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Windows Blue 9364 Screenshots Show Feature Enhancements
An anonymous reader writes "As expected, a new pre-public version of Windows Blue (build 9364) has leaked online and it reveals a handful of features that are coming in the next big Microsoft Windows 8 update." Several sites have screenshots from the build; Hot Hardware says "Assuming this is all completely legitimate, the most obvious change pertains to the Metro UI, including greater flexibility in sizing Live Tiles and customizing the Start screen, particularly as the Personalize setting (among others, including Devices and Share) is now under the Settings charm. The Name Group feature for the Start menu looks a little more polished, too."
Shit.
The only connection people already know between Windows and Blue is the Blue Screen of Death. In fact, it took me a minute to realize this wasn't about 9364 screenshots of BSODs.
As a Win7 user, did anyone else feel completely lost reading the summary?
PS: I don't reply to ACs.
Christ almighty! Would someone please tell Microsoft that Windows 8 is a content consumption platform whereas the corporate world needs a multi-tasking UI. This is fucking bullshit!
Life is not for the lazy.
one of the featured screenshots being a calculator that will suck up every inch of my large desktop monitor, take that you 20 year old serial terminal in the other room and your fucking text based "windows"
So, anyone have any meat on the new version?
Why is a Windows release named after its most famous failure screen? Is the marketing department that ignorant?
Several sites have screenshots from the build; Hot Hardware says "Assuming this is all completely legitimate, the most obvious change pertains to the Metro UI, including greater flexibility in sizing Live Tiles and customizing the Start screen, particularly as the Personalize setting (among others, including Devices and Share) is now under the Settings charm. The Name Group feature for the Start menu looks a little more polished, too."
They don't get it, do they? Power users and most business users don't want to tinker with the Metro UI. We want to be able to get rid of it and boot straight into the Desktop with a traditional Start Menu.
I can sort of see what Microsoft is trying to do with Windows 8. The idea is not theirs, nor is it a new idea. It actually goes back a long, long time. When GUIs were born designers wanted to implement direct-manipulation as much as possible. The user had to be able to grab anything, drag and drop and click and whatnot it. This included the windows used by programs, if the user wanted to have that giant word processor in a 50x50 pixel window overlapped by a dozen other windows then they should be able to.
Now that GUIs are old hat, all that direct manipulation is getting a bit long in the tooth. Shuffling windows around, organizing them 'just' so is just as inefficient as doing the same to text in a word processor. Why not leave all that repetitive work to the computer? That is what machines are for, after all? In short, Microsoft has discovered the advantages of tiling window managers.
The sad part is that they seem to have forgotten to study the subject before designing Windows 8. All they had to do was install one of the many available existing tiling window managers on a unix of choice and give it a whir. Xmonad or dwm or any of the others do an infinitely better job of it than Windows 8 does. They work with the user, not against him/her.
--frank[at]unternet.org
Maybe I'd better luck wishing for some higher res displays as standard on notebooks... How is it that cell phones need 1080p displays, but for doing real work, 1366x768 is supposed to be great ?!
...maybe you should look at a chromebook like the pixel. [2560 x 1700 at 239 PPI] which has a higher than 1080P resolution :)
http://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/devices/chromebook-pixel/
How much longer are they going to keep making products for consumption instead of creation?
Windows 8 is the "other" in "every other version of Windows sucks," which means they better get their head out of their ass for Windows 9 (or whatever name they pick out of the hat next).
Otherwise, this is going to push their bread-and-butter business customers away from them and towards Linux. Who'd have thought that the year of the Linux desktop might actually end up being Microsoft's doing?
I welcome these changes as I dispice Metro in its current form for all the reasons you stated. I like to be able to see multiple programs at once, use the taskbar to preview with aero all the differnet IE tabs and apps, and use instant search for things in my word document to see if I have matching files etc.
So far Microsoft is responding to some of the criticism by making making Metro applets do the same things like resizing and having more than one app open.
But the desktop and the start menu is notcoming back. The desktop is dead and Microsoft has invested too much into this and is losing too much marketshare to go back to the old ways. Customers are telling Microsoft they want a cool IPAD, iBook, or a Droid. Not wanting the same sluggish crashy POS with 11 year old blue and green colored XP machines they use at work. Desktop apps are not touch friendly and do not go beyond 100 DPI without major gui issues and bugs. Why is my 2 year old Samsung Galaxy S gives a better browsing experience with smooth GPU acceleration, less pixely graphics, and HTML 5 goodness than my desktop PC?
The infrastructure is dated due to XP compatibility with win32. I do not feel Metro is ready yet which is why I am typing this on Windows 7 but if MS clears its act with more colors a taskbar, a smart screen that doesn't block what you are doing, and more Skeumorphism they will have a winner. Windows Blue is even faster and less crappy and sluggish with huge ass latency compred to Windows 8, which beats Windows 7, which is even more responsive than XP when it comes to Windows Rot.
Arguing against it makes it look like we are old men who hate change because of a silly button.
http://saveie6.com/
My suggested Windows 8 slogan: "Nowhere to go but up!"
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
"...this monotone nonsense that just blends into everything." Are you referring to the fact that looking at an MsOffice doc, you can't tell whether it has the focus or not? I think the top bar changes slightly, but ever so slightly; I have to look at the other apps I have open to see if any of them has focus. If they don't, then I assume Word (or whatever) has focus.
I dunno how they could do that with XP, as I've not given an Internet connection to its VM.
You can't trust Windows on the net; and you can't trust Microsoft, period.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
LOL. It's not ironic. It's imaginary. There's no significant move towards Google Chrome or Google anything else for that matter in the OS space. There are three players, and only three: Microsoft, Apple, and linux. Apple's got the ball right now, as their machines can run all three OS's, all at once, legally and legitimately. If you're worried about movement, worry about Apple. Google? No chance.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I have a soft spot for the new Start Screen. I find it much more appealing than the old Start Menu which seemed more like a Start Slab by the time it was deprecated. The initial concept had been compromised by the amount of crap that it was asked to handle. Using a tile-based system is a great way to package different sources of data and information into neat little groupings. We can agree to disagree on that one.
My problem is that the rest of the Metro UI doesn't really follow the lead of the Start Screen at all. Aesthetically, it jettisons the entire look and feel for what seems like a bunch of images and text adrift in a lot of whitespace.
Icons have little or no depth at all. They don't really adhere to their origins in minimalist mass transit iconography as the Start Screen does, nor do they acknowledge the benefits of effective drop shadows - or really any developments since the year 2000. I'm pretty sure the version of KDE that shipped with my copy of LinuxPPC 1999 was the aesthetic equal in this one regard.
Text is widely spread out with no clear delineation between where one active area begins and another ends. Even info grouped together appears to take up a significant amount of screen real estate. Not due to font sizing issues, but rather, the line spacing and just random weirdness in the layout. It reminds me less of an OS and more of a poorly-designed Web 2.0 site.
I'm not seeing anyone, not even Microsoft, demanding that the workplace convert over to touch-screen UIs, even in a distant future.
A touchscreen, and there for 8 would be terrible for office work.
...but if MS clears its act with more colors a taskbar, a smart screen that doesn't block what you are doing, and more Skeumorphism they will have a winner. ...Arguing against it makes it look like we are old men who hate change because of a silly button.
Actually, that's one of my biggest complaints with the start screen - it covers everything. I like the start menu because it doesn't take up a lot of space. My second biggest complaint is that Windows 8 is ugly - Aero is gone, colors are basic, and it's so blocky. (My third is I don't want to retrain the users I deal with - we have Windows 8 on a few computers at work that are used at floating desks so that we can see how users react, and every one of them has issues using it).
I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
why does Calculate, Sound Recorder need to be full screen??
It's not a small screen tablet or phone
...but loves the hardware.
https://plus.google.com/+LinusTorvalds/posts/dk1aiW4JjHd L "I'm still running ChromeOS on this thing, which is good enough for testing out some of my normal work habits (ie reading and writing email), but I expect to install a real distro on this soon enough. For a laptop to be useful to me, I need to not just read and write email, I need to be able to do compiles, have my own git repositories etc..
"
I'll use Metro when I can see my application, code trace, call stack, and variable watch list at the same time.
If Metro is so friggin' brilliant how come VS2012 isn't native? Oh and thanks for making the menu titles shout at me. That's nice.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
I have been using Windows 8. Yes, as a power user I do miss the start menu and how it enabled discovery of programs and multitasking. But, the kernel is responsive and I like the simpler, less chrome look. Even Windows 7 feels less responsive and snappy to me now. And the ideas in Windows RT (the new runtime) make a lot of sense (highly asynchronous, access from managed and native environments). But, they wrapped it up in the weirdest way.
Why Microsoft just doesn't embrace a "desktop mode" and "metro mode" on a per user basis just baffles me. If you select desktop mode, you get the start menu, and to get to the metro screen, you have that option on that menu (or shift+win). Win key takes you back to desktop from any metro app. Metro mode, works like Windows 8 now. Shift+Win is desktop shortcut.
Ta-da, best of both worlds. And you buy some time to get the Windows RT runtime for desktop apps, or integrating metro into desktop mode.
Microsoft, this isn't hard at all. What's up?
I have been using 8 since the 1st preview and I have come to really like it. A LOT. I did NOT like it in the early days as I was die hard windows 7 user and it is a great OS. But 8 is 7 after a couple more years of refinement. Do I like Metro? nope. Do I want a touch screen? nope. I hate fingerprints on my screens! But thanks to apps like Start8 I don't even have to know there is a metro ui. [though there are a few nice apps there].
There just are so many refinements in 8 that I could never consider going back to 7.
Is it perfect? nope. But the parts that irk me are few and far between.
It really is fast, it really is rock solid stable, and it get's out of my way and lets me actually get work done.
I'm sure I am going to be modded to hell for this but it is a great OS. I'm not a shill, nor do I have a gun pointed at my head to say this. I just am a old fart who likes my PC and I really do like 8.
The magic is the fantasy kind, not sleight** of hand -- the quote refers to humans' tendency to resort to supernatural explanations for things that they lack the necessary scientific knowledge to otherwise fully understand. Arthur C. Clarke wrote the "law" after publishing The Sentinel (upon which 2001 was based), in which the narrator describes the underlying mechanisms of an alien object as probably belonging "to a technology that lies beyond our horizons, perhaps to the technology of para-physical forces."
**sleight = an action performed with cunning and dexterity; being "slight of" something means it's unusually small. (Both would earn a guy quite a reputation in the bedroom, but I'm pretty sure most would rather be known for one than the other.)
Your interpretation is a lot closer to one of my favorite signatures, though:
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo."
Now mostly at Usenet:comp.misc & SoylentNews.org (it's made of people!)
4GB of ram? 64GB ssd? that's it? yeah the screen is nice, but the rest of the machine is anemic rubbish..