BGR’s Zach Epstein has decided that Windows 8 (Microsoft’s unreleased operating system that was recently previewed) is the business, and he happily says so in his article Sorry Apple, Windows 8 ushers in the post-post-PC era. (Grammar pedants will also note the lack of a comma before ‘Apple’, which rather changes the meaning in that sentence, BUT!)

The difference in opinion between Apple and Microsoft is largely down to the line drawn between their operating systems. Apple has iOS for smartphones and tablets and OS X for the desktop. Microsoft instead limits its mobile OS to smartphones and is instead banking on a hybrid of sorts working across tablets, laptops and desktops. It calls this a no-compromise approach, and yet it is a compromise.

With Apple’s iOS kit, developers couldn’t bank on legacy with iOS, so they were forced to adapt applications radically; with Windows 8, ‘standard’ Windows lurks underneath. How many developers will pay scant regard to touch? How many will make the assumption that when you want to do ‘proper’ work, you’ll connect up a mouse and keyboard, and so won’t bother creating anything like iOS apps GarageBand, iA Writer, Brushes, NanoStudio, Numbers, and so on?

Maybe I and like-minded journos are wrong in thinking Microsoft has this arse-about-face and should concentrate on utilising the excellent Metro as a clean-slate for its slates. Epstein certainly seems to think so.

Apple bloggers were apparently so flustered by [Windows 8] that they resorted to bombarding Twitter with jokes about cooling fans and Silverlight instead of stopping for a moment to realize that Microsoft is showing us the future of computing.

The fans thing might have been a jibe, but when you’re banging on about a tablet being able to run Photoshop and Office as-is, you’re not going to be doing that on the kind of hardware that currently exists and is predicted to exist over the next year. One of the true benefits of a tablet is silence—I don’t want a fan inside my tablet. But more to the point, the ‘future of computing’? Really? Even the iPad isn’t the future of computing—it’s the present.

The PC was the future, and it let people perform functions they never thought possible. Then the tablet was the future, and it let people interact with content in ways they never thought possible. Now, the future means all things to all people.

To clarify, then, the future of computing is a mish-mash of the present of computing and the past of computing. OK, got it.

PCs are not going away. They will continue to be the primary means of computing for business and consumers alike. Tablets are not going away, either. They will continue to provide a much more intuitive way to interact with a consumer electronics device. Microsoft’s vision, however, unifies these devices.

And thereby compromises both. Desktop systems won’t work with touch; touch-based interfaces might be OK with a pointer, although they’ll be a bit clunky. Launchpad on OS X Lion is a case in point from the Apple camp.

One platform to rule them all. The technology exists to enable users to carry a single device that is as portable and usable as a tablet, but also as powerful and capable as a PC.

Capable in what sense and to what people? While I still mostly work on my Mac, that’s increasingly out of habit. I can just as easily write on the iPad and I’m more focussed when doing so. Also, most of my recent music ideas have been worked out on the iPad, rather than on the desktop, despite it being more powerful and ‘capable’.

It has a battery that can last all day, but it can also run Photoshop, Excel and Outlook.

This being the mythical ‘weighty tasks do not drain me’ battery, presumably.

It can weigh next to nothing and slip into a slim case, but it can also power two monitors and run proprietary enterprise software.

And it can make toast.

Apple paved the way but Microsoft will get there first with Windows 8. A tablet that can be as fluid and user friendly as the iPad but as capable as a Windows laptop. A tablet that can boot in under 10 seconds and fire up a full-scale version of Adobe Dreamweaver a few moments later. A tablet that can be slipped into a dock to instantly become a fully capable touch-enabled laptop computer. This is Microsoft’s vision with Windows 8, and this is what it will deliver.

Maybe Epstein is right. Perhaps this is what people want. Or maybe it’s what they think they want. But I’d sooner see more companies push boundaries in providing interfaces and systems that help us move on, rather than leaving one foot rooted in interface archetypes that are three decades old and that no longer provide an intuitive means to access and manipulate information. With Windows Phone, I thought I’d seen a new and brave Microsoft, a company willing to try something innovative and exciting. With Windows 8, I see the same company that’s tied to its past, scared to move on, bar adding some gloss to dated conventions.

Much has been said about Apple’s attempts to weld bits of iOS to OS X. Generally, I’d argue that system-wide functionality like autosave is a boon to the desktop, but the iOS-like launcher called Launchpad is just awful. Still, despite nods to iOS, it’s pretty clear Apple still has two operating systems. They are distinct and separate and apps are designed for each, even if they share a name. For example, Numbers exists for Mac and iOS, but the spreadsheet app is hugely tailored for each environment.

Now take a look at PC Pro’s Windows 8 gallery. If you had no idea about Microsoft’s plans for Windows 8, you’d be forgiven for thinking it’s a gallery of two different operating systems—and that’s because it sort of is. Microsoft has smashed its lovely mobile UI into Windows with a brick. The net result is a touch system that will in many cases reveal ‘standard Windows’ underneath. Microsoft argues this is about choice, providing people with the ‘power’ of Windows on tablets, but also a touch UI. It argues it’s a no-compromise approach. I say it’s the result of a company that didn’t have the balls to bet the farm on something truly new, unique and suitable for the future of computing.

Apple got things right with iOS, even if it took a while. Amazingly, Microsoft’s Windows Phone team then not only created something that didn’t rip off iOS, but also sometimes bettered it. But once again a lack of vision and a desire to ‘respect’ legacy is holding Redmond back. What a pity.

AllThingsD:

Apple scored another victory in its patent battle against Samsung today when a German court upheld the preliminary injunction banning sales of the company’s Galaxy 10.1 tablet computer in the country.

“The court is of the opinion that Apple’s minimalistic design isn’t the only technical solution to make a tablet computer, other designs are possible,” Presiding Judge Johanna Brueckner-Hofmann said in her verdict. “For the informed customer there remains the predominant overall impression that the device looks [like the iPad].”

Among my chums on Twitter, opinion is split on the Apple/Samsung spat. Some argue that Samsung is being bullied and that Apple’s design is ‘obvious’ and therefore suing Samsung isn’t fair. I agree with the German court: tablets didn’t look like the iPad before Apple’s device appeared, and now they all do. In the case of Samsung, a bunch of other stuff, such as icons, is almost identical too. I’m not sure Samsung has been trying to ‘trick’ people, but if I had any respect for Samsung I’d have lost it on hearing the company’s statement:

[We] believe that by imposing an injunction based on this very generic design right, this ruling restricts design innovation and progress in the industry.

Copying a successful competitor is not innovation; and if the design is ‘very generic’ why didn’t other companies do it first or simultaneously, rather than many months after Apple?

Mark Bernstein writes that there are always problems. He thinks the Mac and tech press is trying to drum up traffic by running articles critical of Lion. But he thinks the operating system isn’t to blame, and other factors cloud people’s judgment.

Whenever an operating system ships, everybody always runs around in circles to complain about it. Operating systems are big. They interact with everything. And they’re new, so they are a blame magnet. If you have an application bug, people will blame the operating system. If their disk is wearing out, odds are the operating system installation will push it over the edge and they’ll blame the operating system. If their network is wonky, what sort-of worked before might not work how – or might still sort-of work – and either way, some of them will blame the operating system.

And he also blames the press:

I blame a corrupt trade press. The way you get attention and make money – not much money – in this game is to start flame wars, and so “Apple ships lousy operating system! Scroll bars backwards! Apple doomed!” gets links and traffic and sells ads for off-brand iPad cases. And of course some of the financial press try to launch memes to manipulate stock prices – either because they play the market or simply to show what big lever-pullers they are.

I have some sympathy with that viewpoint; too many tech blogs are clamouring for hits rather than offering quality writing, and much of this comes from Apple rumours and anti-Apple sentiment. But there’s a nugget of truth in the Lion blame game. I cannot remember an Apple OS so buggy since the very early days of Mac OS X. I’ve certainly had way more problems in OS X Lion than in Snow Leopard, Leopard and Tiger. Apps crash far more regularly (mostly those that utilise the new auto-save feature), my Wi-Fi network that was fine under Snow Leopard absolutely refused to work using the same settings under Lion, and I’ve seen a ton of interface glitches, most notably with Save dialogs randomly getting really messed up and printing buttons and menus in the wrong place.

Of course, as Bernstein states, other factors could be at play here. For the first time, I installed a new OS over an old one, so perhaps there are clashes; although in my defence, this is how Apple wants people to install Lion by default. Perhaps my Wi-Fi network was screwy anyway, and Lion merely finally broke it. But I’m seeing too many issues, too many bugs, to suggest this is anything more than an OS that doesn’t have quite the same level of care that Apple usually enforces. None of the bugs have stopped me from using Lion and I certainly don’t plan to revert. But when TextEdit and Numbers crash for the nth time—despite neither app having crashed even once during my using them with Snow Leopard—that sets off alarm bells about the state of the system itself, rather than the state of tech journalism.

Hat tip: Daring Fireball.

Back in May, I wrote a quickfire review of sorts of the iCADE, a little arcade cabinet for the iPad. Around the same time, I also turned down two commissions to review the hardware for British magazines, primarily because I believed at the time that the hardware wasn’t reviewable in the traditional sense—the lack of support by third parties meant it was impossible to rate. The hardware was solid, but the only game at the time you could use with it was the mediocre Atari’s Greatest Hits; making that car crash about 20 per cent better certainly wasn’t worth a 75 quid investment, and yet it seemed wrong to massively downrate great new hardware due to poor support.

iCADE support has since grown, albeit slowly. But it was interesting that when I recently interviewed a bunch of major publishers involved in retro-gaming, they remained utterly tight-lipped about iCADE plans. To my mind, it would make perfect sense for Taito, Namco, Capcom and others to support the hardware, but what we’ve instead seen is a handful of indie developers quietly adding iCADE support to their apps. I no longer have an iCADE to hand, but I imagine that mini cabinet with Mos Speedrun or Minotron is probably a great pairing.

What’s most curious, however, is the lack of support from majors might be down to them working on their own systems. TouchArcade last week reported on Atari’s own stick, which strikes me as an odd idea—it’s portrait only (many of Atari’s games aren’t, nor are many of the apps that support iCADE), and a good chunk of the games in Atari’s compilation weren’t originally designed for joystick control, which is part of the reason they never really clicked for me with the iCADE. And earlier today, developer Stuart Carnie linked through to the iNVADERCADE, which looks like a tiny arcade cabinet for playing Taito’s rather poor iPad version of Space Invaders (which scales up the iPhone release in a lazy manner). It’s unclear from the video on the site whether other games will be supported, but even so, as developer Paul Pridham asked:

Is the iPad controller market that lucrative?

I doubt it is, and I very much agree with Carnie’s reply:

I would think one general purpose controller would be ideal. There is no standard SDK by Apple = fragmentation

I’m not really convinced at all by the need for physical controls for iOS games, because the best developers have gotten past that limitation, but I can see there’s a certain niche appeal regarding a ‘traditional’ controller, especially one as cute as the iCADE. What I don’t understand is individual developers releasing ones for their own games, fragmenting an already tiny market, rather than seeking to support a product that already exists and is already generally liked by those who’ve used it. I’d quite like an iCADE, especially if more games supported it; but the last thing I need on my desk is a little row of iPad games controllers, each one only working with a tiny number of titles.