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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.
Screenshots of more than just the settings would have been nice.
Google Images search for windows 10 continuum brings up images such as this one from this page. It looks like a small chunk of a Windows 8 Start screen and part of a Windows 7 Start menu put together. I'm assuming that the appearance of the new Continuum start menu didn't change when Microsoft removed the option to use full-screen Start screen.
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.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
... 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.
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.
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"
Good people go to bed earlier.
Thank you, Mr. Ballmer.
Seriously. It seems like Microsoft decides what are the systems that users should be working with and runs from there with no regard to what users are actually working with.
The biggest irony is that they don't seem to understand that the people who will have the biggest problem with what they are throwing out are developers. I can't imagine that Microsoft's own developers are running their own development systems on Windows 8.1 - I wouldn't be surprised if it were a dirty secret within Microsoft that application development takes place on Win7 (and maybe WinXP).
I understand the appeal of having one OS and UI for all devices but a Phone isn't a Tablet which isn't a laptop which isn't a desktop which isn't a server. And if you're a developer, requiring a touch screen hurts your productivity.
myke
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
Now they're just marketing doublespeak.
So true. When I saw the blurb about the 'charms bar' I immediately imagined an exclusive hipster cereal bar in San Francisco that exclusively served lucky charms cereal with organic unpasteurized milk. The flatware was reclaimed 1890s mining camp tin spoons, and the maitre'd was dressed like lucky the leprechaun.
I suppose we have that dumb fuck Balmer to thank for this....
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
What I still don't understand is how management, which is presumably comprised of older, more conservative, more experienced types, fell for the ridiculous idea of replacing the proven desktop metaphor with a tablet interface. (I'm assuming the idea was proposed by young, inexperienced marketers and junior executives.) What in the world was upper management thinking when they signed off on this, and why are they still working at microsoft after it's been proven a disaster?
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.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/... The real Windows 10! We fixed everything.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
IF not, WHY not? Apple does it. WTF?
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
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.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
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.
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.
The road to tyranny has always been paved with claims of necessity.
That brown stuff isn't shoe polish.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
Cat exists under Linux.
You can do that natively :
make a box :
if (( RANDOM % 2 )); then echo "Cat is dead">/tmp/Box; else echo "Cat is alive">/tmp/Box; fi
open the box :
cat /tmp/Box
aaaaaaa