? I'm not the only one having trouble implementing the printing protocol in metro. These apps are written by software companies, and even they have trouble implementing it correctly.

Added by edit.

By the way, a comment on there complained not being able to print by ctrl+alt+P. That's a good idea. I'll implement that in my next update.

 

[oion]

By the way, did you read the comments on the article you linked to? Plenty of people complaining about not being able to print properly with their apps. Like one person complained that he/she couldn't print multiple pages off of her cook book. Only the first page.

See? I'm not the only one having trouble implementing the printing protocol in metro. These apps are written by software companies, and even they have trouble implementing it correctly.

Added by edit.

By the way, a comment on there complained not being able to print by ctrl+alt+P. That's a good idea. I'll implement that in my next update.

I don't normally see comments to articles (the vast majority of times, article comments are pointless) because I surf with Javascript/iframes disabled, among other things. Most times when users post problems whether in article comments or reviews like on Amazon, they usually leave out all sorts of important information for any diagnosis of where the problem actually is. Was that cookbook printed successfully before? What app was it? Was it a protected file where only limited pages could be printed anyway? So on.

 

[ChemCat]

I don't normally see comments to articles (the vast majority of times, article comments are pointless) because I surf with Javascript/iframes disabled, among other things. Most times when users post problems whether in article comments or reviews like on Amazon, they usually leave out all sorts of important information for any diagnosis of where the problem actually is. Was that cookbook printed successfully before? What app was it? Was it a protected file where only limited pages could be printed anyway? So on.

Don't know. Someone just said his/her cookbook app wouldn't print more than the first page. Someone else complained ctr+alt+P didn't work. Just a whole bunch of comments by people complaining their apps wouldn't print.

Just start using random free apps in the winstore. Try to print from them. Almost all of them didn't have a print option even if you swipe from the right to open the charms.

Like I said, it is complicated enough that most devs don't even bother with it. And everytime someone brings it up, there's always an MS person giving us the links to documentations that are only helpful to whole teams of devs. I would really love to see these MS people actually try to implement those documentations in their own apps. See what I mean. Again, printing protocol shouldn't take 200+ lines of code to execute. Printing is the most basic part of any system. What good is a productivity app if you can't print out the result? Why make it a stumbling block to indie devs by complicating the most common part of a productivity app?

 

[TeknoBlast]

What, people still print?