Microsoft has definitely had its work cut out since the launch of Windows 10, with some promising and bold developer features such as its Universal Windows App platform. One component that the company is banking on is the ability to bridge apps from different platforms to work on Windows 10. These “bridges” are still in development, although a developer has recently published a video giving us a taste of what to expect from the Windows Bridge for iOS tool, which is published on GitHub as an open-source project.
David Burela gives a surprisingly quick hands-on of the process, converting an open-source iOS game Canabalt to Windows 10 in just under five minutes.
After downloading and extracting the bridge and the game’s source code, he imports the code into Visual Studio which builds and launches the game. It appears to run flawlessly with correct resizing, sound, click events, and even touchscreen support with supported hardware. Burela even makes a small alteration to some text in the credits, showing just how quick and easy it is to make changes to the Objective C code that translate to the Windows 10 app.
The game is fairly simple, and while not every app will be as easy to port, it does show just how far Microsoft has gotten with the bridge tool, and the efforts being made to make the process as simple as possible. Meanwhile, the Android bridge tool, which the company showed off last year, has been put on pause due to setbacks with development.
Source: David Burela via Pocketnow