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Microsoft Reveals More Windows 8 Details
Barence writes "Microsoft has released the first full details of Windows 8, with an all-or-nothing approach to touchscreen technology. All versions of Windows 8 — whether used on a touchscreen device or not — will use the operating system's new Metro interface, which was first developed for Windows Phone 7 devices. The advent of Windows 8 sees Microsoft introduce a new style of application, dubbed Metro Style apps, and its own app store. The company also claims to have boosted Windows 8 performance with fast boot/shutdown times, a new Task Manager and the option to refresh a PC with a clean install of the OS with apps and settings left intact."
...as if millions of PC users suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.
which should be the next good version, and if MS keeps to their historic release schedule, we should see sometime in 2014 to 2015. Not that long to wait really, since I'm sure Windows 7, which I find to be excellent, will tide me over while I wait.
There's not a fucking chance I'm using that shitty windows phone interface.
My Desktop PC is NOT a smartphone with a 22 inch screen
Please dont treat it like one
Quote from link: "Every screen needs to be touch. A monitor without touch feels dead."
Response: Like everything developed by every company that wants to have mass market sales, it's humorous to NOT hear "It's what we've noticed as something very popular with other types of [technology] that eats up peoples' time and develops even further interest in buying. Mystery and slow revelation with additional hidden secrets is the key to fast up-front sales. We'll jump on the bandwagon, but it's something completely different from the norm! Buy it and you'll find out how!"
Honesty is too painful to just throw out there, I guess. :)
Not troll material or flamebait at all - It's just something I see constantly and I find it humorous. I may love Windows 8, I may hate it. Don't know until I use it.
Just think about it... Microsoft has probably made the biggest improvement to their software in two decades... You can now reboot far faster than ever before! Just think about the time saved per week for your average Windows user!
'User Interface Designers' are clueless about what users actually want; news at eleven.
they've included the option to reimage your Windows install as a basic OS feature.
Except thats not what they are giving you. They're giving you the same thing you've always had, install over the top of an existing install.
option to refresh a PC with a clean install of the OS with apps and setting left intact.
Considering that 99 times out of a 100, its the settings that broke the install in the first place, recopying new files over isn't all that useful.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
FUD back at you, when most apps require the Metro, that won't be a useful solution.
Can we refer to Windows 8 users as Metrosexuals?
#DeleteChrome
You heard of the app store first probably with some Linux distribution in the 1990s. You heard of full screen mode before you ever heard of any alternative, with nearly every post-dumbterm but pre-windowed platform (e.g. MS-DOS, C64, etc) since fullscreen was all they had.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
Why the fuck would we want that on a desktop? Part of what makes a desktop system so useful is having multiple things open that you can switch between, position around, and so on. Right now I have my browser up on top of my primary window, but my e-mail client hiding behind it. I can see when new mail comes in. On my secondary monitor is the interface for our digital security system so I can watch over the cameras. There are a few other things loaded and running, but the windows are occluded at the moment. I don't want to be "immersed" in any of this shit. The ability to have multiple things going is why I like my desktop, it's why I have 4 cores, 8GB of memory and north of 4 million pixels of total display.
I do not get this obsession with trying to make computers work like phones. No, bad idea. When I heard of what they were doing with Lion I said "What a horrible idea." Now MS is doing the same? What the fuck? How about you give me a phone interface on a phone and a computer interface on a computer?
They say we'll be able to make "Metro" applications with HTML, CSS and Javascript. Does that mean we won't even need Windows to make Windows Apps?
If you're at the fucking keynote, describing a demo as "working wonderfully" you're a Microsoft shill by definition.
As I said when OS X Lion was released, I think this push towards full-screen apps is a move backwards. Yes, having the app fill the screen makes a lot of sense for smartphones and tablets, where screen/interface space is limited and you're typically focusing on a single task at a time. But on a desktop?
The whole point of a multi-purpose desktop computer is to be able to do a myriad of things, and more importantly to combine all the various resources/applications together in powerful ways. I want to be able to have a web-page reference document open while I code something, or copy-and-paste something from a spreadsheet into a text document. I want to be able to cross-compare multiple graphs/images/whatever at the same time. To do all this, I need to be able to tile, stack, and move windows on my screen. Endless alt-tabbing just doesn't cut it.
With desktop monitors getting bigger and bigger, fullscreen apps just don't make sense. Even maximized apps don't make sense: your mouse has to travel ridiculously far to get from content to controls if you make your app fullscreen on a 30-inch monitor. (There are of course times when you want a single app fullscreen; e.g. photo editing on a large monitor gives you a much better view of the content.) One of the main advantages of modern large monitors is the ability to have multiple apps open at once, without them blocking each other or being ridiculously constrained. Why are we throwing away these advantages?
I'm fully aware of the cognitive science research on multi-tasking (specifically, that people are bad at it and that focusing on a single task for a longer period of time has big advantages). What I'm questioning is whether any non-trivial task can really be accomplished using a single application. We should be optimizing our user interfaces to maximize the efficiency and focus on tasks and workflows: not boxing ourselves into stripped-down full-screen apps.
There is a button to go to the desktop, but I doubt they will let you turn off the Metro UI completely. Microsoft is essentially using windows 8 to force their way into the mobile market. If every user is suddenly familiar with the windows phone UI, and all of their applications suddenly work seamlessly with their desktop and the windows phone OS, then maybe that windows phone starts to look that much better.
It is actually a rather brilliant move (not that I endorse it in any way) by Microsoft to leverage their desktop supremacy into the mobile space while seemingly avoiding anti-trust issues. I am sure that some of their competitors may try to call them out on this, but it seems like it would be an upward legal battle.
Every time I see "Metro", I see "Metrosexual" as in Windows Metrosexual. Oh well, off to the land of OS X - frak Messysoft.
From the article:
The full-screen Metro Style apps are likely to be web apps; the kind you would typically expect to find on a tablet. Things such as Twitter clients, video players and news readers, rather than full-blown desktop software such as Office or Photoshop.
Although they can be coded in conventional programming languages such as C and C++, they can also be created using standard web technologies such as HTML, CSS and JavaScript (but not, rather controversially, Microsoft’s own Silverlight). And because they are based on web technologies, they are the only applications that can be used across both the x86 and ARM-based versions of Windows 8 without any recompiling.
Guess I misinterpreted it
You miss his point entirely - his point was not that Apple invented those concepts by any stretch of the imagination (hell, Classic and OS X were about as *far* from fullscreen as you could be in an OS), but that they released a new version of OS X very recently with those two features as key selling points.
Very coincidental, I think?
Either way it's a bit of a no brainer - it's Apple's attempt to streamline desktop computing to make it easy enough for anyone to use and there are a lot more users who want that in a computer. It doesn't mean (on either platform) that the 'old' way is going - it mentions it right in TFA that you can go back to classic view, and you can run 'fullscreen ready' apps in OS X in the old way (which I do - I prefer the layered window approach with Command+H being my usual method of task switching).
Just like the mp3 player, the tablet, a online music store, the large-screen-multitouch smartphone, the all-in-one desktop computer, Apple didn't "invent" the App Store, but they did make it the current popular thing.
'Jensen Harris, director of program management for the Windows Experience. "Every screen needs to be touch. A monitor without touch feels dead."'
I applaud your efforts to make a more modular windows. I think it's a long time coming and I'm glad to see you move in a more compartmentalized direction.
One problem, you may argue all you want that my monitor is dead, however I would point out that I can at least read it. Unlike your touch screen, my monitor has none of the crud and filth that fingers put on keyboards and mice like your touch screen has. When you learn how to make a desktop interface, you may be installed on my hard drive. Until then you are dismissed like Gnome and Unity will be from my DESKTOP hard drive.
Good day sir!
~~ Behold the flying cow with a rail gun! ~~
Considering that many businesses are still on XP, I wouldn't be entirely surprised to see a lot of them hold on to XP until 9 comes out.
Is 1563649 a prime number?
That's like defending your purchase of a Pinto by saying it was better than a Lada.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
I find Windows 7 to be a better overall computing experience than XP, Vista, and Ubuntu 9.04 and 10.04, which were the 4 operating systems I had running across various systems at the time I tried out 7. I made 7 one of my dual boot options on my primary system not long after that, and recently I reformatted the HD as I wanted to reclaim the full space into a single partition as I found I was only booting into the other OS about once every few months.
I don't know where you got the Idea that there exists any OS without several pages of google results for "OS problems". I've never used one, and I started with dos 3.2, and have used almost everything since, including such outlier gems as NT 4. Windows 7 has fewer problems for me on a day to day basis than any other OS I've ever used compared to the amount I use it. maybe some other OS marketing team coined the phrase "it just works", but that really is my experience with win7. Nothing's crashing. nothing's blue screening. no programs are doing weird shit for no reason. nothing's claiming security problems or rights issues. no malware or viruses. it detects hardware and auto-configures absurdly well. I could chalk it up to being lucky, but I've got two different systems (a desktop and a laptop) that both run very well on the OS, no matter what I throw at it. Hell it usually runs older software better than older OSes!
perhaps your experience is different than mine, but everybody I talk to seems to share the same opinion. This post may sound like MS fanboyism, but I assure you that I was unhappy enough with MS's offerings to go to linux as my main OS for a good period of time. They've done a lot of backwards shit in the past, but I've got nothing but praise for Windows 7. The worst thing I can say about it is it's UNC file sharing is difficult to get working correctly.
The Zune was a decent device, as good or better than its competition at the time. It was just a huge failure of marketing. Reminds me a bit of some of the Android tablets going against Apple right now, actually.
Well, there's a couple of reasons: I keep a row of icons for frequently used apps on the left side of my desktop, I like instant (well, as "instant" as they can be) access to them, so I prefer them visible (in addition to the quick launch bar.. I have a lot of shortcuts!)
I've also noticed a little, infrequent bug where sometimes the taskbar button for a loaded app vanishes, usually Firefox for some reason. There's always the "Alt-Tab" combo, but honestly it just doesn't really appeal to me as a primary method of app switching.. it's just a preference thing.
There's a certain "sweet spot" for me where window size is concerned, because I also can't stand to use windows that are the size of a postage stamp either, which I also frequently see people do -that's just too much scrolling. I guess I like a happy medium, but that's just me, to each their own. *shrug*
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
I agree that for some desktop applications (like web browsing) it's useless. However for some other applications like content creation (movie or photo editing) or consuming (video playback, video chat with presentations) it is nicer to have a full screen available as in your random video game so you're not distracted by your e-mail counter or other random things that happen.
As you said, multitasking is hard and it's sometimes nicer to even work on a document or e-mail and simply have some type of solid, dark colored background away from all the apps that scream for your attention. Well implemented, your chat will detect it and put you on Away and other applications might not make a notification noise.
Mouse tracking is not an issue, just put your mouse sensitivity and acceleration higher. I can go from the left to the right on my 24" display with about a half inch movement of my thumb (trackball). In the beginning it's a bit odd but you get used to it. Also learn to use the keystrokes for your most used functions.
The problem with your statement is that you would need to create highly user-tailored applications in order to achieve this which is not feasible in the current programming model. Maybe when computers program for us (and can interpret our wishes) we could make such a thing happen where the program is stripped down to fit our needs but for now, we need to live with a stripped down, uniform version.
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I want to be able to have a web-page reference document open while I code something, or copy-and-paste something from a spreadsheet into a text document. I want to be able to cross-compare multiple graphs/images/whatever at the same time. To do all this, I need to be able to tile, stack, and move windows on my screen. Endless alt-tabbing just doesn't cut it.
Note that Win8, unlike iOS or Android, actually lets you run Metro apps side by side. You do it by using the swipe-from-left-edge gesture, but instead of releasing the finger, you keep it down and drag the app thumbnail onto the edge.
It's somewhat limited in that you can only handle two of them that way, and you always have one smaller window docked alongside one bigger one. On the other hand, the apps are expected to be aware of this mode, and adapt their UI to the situation when they're docked as "small window" alongside the primary app.
Oh I can certainly drop to terminal window when I need to, and I did with ubuntu. a lot. a whole lot.
That's part of what I didn't like about ubuntu, that I had to dick around with a lot of stuff on a nitty gritty level to get it working. It reminded me sometimes of the old days manually editing config.sys to get IRQs and DMA channels playing nicely between different hardware. To be fair, Ubuntu wrapped a whole lot into gui, a far and away better experience than when I first tried slackware in 1995, but ubuntu gui config was always hit or miss. Wine's gui config worked quite well for instance, but 9.04 never truly liked my video card, and I'd have to manually update my xconfig file half the time, etc (hell, I had to install the video driver from a command prompt more often than not). The repositories rarely had the most updated version of non-big-name software, etc, so I spent a good amount of ubuntu time at a prompt. Now, I'm certainly capable of doing so, but as I said... I just don't want to anymore. I still used dos to do most of my file management even into the win98 era, but eventually GUI interaction won me out, and I prefer it to this day for most tasks. Say what you like, I'm just not that hardcore geek anymore. At least not on my home machine anyway.
I have nothing bad to say about people who like that level of intimacy with their OS. 10 years ago I might have been into it too. I just have other stuff to do now.
Many people simply don't believe MS is able to deliver. Trotting out a prototype/development tablet with a fan doesn't inspire a lot of hope. Are they really that far behind that they're still not running on their target CPU architecture, yet?
Why does it have to be either or? People get so worried that everything is changing. It has been one way for ages and now there are other ways. I agree that it is cool, useful and necessary to have your apps all on screen and available, but there are definitely times when it is nice to have the option to work full screen - video editing, for example - something where you are engrossed in one thing and you don't want or need to see the clutter of the desktop and the other windows.
"The world is a construct of forceful imagination. Those who don't know walk around in the reailties of those who do"
I think this push towards full-screen apps is a move backwards.
Only for us who know better. Unfortunately, we are not the target market, anymore. All I see all day at work is people swishing their middle fingers around on their smartphones, and they seem to love all this stuff.
From Firefox to Unity to Aero to Chrome to Ribbon to iAnything, everything released within the last 6 years has driven me nuts. I'm really trying to give this stuff a chance, but I just hate everything I come across. It was the obscure error messages and badly designed menus that confused people, not the taskbars, status bars, and maximize gadgets.
What really frightens me is that the Linux community is heading in this direction, too. WTF?