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.
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.
"That's right...I said it."
wobbly windows. Where ARE my wobbly windows??
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.
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.
The worst part is the animation duration, how in the hell can you use a system where it takes nearly two seconds for each menu to appear? It's completely insane!
Celebrity worship is a poor substitute for Deity worship and costs more to boot.
The OSX animations are awful, people have been using windowing systems for decades and completely grok what happened to the window. At most you need to a tiny fraction of a second to avoid the user overlooking the change. Please do not waste precious seconds or cause people motion sickness for your whizbang effects.
I know, I know, Apple did it so it must be cool right? I really want the ability for people to change themes as they see fit come back. If you are on a low spec phone, tablet or PC, or just don't like effects, you should be able to turn them off. But if you want more effects, you should have the option. You could easily turn off the Aero Glass effect in Windows 7 and either stay with the less-transparent Windows 7 GUI or even go all the way back to Windows Classic. Why can't we have that option again?
All builds starting with 986x must be identical to each other because they're now being used for a classification of releases! Clearly this means 9870 must add more features!
Because build numbers mean something!
MUST... HAVE... MORE BUILD NUMBERS!
All the issues that stood out like a sore thumb in Windows 10 and the headline feature of the latest release is window animations?
Meet the new MS same as the old MS.
Gimme my Clippy!
Even if you don't, you should be able to download it and install it as a theme. Windows is pretty customizable. The desktop effects are under advanced computer properties and the theme is under personalization. You can also turn Aero glass off in the power management menu.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkN-gEUnICI
"Go to CNN [for a] spell-checked, fact-checked summary" -- CmdrTaco
I think the default animation time in windows 7 menus is 200ms. Or at least that's what ClassicShell claims it to be in advanced mode that lets you adjust the timing.
If they actually push animation time as far as you suggest, I think that would just become another reason why people will stick to 7. OS needs to be functional first and foremost. That's why 8 failed, vastly impaired desktop desktop functionality. Too pronounced/delayed animations would likely fall in the same category.
Can we have our transparency back?
It's great to see features from X11 Enlightenment are finally being picked up by other systems....15-20 years later.
So no file paths longer than 256 characters, but animations I will turn off ?
Good work, concentrate on what you're good at.
... we know damn well that Windows is an Apple knockoff.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
This is a good start (assuming you can turn these animations off if you don't like them). Hopefully they'll bring back Aero Glass-style transparency soon.
There are also a lot more substantive flaws that need to be addressed. The Start menu (which is Win10's big selling point!) doesn't currently do DPI scaling properly. It's disappointing enough to see this flaw with third-party software, but for a core part of the OS, it's inexcusable. And there is still no way to remove the obtrusive Search and Task View icons from the taskbar. (Both of these issues have hundreds of votes on Feedback; hopefully they will be addressed.)
There are also a bunch of smaller annoyances – unlike in Win7, I can't get the useless "Homegroup" option to disappear from the left panel of File Explorer, even if I leave all homegroups completely. They also shove OneDrive down your throat. And if I rename "This PC" back to "My Computer", it displays under my preferred name in most places, but not in the tile half of the Start menu – it appears fine in the left-hand list portion, but the tile always says "This PC" no matter what it has been renamed to.
There are some encouraging signs, but this is definitely an alpha-class release in my experience. Glad I installed it in a VM.
Does it feel me or do I feel it comprehensively? And how many CPU cycles and RAM percentages does it use to be "comprehensively" felt?
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. George Orwell
Hand me the Windows 10 installation CD, and I will go and get a hammer.
If you polish a turd long enough, it turns into a diamond.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I do hope I experience as much consumer satasfation with this iternation of Windows as previous affordable MICROS~1 products ..
The Ballmer "Chair" interface, eh?
Seriosouly, though, I hope there is an option to switch that animation off. I like quick response, and switched off the XP and Win7 animations on my PC. Please, don't take that away, Mr. Nadella.
Table-ized A.I.
Looks like Apple's animation... must by a copyright infringement, or if not that a patent infringement, or if no that just really really bad. Fire up the lawyerbot.
If done right, such animations can be helpful to newbies, showing the relationship between the icon and the newly opened window (versus say a randomly popping message or spam). But after a while such "training wheels" get annoying and slow you down.
Table-ized A.I.
If you're visualizing large or dynamic datasets, a hardware accelerated animation adds all sorts of value. Not everyone can produce meaningful conclusions from screenfuls of cascading text.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
All I care about is if users that are stuck with the never-ending train-wreck that is Windows 8/8.1 going to get a free upgrade to Windows 10.
>" It is a slick animation and if you have used OS X [(MacOS 10)], it is similar to the one used to collapse windows back in to the dock."
You mean like the one we have been using in Compiz/Beryl in Linux and then in KDE under Linux for many years?? Yawn.
More eye candy? How about making it look less flat - you know, how like Aero used to look? You could distinguish windows and panels and widgets more easily, and didn't have to squint to be productive.
Or.... you could be Edgy!! Yeah let's go with edgy...
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
Sensible, and functional, without an overload of useless crap.
JMHO.
> Not everyone can produce meaningful conclusions
> from screenfuls of cascading text.
Blonde, brunette, readhead...
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Actually linux back in the day, as in about 1997, resembled this sort of thing with the animated effects available for the Enlightenment window manager - however they were designed to be very easy to turn off if you didn't want them. It even had the little window snapshot images that are in win7, and of course the multiple desktops coming with Win10 (but even twm has those).
Rob Malda had an popular web site for the Enlightenment application ePlus when Slashdot started which is why a lot of people who used it turned up in this place early on.
Yes, don't they always blame the victim?
Seriously, if you want it to look different, just get windowblinds and you're done.
What could microsoft do better? get functionality like windowblinds built-in and make it easy to use
..
and many more!
incorporate ability to mount ftp drives
fix built-in defrag too to allow it to move page file so you can shrink partition to minimum size
get rid of the abysmal ribbon and change menus in office to allow typing (ie. type commands/keywords instead of browsing through menus/toolsbars)
how about improving built-in notepad to not suck ass? year 2014 and notepad still chokes while opening large files
same with ms paint, is this a joke? it hasn't changed since 1996! either improve it by adding modern features to it, or get rid of it.
get rid of IE intergrations. wasn't there a lawsuit about this
include a pdf reader that's not a full-screen piece of shit, get rid of fullscreen craps, this is a desktop os, not a phone/tablet/phablet.
how about an ability to run exes in sandboxed mode? ie. catch all file/registry access, report it, undo it.
no, instead they're adding "eye candy"...
The highlight of the top bar that caused the windows to expand to fill the screen was actually nausea inducing.
FFS people.....
Eye candy might help some of you a bit, it'll hurt some of us others a bit.
Simple utility and well thought out design for usability makes a quite usable UI. Windows 2000 had a workable UI. So did XP if you put it in classic mode. So does 7. 8+... assssssssss.....
Xubuntu I quite like. Ubuntu before Unity isn't bad. I've seen Zorin lately and it looks okay.
A decent operator can learn a consistent UI in a bit of time and work around its ideosyncratic behaviours to accomplish a lot.
The main offense in UI/desktop design is inconsistency and too much contextual stuff that can choose to hide key things when IT thinks you don't want to do them. Inconsistency ruins any amount of training.
I find Apple's UI unintuitive. I can navigate Droids and Crackberries fine, but iPhones give me pain. I can navigate Slackware, RH, RHEL, Ubuntu, Xubuntu, and likely even BSD or Yggdrasil (that goes back!) no problem. Even NonStop UNIX or Sun UNIX. But OS X.... makes my teeth gnash. Windows 8 Metro a bit too (others I could manage fine).
I can't quite put my finger on it, but every assumption I make in those problematic environments that would be the logic of all the other named systems in one way or another, doesn't seem to work as expected.
I do appreciate that the people who find OS X and iPhones straightforward may struggle with Droids and other OSes for the reciprocal reason.
Generally, if I have to fight the UI or Desktop to get things done, it isn't doing its job.
-- Mal: "Well they tell you: never hit a man with a closed fist. But it is, on occasion, hilarious."
And stop shiny monitors as well. Literally the worst thing to happen to screens.
The low-frequency 200Hz backlight is the worst thing that has happened to screens. The glossy finish is a nice runner-up though.
It seems ther've finally caught up with what was possible on Linux over 5 years ago. Virtual desktops too. How very, erm, usual!
The animation is choppy because the screen recording is running at 10-15fps (my estimation), which is perfectly fine for showing off a piece of software, but not very good for showing fluid animations.
Eat the rich.
Because what I want in an enterprise-class operating system, what I desire more than anything else, what I cannot live without, what my users are crying out for, what I will pay good money just to have... ... is more shit jumping out at me on the screen for no good reason.
Gimme WinFS and we'll talk. Gimme complete application isolation and I'll think about it. Otherwise, honestly, you're just papering over the cracks.
who fucking cares about windows nein...Not anymore, I have jumped to other pastures far too long ago.
Look at how the mouse moves. Have you every seen any desktop environment where the mouse update rate is that shitty? No, you haven't.
A lot of desktop recording applications run at 10-15fps to save space and/or bandwidth, and because it's plenty to adequately show off the user interfaces of most graphical applications. I've been using WebEx and other screen recording solutions (including FRAPS) for over a decade. don't try to school me on this.
Eat the rich.
Dude your office seriously needs new hardware if the cursor in Word lags behind your typing. Although I agree that all Office apps have an irritating startup time that was not there earlier.
Wealth is the gift that keeps on giving.
http://www.worldofspectrum.org...
B.C. Bill. Very apt naming...
Glad to see MS continues to be style over substance.
Posting AC since I already moderated here.
After going to the Youtube page, I gotta say - Just what the fuck?
So now in order to salve the wounds of people butthurt by the monumental sucakge of Windows 8, will be treated to the awesome best ever spectacle of rotating menu items, what they've always been waiting for?
Ahem. The youtube link (showing the flipping menus) shows a Linux desktop. It was intended by submitter jonas-supa to show how much more advanced Linux desktops are.
Can't wait until the fanbois come out and tell us how waiting for a menu to spin around a few times is based on extensive research done by Microsoft that proves once and for all that most users want the operating system to waste their fucking time, and that anyone who doesn't just love the steaming hot piece of shit is an idiot who doesn't kow that they are doing.
Lol. We have to wait for the Linux fanbois to explain why the hell Linux needs compiz and all of the (agreed: Horrid!) animations from that youtube link.
Way to go there, buddy.
Reading slashdot one-liner: (irm http://rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/slashdot).rdf.item | fl title,desc*