In case you missed the recent Embedded Systems Conference in San Francisco, WindowsForDevices presents a virtual tour down Microsoft’s embedded “Device Alley,” showcasing a wide range of next-generation cool gadgets and smart, connected devices that incorporate the company’s embedded software platforms including Windows CE .NET and Windows XP Embedded. The slide show includes over 80 devices ranging from PDAs to set-top boxes, robots, and even a sewing machine.
A virtual tour of Microsoft’s embedded “Device Alley”
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Interesting, but a lot is not new (or rather – it is new, for WinCE / eXP). For example the settopbox that proclaims ‘you will be able to do home banking and watch video at the same time’. We built one of those in 1996…
HTTP is stateless – HTML-GUI based settopboxes do quite well at creating small packet storms on the network when exchanging tickets (content authorization), non-visible data, and GUI elements. HTML was seen as the godsend replacement to custom GUI design using C and toolkits such as OpenTV or PowerTV which took time to develop and have terrible debugging/test environments. While it works now, I don’t think Javascript/HTML has much of a future on these devices, and creating a complex frontend is just as big a nightmare to maintain in the end as the ‘old’ stuff.