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Aero Glass UI No More On Windows 8
New submitter closer2it writes with news of interface changes in Windows 8. From the article: "Microsoft has revealed that it has made some big changes to its desktop UI for Windows 8, which includes moving away from Aero Glass — the UI first introduced with Vista. According to the company, this means visual changes that include 'flattening surfaces, removing reflections, and scaling back distracting gradients.' Despite all of these changes with the interface, the company doesn't appear to be worried about the issue of 'learnability.' Instead, Microsoft believes that with a little help it won't take long for users to adapt to the new operating system."
more walled garden... still not enough to make me leave my Linux freedom that I enjoy so much.
Tomorrow is another day...
The start button seems to be missing
Yes, it was tiring that all the car designers seemed to be copying each other when it came to body shapes for sedans, with the rounded "aero" corners and indented "soapdish" transoms.
But if you look at an old car from the '80s or early '90s, with its boxy shape, it just looks really out of date.
Instead, Microsoft believes that with a little help it won't take long for users to adapt to the new operating system.
I finally agree with Microsoft on this one. They are correct, with only a little help it won't take long for users to adapt to a new OS such as MacOSX or Linux! Glad they finally are admitting it.
The only reason anyone stuck with Windows was the backwards compatibility and all the software available and that people have already invested in. Seems they are working pretty hard to remove as much of that as they can from Win8, which lowers the reasons to use it from 1 to 0 for a large number of people.
Windows 8 might be worth using if it had the Windows classic interface with the Windows 2000 look, the Metro abomination is a shovel digging the grave of Win 8. Like Ubuntu dumping Gnome 2.32.2 and adopting Unity in 11.04. You just drive users away. I just installed Windows 7 in a Virtualbox instance and the Windows classic interface is the only one I can stand.
liberare massarum ex ignorantia, clausa descendit molestie.
If they so badly want users to adapt to a new OS, then those users might as well switch to Linux and adapt to something good.
The user is getting f**ked by unfamiliar territory either way. This would be the most perfect opportunity so far to break out of the Windows cycle and dependence.
Here's the workflow they should have done:
1) Start with Metro-driven login screen.
2) Show the user a panorama of Metro for a minute and ask "do you want this or the traditional windows experience on start up?"
3) If they want classic, login takes them back into the desktop like they're used to.
4) In classic, the effin start menu works like it did in Windows 7.
5) Metro apps can be launched seamlessly from explorer with Windows shifting effortlessly back and forth between metro for metro apps and explorer for everything else.
6) Windows key + tab shifts between the two environments like alt-tab between windows in explorer.
Microsoft's only hope in fighting Apple in the integrated PC/tablet/phone market is to make Windows be more open and more "whatever you want is cool with us." That means they should be planning RIGHT NOW how to make Windows on PC behave in a totally laissez faire fashion in UI and have a touch UI system for traditional Windows apps so that businesses that don't like Metro can recompile for ARM.
This isn't even news for nerds. Nerds have already been using the Developer and Consumer Previews and await the first beta, like me.
Flattening of window widgets is not news. It's not even a story.
And a link to the MSDN blog that discusses the entire history of Windows from 1.0 to 8 to justify the shenanigans in 8? Come the hell on. The Windows "defenders" here already do that in the comments. I can't even imagine the flood of grievances filed with the MWSU.
The story is Metro. The story is how maddening Metro is going to be to the vast majority of desktop users when you can't turn it off. The story is about how Microsoft thinks they've found the holy grail of a "one interface for all devices" when it's self-delusion, again. The story is how you and I and every other nerd on the planet is going to have to answer dumb questions about Metro just to be polite. Repeatedly. Until Windows 9.
--
BMO
Cause that worked with vista. It seems like every time Microsoft has a successful launch they ignore all their lessons learned in the next release. I wouldn't be surprised if windows 8 has driver issues and is certified for under performing systems.
I cannot believe that they still left that startbutton out. It will be a disaster for people picking up windows 8 for the first time. And no, a 'first boot' help screen still will not help! This is mystery meat UI!
http://reverttosaved.com/2012/03/14/mystery-meat-ui-design-in-windows-8-ios-and-os-x-could-point-to-a-confusing-computing-future/
The windows OS was largely similar from Windows 3.1 to Vista. Stop toying with it. I think it's find to have these as optional or even the default GUI if people really want it. But some of us have been using the windows GUI for ages and it's frankly not appreciated when things are moved around.
We know where all the buttons and features are supposed to be guys. There is no other place you can put them that will be better.
Every new version of windows is like some guy randomly coming into your kitchen and reorganizing everything only to leave a little message behind saying "I fixed your kitchen, you're welcome.".... Well great... I can't find the maynanese... my spice rack is completely out of order... and there are about a hundred things that i have to patiently remove from whatever stupid location they were put and put them back where I want them.
What? I can't move it there because you outright removed cabinets and installed totally different appliances? I had that experience in Windows 7 where they took away the ability to sort folders manually. Happily I found a registry hack that added the feature back into the system.
This is obnoxious Microsoft. And beyond that, we've lost compatibilty with most of the old dos apps in the 64 bit version of windows. There's no good reason for that since dos was already being emulated. You can't tell me that you can't emulate a 16 bit environment in a 64 bit environment when there are a dozen dos emulators on the market that will do just that. Of course, most of them are designed for games and so don't work with networked printers or any of the other fun stuff that we've been counting on for YEARS.
Seriously Microsoft. You're killing it. Your selling point forever has been standards and backward compatibility.
I can over look a lot of nonsense if you just give me an updated version of the same thing. I don't use windows to be wowed by the GUI graphics. I use windows because that's how I launch the programs and manage the files that I ACTUALLY care about. Changing everything around randomly is not helpful. Stop doing it. At the very least, at least provide some buried Classic mode somewhere in the system.
I'm tired of New Coke Windows. No one stick with you because you're innovative. We stick with you because you're consistent.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
I shudder to think how a typical employee will use an OS that has such an in-your-face look.The icon boxes in The Metro (rhymes with the Matrix) look huge, perfect for a small device or a huge TV that you view from 10 feet away. But for a desktop that sits an arm at most from the user? Perfect for the boss to look over that naughty FB notification that just came in.
On the other hand, if The Metro is a mere option, then what is all the fuss about? It would have been better if Miscrosoft simply targeted the tablet market with a pure tablet OS, and left the already successful Win 7 for the desktop.
So its back to windows 3.1 then? And for a prediction. The next version will feature lots of gradients and maybe some wordart/clipart.
Here's the workflow they should have done:
1) Start with Metro-driven login screen. 2) Show the user a panorama of Metro for a minute and ask "do you want this or the traditional windows experience on start up?" .
Yup..Ubuntu should have done the same thing,but noooooo.
I need less expensive MBs for my headless GNU/Linux server....
Sure, let that grand mother who barely even know how to use a computer find that "help" of yours.
Seriously Microsoft, Windows 8 is crap as it is, at least bring back the damn start menu, who the hell thought it was a good idea to hide it completely and require you to move the mouse to the corner of the screen, where there's nothing apparent there, to open "metro".
Based on recent trends in IE and Win UI design, Microsoft's announced plans, and their track record doing things just a little differently from Apple, I expect the default UI for Windows 9 to be just a blank bluish-grey screen with a lighter logo in the middle, and functions will be brought on screen and selected by gesturing in front of it in a dialect of American Sign Language. (Passwords will be entered by hiding one hand behind the other and finger-spelling.)
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
I switched the to classic theme immediately upon installing Windows 7 so this is of no matter to me.
I'll show you learning. How about that I just learned Win7 over the past year, and now that I'm settling in to it alright MS is changing things *again*.
Learning should be on their part, that constantly changing things makes life difficult for people. Unless this is a VERY intriguing usability upgrade then I find this development disturbing.
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Take away the one thing that differentiates you from Mac OS X-- the fact that your UI isn't ugly. We like Aero. If you make your UI ugly, why not just use OS X with it's ugly brushed aluminum and stoplights. Works for me. Metro is cool on tablets and phones, ridiculous and stupid on desktops. Clearly we've got this 'every other release is crap' thing going on with Windows now. But keep in mind that it's easier than ever to switch to Mac these days. Sure the UI is ugly, but the architecture is clearly superior to Windows, and 80% of the time we're using a web browser anyway. Make the UI suck and there's nothing left. Sure, Windows Explorer is superior to Finder (in basically every way), but that's not enough to keep us from using Mac OS X. If you thoroughly ruin the UI, there aren't many good reasons left to use Windows.
I like Windows 8. I'm typing this post from my laptop with Windows 8 CP, and I have little problem with it. In Windows 7, the start menu makes me click on two buttons and scroll a list, then click another folder and click an icon. In Windows 8, the start screen has large buttons that are easier to hit with a mouse (better for Fitts' law). The Metro-style apps help focus, and the snap view feature helps multitask. Most of the Windows desktop applications have been revamped in a good way. The startup time has improved considerably, and the whole OS seems a bit faster.
While not surprising, it is quite annoying that every post on the internet about changing something in Windows is met with hatred and fear. Get over it, you figured out how to use Windows 95 after the "abomination" of replacing Program Manager. You figured out how to use XP with its colorful toy interface. You figured out that Aero wasn't going to drain all the performance of your computer and slow it to a grinding halt. And now you're going to figure out that really smart geeks knew what they are doing when they put a lot of thought into the design of the Windows 8 UI.
(Not to say that I like everything in Windows 8... for instance, I put my taskbar on the left, so now my Windows 7 work computer has the start button in the upper left, and my Windows 8 laptop activates the start screen from the lower left. The split-thumb keyboard on the tablet interface really needs work. And I am a bit pissed that Microsoft put the snap view cutoff at 1366 px wide, when my laptop display can only do 1280.)
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
Everyone was happily moving along in a world where more gradients, more gloss, or more 3D was the way of the future. Then Apple changed all that by going retro. They still used gradients and gloss, but in a more subtle way. Their icons were 2D, flat, iconic rather than 3D and realistic. This changed more than just GUIs: slideshows, packaging, advertisements, and trade show posters are changing too.
Microsoft is just following the trend. This will be consistent with the look and feel of Metro, and Visual Studio 2012.
It has all happened before and will all happen again... Chris
To sell more Macs.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
is complete.
Worst interface in OS history.
A 5 year olds drawing of a computer screen would likely be better.
And I'm not even kidding.
The interface is a mish-mash stuck in the void between desktop OS and tablet OS.
The interface is literally what ended up happening to Spore, the cute team vs the science team. Sadly that tit Chris won and ruined what Spore could have been.
Then there is the generaly bloat.
And whatever retard thought it was a great idea to make the CLOSE WINDOW button wider should actually be shot.
There were a few nice things added here and there, but that doesn't make up for the lack of consistency and straightforwardness.
It's about time OS stopped wasting time, cpu and ram with rubbish like pretending to be something it isn't, and focused instead on using resources wisely to be a better computer. They can't ditch skeumorphism fast enough for me. Are you listening Apple? I'm talking to you.
Korma: Good
If they keep Metro as The One UI to Rule Them All, as it seems they wish to, my strategy at work will be twofold:
1) Don't roll out Windows 8. 7 has support until 2020, there's plenty of time. We'll stay on 7, and we'll make sure to let the MS rep know why.
2) In cases where we need/want 8 get a UI mod to make 8 look like 7. Someone will have what we need, probably Stardock. They already have a start button restorer (http://www.stardock.com/products/start8/) and given that UI customization is their big market, I imagine they'll develop a suite of tools that'll make 8 act like 7 to whatever degree you desire.
So that's my plan. If people want to use Metro they'll be allowed, of course, but I'm not going to be doing any hand holding on it. Anyone who says "I don't like this can I have the old way back," will be accommodated.
I just think it is funny that MS doesn't seem to realize they are going to create another XP, meaning an OS that people don't want to move off of. XP wasn't all their fault, it was just the first real solid version of Windows most people had used (the first NT based OS for home users), Vista had teething problems initially due to very lazy-ass driver development from many manufacturers, and there was a big smear campaign against it (to the point I'll see people at work say that Vista sucks and they like 7... working on a Vista machine, they don't even know what it is, they just know it is bad, so they think they are on 7).
Well this time they'll do it again with 7, but it'll be all their fault. They have a good OS that people were happy with the upgrade to. If they release one that people don't like, they'll get stuck in the mentality of "7 is the only good OS, I won't upgrade."
That's the part I'm going to be annoyed about. Not 8, but in 2018 when 9 or 10 is the thing and it is a good OS, trying to convince people that yes, there is a new good one and you need to move to it before support expires.
That sounds good on paper, but it takes resources to develop the 'classic' interface.
Now, while i don't agree with changes for the sake of change, they did make the decision to go in another direction and there really isn't a need to keep spending money on legacy.
Legacy support is part of Microsoft's problem that has held them back. But to be fair, if you leave existing platforms in the dust every time you come out with new product, you wont have customers for long.. I am still surprised that Apple pulled it off with the 86k to PPC and then again with PPC to intel.. We bitched and moaned at first but did adapt.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
The more I learn about windows 8 the less I want to use it. Are the extremely functional UI's that have evolved for the last 30 years that broken? Why does every company want to subject me to a "streamlined interface" that makes what I want to do more and more cumbersome.
Ubuntu unity, the new gnome, and current kde, stopped me from rejoining the linux world. In my opinion Linux desktops have gone down hill since kde 2. I know that there are lots of options, but what good is that if all the mainstream ones suck.
OSX is still good but heading a direction I don't like. plus I really hate apples tendency to break and/or remove features I like on a whim, and I really hate apples fans because they see it as progress rather than getting shafted. Their removal of Rosetta, express card slots, and affordable matte screens just piss me off. If they take away firewire there is no way I'll buy another mac (no making me buy a 100 dollar dongle so they can save 50 cents is not an option).
Windows 7 is easily the best windows ever. But I don't like the changes made to start menu and control panel.
Windows 8 just looks awful, everything about it rubs me the wrong way. I don't know where to start so I won't say anything.
Why are they trying to make computers suck. Why fix what isn't broken? why force me to use programs in full screen that have almost no function or content. Why force me to search for a program rather than picking one from a list. Why make me memorize stupid keyboard shortcuts?
Im not old, I love improvements in technology, but change for changes sake is not improvement. new is not always better. Plus the market isn't driving the changes, the vast majority of computer users are just annoyed that they have to relearn how to use computers and get no benefit.
I found metro pretty much useless as i get all my work done from the Desktop. Metro is just a speed bump where im betting a lot of advertising is going to go on. OEMs have been trying to get a better grip on the desktop i think this is the golden key. Some will find it useful but i think its just going to confuse and slow people down. They say the change is because most people don't use the start tab and when i have my task bar all set up i don't use it much either but i do shut down at nite and this has made shutting down, installing programs a very unpleasant event.
Jack of all trades,master of none
All the software vendors have come up with a new game. If you upgrade your Windows, you need to upgrade our software too!
I've got a customer that has Quickbooks 2003 running on Windows 7 with no problems.
I've got another customer that has Quickbooks 2008 or 2009 and had to upgrade to 2011 because they went to Windows 7.
Screw backwards compatibility, at least you will get some new programming when you get charged up the yang for new software, and not just a "Old version+1" and new "Check for OS version > 6.1" or whatever.
Already ahead of you on that one M$. I've been ramping up my Ubuntu usage ever since details of Win 8 started appearing.
I quite like the Aero glass effect, but if you are going to make it simple like this, at least make the window frame bezelled and ensure it's not white. It's horrible to have (say) a notepad open, and the frame looks like it's part of the document. That screenshot in the main link is horrible. It all looks white and washed out (it's a disturbing trend that's become more apparent on the web too).
Some contrast goes a long way.
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
The good old Windows 95 interface idiom used by the likes of Windows XP and Gnome2 was good enough for Jesus in the Bible, it should be good enough for everyone in America and the other part of the world (Alaska and maybe Hawaii, too). Doesn't Microsoft know they will burn in Hell for fiddling with the UI God handed down on Mount Ararat?
Many of the arguments here points to the fact having a lot of choice is good. Seems proprietary OSs these days are fast are accelerating towards 'walled gardens'. For instance, I am still using a GUI interface I have been using for well over 15 years, but now on a 64 bit Linux. There are some worry some trends in Linux regarding to GUI interfaces, but for now and for quite a number of years, I will still be able to use that ancient interface on modern Linux systems. So, no matter what the distro you use, it is not too difficult to change to a different Window Manager or Desktop if you really want to.
Heck I have a powerful graphics card and windows is always auto adjusting me back to basic so it can run programs.....probably the reason Microsoft has deemed it junk.
If hovering over (x,y) on the display is required to bring up the list of available programs, then Microsoft just gave me another grievance. Bear in mind, I haven't actually used any Windows version greater than XP on anything but a friends/clueless-user's computer, but if to bring up the start menu, (which they sodomized in Vista, but we'll ignore that for now), I have to leave my mouse point in one spot, and wait a specified interval, it'll get annoying, IMO. In the glory days of XP, I never made use of the auto-hide feature, specifically because I could never be sure when it was going to appear. Sometimes I was too high up and the bugger wouldn't come, and sometimes the pointer was low enough that it came up when I didn't want it there. Bonus points if doing so also removes Window focus. Many times did that cause mouse throwing rage on my part.
Hover is bad because there is no indication of progress till the bar comes up. If you're not in the hotspot, your SOL till you move the pointer again. For full screen applications, it can also get annoying, since if it takes up the whole screen, you expect to be able to use the entire screen. Including the corner with the hotspot.
This looks like Windows 3.11 with extra stuff inside the windows. Terrible. I honestly have no idea anymore if MS has any sort of plan or vision, it just seems like they have lost the plot. I can't see migrating my users to even just the upcoming Office version with the overly drastic UI changes that make support a nightmare, Windows 8 manages to take those same concerns and make them even worse. Companies have been so consistently resistant to upgrade with each successive release of the OS with many still on XP SP3 because of training and compatibility issues, instead of every trying to simplify and streamline the entire ecosystem they just keep reinventing the wheel... but functionally worse each time.
It is so simple for them to not just maintain but assert their dominance again. Create a new OS for the simplified current uses of PCs, create a server OS that is ridiculously simple and streamlined to manage them. Drop all the million esoteric control panels, snap ins, one-off apps, etc. Instead they are going in the opposite direction everywhere but the UI, which ultimately doesn't matter that much.
http://teasphere.wordpress.com - A little spot of tea
It's not UX design, it's fashion design. Bunch of artistes wanking away on Photoshop trying to out-trendify each other. It's an utter waste of computing resources, and I'm sick of it.
Yet I constantly see people ruing how so many things are clunky and unusable because they're "designed by engineers." The fact is that Microsoft isn't trying to capture the command line guru market, they're trying to capture the 99.9% of everyone else market. So if you're sick of companies and organizations using professional designers who specialize in making UIs more U-friendly and pretty, that's too damn bad and you've got a really hard life ahead of you.
But hey, there are always still command-line installations of Linux you can use to soothe your pain. Or you can suck it up and get used to the fact that things change to make people's lives easier and better and be happy. After all, that awesome command line interface was a UI improvement over teletype terminals and punch cards, but I don't see you whining over how you're sick of it want to return to those days, yet 40 or 50 years ago, there probably were some people doing exactly that.
When it comes to designing UIs for the general public, especially when it comes to my bottom line, a bunch of artistes is exactly who I want.
Asking questions for which there is no right answer and where many people have no clue which option is best for them is just confusing. It's better to pick a default behaviour and provide the means for those determined enough to change it to something else.
On Windows, at least, you can just type "appearance" into the start menu search box and go straight to it. Where's that functionality on the command line?
Since UI is no longer something difficult to learn, I don't understand, why peopel shoudl stick with their OS?
The one that said that you are not supposed to shut it down. If you do, MS will now require you to re-authenticate your copy of windows. The same will apply if you try to use Windows 8 without an internet connection. In this case, the Windows GUI will nag you every 30 seconds to get you ro restore your internet connection. After 24 hours it will stop working altogether.
This is an anti piracy measure.
(Only joking but...)
An ARM-based desktop would be running Windows RT, which means UEFI Secure Boot without the option for custom mode, which means no ability to install GNU/Linux, a compiler, or anything else that doesn't come from Windows Store.
The only real story here is that Microsoft makes another kneejerk reaction to OSX.
Seriously, if I were the UI lead for W8, I'd save time and start with a 'shopped W2K screenshot as a mockup. It's clear that nobody at MS particularly takes UI seriously except for the purposes of competing with Apple and selling graphics hardware, and their article running down the changes between OS versions does an excellent job of highlighting that as soon as you get past W98.
If MS wants identity, they ought to focus on the business users, and make something that looks like a Blackberry in 2D with the corners sharpened out. Polarise their users against the softy OSX interface.
(For karma's sake, I should point out that I've been an OSX convert for several years since I dabbled in *nix after W2K)
Do you see what I did there?
Why is there any interconnect at all between an OS and a GUI ?
Curse Microsoft for presenting the unwashed massed with no difference between hardware device management user input to software.
what's up
On Windows, at least, you can just type "appearance" into the start menu search box and go straight to it. Where's that functionality on the command line?
Go straight to what though? If I type something at the command line, what I type *is* the command (you know, hence the name) - it doesn't need to "go" anywhere, what I wanted to happen was achieved by my typing.
Good for you. You're in the minority. There's probably a powershell cmdlet you can use to do the same thing, but most people prefer GUIs.
A new, full-sized window pops open with audio of a guy screaming? The designer should be dragged into the street and beaten.
And yes, I _know_ how to block/control everything. I'm a designer myself though so I like to browse like a "normal" person. Empathy, you know? But I have none for that site, bleargh!
It's really not that hard. And unlike the command line, you get to see related items, which might end up being more what you want. I'm a big fan of the command line, but even I like the ability to just type relevant words into the start menu and almost always get exactly what I want at the top of the list, plus other options. That feature of Windows and OS X is nice.
Alfred Sloan has a billion dollar charitable foundation in his name, and you are a nobody, ergo Alfred Sloan is correct on the preference of vehicle.
And when you run an older app and it puts you on the old desktop and then you want to get back to the metro start menu, what button on the screen do you press?
How easy is it to figure out how to shutdown the computer in metro?
It helps me make up my mind as what next laptop to buy - Retina Mac Book.
They removed pretty the single thing I like about Windows 7.
A few years ago, I would have asked, "Why do you have to click 'Start' to shutdown?"
No really, I agree to an extent, but both will be learned over time. The start screen is still the same motion (mouse to the lower-left); people will accidentally do it out of habit and figure it out. The shutdown I agree with more, actually... Settings is not really the place for it (but ideally, one shouldn't need to shutdown ever... perhaps that is the message Microsoft is trying to convey).
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
Now if they would only get rid of the ribbon interface. BTW, did anybody else notice that the screenshot in the link looks an awful lot like XFCE with a transparent panel? Maybe it's not only gnome-shell/unity haters that are switching to XFCE, but MS, too!
On the Microsoft blogs, the vast majority of users, by *far* have asked for the Start button to remain as is. Guess what Microsoft is going to do?
Microsoft, because you *needed* more unthinking, unaware, 20-something arrogance in your life. Daily.
Thank goodness for Linux and Wine, that's all I have to say. The Zorin distribution of Ubuntu particularly.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Good for you. You're in the minority. There's probably a powershell cmdlet you can use to do the same thing, but most people prefer GUIs.
I don't think you can really say 'most people prefer GUIs'. It depends what market segment you're talking about, a web server administrator may well prefer CLI, SSH or PowerShell as opposed to a GUI. I certainly prefer a command prompt to a GUI when dealing with administrative tasks, it just makes it a lot simpler and more efficient to do that sprawling through menus and options.
You figured out how to use XP with its colorful toy interface.
Nope. I figured out how to disable it and go back to classic.
You figured out that Aero wasn't going to drain all the performance of your computer and slow it to a grinding halt.
Nope. I disabled all useless animations and transparency. Everything POPs so much faster after that.
And now you're going to figure out that really smart geeks knew what they are doing when they put a lot of thought into the design of the Windows 8 UI.
Nope. I've already figured out that they put a lot of thought into building a TABLET UI. It's not bad with a touchscreen, but I don't own a touchscreen.
...whining about moderation IS off topic, though.
I don't think you can really say 'most people prefer GUIs'.
You can. And it would be true.
It depends what market segment you're talking about
"most people"
I certainly prefer a command prompt to a GUI when dealing with administrative tasks, it just makes it a lot simpler and more efficient to do that sprawling through menus and options.
Meh, beause reading through a 20 page man page to sort out what option you need on some rarely adjusted setting is better how?
The command line is great for scripting .. to make something easily repeatable, or to apply the same setting to a lot of systems.
To look something up, or make a change on one system, especially a change that isn't something you do daily... the gui is simpler, faster, and less prone to error.
This is getting to be like the car industry in the 1950s. By the late 1950s, automobiles were a mature technology, and all the manufacturers had roughly the same feature set (V8 engine, automatic transmission, sedan and convertible options). So the era of over the top styling began. (1959 Cadillac tailfin). That's where computing seems to be going.
Previously, we just had the progression of case colors from beige to black to white to grey and back to beige again, on about a 10 year cycle. It's about time for Apple to announce a grey iPhone.
While not surprising, it is quite annoying that every post on the internet about changing something in Windows is met with hatred and fear. Get over it,
When a statement like this is made there has to be some avenue of falsifying it should it be applied to support total nonsense. Otherwise the statement itself is essentially specious worthless drivel with no meaning in and of itself.
For example if Microsoft removed all support for sound and replaced it with a snazzy graphical fft/waveform display atop the screen..what prevents me from applying your argument to assert you are just being change adverse when you point out the new system is worthless to you?
I guess you could always use sign language during a skype call or a series of grunting noises that could be visually discerned from the FFT waterfall in lieu of english.
Rather than rally against people for being change adverse in my opinion the only acceptable course of discourse on this topic is to argue the MERITS of each and every change.
Really, you want *both* - a GUI for being able to set standard options, config etc., and a command-line/config file you can use for setting all those odd little options that only 10 people in the world care about.
Even windows has this, but they call it the registry and it's one heck of a mess.
That all being said, my view of GUI vs Command Line is that a GUI is best for new users and graphical manipulation of objects. A command line is best once it's been learned and people are trying to get /work/ done . Just look at Autocad for instance: Seems every user who isn't a complete newbie uses the command line in it for a lot of stuff... though you'd be hard pressed to find someone who uses it exclusively.
This is getting to be too much. Is that screenshot on the article a mockup or seriously what Microsoft is pushing? I'd sooner use Classic mode than sit there and stare at a white box.
I've never been apprehensive about upgrading Windows (from Win 3.1 all the way until Windows 7) and never been burned (never got around to ME through) - Even Windows Vista I had no problems with after SP1, and even before that, I used third party tools for file coping and such, so it wasn't really a huge issue for me.
But Windows 8? I'm genuinely concerned Microsoft is turning it into a tablet OS for desktops. I have a feeling I'm going to be like one of those Windows XP holdouts, using a 10+ year OS with no intention on upgrading until I'm absolutely forced to.
"but ideally, one shouldn't need to shutdown ever."
Is that your opinion or your interpretation of MS's intent? I ask because I have observed some Win. PC's performance improving after a reboot, and also that a reboot is, sometimes, the only solution to solving a problem on a PC. I agree that "ideally" you should not need to shutdown/reboot to solve a problem as every application would best be sandboxed in RAM and if it failed the application would be removed from RAM by the OS, and the OS remain running happily in the background awaiting your next exciting command.
Just saying...
The sad thing is that even if they move away from it, now it's a backward compatibility burden.
Microsoft has been aggressively pushing developers to use the glass APIs, so Microsoft has to choose to keep it around and make sure it keeps working nicely with everything else, or it has to break backward compatibility.
The main thing that has kept Microsoft on the rails as a company is its strong emphasis on backward compatibility, in particular the 25 years backward compatible Windows API. But lately they have been superseding new API after new API, which they cannot possibly hope to support all. And then again, many people are using other cross-platform APIs now, like Qt or SWT.
More and more, Windows' raison d'être is fading, and Microsoft will have to find other sources of income.
and all WinPhone manufacturers will have to support CGA only.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Still windows 7/vista/xp underneath the fancy buttons. It does not look any different in footprint or anything except the start button was replaced with the stupid unity like tablet front end. BLEH Just added a few more layers to wade through to get anything done when setting it up. They keep trying to pretty it up and make the IT support staff's job take longer. It is not harder since it is the same stuff, but I have to click through about 3 times the amount of buttons to get stuff done like just adding it to the domain.... getting old for sure.
I feel like I am about to be a POD clone of my former self and be turned into those anti technology luddites that still use IE 6 and XP that I can't stand if this keeps up!
I am starting to love Windows 7 and feel its the pinnacle of Windows and good UI design after seeing Windows 8 and its UI devolve more and more. It is like those who say the same thing in regards to XP being all that holy and awesome and resisting change at all costs.
I do I.T. stuff now so its not like I can switch to a Mac easily. Maybe if my marketing career takes off I can convert to being an Apple user, but I do not like the MacOSX UI. It looks georgous and I can use it for basic tasks. I do not like the fact that I keep going to the top of the screen for menus ALL THE TIME with it! No right mouse button click menu makes me anxious.
But this ... wow. It is butt ugly! I remember looking around and seeing my classmates at the university stuck with LUNA basic because of the crappy intel chipsets and the false Vista certified label on them and feeling sorry for them. AERO has aero peak, the ability to move the mouse cursor over Chrome/IE on the task bar and it will graphically preview all your tabs! I can even hit Windows, TAB, and see all the apps to see what is on them. It is not just eye candy. ... which is nice too
In other words Windows 7 does it right. It is perfect for any user with a million tabs, apps, and other things to multitask and work with many different apps open to get work done. Metro might be ok for a phone but they are purposely crippling the desktop too.
I do not like this. True humans do one task at a time but our data is in several apps. Windows 8 is very poorly done and Balmer should be fired if this flops! If Metro could do somthing 1985ish like, have one Windows on top of another I would be amazed. Good GOD
http://saveie6.com/
I hated this too when Vista came out. Then I learned all I had to do was hit the Window key and type what I wanted. If you browse with the mouse you are doing it wrong.
Now I get ansy when I go on an XP desktop as I want to go right into the command line but can't hit Windows and type CMD in a blink of an eye etc. I have the multitasking better with WIndows 7. All I have to do is hit Window Key + tab or even move the mouse over the icons and I can preview them on the screen. Windows 8 doesn't have this.
In Win 8 I just move the mouse in the upper left hand corner and go click click click click until I see the app. WTF. AERO doesn't use extra battery life. MaximumPC proved this false unless you count mere perfectanges.
I think MS is crippling the desktop to force the METRO way because Aero is far supperior over Metro.
http://saveie6.com/
Uhhh...you just backed up what vux984 said when it came to CLI friend. What did he say? That CLI was best when the action was repetitious or had to be done across multiple systems. Now I'm not a CAD guy but I'm betting its usage is similar to my engineering friends using Solidworks in that you have certain actions you do a LOT which is naturally gonna lend itself to CLI because that is what CLI is good at, repetition. But I can tell you that home users, which are the majority of Windows PC users, simply don't have hardly any tasks that would be better served by the CLI so I'd say vux984 was right in that most people would be better with a GUI.
As for Win 8...can we have a "supergiganticsmartphpone" tag please? We ALL know that everything they are doing for Win 8 ties into the smartphone and tablet market, hell try the free CP and it feels like you replaced your PC with a REALLY big smartphone. This change, like the craptastic Metro is because having Aero on tablets and smartphones would run down the battery too quick, that's all. This whole dumb as a bag of hammers exercise is simply Ballmer doing a Hail Mary pass because he knows that x86 is a VERY mature market and that the writing is on the wall, the future is people not replacing their PCs until they die. With smartphones they are as much fashion as anything and people go through them like crap through a goose, not to mention they are in the middle of their own MHz war, so MSFT needs to get into that market BAD if they want a market that is growing because X86 has gone past "good enough" and into "insanely powerful" for the vast majority.
But what I find ironically delicious is the reason they are doomed to fail is the exact same thing that gave MSFT a monopoly on the desktop, which is Wintel. Nobody buys Windows because they LIKE Windows or desire the programs that MSFT includes by default, Windows is ONLY a platform for third party programs as far as the masses are concerned. You could replace Windows with Linux or Mac tomorrow and as long as it ran their programs the majority really wouldn't give a shit. But that very same strength is gonna weigh MSFT down like a boat anchor because you can't run Windows x86 programs on ARM and at least for now neither Intel nor AMD is pushing x86 smartphones.
As a final note both Dave Cutler (the designer of the NT kernel) and of all people Apple showed them the way but MSFT didn't listen and now its too late. Cutler pushed for NT to be kept portable and Apple showed that if you want to change arches you need to have a crossover period where you can run both new and old on the new platform. But in a classic example of shortsightedness MSFT hitched themselves exclusively to Wintel and now they are screwed. maybe if they would have pushed R&D to come up with an x86 emulation layer for ARM like Apple did with Classic? Then maybe it would have worked, maybe. But nobody is gonna want to run Win 8 on the obvious platform it was designed for since WinRT don't run wintel apps.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
make sandwich -Icheese -Iham -Ilettuce -lmustard
;-)
sudo make sandwich -Icheese -Iham -Ilettuce -lmustard
FTFY!
soylentnews.org Go there to enjoy the people!
Nice. Great Idea. Excellent feature. Now look at the screenshot in the article. Where is the start button to get that glorious start menu? ;-P
"Where the heck have they hidden it this time?" basically describes my Windows experience from W2K onward. From the old days of DOS, Windows 3.11 and NT 3.5 it was always pretty "obvious" where stuff had moved. But these days they seem to move stuff around just for the heck of it.
They're just doing a bad job of morphing to a new paradigm. They seem to get stuck in half paradigms, something that Apple avoids nicely. The Windows 7 taskbar, for example, is probably the worst way to do a taskbar that I can think of. Like on OS X, each app gets one entry, but unlike OS X, it's actually multiple sub-entries. You can't just go to an app because, surprise, it's still just like it used to be. But neither can you actually just go straight to a specific window. In other words, it takes the worst elements of both systems and none of the good elements. They picked the one wrong combination of features.
So moving stuff around isn't necessarily a big deal, as long as it's obvious where and why things were moved (even if just for the heck of it). Microsoft seems to fail to grasp this concept.
Uhhh...you just backed up what vux984 said when it came to CLI
You mean he agreed with someone? On Slashdot? Good thing we have you to point out such a heinous act of barbarism.
friend
Don't call people "friend" unless they actually are your friend, especially if you're trying to insult them in the same sentence.
You had me until:
"Meh, beause reading through a 20 page man page to sort out what option you need on some rarely adjusted setting is better how?"
If the man page is 20 pages long and the setting is rarely adjusted I can guarantee you that the setting is not available in the GUI. One of the reasons people like the command prompt is the greater power.
I personally use the command prompt for listening to music. Just the simple idea of sending a program more than just the file to be played (tempo and key for example) is something utterly alien to the GUI file managers and most all GUI music players.
Mass file renaming is still absent in nautilus as far as I'm aware so I still use bash as my file manager most of the time. I've started using nautilus for the simplest tasks (trying to use the GUI more) but if I want to do something complicated or quickly then it's straight to the command line.
I don't think you can really say 'most people prefer GUIs'.
You can. And it would be true.
What I've observed is this:
* people are lazy, even if they work hard. They want to get more done for less.
* people are either stupid or smart.
* smart people prefer using the keyboard (less doing and repetition, which is mentally painful)
* stupid people prefer using the mouse (less thinking, which hurts their walnuts)
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
As a final note both Dave Cutler (the designer of the NT kernel) and of all people Apple showed them the way but MSFT didn't listen and now its too late. Cutler pushed for NT to be kept portable and Apple showed that if you want to change arches you need to have a crossover period where you can run both new and old on the new platform.
There have been a number of other cases where vendors moved the arch underneath their user base. HP-UX comes to mind, the PA->Itanic conversion happened pretty much seamlessly, except for the fact that PA apps ran pretty bad on itanium for about 5 years.
And that is where the problem lies, see they could write an x86 emulator for ARM, and detect the binaries, and make the whole thing seamless. The one huge problem is that when apple moved from 68k to PPC, and then again from PPC to intel, there was a pretty extreme performance advantage on the newer platform to hide the inefficiencies of the emulation layers.
With ARM vs x86 this simply isn't possible there is at a minimum a ~2x to ~20x performance delta between the fastest ARM available and a x86 (atom to intel EE). So even with fat binaries, its going to be a noticeable speed impact for anything that is performance intensive.
All this is sort of moot though, because MS has been pushing .net for the last decade. In theory anything written for .net can run on any platform, the same way java could. Its just a matter of getting the .net layers working. Of course MS doesn't have a good track record of getting it working on new platforms. Look at the delay between the beta release of windows x64 and .net for the platform.
Microsoft is having a sea change of internal junior developer-itis. Out with the old, in with the new, don't listen to anybody.
That's how failed products get rolled out the door and billion dollar marketing campaigns sink battleships.
Windows 8 will be another Windows ME or IBM OS/2 - it will be a pivotal event for the company.
How many places that survive really, Really.. tell the customer - (a) we don't listen to customer feedback (b) we design the OS, start button is not negotiable (c) Vista wasn't so bad.. we funded project Mojavi just to prove customers were wrong
Are these the behaviors of a "rational" company?
I believe the market is voting with its feet, Apple is delivering products people like and don't mind paying for. Linux is delivering products people teeth on then pay for when they upgrade to production and need support.
Microsoft more and more is known as an API company but its alienating its developer base, which is odd if not undefinable. Obliterating Silverlight, deprecating API's without a road map, blogging at developers and blaiming them for the failure of their products? Wow.
The screenshot looks very similar to loading Win7 without video drivers. Which makes sense if their mobile can't support aero.
sudo make sandwich -Icheese -Iham -Ilettuce -lmustard
No.
You don't want to run "make" as the superuser. "make install", yes, but not make. Even if a sandwich.
You also don't pass non-numeric values with -l in make - the GP was probably thinking of the linker, not make.
Sorry to trash your guys' joke, but c'mon, is it that hard to get even the basics right?
TOPPINGS="cheese ham lettuce mustard" make -k sandwich
The Ribbon is also one of those things un-Windows. I hope MS will remove it.
* smart people prefer using the keyboard (less doing and repetition, which is mentally painful)
And really smart people use whichever works best for what they are doing at the time, and don't worry about being smarter than other people.......
Because I haven't yet found the command line all that much help while drawing in Photoshop, and a nice Unix shell helps me move filenames and numbers into a database a whole lot better than the mouse.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
"Where the heck have they hidden it this time?" basically describes my Windows experience from W2K onward.
You are really going to love trying to figure out how to shut W8 down. Although with my experience with the CP has shown me that the best thing is to not start W8 in the first place.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
And how many consumers are using .NET apps exclusively? hell how many are using .NET apps AT ALL? while i still have .NET on my PCs because of the old ATI drivers needing .NET frankly I can't think of a single program I use that is made with .NET, not a single one. Plenty use Visual C++, I have one or two that use SQL Server Compact Edition for a backend, but not a single .NET program.
Again this goes back to MSFT making a serious mistake when they didn't listen to Cutler and keep Windows truly portable. Cutler's big thing with WinNT was to keep the code portable and to make it trivial as possible for a program written for Windows to run on Windows everywhere. In a way what he was pushing for was similar to the idea that Sun used for Java, the whole "write once use everywhere" meme. But MSFT gave at best really token support for anything other than Wintel, hell they never even ported over their entire MS office suite to the other arches because IIRC they never ported Access or Excel. When other companies saw MSFT was only gonna barely bother many of them didn't bother either and that was the end of NT being truly portable.
As I said this showed severe shortsightedness on the part of MSFT who acted like nothing would ever come along to defeat Wintel. But this kind of small vision is frankly been a hallmark of Ballmer's reign, look how they really didn't seem to care about how bloated WinVista was until netbooks showed up and nearly gave Linux a market all to itself. But you watch, I predict WinRT and Win 8 WILL bomb, simply because nobody is gonna want Windows simply for the "pleasure" of having windows and this is from someone who has been running Windows since the days of Win 3.x.
How MSFT can be so blind as to not see that people buy windows for the Wintel programs and not for the MSFT brand is beyond me, if I didn't know any better I'd swear that the CEO was a plant, like how many say Elop is a MSFT plant. Because otherwise...how could you be so damned blind about your own damned product or the people who buy it?
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
It's not like anyone who knows how to change the theme would leave Aero Glass turned on anyway. It looks even more ridiculous than the Fisher Price theme they introduced with Windows XP, nevermind about the performance issues and the excess screen real estate it consumes with its gratuitously oversized window decorations and the fact that you can't even customize (most of) the colors.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
Does anyone know what the role of UxTheme.dll will be in the future with Windows 8? Will one be able to render with platform native functions, the appearance of Windows 8 widgets? Or will MS be relegating the role of UxTheme technology to previous versions?
One man's pink plane is another man's blue plane.
Really, you want *both* - a GUI for being able to set standard options, config etc., and a command-line/config file you can use for setting all those odd little options that only 10 people in the world care about.
Even windows has this, but they call it the registry and it's one heck of a mess.
No, that's completely the wrong way to look at the GUI/CLI divide. And it's that sort of thinking that has progressively made Gnome worse and worse.
If it's configurable, you should be able to configure it in the GUI. It doesn't need to be in your face, but you should be able to do it.
The CLI is for when you know precisely what you want to do, and you want to do it without user interaction. Nothing about the CLI should imply that it's only for people that like jumping through hoops. Quite the opposite in fact.
Removing a GUI configuration option, but then telling someone they can change it by modifying a file or registry setting is just a cop-out. Either take a stand and decided that it's _not_ configurable, or go to the effort of figuring out how to give it a GUI.
How MSFT can be so blind as to not see that people buy windows for the Wintel programs and not for the MSFT brand is beyond me,
I totally agree, but the people who understand the windows marketplace left somewhere between XP and vista. When the 64 bit versions of windows were released I expected they would run 16 bit apps via some kind of software thunking or even a mini VM. The one reason to run windows before then really was the fact that you could get just about any application you wanted, and it would probably work for the rest of time. I have copies of MS word for windows 2.0 that could run on the 32-bit version of W2003. Then MS decided to throw compatibility and consistency to the wind. The one thing they were good at, they are throwing away. Now you can't even expect keystrokes to be consistent between Microsoft applications much less any kind of UI rules. I was just ranting to my co-workers how ctrl-end no longer works in firefox.. Of course its not firefoxes fault so much as MS which no longer has any kind of real UI guidelines. Even if they did, they would be throwing them away every 2 years.
The GNOME3-Borg have taken Microsoft, too. Seriously - I was playing with the thought of Windows as a last resort, if the dumbing-down-the-UI idiocy would ruin Linux. No chance, as it seems. Say 'hello' to the shiny new world where everything feels like a toy for the mentally challenged...
Oh, the beautiful gloss of greality!
I'll make a note of it. I haven't been looking that hard yet because 8 isn't out. There will still be changes yet and so the fix it software will still need to change. Once it launches, I'll find a tool that makes me happy, and then have it to recommend to people at work that wish to move to 8, but don't like the interface.
And I used Vista. I always use the newest MS OS on my desktop at work, since supporting Windows is a big part of my job. Vista did need better hardware but I don't see that as a problem or unexpected. Idiots that tried to put it on system that struggled with XP in the first place had a bad time. I didn't, I have a Core 2 with 4GB of RAM, it ran great.
Drivers I'm sorry, but you can't blame anyone but the driver authors. MS froze the ABI and DDK a good bit before release (I'll not freezing the ABI is something Linux refuses to do). Many drivers worked great on release day. Others didn't and still other manufactures (like HP) took the opportunity to try and flog new hardware by refusing to support it.
What I do remember was a massive amount of misinformation spread about Vista, much of it right here on Slashdot. The one that most sticks with me was Peter Gutmann's article calming that Vista's "new DRM" broke the ability to record good audio. I was reading it while taking a break from using Cakewalk Sonar, a professional audio program, to work with what people would call "HD" audio (as in 24-bit, 96kHz) with no problems. He just had a shit audio card without a good full duplex mode, but he claimed it was Vista DRM with no proof, he just assumed his trouble was DRM related since he didn't understand how it worked.
Windows 7 happened because MS did a test and found the same thing. Those commercials of people being surprised they were using Vista after having "beta tested" MS's new OS? Not a contrived idea setup, it came from actual research they did. They found that people didn't like Vista... but hadn't used it. They'd heard it was bad so decided they didn't like it. When exposed to it but not told what it was, they liked it by and large. Hence the realized if they rebranded it, no problem.
Of course the driver situation was much better at that point since it had been long enough that even the pokey pro audio companies had gotten working drivers (after two years in some cases) and hardware had advanced so systems were faster over all.
Vista's launch was not perfect, but this "it was total garbage" is bullshit. That opinion came largely from three groups:
1) People who installed it on shit hardware (Dell didn't help here, shipping it on low memory systems) and got shit performance.
2) People who had ideological reasons to hate it and spread crap on the net.
3) The echo chamber effect, from people who heard something from one of those two and repeated it as fact.
I liked Vista enough to put it on my home computer, after having tested it at work for awhile, using it on a daily basis.
But that very same strength is gonna weigh MSFT down like a boat anchor because you can't run Windows x86 programs on ARM and at least for now neither Intel nor AMD is pushing x86 smartphones.
Ahem, your entire point disintegrates with a single Google search:
http://www.google.de/search?hl=de&q=intel+medfield
Intel is pushing HARD into the direction of getting x86 handsets, smartphones and tablets out into the open; that's pretty much one of the main reasons they bought Infineon Wireless for 1.4 Billion USD; the second biggest RF-chip producer in the world after Qualcomm. Intel wasn't in the smartphone/handset market and they wanted (and still want) to get into it.
And as soon as you have x86 on your smartphone, and Win8 on top of it, suddenly you can run ~95% of all Windows applications unmodified on your smartphone or tablet. That is a sales argument, if I've ever seen one.
Correct link for non-german speakers:
https://www.google.com/search?q=intel+medfield
Copy+Paste gives you great power, but with great power... :)
In Windows 8, the start screen has large buttons that are easier to hit with a mouse (better for Fitts' law).
Yes, because that's why I bought a 24" monitor with 1920x1200 resolution - I want bigger buttons. No, I can click on small buttons just fine (and I play FPS games with mouse sensitivity turned way up), I bought a bigger monitor with a big resolution so that more icons (and windows) can fit on the screen. If I only wanted to use one app at a time, I could have stayed with the 15" monitor that can only do 1152x864.
Too bad it is not possible in the real world. Windows is already quite good at removing frozen apps from memory, but what if the app was accessing a device? If the driver or the device freezes only a reboot will restore it, if the app is using a device and freezes with the device locked - restart.
Could you imagine what a gui that implemented every option on mencoder would look like?
The flight deck of a 747, that's what.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I knew the old guard with any sense had left the building when even on MSFT's own blogs I saw plenty writing "how to" articles on how to make WinServer into Windows workstation. Why were they doing that? because MSFT wasn't serving the needs of those that use computers for workstations that's why. I was one of the first ones who got WinXP X64 because that was what it was, a 64 bit workstation OS.
Where you and I disagree was on 16 bit support. Frankly DOS support in the NT line was a kludge and buggy as fuck anyway so i honestly don't see that as a real loss. anybody that wanted to run 16 bit is probably wanting DOS which DOSBox frankly did better. The only thing I would have done different if I were MSFT is make DOS support optional and if they chose it then it would give them a version of DOSBox which I'm sure the DOSBox guys would have been happy to sell them a license for.
But where I bet you and I agree is the current practically insane obsession MSFT has for smartphones ATM is frankly a BAD move and will most likely make Win 8 a bigger bomb than Vista. While I agree they need to be pushing guidelines frankly I thought Win 7 was the best release from MSFT since Win2K pro, the combo of search, breadcrumbs, and jumplists make it just a pleasure to work in every day. But now Ballmer wants to be Apple so damned badly they are trying to turn Windows into iOS, simply in the hopes of getting some of the ARM market and fooling devs into writing apps for it.
In the end its not gonna work, and that is because of Wintel. if you can't run your X86 programs the customers simply aren't gonna want it PERIOD. BTW if you want a laugh look up some of sinofsky's talks on win 8 and count how many times he says "touch screens" and listen to some of the insane scenarios he comes up with to justify the touch screen UI of Win 8. last one I saw I quit counting at 30 and he said that the majority of people would buy touch enabled devices. he even came up with a scenario of someone trading stocks buying a triple monitor with a touch screen in the middle! Yep because when a single wrong move can cost my life savings I want to bet it all on whether my big fat fingers poke the right spot.
Try the Win 8 CP though, just for a laugh. I swear the first time you log in you'll wonder if this isn't some sort of trick, like you've been rickrolled by MSFT. you honestly won't believe what a UI disaster it is.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
That's a nice binary view you have of the world. Too bad it isn't realistic. Some tasks are better suited to the mouse, some to the keyboard. There's also a wide spectrum of intelligence, and some people are smart about some things while dumb at others.
AutoCAD is for kids. Advanced CAD NX or CATIA use GUI.
JAM
I use a software for selling on the internet. The company used to have a CLI type interface for mass changes to the inventory/listings/whatnot. It switched to GUI.
Not even 1/8 as powerful, slow, and painful. Not to mention I have to check listings to see if the change actually took hold. Now what used to take 5 minutes can take the whole day.
This software is geared towards power users and they went the wrong way.
GUIs are great for some things but should not replace established tools for the sake of "progress" or pleasing more users. (Especially in a tool not geared towards most users).
I enjoy Microsoft products a lot. I work on them every day and i just, enjoy the products... but windows 8 is just sheer crap. It's made for a tablet not for a desktop / server. Its horrible on split monitors (extended desktop) because you cannot reach certain buttons that they hide now without falling onto your second monitor. Its just sheer UI garbage. I could keep going, but i won't. Whomever thought up this design should be punched in their reproductive organs.
What I've observed is this:
* people are lazy, even if they work hard. They want to get more done for less.
* people are either stupid or smart.
* smart people prefer using the keyboard (less doing and repetition, which is mentally painful)
* stupid people prefer using the mouse (less thinking, which hurts their walnuts)
Because, you know; doing photo editing and video editing with a command line is such an improvement and less painful.
How about my observation; people use the right tool for the job at hand until someone shows them a tool that works better. For some things (administering a server) a command line is a huge improvement. For others (the aforementioned video and photo editing) a mouse is better.
You really sound like someone who just doesn't grok the fact that people use computers for a hell of a lot more than serving up web pages. Get over it; computers have grown far beyond that level and while the mouse is not the perfect input method it is a damned good one for a reasonable cost. The command line is also not perfect, and while powerful there are some things it will always struggle to perform as well as the mouse.
Oh, and before you go telling me how you can manipulate photos and videos with a command line; I know you can. I've done it many times... but if you can give me a simple command line that will take a random arbitrary picture, straighten it to a point that it's visually more appealing, fix errors due to chromic aberration, fix red-eye, soften the focus around the eyes to make them pop a little more (a common photog trick) and whiten the teeth a smidgen then I'll start using that for 80% of the picture I manipulate.
sudo make sandwich -Icheese -Iham -Ilettuce -lmustard
No.
You don't want to run "make" as the superuser. "make install", yes, but not make. Even if a sandwich.
You also don't pass non-numeric values with -l in make - the GP was probably thinking of the linker, not make.
Sorry to trash your guys' joke, but c'mon, is it that hard to get even the basics right?
TOPPINGS="cheese ham lettuce mustard" make -k sandwich
Absolutely damned right. You save sudo for when you want bacon.
Or perhaps there are smart, productive people who simply want to get the work in front of them done straight away, without having to stop & figure out exactly what form a given CLI command needs in order to do a particular thing on a particular version of one of the several different OSes they frequently switch between?
Sometimes, things simply aren't worth spending the time on. If I have to do the same thing twice in a GUI, it's still way faster than Googling for some random forum or chasing down details that may or may not exist in man pages to work out how to type one command to do something twice for me. Of course, this argument doesn't hold for things that I'd have to do 2000 times in a GUI, but I think the issue in general is more a "cost/benefit" consideration than a "smart/stupid user" one.
Push the power button, it shuts down quite nicely. Or close your laptop's lid.
If you want, you can use Control-Alt-Delete, Alt-S then up and down to pick which of the 3 menu items pops up on the power button.
If you'd rather use the command line, the "shutdown" command still works just fine.
Almost the mechanisms to shut down windows over the past decade or so are still there. The only thing that's missing is the "shutdown" button on the start menu. The one that spawned all those "You have to use Start to shut down windows" jokes?
Win8 is ugly and boring. My first impression was: is it Win95? ...with a little help it won't take long for users to adapt... Blaa-blaa-blaa. Keep dreaming.
And you can never change first impression.
Um... its go fuck yourself... retard
I'm confused. Aero was too "dated", so they are going to something that looks more like DeskMate?
Also, unstylized white buttons on a white ribbon background saves power vs. a 3d stylized aluminum look? Really?
yeah, like in gnome 3
Subversion of spatial scale luxury decoration ideas.
That too, but OS X had it first and Windows followed with a nice implementation. I guess I could have listed every environment with that feature, but honestly, Windows and OS X do it the best. KDE and GNOME 3 are in second place.
I guess they are buying into the less is more mentality?
I'm not sure they are going about this in a smart way, it's like their promoting Windows as a plain old boring operating system. People like shiny good looking software and gadgets, if they had to choose between a slick eye-catching GUI or a bland, flat, no-bling GUI - which do you think people will buy?
Not even 1/8 as powerful, slow, and painful. Not to mention I have to check listings to see if the change actually took hold. Now what used to take 5 minutes can take the whole day.
Your complaint is more orthogonal to them switching to a gui than an issue with guis themselves.
I mean, they could have redone the new version with a botched implementation of CLI too, so that it was 1/8th as powerful, slow, and painful, and where you couldn't trust it enough to know that changes you'd submitted had actually been committed.
The problem isn't that its a gui, the problem is that its a lousy gui.
If the man page is 20 pages long and the setting is rarely adjusted I can guarantee you that the setting is not available in the GUI. One of the reasons people like the command prompt is the greater power.
Your thinking of "rarely adjusted" as "obscure". A good example is simply changing the screen resolution. That's something I rarely explicitly do. But occasionally it comes up... I'll deliberately set my screen to 800x600 for a usability test or to run some ancient piece of software that was designed for that. System->Prefs->Screen resolution...
Your right if I wanted to apply some custom matrix transform to the display output then I'd need to drop to the command line.. but that's truly obscure, not merely "rarely adjusted".
I personally use the command prompt for listening to music.
Whereas I like having gui for luxuries like pause and skip track, and selecting the songs I want played.
but if I want to do something complicated or quickly then it's straight to the command line.
So you've got a folder zoopics of 68 picture files you took at the zoo today with your cousin, you want to send him the 6 you took at the monkey exhibit and the one of him next to the elephant...go!
gui
click to open folder, thumbnail view, click on first monkey pic, shift-click on last monkey pic, ctrl-click the one by the elephant... right click on the selection, send to mail recipient, mail client opens, with new message, and the 7 picture attachments. type a few letters of your cousins name for the contact to auto pop his email address, press tab to get to the sujbect line... type "Zoo pics", tab to get to the message... type enjoy!! and press send.
Time from start to finish 30 seconds.
cli: ... uh ...
cd ~home/pics/zoopics
Time from start to finish... uh...
The CLI has its place. But that example is a pretty straightforward request of something a completely normal person would want to do and for which the command line is almost completely unsuitable.
So while your "Mass file renaming" example is playing right into the CLI wheelhouse, mine plays right into a GUIs. The point remains that neither is inherently better... they are good at different things.