Friday, November 7. 2008

Windows 7 Location API: No "By App" Control

The big news last week was Microsoft's Professional Developer's Conference (PDC). That event, I learned via TWIT, is typically held a full year before regular folks will see a new operating system from the company. This year the event focused on Windows 7 (desktop ) and Azure (cloud computing).

This week in LA is an event called Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC), an event focused on the hardware side. C|net reports from there on the implementation of the location API in Windows 7 and one thing that's missing: the ability to limit which application uses location information. Why is that not in the API? It seems to go back to authentication of apps: Windows doesn't have a reliable means of determining that an application is what it says it is, so any attempt to limit the location to a specific application would be easily spoofable, according to Microsoft program manager Alec Berntson.

Previous implementations were so clunky, says the article, few developers bothered to use the API. The folks from Microsoft admit they'd like that sort of feature and have in on their Christmas list, but are not promising anything. On the whole developers spoke positively about what they saw in Windows 7; it's hard for me to imagine Microsoft will leave this whole with all the pressure from other OSs and apps in the LBS space. My solution: use Fire Eagle to manage which app gets location info...

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