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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"
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
Why is a Windows release named after its most famous failure screen? Is the marketing department that ignorant?
Because they're willing to be bold and daring.
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/
My suggested Windows 8 slogan: "Nowhere to go but up!"
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.
...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 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.