> I’m going to avoid commenting on Metro on touch-based systems for now because Windows 8 is too far off in the future to know what the hardware is going to be like. Instead, I’m going to limit my discussion to using the operating system on desktop and notebook systems.
I think he roundly missed the point.
Yes you scan over the screen and it might be hard to find the things you want on day one. That's how it was with our iPhone and Androids too on the first day we got them.
You all know what happens. People rearrange to their taste or memorize the locations of the less-than-five applications that they commonly use. It's not as if the "where's waldo" game goes on indefinitely.
I think he's being intentionally obtuse about this. Windows is trying to unify their UI among the XBox, Phones, Tablets and Desktops and he wants to focus on the one where it will be less useful than the others by complaining about a problem that literally every smartphone user has already solved by day three.
Typing the name of the app you want is clumsy, you say? More clumsy than eyeballing a list that gets rather large?
But what stops you from re-arranging and placing the most often used application shortcuts on your desktop in Windows 95? And indeed, most users do just that. The reviewer correctly points out that this new UI doesn't really add anything, only takes things away. Shortcuts+search have been around for a while.
Actually I have no opinion on Windows 8 because I have not seen it myself, but this review fits both Gnome Shell and Unity very well: it's like they all suddenly joined the iphone-as-a-desktop cult.
Typing the application titles does not work for me. Because for frequently used apps I already have hotkeys or sidebar icons, but I never remember the names of rarely used apps: should I be typing "Monitor settings" or "Display" or "Desktop" or whatever, if I need to change the background or a screen resolution?
Lastly, is that really the biggest problem with the modern desktops: finding apps? Seriously, of all things that could possibly be made better, why are they all trying to re-invent how we're launching applications?
> but I never remember the names of rarely used apps: should I be typing "Monitor settings" or "Display" or "Desktop" or whatever, if I need to change the background or a screen resolution?
Windows Vista and up automatically help you with this. Even typing things like "DPI" or "wheel" into control panel come up with a list of all possible relevant actions that could be taken, as opposed to just different panel screens. Here are a few examples of that in action:
> why are they all trying to re-invent how we're launching applications?
My comment said why! It's not a re-invention, just a unification of the look and feel with the rest of Microsoft's ecosystem (xbox, phones, tablets, PCs will all have the same "start" screens).
I hate the wizardly control panel, incidentally. Just the other day, I was trying to remove a device. After maybe five minutes I decided it's not possible, until some time later accidentally finding the right button to press. It's very much not clear to me anymore what I can do, or how.
Not sure whether you're removing drivers or ejecting hardware, but Device Manager is still in the control panel and Eject Hardware is where it always was. I wasn't aware of any other way you could do it, past or present.
> why are they all trying to re-invent how we're launching applications?
I understand that they want to grow the tablet and mobile market, but forcing a tablet interface on desktop users seems like a serious strategic error on their part.
Microsoft has lost their sense of identity. IBM is not a sexy company. IBM is not in the news. But IBM knows who they are - a mature company that quietly goes about making a solid profits. Instead of embracing who they are, Microsoft seems to be chasing everyone else.
Those rumors are BS, nothing is being blocked. The basis for them seems to be that they have removed implementation code for the Windows 7 start menu that was left in earlier Windows 8 builds. Third parties can still write their own start menu replacements, they just won't work if they're based on hacking Microsoft's leftover start menu code.
>"But what stops you from re-arranging and placing the most often used application shortcuts on your desktop in Windows 95?"
Nothing. Lots of people did it that way...even back in the Windows 3.1 days. And I suspect that Microsoft has mountains of data showing that lots of people still do.
This is vastly different from the wild speculation and design dogma that went into Unity's design.
I haven't played with Unity much, but I'm running F17 and I have to say, as much as I despised Gnome 3 when I first encountered it, Gnome Shell extensions[1] have taken it from an unusable pile of excrement to a legitimate improvement on Gnome 2. Gnome Shell, for all of its design faux pas, is built on an incredibly modifiable foundation that allows you to reconfigure just about everything. Moreover, these modifications are dead simple to share (easier than adding an extension to Chrome).
Sure, it's worse than just getting the damned thing right in the first place, but it's much better to get things wrong and make them easy to fix, as Gnome has done, than get them wrong and make them unfixable, as Microsoft has. For that reason, I resent the comparison of Metro to Gnome Shell, although I get where it comes from. There's nothing wrong with Gnome that can't be fixed with some some js and CSS. Your UI is essentially a web app that you can modify arbitrarily, which is an incredibly powerful idea. Metro may have some themes, but there'll likely be no way to fix its underlying issues.
Can you give some examples of Gnome extensions you find useful? I tried perusing the list a few times but nothing really jumped out at me as a huge improvement.
It seems it's not really a popular opinion, but I also like Gnome Shell a fair bit. It just gets out of the way for the most part.
Sure. I started off by installing cairo-dock (pkg, not ext), a nice OSX-style autohiding dock (tweaks req'd). This allowed me to install Remove Activities Button[1] and Applications Menu[2], which combined to replace the rather useless and annoying Activities menu with a standard Gnome2-style applications menu, and get rid of the ugly dash that was stuck to the left of my screen, hogging real estate. This had the sanity-preserving side-effect of removing the stupid hot corner to Overview that I would accidentally trip every other time I tried to hit the back button in the browser. It can still be accessed with the Tux/Windows key. I also installed Force Quit[3], which puts a little 'x' next to the Applications menu. Click it, then click any misbehaving window to kill -9 all procs associated with it. Haven't had to use it, but it seems handy.
Next, I installed Brightness Control[4], as the fn+arrow keys don't work worth a damn, and Advanced Volume Mixer[5], which replaces the standard volume bar with a separate bar for each app. I installed Remove Accessibility[6], just to de-clutter, and All-in-One Places[7], to give me some handy shortcuts.
Quit Button[8] replaces the username "status" menu with the familiar options from Gnome2, and Settings Center[9] gives me quick and easy access to a variety of settings menus. Finally, Frippery Move Clock[10] puts the clock over in the top-right corner, where it belongs. I'll probably look into installing some workspace-related extensions as I become more comfortable with the system.
The combined result of these small changes is a system that I find far more friendly and usable. As I said above, the only thing I find wrong with Gnome3 is the defaults. Gnome Shell is incredibly extensible, and absolutely gorgeous. It now works for me like a cross between Gnome2 and OSX, with some handy extra features thrown in. Some of these changes are fairly major, while others are tiny tweaks, but I love how simple and easy they are to experiment and play with. Most changes are instant, and enabling/disabling extensions simply involves flipping a toggle switch on the extensions web page. I've only been running F17 for a week, so I'm sure I'll discover more changes to make the GUI just right.
I prefer the start screen to desktop shortcuts because, since it’s really a popup menu of sorts, you can bring it up and (single-)click to open up a window on top of your existing window configuration without disturbing that. With desktop shortcuts, even if you use the Win-D shortcut, when you double-click on an icon it forgets your previous window configuration, so you have to manually restore everything. Another thing I like to do with the start screen is keep groups of shortcuts to folders and apps associated with activities or projects I’m working on. I can keep those groups off to the right most of the time, then easily move a whole group to the first page when I know I’ll be working on that for a while.
> even if you use the Win-D shortcut, when you double-click on an icon it forgets your previous window configuration, so you have to manually restore everything.
Windows+M to minimize everything, Windows+shift+M to bring everything back. My favorite shortcut since Windows 95 :)
I don't know about Windows 8, but Unity's applications are well-tagged with appropriate search terms. For example, typing either "monitor" or "display" brings the Display shortcut (which includes screen resolution settings) to the top, while typing either "background" or "desktop" will bring the "Appearance" shortcut (which lets you change desktop background) to the top.
They should have kept the main interface same as Windows 7, and the whole Unity-like interface thing (which they call Metro), should have been an application which you would run to make it more friendly to touch - if you need.
That's exactly what it's like! I've been using Windows 8 on my sole laptop since April and only interact with Metro when I want to (which isn't very often). I use Visual Studio, Photoshop, Powershell, etc. the rest of the time just as before.
On the same token, I never remember how to update the PATH variable in Windows, but in Windows 7 if you type 'PATH' in the search box on the start menu, it pulls up the 'Edit environment variables' screen as a search result.
MS has done their research, and is making slow, incremental progress on making their OS easier to use.
"I’ve been following Windows 8 closely over the past few months, spending a lot of time not only with the official releases but also with a number of leaked builds, and I’ve had the chance to install the operating system on a variety of hardware platforms, both old and new."
"You may think that after a while you will become immune to these annoyances the more you use Windows 8. I don’t know. All I can say is that I haven’t come to that point yet, and the depressing thing is that I don’t think I will."
I don't know about you, but if I'd felt this way about the usability of anything (desktop, smartphone, whatever) after a few months, I'd have chucked it and moved on to something else (or gone back to whatever I'd been using before). Exactly how long should he keep beating his head against the wall until he's allowed to complain?
I've been using Windows 8 since they released the consumer preview. I hated it with a passion at first, but I wanted to see if it was just because it was different, or just because it was bad, so I kept using it.
You definitely can get past most of the annoyances without too much trouble. For example, there's a start screen when you first load up the computer, a screen that comes before the screen where you type in your password. You have to hold down left click and flick your mouse up to get rid of it, which is annoying on a laptop without a mouse, which is what I'm using it on. That annoyed me for a good week or two before I figured out that you can press a key to get by that screen without the mouse gesture.
There are still some things that make me curse, though. Anytime metro goes full screen because I hovered my mouse near the top left of my screen (I'll occasionally try to click on the options in firefox and go to metro instead), any time it reminds me that I can use an annoying full screen metro app to play videos when I open videos with VLC, anytime the charm bar appears (I've never used that thing once). I also wish there was an easier way to go to my computer, because that's what I use the start menu for 50% of the time, and now I have to right click where the start menu was and spend 10 seconds looking for 'windows explorer' on a small menu every time I want to do this.
It's just a lot of little annoyances. I can live with it, but I really do hope that Windows 8 crashes and burns.
I think this is poor design choice. Why would you want to "unlock" a laptop. It is not prone to accidental touches when it's in your pocket or the bag, which is exactly what "<gesture> to unlock" is supposed to prevent.
Now, I'm worried that they've done this just to look cool and so that people go "hey, I do that on my Windows PC, and the same gesture works on my (very rarely found) Windows phone".
They've always had this. Previously it's been called "Ctrl+Alt+Del Unlock". It then takes you to the password prompt. This is just replacing that key combination with a prettier screen, and also adding a quick glance at how many emails you've received, how many IM chats, weather forecast, etc without having to log in.
Without getting into the discussion on how incredibly important a password on a laptop is, you can disable this lock screen just like you would disable the password prompt after coming back from sleep mode on any previous version of Windows.
Again, you don't have to slide to unlock. You can just press a keyboard key. And it's always been there.
Wasn't the point of having C+A+D to get Windows' attention, thereby assuring that only a valid login window will receive your login credentials? How does this handle that?
I disagree that he missed the point. People use Windows because they already use Windows. If a new version of Windows is as hard to learn as OS X or Linux, then there's not much point in continuing to use Windows. (The same goes for Office. People use Word and Excel because they know how to use Word and Excel. Otherwise, they'd be saving themselves the license fee and be using Libre Office or Google Docs.)
I'm no Windows fan (I can't imagine ever going back to Windows), but you've got to be kidding me if you think people only use it because they already use it. How about because it's far easier to use and less fiddly than Linux? How about because the software selection is vastly superior to both Linux and OS X? How about because almost any computer (including Apple's) can run Windows AND all your hardware will work just fine with it, while if you want to run OS X, you'll have to buy an expensive machine from Apple, and if you want to run Linux, you better pray there's decent driver support for your peripherals.
The situation has gotten a lot better over the last decade for OS X and Linux users (though Windows has also improved a lot), but we're a FAR cry from a world in which the only valid reason to use Windows is momentum.
I won't even bother trying to list all the reasons to use Word and Excel (especially Excel) over Libre and Google Docs. Google Docs is a child's toy compared to Excel.
Really, they use it because that's what they are used to. Or mainly that's what was forced at work.
For example for years we've used Outlook Express, then people moved to Outlook. Everyone uses Excel, Word, etc. - because the company provides it, and people if they want to finish their work at home, would use whatever they learned.
I for example learned so much P4Win (the discontinued Perforce client from years), that even if it's less performant (syncing for example, because it's done by 4096 bytes), I still use it more than P4V (the new client), because I simply know it all, so much that I feel P4V as step-back (it's not, but because of slower redraw it feels that way. P4V is way faster than P4Win, and multithreaded).
So color me stupid, but since then, I'm using P4V for heavy tasks (after carefully, and consciously clicking here and there), and then for day to day things - changelists mainly - I'm with P4Win...
Sorry for dragging into this, but I'm just showing an example. And at home for my projects I don't even consider perforce, never use it. (But if it was like office app, I might've).
So why would I want for my productivity tools (which I don't have much fun, but more work) a change?
> How about because it's far easier to use and less fiddly than Linux?
It really isn't. Unless you cherry pick the wrong hardware, it just works. And keeps working for ages.
> How about because the software selection is vastly superior to both Linux and OS X?
I'll agree the selection is larger. As for its superiority, that is debatable. In fact, I consider OSX's experience less confusing. And the package managers you find on Linux are vastly superior to the Googpe-browse-download-run-next-next-finish experience most Windows users have to endure.
> How about because almost any computer (including Apple's) can run Windows AND all your hardware will work just fine with it, while if you want to run OS X, you'll have to buy an expensive machine from Apple, and if you want to run Linux, you better pray there's decent driver support for your peripherals.
It's hard these days to buy a computer that won't run Linux properly. You really need to plan your mistake. As for Macs being more expen
sive, they are also better built. There is no Mac competing with the US$300 HP notebook, of course, but the US$1000 MacBook has feature parity with US$1000 machines from Dell, Acer and Lenovo. Plus, it's pretty.
It's true that the computer components themselves have good support, but that doesn't yet extend to many printers, smartphones, gps devices or suchlike.
It's been a long time since I last met an unsupported printer. Multifunction devices are a sore spot, but they are the epitome of amateur equipment in any case. Any half-decent printer has very good support from CUPS. And what smartphone are you talking about? I don't have much experience with iPhones, but my iPod works just fine (as much as the lack of iTunes allows) and my Android phones work perfectly. I wouldn't be surprised if Windows Phone has problems, but I woulnd't call Blackberries and Symbian devices smartphones by current standards.
I'll admit that I was mainly reminescing about hardware from the previous decade when writing that. But the general point of "windows officially, linux maybe" remains.
How about because almost any computer (including Apple's) can run Windows AND all your hardware will work just fine with it
Ah, no. Having been a windows support/user for nearly 20 years, I am all too familiar with the 'find-the-drivers' dance, in particular, find-the-network-drivers, from which you can manually search the internet and find the rest. Then you get the fun of having a series of different things keeping themselves updated. A friend of mine even when so far as to make a 'golden XP installer', which was a standard XP install disk slipstreamed with 686 different network card drivers.
And boy it's fun trying to find the right Windows drivers. Easy for us experienced folk, because we know what scam sites look like. But to naives, it can be hard to tell the difference between what might work and scam sites, let alone actually trying to find the name of the chipset you're hunting for.
So if the argument is 'ease of installing', Windows most definitely does not get a free pass.
Windows, Linux, and OSX are about equal in terms of ease of driver install. That is, it either has the driver or uses a fall-back driver while it goes online and grabs a new one. Only difference is, most Windows drivers work this way because companies make drivers for Windows. There are a few too many Linux exceptions because companies don't make drivers for Linux.
If you're bringing 20 years of experience into the driver discussion, you're not giving enough weight to Windows 7, where drivers are rarely a problem. For the naive, there's generally a restore DVD/partition with all the drivers included. If you can't hunt for drivers, chances are you didn't built your PC yourself.
The argument of 'but drivers are hard on linux' is a throwback to the days when drivers were also hard on windows, it's just that we were used to the Windows way of doing things so it was familiar. I'm just saying that Windows doesn't get the free pass that the OP was implying.
When the Ribbon first appeared (in a radical redesign of Office) I heard relatives and friends say they "didn't like the new Windows". They didn't even realize at the time that only Office had changed, not Windows. The upgrade was being forced on them by their workplace IT departments.
That's what it boils down to: people don't like it when change is forced on them. It's one thing if you see a cool new product on a shelf, choose to buy it and are happy to try something new; it's quite another to have your existing products keep changing.
This is human nature. And that's why Microsoft is insane to radically change Windows; they're going all "new Coke" on their cash cow. If they really wanted a new product then they should have created a new product: new name, new marketing, new everything, leaving the existing product alone!
This problem isn't limited to Microsoft. I've been disappointed by several iPhone app purchases for instance, as companies keep "improving" their apps with updates and occasionally destroy the essence of the original that I liked so much (e.g. maybe they mess up the UI so it's not as good, or they add in-app-purchasing crap). That's not the way to treat existing customers. Sometimes products should just be left alone.
I agree that change for change sake is frustrating, but I jumped from Office 2003 to 2010 and a year later I still hate it. It's not just a matter of it being different. It's demonstrably worse. Things that took 1 click now take 3 or more. I also went from XP to Windows 7 and I can't stand it either. Why do I need libraries and all the confusion that comes from a library location and a 'real' location?
I'm enjoying Office 2010 a lot. Especially OneNote and Outlook. Everything is so nicely done, and I'm a power-user so I'm actively using it to the limits.
But I'm a power-user and I use keyboard short-cuts, categories, search folders, write my own add-ons if I need them etc.
If MS didn't do a radical redesign now and then, people might catch on to the fact that they're being sold the same thing over and over for each new computer they buy.
I'm very curious to see whether they will use the Metro UI in their server OSes. My bet is, they won't, or if they do they'll either put out a new edition fairly quickly, or will roll it back even faster to the traditional UI.
"Metro and WinRT may be at the heart of Windows 8 on the desktop, but they're purely adjuncts on the server. The charms and contracts are there, along with the Start Screen, but you're hardly likely to see them as you can manage much of a server from inside Server Manager or via PowerShell (or externally via RSAT and System Center)."
> (The same goes for Office. People use Word and Excel because they know how to use Word and Excel. Otherwise, they'd be saving themselves the license fee and be using Libre Office or Google Docs.)
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I can tell you that this is definitely not the case. I've used Word a lot in (non-software) engineering setting, and there are a large number of features used on a regular basis that simply are not available in LibreOffice or Google Docs. Things like citation support, text wrapping for images, and a good equation editor.
I hate excel. For some reason, it has become the standard for creating any grid-based documents, even though the table support in word would often be far superior when equations aren't needed.
I hate the lack of smooth scrolling, especially when you have differing cell heights. I hate the lack of cell padding, leading to manually sizing every row.
Most of all, I hate the total lack of focus. What sort of document is it aimed at creating, these days? The answer is certainly not what is was 10–15 years ago, but the basic interface hasn't changed much (ribbon aside).
I agree with what you're saying, I've seen it used to write up a text document! Talk about missing the point...
Often equations are needed, along with graphing. It's very expandable and customisable by a non-programmer with VBA.
I'm not saying it's the best, but it's pretty good at what it does, and there's not a better spreadsheet application that I've found.
As an aside, I've seen it be used for managing portfolios worth millions. Then you get a clever IT dept say 'oh no, you shouldnt be doing that on a spreadsheet' and so a new IT project is created to retire the spreadsheet and copy the functionality. Predictably, the project is late, over-budget and under-delivers, so the spreadsheet lives on. Tragic tale of far too many IT projects.
While I agree with you that MS Office has -in general- the most features of any common WYSIWYG document suite (note: that's just how I categorize this kind of software), Word isn't really the best example for it. Pretty much any feature in Word can be matched with LibreOffice and most can be matched with iWorks Pages (while the later is worlds simpler to use). What distinguishes MS Office the most IMO are:
1) smart art in PowerPoint
2) most of the data analysis and pivot table tools in Excel
3) powerful and mature, albeit cumbersome scripting support (VBA)
These features are important for a multitude of reasons, but for those who only need a good word editor, MS Office is certainly not a necessity anymore.
The customer market for Windows is already slowly transitioning away from Windows. I think it's logically to say that if the consumer market goes, the corporate market will fall soon after that. Microsoft could have either ignore this, as Apple continues to sell more and more Macs and iPads or they respond with something to take on what Apple see's as the future of their consumer facing business: the iPad. Microsoft chose the action that might have a chance to actually turn this trend around… Time will tell if it works.
Your Office point kind of loses traction since I'd say the Office 2007 was a bigger change from Office 2003 than Windows 8 is to Windows 7.
Honestly Windows 8 doesn't change how people use computers that much. Most people use the start menu to ~search~ for a program. I.E. they hit start and begin typing. You can do the same exact thing with the Start screen.
Aside from the start screen, Windows continues to work in basically the same way it always has.
Who are these users and how do I get a job supporting them? I provide support to over 100 people and I've yet to find a single one who uses that particular feature. And now they're supposed to learn how to use "hot corners" (or whatever it's called)? Ugh.
I worked at a very Windows-heavy company until last year, and we were still on a very old version of Office when I left. (It was the pre-ribbon Office. 2005?) The reality was all the knowledge the employees had (not to mention their shitty macros) didn't transfer to the new version, so we simply did not upgrade.
The reason new laptops ship with a new version of Windows rather than Ubuntu is because people are used to fighting changes in their software, but they'll notice that they don't have "the real thing" when they buy a $13 Windows-only LED keychain charger and it doesn't work when they plug it in to their computer. Then they'll complain to their computer's OEM, and Microsoft will laugh evilly. (I don't really understand it. The amount of hardware I never got to work in Windows is approximately the same as the amount of hardware I never got to work under Linux.)
I wonder if Microsoft's numbers (which we're assuming they have and use) aren't skewed by the usage patterns that they create, with users taking the path of least resistance for the given options, which are themselves sometimes paths of a-fair-amount-of resistance.
For instance, I frequently switch windows in Win7 with Alt+Tab, but also dip into the task bar quite often to click the Word icon, then identify the correct Word document open, then move the mouse to the document... neither of which are particularly efficient.
The only approximate solution I can think of would be having a touchscreen above my F-keys to select apps with. I can imagine MS have no data on how well that would work.
I LOVE Alfred - it beats Spotlight hands down! The best equivalent I've used for windows is Launchy. Honestly Alfred has changed the way I use my Macbook :)
"I.E. they hit start and begin typing." -- people do that because the start menu in W7 has a text box that says "Search programs and file" and a visible caret telling them they can type. In W8 you do not get any visual clues to tell you that you can type to search.
It's improved in Win8. The results are sorted in some kind of MRU or frequency of use order. So the first time you have to look to not launch iTunes Help, but the second time iTunes will be on top.
Unification of UI makes sense where modalities are similar. But touch vs keyboard vs mouse are very different modalities. The first demands a few large areas with gestures; the second demands something very much like a terminal; the third, much more densely packed areas without gestures (because large mouse moves are far more imprecise).
I have Windows 7. But I never use the start menu's search functionality, because I have a terminal; if I want to start an app by typing, I'll do it from the terminal. That way, I get completion for application arguments, I can write scripts to shorten more complicated launch sequences, etc. That's because the terminal (+ shell + friends) is set up for typing; a search box is laughably primitive in comparison.
Meanwhile, my start menu doesn't look anything like yours. I'm running Classic Start Menu, with programs classified by function: Development, Work, Games, etc., just containing the main icon. I use these menu items when I'm being goal directed, but more importantly, it saves me the effort of having to remember any names at all. Menus are optimized for scanning lists of text; in this way, they're far superior to ribbons when looking for an unfamiliar command.
?
If I want to start Google Chrome, I can open the start menu, type "go" or "ch", wait half a second to see that it's the first result, and hit return. To do this from the terminal I need to switch to a terminal, know the name of the executable (not just the display name of the program), know what directory it's in (or make sure to put it in my PATH), etc.
I don't agree with your characterizations. The mouse allows density but doesn't demand it - both more and less dense layouts have pros and cons for mouse and are appropriate in different contexts. A terminal is good for input but limiting for output - I would like to see a command shell that took a text command language, but produced graphical output.
The only time I want to launch Chrome (it's not my main browser) is if I want to visit Facebook (which is blocked every which way in my main browser).
Now, if I wanted to make visiting Facebook quick, I'd create a shell script called 'fb' which would start Chrome with facebook.com as the argument. But I don't, so I haven't.
Switching to a terminal? I'm always in a terminal. I have 4 open on my desktop right now, not including the virtual terminals hosted in screen sessions. I'm pretty much never more than an Alt-Tab away from Cygwin in mintty.
Less dense layouts don't work well with the mouse, in my experience - I'm talking about screen-sized layouts, the kind you see on phones and tablets, only scaled up to multiple 30" monitors[1]. Big mouse moves can cause you to lose track of the mouse altogether for a second.
Graphical output? I'm not really sure what you're getting at. What kind of graphical output would you want, apart from starting graphical applications based on command-line arguments or piped output? I've written many of both. Most of the time all you want is to view a graph, picture or video. All are trivial to integrate to the command line with appropriate glue.
[1] This is actually a bigger concern of mine over Windows 8. I'm normally multitasking across 6+ apps at all times: my custom notetaking app, vnc, several terminals, browser, documentation and two email clients. It's why I have multiple big monitors. Only being able to multitask with two applications at a time sounds like a bad joke.
I agree 100% that the idea of Metro style apps with their severe limitations (on multitasking and otherwise) replacing desktop apps is a bad joke. However, I don't really interpret them as replacements, but just as another model with its own advantages ( isolation, suspension/controlled backgrounding, guaranteed declarative install) and disadvantages (multitasking limitations, walled garden, etc.) I think it's very stupid that metro style apps are set as the default for file types and on the start screen etc. However, as a supplement to the desktop I like having them available.
I think he talks about something else. When I installed Win8, and then cygwin, and all other tools that I use - then the Metro screen became full with lots of icons that you can't read the whole names easily, and all of them were the same. I don't even see some of these names in the Start Menu (or maybe i did not check, because I don't go for example to the menu for them).
So the problem is that it flattens out the whole tree structure, and while I think this is good idea (I like the OSX dock), it's good idea only if you have few important things there. If it's get too cluttered easily, then it's not.
> Yes you scan over the screen and it might be hard to find the things you want on day one. That's how it was with our iPhone and Androids too on the first day we got them.
Most of my friends who use Windows haven't even bothered learning how to use a smartphone. Those who like to play around with gadgets have long left Microsoft land.
There certainly are Windows power users out there, but most of this thread seems to skip over the rest: those who use Windows because they grew up on it, or because they've actually attended paid courses on how to use it. There's no way they will do it a second time. I think Windows 7 will become the new XP.
> These Ribbon toolbars are packed with small user elements and are fiddly to use with a mouse, and even more fiddly — at times bordering on impossible to use — when driven with a finger.
> I’m going to avoid commenting on Metro on touch-based systems for now because Windows 8 is too far off in the future to know what the hardware is going to be like. Instead, I’m going to limit my discussion to using the operating system on desktop and notebook systems.
Yes you scan over the screen and it might be hard to find the things you want on day one. That's how it was with our iPhone and Androids too on the first day we got them.
When the iPhone was released, there was a single home screen. Everything that was available to you was visible from the start. What you see is what you get.
Yes you can arrange the icons on your phone the way you like it and yes you can do this on your laptop too. But when I dock my laptop, the screen resolution changes and now I have to find something.
On the desktop, I use launchy. A simple keyboard shortcut, type and run. Simple.
Overall I agree with most of the authors point. I do mainly agree on the point that users should have an option to have their standard desktop back as the default screen rather than metro.
On a desktop, I use windows. Hit windows key, type and run. Simple :)
I'm sure launchy has more functionality, but both the windows7 start menu and metro lets you press the windows key and type in partial names to open an application. I find it a lot quicker than using the mouse, and it's already built in.
Oh really? You knew exactly where each app icon was located the moment you got your iPhone? And the settings, notifications, and everything else? There was zero learning curve? Come on. Sick of this Apple superiority fanboy bullshit.
Um, yes. When I wanted to find the Settings menu on my new iPhone, it wasn't too much of a leap of faith to try pressing the icon labeled "Settings."
The idea that you have to left-click and drag a certain unmarked area of the screen in Metro to reach the control panel is light-years distant from the iPhone/iPad UX.
A good interface is one that is either highly intuitive, or highly discoverable. I haven't used Windows 8 yet, but from what I'm reading in this thread and elsewhere, it is neither. Don't shoot the messenger.
And a fresh install of Windows 8 comes with only one screen of apps, no scrolling required. It only starts to scroll when you install more than the one screen can display.
I think he roundly missed the point.
Yes you scan over the screen and it might be hard to find the things you want on day one. That's how it was with our iPhone and Androids too on the first day we got them.
You all know what happens. People rearrange to their taste or memorize the locations of the less-than-five applications that they commonly use. It's not as if the "where's waldo" game goes on indefinitely.
I think he's being intentionally obtuse about this. Windows is trying to unify their UI among the XBox, Phones, Tablets and Desktops and he wants to focus on the one where it will be less useful than the others by complaining about a problem that literally every smartphone user has already solved by day three.
Typing the name of the app you want is clumsy, you say? More clumsy than eyeballing a list that gets rather large?
http://i.imgur.com/Z0pCc.png
If you know what you want, typing is vastly easier than scanning a long startmenu list of items.