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Microsoft Sees the Future of Windows 10 as Sets, Ditching Windows For a Tabbed App Interface (pcworld.com)
Microsoft said Tuesday that it plans to overhaul Windows 10, with a browser-like, tabbed application view dubbed "Sets" that groups apps and files by project. From a report: Think of Sets as a mashup of existing and emerging Windows 10 technologies. Take Windows Explorer and the little-used Task View within Windows 10, mix in the newer "Pick up where you left off" and "Timeline" features, and wrap it all into a single-window experience. The idea is that every task requires a set of apps -- Mail, a browser, PowerPoint, even Win32 apps like Photoshop -- and those apps will be optionally organized as tabs along a single window. But that's not all. Microsoft knows that one of the most difficult things to remember isn't what you were working on a week or so ago -- browser histories help with that. It's remembering all of the associated apps and documents that went with it: a particular PowerPoint document, that budget spreadsheet, the context an Edge tab provided. The idea is that the delayed Timeline feature will eventually group and associate all of these into a Set, so that when you open one, Windows will suggest the others, too.
It sounds to me like they want to turn everything into a browser.
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
Microsoft wants to turn Windows 10 into Chrome OS.
I wonder what the pro-Microsoft, anti-Chrome fanboys will say about that?
From a caption in the featured article:
I'm not sure how cutting this down to one window would help. If I'm reading a document and taking notes on what I read, I want to have the document and my notes and side by side, each in a 960-pixel-wide window on my 1920-pixel-wide PC monitor. So unless Sets offers a similar option for a side-by-side view, I don't see how I could adjust myself to its workflow.
I thought Windows already had that since Windows 95 and Windows NT 4, and it was called the Taskbar. Keeping a particular task's windows together is part of multiple virtual desktops, which GNU/Linux has had for well over a decade and Windows recently gained.
...who brought you the Ribbon. And Windows 8's "Tablet interface for desktops".
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Isn't the task bar already functionally equivalent to a tabbed view of apps?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
It's funny how iPadificaton of the desktop OS seems to be a threat constantly looming over the Mac, yet always lands on Windows...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Because people apparently are too stupid to handle "windows" and can't handle seeing more than one app at once?
R.I.P. productivity. At least for businesses. There's a reason I kicked Windows off my workstations at home 15+ years ago and have been running FreeBSD (yes) and Linux ever since.
I recognize that this is probably (long term) a good (or at least not bad) design decision.
I can already picture how it's going to make certain aspects of dealing with tons of projects easier...
But I can't say that I'm going to enjoy all the tech assist calls I'll have to deal with, from my coworkers who just want it to look / work like Windows 7 - some of which are the same people who just wanted Windows 7 to look/work like XP. (And also hated the Office ribbon.)
I like you, Stuart. You're not like everyone else, here, at Slashdot.
I mean... ... I have different directories for different things, and I know what programs (not "apps", fuck you) go with which files by the letters that come after the little dot in the filename that Windows, in all of its magnificent idiocy-provoking glory, doesn't even bother to show you. It doesn't take a massive amount of intellect to realize that filename.jpg is probably a picture, and that you can app it with whatever apps your appy ass apps appy pictures with. Apps!
(Where is app luddite guy? I admit I only opened the comments here to see what that guy had written.)
Why not stop trying to come up with radical new shapes for wheels ("I know! Maybe pentagons!") and focus on making their software not suck?
like bookkeepers who work on spreadsheets all day or news reporters who use Word all day. What about real people juggling a variety of tasks including programming, photo manipulation, ecommerce and playing music? They'll have dozens of programs running where only a handful would do.
This is a solution in search of a problem ... which doesn't exist.
...omphaloskepsis often...
I love to bash MS as much as the next guy, but this actually sounds like it could be useful. If you do any kind of real work on a computer, in terms of programming, or designing, or even writing and excel analysis tasks, you can probably appreciate how long it takes to get a setup configured to really get things done. At my job I have a couple possible coding setups, depending on which projects I'm working on. I also have a couple setups for data analysis work, again depending on the project. It takes time to pull up the right reference documents, arrange windows, configure things...
It would be a damn cool OS feature to remember all the documents and applications I have up, where they are arranged, and allow me to take a "snapshot" when it is all ready to go. Next time I need to work on the same project, refer back to the snapshot, and I can be working instantly.
To the extent that they are trying to provide that level of functionality, I'm interested. To the extent that they are trying to change the task bar to tabs just for the sake of change, this will be stupid.