More Eye Candy Coming To Windows 10

jones_supa writes Microsoft is expected to release a new build of the Windows 10 Technical Preview in the very near future, according to their own words. The only build so far to be released to the public is 9841 but the next iteration will likely be in the 9860 class of releases. With this new build, Microsoft has polished up the animations that give the OS a more comprehensive feel. When you open a new window, it flies out on to the screen from the icon and when you minimize it, it collapses back in to the icon on the taskbar. It is a slick animation and if you have used OS X, it is similar to the one used to collapse windows back in to the dock. Bah.

Comments

how pretty

[CheshireDragon]

I couldn't care less about how pretty it looks...I want it to WORK PROPERLY.
Linux back in the day looked like hell, but it worked.

Re:how pretty

[Anonymous Coward]

There's also a reason that so many of the actual scientists I know come rushing back to Linux after playing around in MacOSX or Windows for a while. It's just not as good at SCIENCE. It wastes CPU and RAM for starters. And if you need a graph of 3d animation or other visualization, Linux can now do that just fine these days, much less annoyingly than it was even a few years ago. If you need to do serious work, it doesn't waste the system's resources as much, and it doesn't distract you into playing around instead of getting work done. It is also still more compatible with Unix-ish software without as much pain of setting it all up because OSX is so comparatively annoying to set up for software developer (I say this as a primarily-Mac dev who likes OSX, but let's be realistic now).

Re:how pretty

[arth1]

Ah. Mystery meat navigation. Got to love it.
The real killers with Windows 8 and 10, though, are
1: Edge detection. Edge detection only works well on single monitors. It really doesn't work at all if you run a VM in a window.
2: Apps that automatically go full screen, and many of which don't even have a windowed mode. That's a huge productivity killer, and source of errors. It kills drag/drop, but even worse, you can't have source and references visible at the same time, nor copy/paste between multiple windows.
3; No activate without auto-raise. Which now is auto-raise-and-zoom. Why won't you let me type in or paste into a window that isn't on top? It makes no sense. Do people really like to bring an entire IM session to the foreground, and, depending on the program, obscuring everything else, just to type in "ok"?
4: Inconsistent menus and windows, self-organizing depending on use. It's a support nightmare when you can't tell someone how to do something, because the menus and windows are going to be different on each user's machine. You have to shoulder-surf people to support them.
5: Dumbing down DPI support. In W7 and to a smaller extent W8, you can set the DPI correctly and control the physical (as opposed to pixel) size of what you display. in W10, scaling changes on you as you try to work. it doesn't matter if you actually want a 10 dpi font to be, you know, 10 dpi in size. No, what matters now is how to scale a random amount to fit a full-screen window with huge unused borders, and your own settings be damned.

It's like they have looked at Gnome 3 and iPads, and taken all the worst "features", making an unparalleled productivity killer.

Eye candy doesn't make up for that. Sorry.
Aero was at least semi-useful, as you can see other windows through the borders. But W8/W10? It's looks for the sake of looks. And bad looks at that.

Will Microsoft ever learn?

[whizbang77045]

I wonder when Microsoft will learn that a lot of us would rather use our CPU and GPU cycles for something other than eye candy? While computers can be used for fun purposes, we shouldn't all be left with the feel that what we have is little more than a technotoy.

Re:Will Microsoft ever learn?

[Dutch Gun]

My computer has had CPU and GPU cycles to burn for the past decade, and while my machines are typically reasonably powered, they're not exactly considered monsters either. For all the complaints I hear about wasting cycles, I have yet to see OS-level effects or window animations seriously slow down my computer in any measurable way, even on specialized workstations I optimize for performance, like my digital audio workstation.

Animation actually has a real purpose in terms of UI design. For instance, an animation between a window in it's normal state and the minimized state is not just aesthetically pleasing, but helps the user to mentally connect those windowed positions, making it less likely for people to be momentarily confused about where their window disappeared to. Moreover, people generally like eye candy, and they like to be able to customize their system. It simply serves to make people more comfortable with the OS environment, but I'd argue that's actually important of any tech product intended for the masses as well.

Adding animations or some virtual gloss doesn't devalue an operating system and turn it into a tech toy, nor does making a product boring and dull enhance it's functionality in any way.

form over function?

[dAzED1]

Given the type of IT consulting I do, I have to stay comfortable with Windows - I've been trying out Win10 on my fairly new high-end gaming laptop, installed on a SDD, and have been amazed at how often a seemingly menial task can lag - or even hang up the entire UI. For instance, I started up IE a bit ago - while using a blank default/home page - and it froze up the entire desktop for a few seconds (even briefly sputtering the audio of a movie I had playing in another window). Seems to me like they have more to work on than animations - maybe they should focus on usability for a bit first.