Windows 10: Charms Bar Removed, No Start Screen For Desktops

jones_supa writes Late last week, Microsoft pushed out a new build (9926) of Windows 10 to those of you who are running the Technical Preview. The latest version comes with many new features, some easily accessible, others bubbling under, but two big changes are now certain: the Charms bar is dead, and Start Screen for large devices is no more. Replacing the Charms bar is the Action Center, which has many of the same shortcuts as the Charms bar, but also has a plethora of other information too. Notifications are now bundled into the Action Center and the shortcuts to individual settings are still easily accessible from this window. The Start Screen is no longer present for desktop users, the options for opening it are gone. Continuum is the future, and it has taken over what the Start Screen initiated with Windows 8.

Comments

Screenshots

[kcwhitta]

Screenshots of more than just the settings would have been nice.

Terrible names

[TWX]

Charms bar? Continuum?

Names used to be fairly intuitive, and even when they weren't completely intuitive their names were derived from their technical function. I'm thinking "context menu", "start menu", "task list", "quick-launch menu", and "system tray".

Now they're just marketing doublespeak.

Re:Terrible names

[Peter Simpson]

Charms bar? Continuum? Names used to be fairly intuitive, and even when they weren't completely intuitive their names were derived from their technical function. I'm thinking "context menu", "start menu", "task list", "quick-launch menu", and "system tray". Now they're just marketing doublespeak.

Hey Microsoft!

Pick a UI and stick to it! I'm getting very tired of having to relearn the entire UI whenever you make a new release.

Re:Terrible names

[grimmjeeper]

But here's the thing. I'm sure there are a handful of people who don't have anything complex to do on their laptop but like having a keyboard when posting their instafacetwitter drivel but still like to have a portable tablet with a touch screen. However, the whole reason Windows 8 has been such an utter and complete failure is that the business world has people doing real work on real desktops and laptops that need real windows. We're not a bunch of hipster douchebags who have nothing better to do than to break out in bad choreographed dancing at staff meetings. We have work to do. We don't care about transitioning from desktop to anything because there's no reason for us to do it. We don't want a tablet UI infecting our desktop/laptop operating system. We want to get our work done. This absurd attempt to make one operating system fit for both business desktops and consumer electronics devices is a fool's errand. Call it whatever you want, it's a stupid idea. Desktops and work laptops need a desktop OS/UI. Phones and tablets need a mobile OS/UI. Trying to make one OS/UI for the whole market will just ensure that you will fail utterly at both. Microsoft needs to rectify their cranial-rectal inversion and break the two halves into separate products.

Re:Terrible names

[JohnFen]

But what the ribbon does in practice, at least for me, is to guarantee that I'll spend far too long trying to figure out where in the hell an option actually is.

God, I hate the ribbon.

Microsoft would be onto a winner if...

[Viol8]

... they took the Win 7 desktop + the win 8 kernel and called it windows 10. Job done. The days when anyone cared about all these GUI toys like the charms bar/continuum/whatever on a PC is long gone - people have got all that crap on their smartphones now.

Re:Microsoft would be onto a winner if...

[Opportunist]

Nobody would mind a better OS, but when the GUI has reached the pinnacle of usefulness, why try to force a change?

To entertain everyone with the ever popular car analogies, a car has a steering wheel, two or three pedals and a dashboard with a more or less common way to display what you want. The designs changed over time, but that's fairly constant. Why? Because it's been tried and proven as useful and intuitive, and people all over the globe know how to deal with this. It works. It works great. You don't see car manufacturers try to come up with, I don't know, a HOTAS setup for cars (well, maybe in some far out "concept" cars to entertain the press, but sure as fuck not in series cars) or try to be "creative" with their user interface. Despite heaps of changes under the hood in the past decades. Quite seriously, cars ain't the same they were 2 decades ago, but the user interface didn't change at all!

And? Do you see people lament and complain how they don't need a new car 'cause it just looks like the old one? Slap on a new paint job and design the exterior differently and they'll go "ohhh shiny!" and buy it.

Same for GUIs. Keep the user experience the same, just round the edges and make it flashy and gadget-y (and PLEASE allow us to disable all the blinkenlights, for those that don't want SHINY but rather go for useful).

Good! RIP Charms Bar

[Anonymous Coward]

It sounded stupid and it was stupid, an artifact of trying to force desktop computers to have the interface of a mobile device. Please stop this insanity. At work everyone has 17" monitors, at home I have a 22" monitor, and none of them are (or will be) touch screens. There's plenty of room for a real UI.

but its worth remembering

[nimbius]

the start menu still contains a mini start screen. George Lucas pulled this shit in the prequels by wedging jar jar binks into the last one, and you know what it has in common? Lucas and Microsoft are doing it as a big "Fuck You" to their respective audiences for refusing to accept what everyone but the author knew sucked. Saying "continuum is the future" is a strange way of saying, "Listening to your fucking customers is a novel approach microsoft is begrudgingly accepting piecemeal after a blinding 2 years of profit loss"

After a glimmer of sanity..

[wolfguru]

Microsoft returns to the delusion that they can drop nearly 25 years of desktop productivity and working style with a wave of their magic wand and everyone will fall happily in line. Changes have to make sense, an offer an advantage, or they will never be adopted. Has Microsoft decided to completely concede the desktop space to Macintosh and Linux? The biggest strength of Windows for years has been that when you start a program, you know how to use it, even if you do not know what it actually does - F1 for help, File > open to get whatever you're working with as material,and other similar conventions that allowed users to go from one program to the next with a modicum of understanding of the tools, if not the functions. The Microsoft design team has gone deaf to the actual user, and it all about the science fiction interface. Funny how you never see anyone in those scifi images do anything for more than a minute at a time.

Re:But how did it happen?

[Anrego]

I think panic is the key word.

Microsoft doesn't want to be the next RIM. They've been sitting comfortably on their office/desktop monopoly while google and apple have (not necessarily for better) been driving the future of computing, and are worried they may no longer fit into it. Everything they've done recently screams of desperate flailing to stave off a march down RIM's "we innovated once, that aught to be enough" path of doom.

This comes off less as some young guy saying "tablets guys, tablets are cool, lets do tablets!" as some old guy screaming "everyone is using tablets and we don't do tablets, we need to get on tablets now!".

Looks UGLY

[ArchieBunker]

Windows 8 and these screenshots look really ugly. Why the switch to every shape being super sharp and using a 4 bit color palette? Looks like something I could draw up in paint in a few minutes. At least Apple's designs are aesthetically pleasing. This just hurts your eyes.

Re:Great news. Bye Charms bar!

[ray-auch]

Good news: charms bar's been gone since early preview builds, wonderfully refreshing to be able to hit the scrollbar reliably again.

Bad news: the start menu has not got more functional and sensible, it's gone way backwards in the latest build, and it's now the only option. Incremental search for applications is now completely broken, you get one result (if you are lucky) and half a screen of completely irrelevant web search results. In fact after enjoying using the previous builds, I may now revert to 8, it's that bad.

Charms Bar vs Action Center

[Bacon Bits]

It's not at all clear to me what "Replacing the Charms bar is the Action center which has many of the same shortcuts as the Charms bar but also has a plethora of other information too." actually means.

If it means you still have to point your mouse to a corner and wait for a hidden window to magically appear, then it doesn't fix the major problem with the Charms bar.

If it means you have a bunch of options and settings that are only accessible from this hidden menu which you have no indication on the screen whether or not it exists, then it doesn't fix the major problem with the Charms bar.

If it means you only get a bunch of random icons with no label for what those icons mean, then it doesn't fix the second problem with the Charms bar.

Having a secondary OS Settings menu to complement the Start menu for programs isn't necessarily a poor design choice, but I am really concerned that they're not going to correct the fact that the theme of Windows 8 was to remove the user interface from the screen and magically expect the user to know what to do.

Re:Three-month-old Continuum screenshot

[hairyfeet]

I'm running it on the weakest system I have ATM, an AMD netbook with an E350 APU, 8GB of RAM (yes I know that is overkill, I scored the RAM on sale crazy cheap) and a 320Gb 5400 RPM drive. I figured that if it ran well on a system this weak it'll run good on anything...the verdict? Even with all the drivers running in compatibility mode it runs BETTER than Win 7 on the same hardware, it even has hardware acceleration for video that is smoother than the Win 7 that came with it!

Anybody whose followed my posts know that I don't talk nice about a version of Windows unless it deserves it, I HATE Windows 8, thought it was a frankentard of an OS, hated everything about Vista except for the cool black theme (which I still use on my Win 7 systems) and think Win 7 is the best OS they've made since XP X64 so when I say Win 10 looks like its gonna be a GREAT OS I don't say that lightly, in fact the only way I see them fucking it up is on the pricing side, the OS itself? its damned good. Takes just a couple minutes to get rid of the social crap (which I can't even get mad at that, lots of people like to be tweeting twits taking social shits) and once I added 8 gadgetpack to get back my CPUMeter and NetworkMeter? I was a happy camper.

And I would just like to say how happy I am to see the death of the "Charms" bar, that thing was retarded! But then again damned near everything about Ballmer's Folly was shit design from the start so the fact that charms was stupid really isn't a surprise. Good riddance to bad rubbish.

Re:Three-month-old Continuum screenshot

[NotDrWho]

I second the nervousness about the cloud, and would like to add my own trepidation about the closer tying of licenses to individual machines and subscription payments.

Seems like since World of Warcraft, every software developer wants me to pay a goddamned subscription fee for SOMETHING. Then when that doesn't work, they want me to go to their store and buy every little update and app for some extra fee.

How about you just sell me your software upfront....I install it....and I use it? Is that too much to ask?

Re:But how did it happen?

[meta-monkey]

And there's no "grown-up" alternative. Back in the day you didn't run Windows 95 - ME at the office. You used NT.

If they'd made a vanilla, office-friendly version of Windows 8 called "Windows 8 NT" or whatever else, that kept the same interface as 7, they might convince some corporate IT departments to upgrade. But when you've got a staff of 10,000 plus, and you're looking at rolling out a new OS with a completely different interface, at the minimum you're taking a huge productivity hit while people figure this new thing out, and at worst you're springing for new training.

I can only imagine how many billions of dollars in productivity were lost when they switched to the Ribbon in Office. It's as if millions of voices suddenly cried out "where's the edit menu?" and were suddenly confused...