App developers should adopt the Moore-is-less principle

Programmer Chris Boss has contributed some intriguing BetaNews commentaries and analyses about the state of application development and as well Windows 8. Some readers call him old-fashioned, for his views on developing software. I disagree. Chris is new-fashioned, and this old dog could teach you young pups some new tricks.

Right now, the sudden surge in cloud-connected device sales has put Moore's Law in reverse. Newer computing products have less processing power, smaller storage capacity and tinier displays than PCs. Big is out. Small is in. This is true as much for notebooks -- particularly the new class of ultrabooks -- as smartphones or tablets. The trend affects Windows developers as much as those creating apps for, say, Android or iOS.

Meanwhile, smartphone and tablet shipments are way up, and they drag down PC sales in many markets. "Major trends in client computing have shifted the market away from a focus on personal computers to a broader device perspective that includes smartphones, tablets and other consumer devices", Steve Kleynhans, Gartner innovation vice president, says. The firm predicts that the cloud will replace the PC as most peoples' personal content hub by 2016.

The increasing popularity of smaller devices

The increasing popularity of smaller devices, even laptops, puts Moore's Law in reverse -- and that's a trend likely to last for several years. Hell, Microsoft champions it, by touting the value of ultrabooks over other laptops and developing Windows on ARM. Right away, Moore is less.

The trend is in no way whatsoever new. The first laptops lagged behind desktop PCs, in terms of processor, graphics and storage. At that time about three years ago along came netbooks, which while their brief surge accounted for about 10 percent of PC shipments. Since, tablets have largely pushed aside netbooks, however their computing processing, graphics and storage capabilities are about the same -- or less. Each category shares other attributes: smaller physical size, tinier displays, cloud connectivity, nearly-instant on capability and less of everything compared to PC desktops or notebooks.

Storage capacity is moving in reverse, an accelerating trend as smartphone and tablet sales accelerate and newer laptops use solid-state disks. Sure, you can buy a laptop with beefy 500GB or 750GB hard drive however that svelte ultrabook is more likely to have a puny, yet more efficient, SSD. For instance, Best Buy sells 13 different ultrabooks, 11 of which come with SSDs-only. Five pack 128GB storage, during the others have either 240GB or 256GB solid-state disks.

Globally, SSD revenue grew 105 percent year over year in 2011 -- to $5 billion from $2.4 billion, according to IDC, which predicts 51 percent compound annual growth rate through 2015. "The increasing use of flash in enterprise solutions, explosive growth of mobile client devices, and lower SSD pricing is creating a perfect storm for increased SSD shipments and revenue over our forecast", Jeff Janukowicz, IDC innovation director, says. The analyst firm expects SSD prices to fall to $1 a gigabyte by second half of this year, increasing adoption in PCs.

Meanwhile, solid-sate storage with even smaller capacities is standard among smartphones and tablets. iSuppli predicts that NAND flash in media tablets will rise from 1.6 billion gigabytes last year to 16.3 billion gigabytes by 2015. Media tablets share of NAND shipments will rise from 9 percent to 17 percent while the time period. The analyst firm expects iPad to consume the most NAND flash, with 72 percent market share, this year.

"Apple's continued domination of the sales of NAND flash for media tablets reflects not only the iPad's commanding market share lead, nevertheless its extensive memory usage" Dee Nguyen, iSuppli analyst, says. "In keeping with its status as a high-end offering in the tablet market, the iPad employs a larger density of NAND than its competitors. Because of this, Apple's iPad will continue to drive the growth of NAND sales in the tablet market for the then and there several years".

Solid-stage storage capacity on tablets is considerably less than ultrabooks or other laptops. iPad offers 16GB, 32GB or 64GB capacity, during most Androids top out at 32GB; a few come with more or micro-SD slots for storage expansion.

As storage decreases, need for more of it exceeds Moore's Law by several fold. Content isn't getting smaller nevertheless increasingly bigger, as people use more HD-capable cameras and camcorders. Already, more photos are taken with phones, many packing 5-megapixel cameras or better, than point-and-shoot digicams. That bloated, 500MB app on the spur of the moment is a storage burden when vacation photos and videos consume gigabytes on a 64GB or 128GB drive. Apps need to make room for content, which matters more to users.

Platform providers and developers cannot sustain the same approach to creating applications, as processing power, storage capacity and device and screen sizes decrease. Apple had the right idea with the App Store in 2008. Others followed suit, with Android and Windows Phone markets as leading examples. Mobile apps tend to be smaller, tighter -- and, granted, not necessarily as feature-filled as desktop counterparts. Apple's iPhoto for the Mac is a 725MB download, compared to 106MB -- nevertheless, pretty hefty -- for iPad; they sell for $14.99 and $4.99, respectively. Adobe Photoshop CS 5.1 Extended is 1.5GB, compared to 50.2MB for Photoshop Touch for iPad; they sell for $999 and $9.99, respectively.

The potential volumes are considerably higher

The potential volumes are considerably higher, too. IDC forecasts smartphone shipments to exceed 1 billion units by 2015, for instance. However there is plenty of possibility now. "In December 2011, 47.6 percent of the total mobile audience in the US used apps, an increase of 13.3 percentage points", according to comScore's "2012 Mobile Future in Focus" report. "In Europe, 38.2 percent of the total mobile audience accessed mobile media via application, up 10.1 percentage points". More:

Smaller apps for a larger range of devices -- and, for now, packing less oomph than PCs -- is the foreseeable future. Developers creating mobile apps are there today, in some cases because the platforms demand it. That's not so for Windows, where big is a motto only Texas can match. To embrace the future, which partly is Microsoft "re-imagining" the OS for touch and tablets, developers must start thinking Moore is less -- or less is more, if you like. That includes, Microsoft.

If the principles of writing efficient software we learned years ago were implimented when writing software for today's Windows tablet computers, I think "fast and fluid" would anyway be the norm...

Today, Intel Atom CPU's are regularly criticised as being too slow, lacking power. Windows tablets as a rule come with an Atom CPU. Nevertheless it is programmers who are most likely to make this criticism. Why? Because their software runs too slow on these CPUs. Yet the problem is not the CPUs, nevertheless the software. A so then-written WIN32 application can run very fast even on the Atom CPU.

He makes a good point. Windows developers can produce leaner software, and Windows Store gives them a means of doing so profitably. Microsoft puts the apps right in front of clients, inside Windows 8, and the possibility to sell more apps for less.