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.

Re:Screenshots

[ArmoredDragon]

It's not much to look at, sadly, as the new build brings the start menu more in-lines with Windows 8. Also sadly, along with this change they require you to use Cortana in lieu of the normal start menu search. They replaced the regular WPF start menu with a XAML (metro app) start menu that depends on a bunch of metro stuff to work, and removing Cortana breaks it. There's a hidden registry setting to go back to the one found in previous builds, but I suspect Microsoft will remove it like they did the start menu from Windows 8.

Meanwhile I've found that you can presently "de-metro"ify this build with these three powershell commands:

Set-ItemProperty HKCU:\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced -Name "EnableXamlStartMenu" -Value 0 -Type DWord
Get-AppxProvisionedPackage -Online | Remove-AppxProvisionedPackage -Online
Get-AppxPackage | Remove-AppxPackage
logoff # logs you off so you can log back in to see the effect

(The first two lines are actually one line; should be 4 lines total)

After you do that, it very much resembles the Windows 7 start menu. But again, I am doubtful that Microsoft will leave all of this intact for the final release, much as they did with Windows 8. One can only hope, or perhaps fill it in as a big petition in the feedback app (the code above removes that app, so keep that in mind.)

http://i.imgur.com/880f17Q.png

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

[jandrese]

Just because open source projects can choose terrible names doesn't mean they have a monopoly on it.

Re:Terrible names

[jellomizer]

I don't care what they call it. But I just want the ability to drill down to find my feature.
The Windows 8 Interface, and Office 2007+ Ribbons with its tiles, kills the drill down idea, and gives you a big set of data cluttered in your face.

I am all for a spot for shortcuts and links, where you can put the most used features right at your beck and call. But being the case I use 20% of the features 80% of the time, means I much rather have most of the stuff shoved away from my site, until I need them, and I can use common sense to find out where they are.

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

[PRMan]

Well, then you'll be very happy. Because after upgrading my Windows 7 laptop to Windows 10, all I noticed is that it's faster and the battery lasts longer and it's harder for stupid people to run untrusted stuff from the internet. Other than that, it's pretty similar.

Re:Terrible names

[Opportunist]

Almost. But it's the OS that's alive or dead, you just won't know 'til you try to save your work.

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

[Minwee]

Shitty names and FOSS go hand-in-hand.

If you can think of another name for the Secure Human Interface Teletype then why don't submit it to the shitty developers? Or make your own shitty fork if you don't want to work with the shitty team. All of the code is right there in the shitty repository.

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.

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"

New name: 'Windows Auschwitz 9-11 happy' bar

[TiggertheMad]

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....

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.

Here it is!

[Ol Olsoc]

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/... The real Windows 10! We fixed everything.

Re:Three-month-old Continuum screenshot

[JohnFen]

10 is looking decent enough to give a shot.

It's good enough that I won't howl if my employer requires me to start using it. However, there is not a single thing in Windows 10 that I find compelling enough to make me upgrade unless I'm required to. There are some minor performance improvements, but nothing that makes the upgrade a "must-have". All of the new features are things that I will never use and don't care about. And I am very, very nervous about the tighter integration with the cloud.

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...