Microsoft's SmartGlass For Android Reviewed

An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft has released their much anticipated SmartGlass application for Android, allowing the Linux-based mobile OS to act as an input device for their Xbox 360 game console. While the app has its share of annoying problems, it does offer a glimpse into a possible future where consumer electronics are no longer crippled by the artificial barriers of manufacturer or operating system."

Re:Um Linux?

[Garridan]

Barriers are not "artificially created" between operating systems. Different operating systems have different APIs, different underlying assumptions, etc., so most barriers between them are very real and difficult to break down, often costing thousands of developer hours. And even then, nothing is guaranteed to work.

Re:Um Linux?

[aaaaaaargh!]

You've got to be kidding me.

Microsoft has been actively fighting for more than a decade by all means, both technically and legally, technologies such as Java in order to make multi-platform development as difficult as possible. The whole idea of .NET was to make it harder to port programs while making it easy to develop for one platform. Apple does the same by tying developers to their toolchain and making it hard to develop with anything else than Objective-C+Cocoa. (Not to speak of various lawsuits.)

Does the word "application barrier" not ring a bell at all? Of course it's intentional. Everybody knows that since the mid 90s. It is not hard at all to overcome low-level API inconsistencies, every cross-platform abstraction layer does that. The reason why all of these libraries are incomplete or create problems is economical not technological. If the big players had worked together rather than against each other, you could today write any application once and run it on every PC, every Mac, every smart phone, your browser and probably also your mom's toaster.