Contracts are a very interesting idea security-wise.
Traditionally you go through a file system or the Internet where apps can access anything, and so you get Android-style permissions that everyone ignores.
With contracts, you go through the user's already-necessary actions, and (I don't know about Windows 8's implementation, but it's definitely possible) you get exactly what you need, no more and no less.
Capability-based security is finally going mainstream.
Yeah, its an interesting way of ensuring security (apps only share out information they want to share) and cross-app compatibility (any platform can now support sharing of simple data from any other platform, without needing to use custom app API's)
Yeah this is really interesting, I can see some really cool possibilities for media applications depending on how it's implemented and what sort of data transfer latency the contracts incur.
This looks like a really neat interface. I know it's just a developer preview, but the article left me with a few big questions:
- Is this going to be the interface on all Windows 8 variants (desktop, tablet, professional & home - or whatever those last two are called now)?
- If this interface _is_ being marketed to enterprise customers as well, has Microsoft demonstrated any clever ways it will work for them? It all looks fairly home-centric at the moment.
- How do legacy Windows apps run in this environment? I run a tiling WM on my Debian laptop and I spend a lot of my time tweaking regular apps so they'll look OK in a non-traditional layout. Is there going to be some equivalent of 7's Windows XP Mode that switches you to a different desktop?
- Microsoft have not yet revealed what SKUs they will ship for Win8, but they have said the home screen on all versions will be this Metro interface
- Clearly it will be marketed to them.
- In the home screen, there is a desktop tile. Select this and you get the Windows desktop as you'd expect where everything will run normally. It does not switch you to a VM or anything like that.
I imagine touch interfaces will become prolific enough and touch screens cheap enough that all laptops will eventually have touch screens, even if it is only a tertiary form of input.
Traditionally you go through a file system or the Internet where apps can access anything, and so you get Android-style permissions that everyone ignores.
With contracts, you go through the user's already-necessary actions, and (I don't know about Windows 8's implementation, but it's definitely possible) you get exactly what you need, no more and no less.
Capability-based security is finally going mainstream.