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Microsoft: Start Menu Returns, Windows Free For Small Device OEMs, Cortana Beta
At Microsoft's BUILD conference today, the company announced that the Start Menu will officially be returning to Windows 8.1. It will combine the Windows 7 Start Menu with a handful of Metro-style tiles. They're also making it so Windows 8 apps can run in windows using the normal desktop environment. In addition to the desktop announcements, Microsoft also talked about big changes for Windows on mobile devices and Internet-of-Things devices. The company will be giving Windows away for free to OEMs making phones and tablets (9" screens and smaller), and for IoT devices that can run it. Microsoft also finally unveiled Cortana, their digital assistant software that's similar to Siri.
So it only took about a year of screaming from the users and slashdotters before Microsquishy paid attention and brought back the MENU instead of that god damned useless start screen. Who knows -- by 9.x maybe it'll even be as usable as 7 again.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Microsoft listens to end users?!
"Microsoft also finally unveiled Cortana, their digital assistant software that's similar to Siri."
As opposed to Clippy, their digital assistant software that's similar to Jar Jar Binks.
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
PLEASE PLEASE TAKE THE DAMN TILE INTERFACE AWAY FROM YOUR SERVER OS!!!!
It's useless! it's painful! I curse myself whenever I hit the start button!
Seriously why would you use something as bloated as Windows for a mobile or embedded device?
So that the device can do double duty. It can act as a tablet by itself, or it can be docked to an external keyboard and monitor and act as a basic desktop computer. At least this is what Canonical promised for "Ubuntu for Android".
Windows on a phone works pretty well -- I picked up a Nokia 520 because it was $40 and why not, and it's actually quite decent.
The tiles based interface works quite well for a small device like that. I certainly don't like it on a PC with a big screen (or two), but for a little screen it works quite well.
In fact, the only real problem I had with the OS is that there aren't many apps available compared to iOS and Android.
Cortana was Master Chief's AI companion (the big space marine carrier's AI computer) in the original Halo game. I still hate that Microsoft bought Bungie, and now they're going to milk the shit out of that IP by naming the rip-off of Siri Cortana. I grew up playing the Marathon series on Mac, and when I first played Halo I saw that all the same stuff was there, just fleshed out into awesome 3D so I was like "yay Bungie" and then Microshit shit all over Halo 2 with their Vista "DirectX 10 required" lies etc. Halo 2 worked well on XP with the Vista checks removed. /ramble
What about all us fools who installed server 2012, and can't upgrade to 2012 R2 without paying another 1400 bucks? Are we going to get screwed without even a start button for the next 5 years that we run these servers?
Now, could they get rid of the flat, huge, ugly UI elements (window borders, buttons, etc.) and go back to the reasonable look of Vista or 7? Sheesh, honestly the hideous ugliness of it was the most irritating thing about 8 for me, as the tile interface and start menu problems could be fixed with a few add-ons.
Same thing goes on my Surface2. The Windows 8 interface really shines on a touch screen device. It's also worth pointing out that you don't need as many apps on Surface as you would on an iPad, because it has a lot of functionality built in. Getting videos to play off my shared folder on the main PC was a piece of cake with Surface. With iPad, it was a royal pain, and it still doesn't work well with certain videos.
If you could get a 9 inch tablet for that ran full windows, you could have a very portable computer that you could just plug into full size monitor, keyboard and mouse, and use it as a full desktop. You wouldn't need any cloud services like drop box because you could literally bring your whole desktop computer with you wherever you go. This is the main point of the Surface Pro that most people seem to forget. You have this ultraportable machine about the same size as an ipad, but that you can hook up standard peripherals to and make it work as a full fledged desktop. The Surface Pro is a little outside most people's budgets, but the ASUS Transformer Book T100 is a little cheaper, and can still run most desktop apps.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
It's interesting,because my opinion on those two is the exact opposite.
I couldn't care less about boot to desktop. That's a single button click when I boot the machine.
However, I use the start menu quite often. It provides a hierarchically sorted list of every program I have installed on the system. I use that about once a week to once a month. It also provides a list of my most recently used programs. I could move those to the taskbar (and sometimes do) but sometimes these change and I don't want them semi-permanently taking up space on the taskbar.
There are three things that are really bad about windows 8. I've ordered them from worst to least bad.
1.) The charms bar is torture on a desktop. You have to go to the top right of the screen, then go halfway down the screen in a narrow strip to actually click on something. If your mouse moves outside that narrow strip for even a moment, the charms bar disappears and you have to do it again. "Thank you, sir, may I have another?"
2.) The start menu was removed, because it is rarely used. This was just not thinking. The start menu has become big and clunky... that's also become it's purpose. We have new and better methods to access frequently used programs, but the start menu continues to be useful for those infrequently used programs. A hierarchical list is certainly better than displaying them all in a flat grid of live tiles.
3.) Metro programs can't run in a window. This makes them inconvenient for multitasking, which is common for desktop users but not for tablet users.
Metro should show some intelligence in how it open apps.
Ideally, if the user opens a metro app from the Desktop, it should be windowed. If it's opened from the Metro Screen it should be full screen.
Metro is a fine interface for touch devices. It looks good and works well. However it fails miserably when you're trying to use it in conjunction with the desktop. MS should go whole hog and create a Metro only tablet.
A lot of the blame for Win8 can be shouldered on Steven Sinofsky, who by all accounts thought himself as a cross between Steve Jobs and Napoleon. He was given free reign over Win8 due to his perceived success with MS Office (and the ribbon interface).
If you follow the MS news, you'll find constant suggestions that he treated the windows division as his fiefdom (and windows phone as a competitor, refusing even the most basic coordination) and that not only did he refuse to include a start menu in Win8 as a transitional step (up to that point, MS has usually offered a way to go back to the old behavior for at least one windows version) he intentionally introduced architectural changes to make it harder for MS to implement one in the future. You'll notice he was fired shortly after without much remorse by anyone.
1) What do you *need* "charms" for on the desktop? You are, I presume, using desktop apps (which don't interact with the Charms bar at all). For things like Settings - even the "Metro" Settings, if for some reason you want those - you can reach them using Start (more on that in a sec). Oh, and FYI, Win+C will display the Charms bar without any stupid mouse shenanigans. I believe you can turn off the hot corner entirely, if you want to.
2) Wrong, the Start menu was removed because they wanted to present the Live Tiles interface and the menu didn't have enough room for that (interesting that Win8 update 2 or Win9 or whatever they end up calling it will have a Windows Phone-like width of tiles as an option on an actual menu...). As for "better methods" that would primarily be Start search, which is much faster than using the mouse. It also generally works a lot *better* with rarely-used programs (or settings, or files, or direct links to settings pages you didn't even know were possible to link directly to...) than hierarchical menus do. Start search has been built into Windows since Vista (2006). They fucked it up a bit in Win8 (still worked for programs, but extra keypresses were needed for files or settings) but fixed it in Win8.1.
3) Assuming you use "Metro" programs at all (eww...) then yes, this is a problem (and is being fixed in an upcoming version). If you're like me, and prefer to just use Win8 as a more efficient Win7 with better multi-monitor support and the ability to run Hyper-V, this isn't really a problem. Aside from games (which I'd want to have running full-screen anyhow), the Win8 apps are worthless on a desktop.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...