As a PC game developer I was angry when I installed Windows 8 for the first time. It's just so bad it makes me angry.
My immediate reaction was "Why are you killing Windows, Microsoft?". From that moment I installed the beta I could see the destruction of PC gaming and everything that came along with it following in it's wake as clear as day.
A lot of people misinterpreted Gabe Newell's dislike of Windows 8. People seemed to think that he disliked it simply because of the windows app store. Just because it might compete with Steam. The problem is much more fundamental than being competed with. He disliked it because it's a terrible release of Windows that destroys the very platform Steam is on.
It's no wonder Gabe decided to go all in on Linux. It may be a slim hope getting that to stick, but at least it's a chance. If the platform you rely on is going to self destruct out from under you, you need to jump to whatever has a chance of keeping you afloat.
I know some people on the Windows team. My immediate reaction when I tried the beta was, "Oh shit, I have to let them know what someone has done to their work before it's too late! The public is about to see this!". Obviously, after half a second of thought, I realized they already know and use what I was seeing for the first time. But it was so shockingly bad that I instinctively thought it was some kind of mistake that they must not have seen yet.
When I did talk to them next, it was more along the lines of expressing condolences. I thought since it was objectively bad, it goes without saying that they also think it is bad, and some internal politics led to what was released, ruining their hard work. To my surprise, they defended it and claimed to really like it. I found this so baffling that I've since been struggling with several theories; "either they are crazy or I am crazy, I'm not sure which anymore", some kind of Stockholm Syndrome, or something contaminating the water around Redmond.
I ruled out the possibility that it's me who is crazy after a few rounds of a game where I hand my laptop to a coworker, who uses windows exclusively (and one even develops drivers for it), and told them to try and close Internet Explorer and shut down the computer. Invariably the result was trying for 5 or 10 minutes before walking away in frustration, sometimes with colorful language.
> told them to try and close Internet Explorer and shut down the computer
I've found Windows 8 actually works quite well if you use the keyboard exclusively for navigation.
- The Metro "start menu" (that's really all it is) works great if you use it mostly by searching (press Windows key, type, arrow keys, enter to launch.)
- The Win+X accelerator menu has made me faster maintenance tasks than I ever was in W7.
- Your puzzle: focus the Desktop; press Alt+F4. (This has always worked, if you're curious.)
I think this might be why people within Microsoft don't "feel the pain" of Windows 8: it works great with a tablet, or with a keyboard... just not with a mouse.
Isn't using a keyboard an alternative navigation? Basically you're bypassing the UI presented on the screen with shortcuts. It's not a very strong argument for Windows 8 working well, but maybe the opposite.
Most of the "Windows 8 Works great" arguments are along the lines of how to bypass it. The whole "Install start 8 and it's awesome" arguments just show the UI was a failure.
I don't buy this argument at all. Just because there are new ways of doing things doesn't make it bad. This kind of attitude kills innovation.
I just got Windows 8 last week. I found the vast majority of functionality I needed without any help, in just a few minutes of playing around with it. My brother (who had Windows 8 for a few months) showed me just a couple more things, but none of them were necessary, only more convenient ways of doing the same things I'd already figured out how to do.
I don't understand the relevance of the sentence: "Just because there are new ways of doing things doesn't make it bad." Not one single person who dislikes the Windows 8 interface has ever cited that as the reason.
And there's no way you figured out how to close a metro app without looking it up.
When I started using the Beta I couldn't get windows snap to work. Spent an hour trying to get it to work and just couldn't get two metro apps on the screen at once.
Was it my dual monitor setup? Was it a bug?
No, I didn't have enough screen resolution and the os wouldn't mention this fact and it took a ton of googling to find out that was the case.
It may be new but it wasn't good. I love getting beta software and trying out new ways of doing things but if you have to go though hoops to do basic tasks it isn't good.
I remember watching the video on the Building Windows blog when they showed off the interface for the first time. Sitting there stunned thinking it had to be a joke, it looked horrible.
They were proudly showing off how your could multitask TWO whole programs and I wondered what they were smoking.
Actually the multitasking is really useful, when you are on a tablet.
Metro is only great for a touchscreen, that's all. They tried to use it for desktop too, which was the big mistake.
On my Android phone I can't really chat on Skype and surf the web at the same time, I need to switch from one to another every time. On my Windows tablet (the Asus Transformer Book T100) I can do that easily.
Their big mistake was to market it as a desktop OS. They made a tablet OS, that's all.
The unification argument is compelling, but there had to have been a better way to go about it than "OK everyone, use your workstations like tablets and everything will be A-OK! The PC is dead, you know." Someone at MS was trying a little too hard to be ahead of the curve.
Yeah I completely agree with you, MS was trying to be ahead of the curve and they failed miserably. Different input devices need different visual interface. What I'm saying is essentially that Metro is amazing for a tablet, way better than Windows 7, but it's disgusting with a mouse.
This version of Windows is so bad, that it will drive the consumer away from the PC, eventually the large PC studios will see PC users decline in number and funding for PC games will slow and stop. Only the indie low budget games will be left.
By destroying the platform entirely, the long term result will be no development for that platform.
All users of the PC are running as fast as they can. Windows 8 has destroyed it for everyone, all of my friends and family have become so frustrated with the PC. Microsoft is really going to destroy the entire platform, they have no idea what they are doing.
What? I've been using windows 8 happily since release. Evidently this doesn't apply to "everyone". There was a little learning curve, as there was with every major windows release. I've yet to find something that doesn't work. The only thing I've experienced taking any longer is turning the computer off, which requires one additional action compared to 7... Not a big deal.
People leaving Windows is potentially an existential threat for Steam if the platforms that they go to don't support Steam well. Consoles and iOS are flat out due to non-negotiable platform policies. Android is possible, but tough. Mac OS X is doable, though word is that Apple has historically been tepid to game developers on the platform. I believe that these are the forces that lead Valve to choose instead to invest into linux, and build an OS of their own on top of it.
Last week I experienced Windows 8.1 for the first time to see what's the fuss about. I just couldn't believe anybody though this is a good idea and somebody got paid to deliver it. As I was installing drivers and work on problems, I had to restart a lot. I couldn't figure it out, had to google how to do it. Skype is fullscreen-only now, are you kidding me? I can't do my work and chat on my 4K screen. And there is no easy way to switch between desktops like on Mac with trackpad gestures.
Basically the concept is to include both the Metro + desktop UIs and let the user explicitly choose. When you're in tablet mode, all desktop apps run full-screen (or using the Metro-style split screen) and when you're in desktop mode, Metro apps run windowed like Desktop apps.
Also, ModernMix gets you part way there on the latter. One interesting side effect I noticed while using it is that Metro / Modern apps tend to use larger fonts and layouts (which doesn't really work that well when you shrink the apps down to a smaller window). Possible solutions include auto-scaling and letting the app present a different interface when Windowed.
If you think MS is going to back down on touch, you're dead wrong. Moving forward, what the author refers to as "Metro" (actually known as the "Modern Interface") will be the default interface users interact with on WP and XBox. And yes, it might be true that they'll allow users to boot into the desktop, it's not confirmed that will be the default option for users.
The whole point of the Modern design language is to provide a unified experience for all of the Windows ecosystem. Honestly, it's really good - except on their most used product, Windows. I think when they allow Modern apps to run inside the desktop, allow desktop apps to work with the charms bar, and build their own laptop you'll see customers flock in droves to the Windows ecosystem.
Please don't call something "unified" when it shares none of the same code, doesn't work the same, and was created by teams who don't talk to each other. Superficially similar looking != unified.
The worst example of this was Visual Studio 2012. The UI was redone to superficially fit the Metro style. It became flat and monochrome and so visually undifferentiated that it was hard to navigate. And there were of course the obnoxious ALL CAPS menu labels.
The allcaps menus are genuinely baffling to me. I cannot even begin to comprehend that decision. It's not a different font or anything, it's just...all caps. Like some mid 90s teenager messing around with Visual Basic thought it looked cool.
Fortunately they didn't manage to really screw up Visual Studio in any significant way, and the dark interface skin looks great.
For the most part imo the flattening of the ui was an improvement. Puts the code in focus and minimizes everything else. They did go a little bit too far I think especially with the icon set but overall I've found it to be cleaner and easier to focus on the code. Hopefully they'll back off a little from extreme flatness and find a better balance in a future release.
Seems to me the whole win8 ui fiasco is something Microsoft does a lot.. Have a good idea, go way overboard with it, and end up having to pull back and find a more refined middle ground in a future release. If only they'd find a way to internalize this process instead of making us all into a usability study...
Because it's infinitely more complicated. One context menu can end up bigger than your screen [1] and that doesn't count the number of different debug windows hanging off the debug menu [2], there's a bunch of menus for testing, editing etc most of which are not right in front of me.
I'm pretty handy with VS but given its sheer size I don't need any extra impediments. RANDOM ALL CAPS MAKES THIS SENTENCE DISTRACTING. I HAVE TO LOOK AT MENUS A LOT.
Contrast with the Outlook ribbon's "Home" tab which puts 95% of what I need to do right there always visible by default. I don't have to hunt around at the top of my SCREEN WHICH IS IN DISTRACTING ALL CAPS nearly as much.
The first thing I do after installing VS2012/VS2013 is to edit the registry to return the correct casing to the top level menus.
The icon scheme for SSDT in VS2012 was the worst. No colour, just symbols. Want to add a primary key? Look for the key icon. Sounds good in practice but there's lots of monochromatic key symbols overlaid onto other monochromatic symbols (primary key on table, symmetric key, foreign key). At least with the colour I can more easily distinguish the primary key is gold and the blue square it's in front of is a table.
FWIW I don't think I was significantly less productive in VS2012 than 2010 but it's a moot point now since VS2013 put colour back in.
Office 2013 is also idiotic, and arguably worse than VS when it comes to caps. In Office 2013, "random" elements are capitalized, with no rhyme or reason. It doesn't mean they're clickable. It doesn't mean they're action items or titles. There's no sense I can find.
The fact that the betas had wildly different casing seems to point to some designers holding the product to their whims, instead of based on any sort of intelligent thought.
What's weird about this thread is that the "Modern design language" is considered to be unifying. A design language is just a theme. A skin. It's not meant to unify. Wide lapels this year. Narrow lapels next year.
APIs are unifying. Too bad they are un-unified in Windows. A security model is unifying. But <sad-tombone/> not in Windows.
So WP and XBOX will be the touch vanguard? Damn but that TV is far away. Makes touch laptop look reasonable.
A good design language is certainly more than just a theme. An arrow is a visual design to indicate direction. It's almost universally recognized. It's a sign. Just like a word.
If iconography can be seen as a form of barebones language, what else can we fit in the concept? Perhaps colour? Red for STOP, or urgency. Green for go. If shapes and colours, why not relative sizes? Big for important things, small for detailed things.
These are the kinds of concerns that pertain to the construction of design languages. You can see how they can be unifying.
No one expects Microsoft to retrench from touch, nor does anyone misunderstand what they were trying to do: They wanted to leverage their desktop dominance into some mobile/tablet marketshare. Many words can be spilled justifying this (unifying being one), but the stark reality is that it degraded the experience on the mouse and keyboard desktop, where the design simply followed the desire to get into what Apple was having success at.
And ofc Apple, in turn, spent much of its 30-years-of-Macintosh celebration making indirect slams on the Metroisation of Windows and the whole desktop/touch-unification idea http://www.macworld.com/article/2090829/apple-executives-on-... "You don’t want to say the Mac became less good at being a Mac because someone tried to turn it into iOS." etc.
The worst problem with Microsoft's touch interface on a non-touch machine: ordinary mouse movements get interpreted as gestures sometimes. You can lift your finger off the display, but you can't lift your mouse pointer, so you end up issuing commands that bring up various screens when all you were trying to do was move your mouse around. I was pretty surprised that got through Microsoft's QA.
I decided they had left behind anyone who wanted to get actual work done, and bought a System76.
What does booting to the desktop have to do with anything? Out of all my Win8 annoyances, having to click the desktop tile is probably at the end of the list. Without a start menu, doing full-screen context shifts to launch programs is just annoying. The dumb metro-style things for, say, WiFi connector (a whole huge side of the screen, instead of a tiny popup, with less functionality than before) -- all that stuff is what's annoying.
Booting direct to desktop seems as pointless as adding a start button that launches the full-screen thing. No one was asking for that. So either MS is incredibly obtuse, or they think they're going to fool people by pretending to have changed something.
Metro is a fantastic design language. What they screwed up is the combined Metro+classic desktop in Win8. A Surface 2's UI is great (the problem is the lack of apps), same for WP.
It might be great for touch, but I don't have a touch screen.
On my new Win8 machine the first program I installed was Classic Shell [1]. Now I have a (functioning) start button and it boots straight to the desktop so I never have to see the touch interface.
Well, it's not really necessary for the start screen to context-switch the entire screen. That's my main complaint. The W7 start menu was more than sufficient in terms of screen real-estate to get its job done.
It sounds like you're suggesting that Windows 8 would've been fine if they had just forced Metro, but people dislike Windows 8 because its default view is so obviously designed for tablets and touch, not because they're able to turn it back into something close to Windows 7.
As far as I know design, Metro could well be a fantastic way to make design-oriented apps.
The problem is that full, complete, design orientation doesn't give you enough clues to accomplish tasks. Maybe no one ever cares to accomplish anything on a tablet but if they do, it doesn't seem like Metro will be helpful.
I mean, the problem with the Metro start button isn't that it's touch oriented - you can click the tiles with a mouse just as easily. The problem is you look at the start button and say "beautiful - WTF is it?" If you just feel like experiencing an endless beautiful demo, it's great but if you have a goal, it's opaque how you'd achieve it.
> design orientation doesn't give you enough clues to accomplish tasks
Design is a specification of an object, manifested by an agent, intended to accomplish goals, in a particular environment, using a set of primitive components, satisfying a set of requirements, subject to constraints;
I wonder if they actually thought they would eventually port the major applications to Metro? Somehow hard to believe that the master plan was to have this mess between Metro and traditional desktop going on forever. On the other hand porting apps like Office to Metro would have been quite a job. The whole concept would probably have to be resigned.
For my usage it would be been quite fine if the old desktop apps could run as Metro apps. I really liked how the splitting of the screen between multiple Metro apps worked in Windows 8.1. It was easier to use the screen efficiently than with traditional desktop windows.
The problem with Windows 7 snap is it's still tied to the overlapping window model, so when you snap a window it just goes on top of whatever was on screen and doesn't automatically manage the remaining space.
Is it fantastic? It's just fonts on whitespace with stock photos while scrolling horizontally.
While paging from the side or a slide in is cool they decided to go with an infinite side scrolling paper thing. Real bitch to read like that. The newsapp is a perfect example of that annoying hard to track with your eyes side scrolling that would be a 1000 times better if it either scrolled vertically or just paged.
The problem with Windows 8 is the fact that it has two different desktops experiences. I quickly realized I felt much more comfortable using my keyboard and mouse on the desktop mode. I tried to ignore metro mode and use only the desktop but the whole metro thing is so ingrained with it's sensible corners and start menu. After some time of tweaking I could disable most of the things and ended up with something resembling a crippled Windows 7 at best.
They really had something going on with Windows 7 and they blew it. Maybe metro is ok for light usage like checking emails, browsing, multimedia, which is certainly what a lot of people do, but for a developer like me it just feels handicapped.
This is what Microsoft should do, offer different versions of Windows, one with metro the other with the desktop. I really don't think they are that stupid to just mess with the momentum Windows 7 had.
If they don't then they are finished in the desktop front, at least for people who make things with their OS and not just consume media.
I think Microsoft jumped the gun by a few years, the Surface 2 Pro is the computing concept I think they believed was the future.
I run Windows 8 exclusively and I use a Start Menu replacement called Start Is Back, and it's great. It was only $3. I never use Metro on my 27" screen.
HOWEVER, I'm really keen to get something like the Lenovo Helix [1], as I think that's where things are going to go (like an iPad that has an i5 and runs both iOS and OS X). Sensible friends of mine who have the original Surface say metro is great as a tablet UI, the only annoyance being that the Store is lacking in many apps.
Either way, I think Metro is OK, they just screwed up the roll out. As we see more devices like the Surface 2 Pro, the Dell Venue 11 and the Lenovo Thinkpad Helix, it'll start to make more sense.
For me, the Win7 start menu was the best. Primarily because of the built-in search, which, while not perfect, makes Win8 search seem broken by comparison. Also I'm probably not a typical user in that don't hunt for the app I want to launch: it's either pinned to the taskbar, something I can quickly search for, or in my PATH to launch from the Run prompt.
In Win8 (prior to 8.1) there wasn't a unified search. I run a lot of programs that aren't "installed", but are just executables in an indexed directory (like small utilities, or putty, etc). These do not show up by "just typing". And in 8.1, "everything" isn't really "everything". It doesn't search within my e-mails, or other programs that used to integrate with the Windows search indexer. It's basically garbage compared to Vista and 7.
That's the point. It's not any better. Everyone saying the Win-Search thing works just fine in Win8 is missing the boat: It ALREADY works fine in Win7 while MetroUI is infinitely worse.
I think the problem is not that the start menu is a fantastic piece of UX (which it clearly is not), it's that Win8 takes away a key method of interacting with the system and replaces it with something worse.
Do something better and there'll be less complaints.
Yep. For example, Alfred on OS X is a fantastic third-party interface addition. The Windows 8 start screen is similar in concept, but it's a pile of crap in comparison: slow, bad search, lacking features, takes over your whole screen, etc.
Isn't the Win8 start screen similar to Launchpad on MacOS? Spotlight is command+space, Win8 search is Win+F. And Unity on Ubuntu does the same thing: a giant screen where you search for the apps you want. Why all this special hate for Metro?
Not really. Launchpad was introduced in 10.7 as an additional way to browse and launch apps, making things more familiar to people who'd only used iOS. The previous methods, like apps in the dock (introduced with OS X) the applications folder (every Mac OS ever) still work fine.
If, at Lion's launch, Apple had said 'we think launchpad is so good we're going to take away all the other ways of launching apps', there would have been a full-scale riot.
The problem with the start menu is that millions of people, people who don't really know much about computers, or want to know much but have to use one anyway, grew up thinking a start menu is what a computer has. It's been there and worked in a similar way since 95 and it's disconcerting to find it's suddenly disappeared.
It's not special hate, I love the design language and it's great to see Microsoft taking the lead in design values - it's just that it is not good enough yet.
The start menu from Windows 98, when they introduced the ability to move and reorder items by drag and drop, is great – assuming you do a bit of manual reorganization of the mess of a structure that application installers create by default. The one-dimensional layout is easier to scan (visually) and easier to aim at with the mouse (since you only have to aim carefully in one dimension), I find, than the two-dimensional designs in XP, Vista and 7.
Windows 7 removed the option for the "classic start menu", so the need for these third-party replacements is nothing new for those of us who preferred it.
Is there any reason it shouldn't be? Yes, I understand how it's not useful for touch interfaces, but why does it have to be? Why do desktops need touch? Why can't tablets have their own, completely separate OS -- or at least their own shell? What advantage does convergence bring?
If they need or not, I think it's not for the OS manufacturer to decide. Desktops ARE coming with touch and so are laptops. Soon enough, all new laptops and desktops WILL have touch. I just went to Walmart tech area and almost all laptops had touch. The ones without touch were in the obscure corner where no one went.
Microsoft can adapt or be eaten. I think they have decided the later.
Now regarding "completely separate OS", impossible to maintain. And "at least their own shell", goes back to desktops/laptops having touch and the old shell not being good for that.
I don't see a problem with their hybrid approach. I enjoy the touch stuff where it fits. I don't see how a SAP or heavy data entry (where a keyboard will make all the difference) will benefit from Metro, so why no keep the desktop there as usual (like they did)?
Desktops with touch are stupid.
My monitor is up in front of my face, and a good distance back on my desk, not down on the front of my desk where my hands are.
I'm not sitting at my computer to give my shoulders a workout. Besides which, any idiot who gets fingerprints all over my nice monitor deserves a slapping, even if its me.
Having touch sized buttons on the screen makes the mouse and keyboard experience worse - everything has to be bigger, with giant borders and separation because your finger is ~100px or more across, and my mouse pointer has a single-pixel click area.
Te problem with the hybrid approach is simply that I, or any anyone like me, can't or won't use touch for our desktop use, so why should a touch oriented UI forcibly impinge upon our experience?
They didn't keep the desktop as it was - they removed the start button and a bunch of context menus and hid them in those ridiculous 'charms' pop-outs. The start screen is an enormous waste of time. If they were optional, or the defaults changed based on whether a touch screen was present it might be different, but they are not optional, or even configurable without third party software.
I'm not saying they can't or shouldn't change things. I think the start menu could have been re-drawn as something visually like a charm menu, fading in from the left edge of the screen, so long as it doesn't take you away from what you are doing it would have been fine.
The new laptops have touch because Microsoft decreed that it should be so. Macs don't have it. ChromeOS devices don't have it. If any manufacturer wants to claim that they take full "advantage" of Windows 8, they have to have touch screens, and having watched people use them, they look like an ergonomic nightmare. Granted, people are actually using them, but my suspicion is that it's because the trackpads on Windows laptops are horrifically bad, and they forgot to bring their mouse to the meeting.
I am extremely skeptical of your "impossible to maintain" argument against separate OSes. Again, Apple seems to do it just fine. I realize I must sound like a total Apple fanboy, but while I'll concede that their innovation has worn thin, the overall usability and design of their core products has remained inoffensive at the very least. The same could not be said for Microsoft's current offerings.
Wasn't it Intel that mandated anything called "ultrabook" should have touch? Of course they could be doing that to work with Microsoft.. buy anyways.
Apple doesn't have touch on its laptops and desktops and a their products can be counted with the fingers we have. Microsoft has always worked with OEMs and has a much more chaotic environment... these partners/OEMs/etc will use, and are using touch,... imagine telling your dad, who owns a laptop with touch, that he should install Windows "Touch" and your grandma with a new ultrabook w/o touch has to use Windows "Original".... it would be a nightmare. Microsoft has, and is trying to, devise a bridge in a single OS.
They screwed up the Start button thing. Have they left it there in the desktop and provided the option to boot directly to it, they would have received much less criticism. They got greedy with the Metro stuff... it should have been a nice "add-on" for traditional desktops/laptops.. not major shell.
They will never drop the Metro interface now. My bet is that they will slowly add things back to the traditional desktop, hoping by this time nobody but the hardcore users will notice... while the masses will swallow the Metro interface.
If the reality of the situation is that consumer devices all have touchscreens because of overzealous OEMs, then affordances should be made for touchscreen interfaces wherever possible. That said, if it's not clear that touch makes sense as the primary input device, more so than the mouse, then the UI should not be designed around it, regardless how many people own a touchscreen that they keep two feet away at eye level.
If, on the other hand, you have a device where touch is the only input that makes sense, then your shell needs to be designed around it. Every aspect of user interaction needs to be reconsidered, because you can't expect your users to run regedit with a touchscreen.
I think you're right that Microsoft won't drop Metro now, but I don't think it's a given that customers will ever adopt it. Windows 7 works fine for everything I use it for, and without architecture-imposed RAM limits, I honestly can't see a time within the next decade that it will stop doing that. I still know people who use Windows XP, 11 years after it was released. The fact is, they all run Firefox and Chrome equally well. Your desktop OS has never mattered less than it does right now.
Three years ago I bought a Macbook Pro, ostensibly for iPhone development. I went in with the assumption that I would still primarily use my Windows desktop, what with the power and the keyboard and the mouse. Within thirty minutes I was signed into my GMail account, browsing my RSS feed, and realized that I had completely migrated my life over to the new machine. In this environment, where switching to Ubuntu requires less of a lifestyle change than Windows 8, why would anyone ever upgrade Windows?
Traditional PCs are coming with touchscreens because Microsoft insisted on shoehorning touch into their desktop interface.
This is not a case of Microsoft being in danger of being left behind, but a repeat of the disaster of XP tablet edition - Microsoft completely failing to understand where touch is and is not appropriate in UI design.
Macs are hardly the recipients of Windows installations. I fail to see your point. Does your local Best Buy store have a non-Mac area? I think you'll have a hard time finding a late generation laptop there that doesn't include touch.. at least the ones aimed at regular consumers (not business people looking for mate screens, or gamers looking for alienware-like stuff).
It's funny if you stay a bit in these areas and notice people immediately touching the screens. I've seen it quite a few times and the comments are all "hmm, no touch".
The whole PC industry is creating this demand for touch out of users' familiarity with them in their mobile phones. I have no use for touch on my laptop but a lot of people I know think it's cool...
>Macs are hardly the recipients of Windows installations.
Um, duh.
> I fail to see your point. Does your local Best Buy store have a non-Mac area? I think you'll have a hard time finding a late generation laptop there that doesn't include touch..
The point is that you're conflating supply of Windows-based touch desktops and laptops for actual demand for those systems.
> I have no use for touch on my laptop but a lot of people I know think it's cool...
And as somebody that deals with end users, I've yet to talk to anyone that didn't ultimately find touch in a laptop/desktop either pointless or outright counterproductive.
It's one of those things that people think is a cool idea until they actually use one for an extended period of time.
The 'Start Button' was in the wrong place during its existence. It should have been at the top left rather than bottom right. The convention being that menus drop down rather than climb up. It went against the 'E' shape of what people scan for on a VDU and the mouse movements to get there were always a bit arcane. Maybe Apple had a patent on it coming from the top left and MicroSoft had to think differently. Windows 8.n presents an opportunity to fix this usability defect but I doubt they will do it.
Pretty much. With Classic Shell I finally have the perfect start menu; a combination of 95, 98, XP and custom traits. I doubt anything Microsoft does will surpass it.
I think it's obvious that mobile & desktop OSes need to essentially merge to a substantial degree.
But the idea that you should use one and only one control scheme / UI in every use case is just dumb. There's not going to be one universal way for humans to interact with a computer, period. Sometimes touch will be used, sometimes keyboards & mice, sometimes voice, sometimes other methods of control. It's vastly more valuable to figure out how to seamlessly transition between different modes of use/control and to maximize the utility of each mode than to try to engineer some grand compromise design that can be used in all modes but takes advantage of none of them very well.
Moreover, Microsoft needs to learn a very hard lesson here. If you want to change things you need to transition. UI reboots are like system rewrites, they carry a lot of the same risks, if you commit to the new system before it's mature without giving people the option of using the old system you'll often times end up with rejection instead of acceptance. Microsoft has developed a bad habit lately of ramming new ways of doing things down users throats without any time to get used to the changes. The only people who can get away with bullshit like that are Apple, and Microsoft is very definitely not Apple.
If you dereference the source links you'll find that "the forthcoming Windows 8.1 update" in the article refers to Windows 8.1 Update 1 (which updates 8.1), not to 8.1 being an update of 8.0:
http://www.theverge.com/2014/1/30/5362156/windows-8-1-update...
Opened comments to find whether this was said. Seriously, Windows 8.1 has been out for months. I checked the published date on this article three times.
I've hardly ever read a non-opiniated review or discussion about windows 8. All these discussions go direct to our fanboy hearts. It's like the programming languages or favorite IDE discussions ... :-)
Anyway, there's a huge potential for having one device that can be used with different UI concept based on the peripherals: A tablet docked into a docking station should be operated by mouse and keyboard (desktop mode), otherwise it should be operated by touch (metro mode). Windows 8 should recognize what default to use.
While Metro as default for a PC doesn't make sense, it's not really a big problem. The issue is mainly amplified by our emotions. It took me much longer to get used to OS X, but as I liked the device to much, it didn't bother me at all. I kind of enjoyed exploring how to use it.
There is nothing fundamentally wrong with the design language of "modern", and no one ever has needed several resizable draggable windows for their desktop. That UI paradigm should be easy to replace by a nice tiling manager.
What I do need however is a UI that lets me run my legacy apps side by side with new ones, in any configuration and number. I don't mind the look of metro and I never liked the start menu. If my start menu is a start screen, fine.
The biggest problems are a) the divide between old and new. The mistake was making a completely separate UI rather than making a single UI that could adapt to both touch and mouse interaction. b) the API debacle: what IS microsofts strategy for the future of heavy desktop apps? What happened to wpf/xaml? Developers don't like constant surprises.
> Dumping Metro is a great step toward making Windows 8 more attractive, but the Windows 8 desktop mode still doesn't have a real Start menu.
Because they aren't actually dumping metro? The problem with metro wasn't that it was the default UI, but that it replaced the start menu. I really hate all these disingenuous tech reporters who lauded the "return of the start button", when they knew true well that the problem wasn't that the button disappeared, but that the menu was gone. Now we have another shill reporter claiming victory because of a default change, when metro is still just a click away.
The problem with metro is that it exists at all (on non touch screen devices).
I have no idea how easy this would be, I imagine rock hard, but couldn't they do a responsive interface, like Canonical is trying to do with Ubuntu?
Apps come packaged with both a mobile and desktop UI, and depending on which input devices are available it shows the relevant one. For example, a Surface by itself would show the metro UI, but connect a type cover or a keyboard and mouse and it'd flip to the desktop interface. Same apps, same data.
Obviously it would take a lot of work to ensure consistency and maintain spacial awareness between modes, but they do still employ some bright people, right?
Conceptually that was more or less what they were trying to do with Windows 8 - provide affordances optimized for each input method. For example, with touch you use swipe/flick gestures to pan back and forth, with mouse a scrollbar appears and you use that. With mouse some commands have small controls that appear when you hover over an item, with touch those controls are on a bar at the bottom of the screen. And so on.
What made it different from what Ubuntu is doing (as I understand it) is a couple of additional problems they were trying to solve:
First, you're probably thinking about "hybrid" devices in terms of having a tablet that you use with touch exclusively for X hours, and then attaching a mouse and keyboard, having it become a "PC" and using it with those inputs exclusively for X hours. In this usage model it's OK to have pretty stark changes between modes because you don't mode switch very often.
However, they really wanted to enable a usage model where "touch plus mouse plus keyboard" became more like "mouse plus keyboard" in that you can constantly switch between inputs without really thinking about it, or even use them simultaneously. For this model to work whatever optimizations are done for different inputs need to be less intrusive and more localized - generally more about hiding/showing certain controls than completely changing the layout.
Second, there was a feeling that even for large displays and mouse/keyboard the desktop windowing model felt too heavy and required too much manual window management, at least for some (more casual) use cases. So they were hoping the model developed for tablets could double as a solution to the "Windows feels like too much work" problem on the desktop, especially for home PCs used for entertainment and communication.
To me the recent rumors sound like they're continuing the same general philosophy (of having a common UI with optimizations for each input method), but maybe deprioritizing the above two goals somewhat, which would leave them freer to make more drastic per-input-method optimizations.
I can't really complain about it much, it's awesome on my Surface of course, and not so great on my laptop. But really all I do is go back to desktop and it's really out of the way.
I too am missing the start menu, I think it's one of those things that just worked so well they shouldn't have changed it. The extra few seconds added to go in and find something on the metro desktop and pin it to my desktop or taskbar is a waste.
I see what they tried to do, but it's didn't really work out.
I'm confused. Why does it take you longer to find something on the Metro desktop? At least in my usage, it functions exactly like the old start menu did: I either start typing to find a program (most of the time) or I hit all programs and look around for it. What slows you down?
The main things I dislike about 8/8.1 are hot corners and the Metro apps being default on desktops. (Seriously Microsoft, I'm glad you finally implemented a native PDF reader but come on.) I don't understand complaints about the start screen.
That being said, Windows 8 did one really great thing for the desktop: multi-monitor support finally works the way it should have all along. The upgrade is worth it just for that, for someone like me with three montors.
> I'm confused. Why does it take you longer to find something on the Metro desktop? At least in my usage, it functions exactly like the old start menu did: I either start typing to find a program (most of the time) or I hit all programs and look around for it. What slows you down?
Yeah I never got why people complained about this. We're running Windows 8 and now 8.1 at work on our development machines (not for "now I can develop Metro apps!"). It's good because we get the latest RDS protocol improvements so remote access works just that little bit better and Windows 8 comes with other technical improvements.
My workflow for launching applications never changed: if it's not pinned to my taskbar then it's WinKey + Type "Fi" (say for Firefox) + Enter.
All that said, I did install ClassicShell a fortnight ago just to try it out (after using the Start Screen since Windows 8 RC) and not having to leave my desktop for the Metro interface just works that leeeeeeeeetle bit better in unquantifiable ways. Now it's on my home + work PCs.
Does anyone know what this means for the windows 8 app store? Is it still going to be restricted to metro only apps? I know you can link to desktop apps but you can't sell them through the app store yet. Will they lift this restriction?
Flat is inevitable. Flat is practical. But, yeah, you can not make money on it yet, because you know people love what they used to look at. They don't like change.
Kazimir Malevich 100 years ago tried to tell the world about it but the world is slow.
Flat is nothing more than a cost cutting measure to "benefit" developers. They don't have to pay for or do design any more so they can be more productive in churning out more of the trivial things Steven Sinofsy and Jony Ive think really sell licenses and machines.
I feel really sorry for all the graphics design people whose work I loved and who now have to use pastel crayons with large blunt tips which of course anyone can do so puts the designers pretty much out of work. I hope this too shall pass and eye pleasing detail shall return. I just hope all the designers weren't pushed into becoming higher paid programmers never to return to esthetics.
Metro is just too flat, too radical UI change. It seems refreshing at first, then gets boring quickly. iOS 7 is also flat, but not completely. It incorporates subtle gradient and shade, and kept the around corners mixing best of both worlds. The bottom line, it's not a completely new UI. It's a incremental update. Users are somewhat still familiar with the new UI. OS X pretty much evolves the same way. Incremental changes seems to be much a safer bet.
About 5 years ago, when Mac OS X 10.4 was the latest, I started considering switching from Windows (Vista at the time) to Mac. But all my friends and colleagues were telling me about how awful Macs were.
They were remembering the Macs from the 90s, and that image stuck with them long after those Macs died. They had no idea what innovation and improvements Apple had done with Mac OS X and the iMac. They were just blindly biased and either okay with it or unaware of it.
I wonder if that's the same thing happening today with Windows 8. I bet people here are so biased against it because previous versions of Windows or previous Microsoft products or practices left a bad taste.
To be fair, I don't know any modern news about Microsoft. So maybe they still are shady business people. But I don't expect to be able to find any unbiased sources who can confirm or deny this credibly.
Hopefully when win9 comes out we can all look back and laugh at this. It somehow magically fixes the dual UI issue. At least if it doesn't we don't have do worry about Win10 at all.
My immediate reaction was "Why are you killing Windows, Microsoft?". From that moment I installed the beta I could see the destruction of PC gaming and everything that came along with it following in it's wake as clear as day.
A lot of people misinterpreted Gabe Newell's dislike of Windows 8. People seemed to think that he disliked it simply because of the windows app store. Just because it might compete with Steam. The problem is much more fundamental than being competed with. He disliked it because it's a terrible release of Windows that destroys the very platform Steam is on.
It's no wonder Gabe decided to go all in on Linux. It may be a slim hope getting that to stick, but at least it's a chance. If the platform you rely on is going to self destruct out from under you, you need to jump to whatever has a chance of keeping you afloat.