A developer put a popular iPhone game on Windows in 5 minutes

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Canabalt iPhone

Canabalt

Canabalt is a side-moving survival iPhone game.

Developer David Burela has moved "Canabalt," a popular game for the iPhone and iPad, onto Windows using Project Islandwood, one of Microsoft's tools for moving apps onto Windows with minimal effort. 

In a blog post, Burela describes Islandwood as a "cool tool" and demonstrates how easy, and quick, it can be as he completes the task in five minutes. 

"Today I wanted to show you how easy it is to take an iOS game and port it straight to a Windows 10 UWP application," he wrote in the post. "I'm porting the classic game Canabalt which was originally an online flash game, which they then ported to an iPhone game." 

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Building, testing, and deploying software takes a long time, and this is something Microsoft has struggled with: Windows on phones has such a little share of the market that developers were not willing to spend the time and resources on making apps for it. 

This has meant that Windows now has an "app gap," with popular apps, such as Snapchat, not being available on the platform

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Microsoft has been working to fix these problems by using Windows 10, the latest version of the operating system. Developers can now build universal apps, called Universal Windows Apps, that work on a desktop, tablet, or smartphone. 

One of the other ways Microsoft is trying to attract developers is through the "bridge" projects which aim to make it easier for Android, iPhone, web-based, and older Windows apps to work on Windows 10. 

The Android bridge, named Astoria, has been put on hold (and maybe killed) but the others are still alive and well. 

Here is a video of Burela porting the game in under five minutes: 

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