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Windows 8 Roundup
There has been no shortage of Windows 8 news today. MrSeb writes: "Earlier this morning, at the Build Windows conference in Anaheim, California, Microsoft made it patently clear that 'To the cloud!' is not merely a throwaway phrase: it is the entire future of the company. Every single one of Microsoft's services, platforms, and form factors will now begin its hasty, leave-no-prisoners-behind transition to the always-on, internet-connected cloud." netbuzz pointed out that even the famous Blue Screen of Death will get a new look. Lastly mikejuk writes: "While everyone else is looking at the surface detail of Windows 8 there are some deep changes going on. Perhaps the biggest is that Metro now provides an alternative environment that doesn't use the age old Win32 API. This means no more overlapping windows — yes Metro really does take the windows out of Windows."
The windows 8 tiles system supports true multitasking, and has a few window arrangements that let you have 1/2/3 (or 4?) applications on screen at once.
Its actually pretty well though out, and should work pretty well for tablet users and netbooks.
For those of us power users with big desktops and multiple screens with 10+ windows open... guess what... that's not going away. You just launch Explorer, and have a full desktop window manager.
Seriously... what's with all the idiotic hate on this?
Microsoft is only changing the DEFAULT window manager to be more consumer / tablet friendly. Good for them.
The prosumer/business/productivity group will still have the more pro oriented traditional window manager for doing what we do.
Nobody even half expects people working on an excel spreedsheet business projection drawing data from pdfs, web pages, and their email to do so using the new interface. Some things make sense to do in multiple overlapping windows. That's not going away.
So stop flipping out about it.
Cloud computing is the wave of the future. The idea of using a desktop PC as a primary computing device is increasingly becoming an anachronism. The wave of the future is ubiquitous computing capability not tied to one specific device. For instance, being able to listen to a song in your car on the way home from work, your phone while you walk to the mail box and through your home entertainment system when you walk in the door, with all the systems seamlessly interacting with each other so you never miss a beat.
Obviously this won't happen with Windows 8 but at least it's step in the right direction.
And most of those people stayed with XP till Windows7 came out... A lot of businesses did the same thing, simply stayed on XP and skipped Vista entirely. At work we are already making plans to skip Windows 8 unless Microsoft gives us ability to make our workstations more business oriented rather then having them look like a bunch of touchscreen home PC's.
> Windows 7 works just fine. It's the new XP - didn't you know?
It's sad, but you're probably right. Microsoft today is kind of like a rock star who's made so much cash, he's just going to be weird and do whatever the fsck he feels like doing from now on. If Microsoft is hyping "Metro" in an effort to generate developer excitement, they're having the exact opposite effect. Everyone *I* know is like, "WTF, has Microsoft gone completely batshit insane?"
It's almost like Microsoft's entire developer elite just hit their mid-40s, had a midlife crisis, realized they have enough cash to spend the rest of their lives coding for fun, retired en masse, and handed over the company to a marketing department that thinks making Windows look like a tablet UI so it can run phone apps better is somehow a good idea.
I'm at the BUILD conference, and my impression is that Windows 8 will be very competitive. The re-imagining effort is sweeping, and touches everything from the back end to Consumer devices. The big news is that HTML 5 is now a "native" programming platform for the client UI. There are two JS libraries, a pure JS library that implements the new Metro look-and-feel (WinJS), and a Windows/JS bridge library that exposes the Windows API (and hence the Windows-controlled hardware such as the camera) in Javascript (WinRT). Tooling improvements include terrific new debugging scenarios and a major upgrade to Expression Blend to be able to edit HTML/CSS as well as XAML.
Basically, MS has taken the best ideas of the web development world, and leveraged them to massively improve the development experience for their next OS. If I wanted to write Windows-specific apps, Win8 is a huge improvement. It's an open question, however, whether people want to write Windows-specific apps as opposed to web-centric apps. Even then, Win8 will definitely shorten and simplify the transition from a web app to a Windows app.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
Considering we have give about 12% of our workforce ipads which are barely usable for "real" work I think MS is looking at things in completely the right way. I know I have little use for a tablet at work, but about 25-30% of my user base probably does and probably 80% wouldn't mind having one at home.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.