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Windows 8 Desktop 'Just Another App'?
CWmike writes "Steven Sinofsky, president of Microsoft's Windows and Windows Live division, said this week that Windows 8 will let users treat the traditional desktop as 'just another app' that loads only on command. When it unveiled Windows 8's UI in June, Microsoft said it would feature a 'touch-first' interface to compete in the fast-growing tablet market. Underneath that, however, would be a traditional Windows-style desktop. 'Having both of [the] user interfaces [work] together harmoniously is an important part of Windows 8,' Sinofsky said in a blog post on Wednesday. The Metro-style UI — the one inspired by Windows Phone 7's tile-based design — will be the first to show up when a user boots a device. At that point, users reach a crossroads. 'If you want to stay permanently immersed in that Metro world, you will never see the desktop — we won't even load it (literally the code will not be loaded) unless you explicitly choose to go there,' Sinofsky said. 'If you don't want to do ... 'PC' things, then you don't have to and you're not paying for them in memory, battery life or hardware requirements.' If using a conventional PC with keyboard and mouse, Windows 8 users will run an 'app' to load the desktop, he said. 'Essentially, you can think of the Windows desktop as just another app.'"
This is the version of Windows that you skip, right? Every other version is the good version?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Before anyone jumps on the band wagon and says that we all have perfectly usable user space desktop apps for 28 years in the UNIX world, let me say that it is actually very important that now even Microsoft starts to understand that modularity is the way to go while designing complex systems. Moving various operating system components to the user space is just a logical conclusion of the research done during the last four decades. Look at the direction of modern OSii development, from MINIX to GNU. Started by GNOSIS, KeyKOS, EROS and Coyotos this trend seems to suggest that it is much more natural and reliable to design a secure capability-based system when all of the services are separated from each other. Now when even Microsoft is going in that direction - and it is not a trivial change for them, trust me - we can expect Apple and other OS vendors to follow which is a Good Thing. After all, even if people like you and me are using secure operating systems we still don't want to get spammed and dossed by all of the legacy machines out there. It turns out that the rumors that Microsoft is starting to take the latest research in operating systems seriously turned out to be true. This is good news for everyone.
Karma: Positive (probably because of superiour intellect)
I can't imagine they could do away with much more than explorer and maybe a hand full of DLL's. So, basically, we are given an extra step to load our desktops... probably while we are inundated with news feeds or advertisements. I wonder which HKey will turn this off.
Since the dawn of time, the Windows "Desktop" has always been an application. Before 95 it was progman. After, it was explorer. You've always been able to switch to a new shell with ini file or registry modifications.
Explorer has always been "just an app". You can edit system.ini and replace 'SHELL=explorer.exe' with any other application. e.g. LiteStep, a MAME front end, XBMC, etc.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
The Metro-style UI — the one inspired by Windows Phone 7's tile-based design — will be the first to show up when a user boots a device.
I sure hope it'll be easy to turn that off. It makes sense on a consumer box with a touchscreen, but for my work station, I have no intention of using the Metro UI.
this sounds like a good choice. Granted, people like me may be up in rage because of the unfamilar feeling, but the fewer calls I get because people totally screwed up their own rig is a good thing in my book. As the first major desktop/notebook/netbook/whatever OS to embrace this idea (as in it's not a phone or PDA), it could verywell lead how it's really supposed to be done. Just please tell me I don't have to jailbreak my own computer...
For those who seek perfection there can be no rest on this side of the grave.
That's not the Droid I was looking for.
Wow. I had to look up the word 'shkotzim' - is there any subject, no matter how mundane (OS loading, for example) that can't be turned to anti-jewish sentiment?
In answer to your question : yes, this UI customisation issue IS the inevitable result of millennia of Jewish culture! It's what they've been planning ALL ALONG!
Never, as Apple would likely sue.
FC Closer
Sounds like Windows 3.x. You booted into DOS and Windows installed and ran as an application on top of it. Of course, at the time my favorite DOS command was deltree, and my favorite folder to use it on was the root Windows 3.x folder.
The Windows desktop was already an app. It was called "Explorer.exe".
This really isn't news until it ships, and we can assess the product as a whole.
This is not a slashvertisement, it is information for people who are interested in what the next MS OS will be. This being a website that is frequented by people who develop software and people who administer software, they need to know what is coming down the pipe before it happens.
Besides this gives us more ammo to talk crap about MS when they drop features they have talked about.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
This is an interesting idea that has shown up elsewhere... In OS X, there is the "full screen" mode, and many windows also have an oblong button in the top right which is used to show/hide extra toolbars, and many apps also use this to switch between "Simple" and "complex" modes, including the Finder.
The merit would be to force developers to include different interfaces for the same underlying program, and to consider this type of workflow during development. This definitely sounds like a good thing, because many desktop programs are very robust but lack similar tools in the burgeoning touch interface market.
Tablets are already very powerful and capable of handling these applications, but quickly porting them over would be clunky. Many of these apps would be perfectly usable with a touch interface, but are not available for those platforms despite the practicality. Audacity could work great with a touch interface for example, but we don't want to create an entirely new application when the same one could be used with a slightly different interface.
I think that positioning the interface choice so predominantly on the desktop will spur the maturation of touch interface on already existing applications, and it will be good for users because they will already be familiar, and will be able to switch back if they can't find a certain option. They'll be able to learn at their own pace without having the rug pulled out from under them. It will also help developers design more modular programs, and slowly build up the touch interface portion instead of having to design two separate applications and make either/or trade-offs for both of them.
It would be great to re-use all of our code and be able to switch from a touch interface to a mouse/keyboard interface at will. Dock your tablet and it becomes a desktop... for real this time. Take the screen off your desktop and you can walk around with it. Maybe future monitors will have lower-powered hardware built in so we can do this, and snap the monitor back on when we need more horsepower or different input options.
Twinstiq, game news
Maybe I'm wrong, but when explorer.exe is closed, you don't see ANY windows until it is restarted. When it is restarted, everything is back in its rightful place though, so I'm not sure how far away explorer.exe is from the actual window manager since windows is... weird... about the distinction between a window manager, the shell and the window system.
If I can just reach out with my words and touch a butthole, just one, it will all be worth it.
Explorer.exe is almost exactly analogous to Finder on a Mac: just an app that provides the familiar UI environment.
What's ironic is that this is pretty much doing Win98/IE4 in reverse. That was when Microsoft decided that not only did you have to load the standard UI at boot time, you had to load their web browser too, so they combined the browser and the UI into a single program. Unbundling the UI from the OS... hell, that's almost like rolling back to before Win95! First boot the OS, then (if you want) load the GUI. :)
While I can see plenty of good reasons for doing this, it's going to be very confusing to the users, who have no conception of the distinction between the OS and the UI. If you load Windows, and there's no Start button, no (My) Computer, no task bar, etc.... to most people that's not Windows. They don't care if the drivers and kernel and whatnot are all the same; it will be (for their perspective) an entirely different operating system.
So maybe it's time Microsoft changed the name?
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
In the days of MSDOS and the first 8086, there wasn't any hardware based security. About the only multitasking was the CLI/SLI (clear interrupt mask/set interrupt mask) and the 18.2Hz interrupt. There wasn't even any boundary between system files and users files except for a few bits in the directory structure for read-only, hidden and system files.
DosBox recreates the MSDOS environment perfectly. Every service device driver depended on interrupts. Int 10h for this, Int 31h for that.
Want mouse support? Install MSDOS v3.1 to get those.
Need IPX support? Install packet drivers for that.
Need Adlib/Sound-Blaster support? Install sound drivers for that. Want higher resolution SVGA modes. Update your BIOS/graphics card for those.
To run Windows, required rendering GUI widgets all the different framebuffer sizes and formats in software (CGA- 4 color, EGA - 16 color, VGA EGA+ 256 color, SVGA: VGA+16-bit/24-bit color). Hardware accelerated blitting was a luxury then, let alone texture mapping. Having clock speeds less that 33MHz didn't help with the GUI desktop rendering.
Writing an application back then involved making your own interrupt calls to the mouse, audio, keyboard and display drivers, to set up and shut down these services.
First edition of Windows just slapped on a set of GUI calls to set these up consistently between different hardware setups. It was a layer of bureaucracy but it simplified the process of writing applications so that users just had to worry about GUI design and events.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
Ahm, so? It's the default on Linux, you have several tiers, you can use no graphics or windows at all (shell), "just X" with twm or just a root window, a full blown desktop like kde. You can even use something sophisticated like clutter without X (direct FB backend).
Sooo...What's the news, Microsoft?
On second thought, let's not go to Camelot. It is a silly place.
No, don't. Unity sucks hard enough.
Turn off [xgk]dm and just boot to a console.
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With new Windows server OSes you can choose a "full" installation or a "core" installation. The core installation lacks a whole lot of shit, including the GUI. I mean you still have a mouse cursor and window manager, but the GUI as in explorer itself is missing. All command line interfacing (though as noted apps can run graphically if they wish). You can do it to save resources, though it can be a bit of a pain to administer.
Sounds like this is just the next step in making shit like that easier. It can apply to desktops, as well as servers, and is something that can be loaded or not on demand, rather than having to choose. Makes sense to me. Windows is actually fairly modular at a low level, they just don't make it that easy for users to disable things.
I recall reading that the MetroUI itself was an html5 app. If that's the case I'm sure this version will be much better for customization than previous ones. Hacking the metroUI interface or replacing it with a different html5 app will be far easier than replacing the explorer.exe shell has been in the past. I'm sure it won't take too long before the mod community comes out with a replacement desktop UI that's actually slick and functional.
I can tell you who consistently hates it no matter how long they use it themselves. Anyone who has to walk someone else through doing something using a Ribbon-ized application over the phone. It's absolutely impossible if you don't have the app in front of you for reference yourself. Its especially difficult when the element they're supposed to click on doesn't even have a fucking text label, only a big shiny icon. It's much easier to walk people through navigating hierarchal menus, the way they're organized, you can even feel your way around without having the UI to reference just by feedback from the user's descriptions over the phone. Also, the Ribbon just wastes more screen real estate.
grep -iw skynet
If the desktop only starts up on command, that means users will be presented with a black screen of death. How is this different from every other version of windows?
Windows has always worked that way, since day one.
Windows boots into NT mode, and starts win32. Win32 loads the display bits, and starts the various processes that manage winstations, and starts winlogon to manage your user sessions.
Go into the registry, and you can boot every version of windows to a text prompt with no graphics at all.
I find it funny on here when people talk about the things that Windows doesn't do or Linux does do, and 99% of the people talking about it have never pieced together a Linux system from scratch, or done the same with Windows. Having done both, I can tell you the two may be configured differently, but logically do a lot of the same things. And most of the guys I know (myself included) who are intimately familiar with both systems from the Kernel on out will tell you that Windows, at that level, is a lot more modern and sophisticated than Linux is.
The things people call out as being "bad" in Windows tend to be the things that the billion people who use Windows expect to have. That's the reality of having customers to support.