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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!
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?
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.
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?