Newsletter Archives

• That “new” Office app? There’s less – and more – than meets the eye

  Posted on December 19, 2018 at 11:23 CST by woody • Comment in the Forums

  Microsoft blogland is abuzz with news about a new! improved! Office app for Windows 10 called, doh, Office.

  MS 365 VP Jared Spataro just posted:

  Last year, we updated Office.com with a new experience focused on two simple things: helping users get the most out of Office and getting them back into their work quickly. The streamlined site has clearly resonated with customers, and now more than 40 percent of Office 365 web users start their work by visiting Office.com.

  Starting today, we’re bringing this experience to Windows 10 in the form of an app, simply called Office. It’s now available to Windows Insiders (Fast) and will roll out to all Windows 10 users soon. The app itself is free and it can be used with any Office 365 subscription, Office 2019, Office 2016, or Office Online—the free web-based version of Office for consumers.

  The announcement goes on to say that you’ll be able to use this new app to, basically, do everything you can do right now pretty easily with OneDrive and the Office.com portal.

  But there’s one thing the announcement doesn’t mention. Mary Jo Foley explains that this new Office (there must be two dozen things running around called “Office”) is, in fact, a Progressive Web App. Which is pretty cool. Not a UWP (“Metro” “Windows Store”) app, but a real, live presumably working PWA.

  The future is coming fast.

  Office News Office, Progressive Web App

• Universal Windows Programs (“Metro apps”) aren’t dead yet, but there’s a better alternative on the horizon

  Posted on February 6, 2018 at 11:56 CST by woody • Comment in the Forums

  Microsoft just announced that it’s going to start building Progressive Web App support into Edge and Win10.

  Progressive Web Apps aren’t so much Google’s much-better alternative to Win10-only Universal Windows Programs (formerly known as “Metro apps” or “Universal apps” or “Windows Store Apps” or any of a half-dozen other monikers) as they are a genuine attempt to make browser-based applications look and feel more like regular ol’ apps.

  Chances are very good you’ve never seen a PWA in action. But they’re definitely coming. At some point.

  The theoretical benefits of PWAs over UWPs are enormous. Just for starters, UWPs can only run in the stripped-down Win10 environment. PWAs, on the other hand, should be able to run on just about anything that supports a browser — particularly Chrome, or ChromeOS. Yeah, that includes Chromebooks, at least at some point.

  The browser requirement has vanished in the past couple of years, banking on a concept called service worker. Horrible name, but web folks are good at horrible names. Paul Thurrott described service workers months ago:

  Google’s initial take on PWAs wasn’t that compelling: The full resources of Chrome needed to load each time a PWA ran, and there was no minimal user interface or runtime. But when Google introduced the notion of service worker, the technological core of what we now know as PWAs, it was a big differentiator. With service workers, PWAs could work like native apps, offering features like offline support, background processing, and more.

  It now looks to me as if there’s going to be a headlong dash into developing PWAs — and that UWP’s days are numbered. Time will tell.

  UPDATE: Mary Jo Foley has a calendar for future developments in Microsoft’s side of the PWA wars, in her ZDNet blog.

  Uncategorized Chrome, ChromeOS, Progressive Web App, service worker, UWP