The Windows 8 Power Struggle: Metro Vs Desktop 590
MojoKid writes "Metro, Microsoft's new UI, is bold; a dramatic departure from anything the company has previously done in the desktop/laptop space, and absolutely great. It's tangible proof that Redmond really can design and build its own unique products and experiences. However, the transition to Metro's Start menu is jarring for some desktop users, and worse yet, Desktop mode and Metro don't mesh well at all. The best strategy Microsoft could take would be to introduce users to Metro via its included apps and through tablets, while prominently offering the option to maintain the Desktop environment. Power users who choose to use the classic UI for desktops and laptops can still be exposed to Metro via tablets and applications without being forced to wade through it on their way to do something important."
Two Options (Score:5, Interesting)
Citation needed (Score:0, Interesting)
>and absolutely great. It's tangible proof that Redmond really can design and build its own unique products and experiences.
Submitter is a blunt, biased idiot.
I tried it. It fails. (Score:3, Interesting)
If there are no on screen visuals I'm lost. I rarely use keyboard shortcuts and I can see that increasing when there isn't a keyboard.
The problem I have with Metro is that it's so hard to organize things. I have over 1000 shortcuts currently on my Windows 7 machine, where are they supposed to fit in Metro. I'd need to scroll for a week to find what I'm looking for. "Oh, but you can just type the name of what you are looking for. " but I don't remember the name just what the icon looks like. Keep your Metro, give me a start menu and we can both be happy.
my main problem with it... (Score:5, Interesting)
... Apart from Metro only being useful if you have a laptop/tablet/smartphone (touch screen Desktop/TV never worked!)
Was that both GUI's weren't linked, they were in essence 2 separate desktops.
So if i opened IE (or any other program) on Metro and had to switch to the "other" desktop, If I opened IE there it was a totally new session. (I'd think it would be better, or nice, to ask the user if he wanted to pull the session from metro.)
i gave it a week of use, then wiped it.
Re:"Designers" are ruining UIs all over the place. (Score:5, Interesting)
Failed web "designers" are ruining GUI applications left and right. It doesn't matter if they're open-source apps or if they're closed-source commercial apps. These self-labeled "UI designers" and "usability experts" get involved with a popular project that had a usable UI, and they completely trash it.
This has happened to GNOME. This has happened to Firefox. This is now apparently even happening to Windows!
I used to think that about Gnome, until I installed it and started using it.
True, I installed a couple extensions to help me out, but after spending some time with Gnome Shell, it does a really good job of just staying out of the way.
I'm very much a keyboard kinda guy though. To me, too much mouse use gets in the way.
Re:Nobody actually uses tablets. (Score:5, Interesting)
Proving the value of anecdotal evidence, I have had the exact opposite experience. I take flights weekly, and I have not been on a flight without a few tablet users in a long time.
As a tablet owner myself, I find I rarely take the effort to drag it out of my bag when I can just reach for my phone.
Re:Nobody actually uses tablets. (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually, not a single niche –many many many niches. The same is true of computers –they suck if you go "hey, what's the killer app", but are great if you realise that they're useful for hundreds of useful little things.
Several of my friends are now considering them, simply because each time they're round the phrase "could you pass the iPad over" gets uttered a couple of times. Be it to check wikipedia, look up some random cat video someone mentioned, display the rules of the game we're playing, ...
All of these individually are trivialities... but they add up to a really fucking useful device.
Re:Nobody actually uses tablets. (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe that's because most tablets suck for getting any work done, and thanks to the corporate hostile takeover of all of our lives, people have to work a lot more than they used to. Thus, the tablet stays at home and the phone or the laptop comes out on the train, at lunch, etc etc.
If there were reasonably-priced tablets that could be used to do actual work, you'd see a lot more of them. On a plane, on a train, bus, etc standard laptops can be very clumsy. You end up needing quite a bit of space to use them.
I watched the video of the Lenovo Yoga, and while there are things about it that don't look so great, it's a start toward a tablet-style form factor that can actually be used to accomplish something besides consumption. It's a step in the right direction to create functional tablets that provide keyboards for the few billion people who would rather key input than anything else.
I'm sorry, but Siri-style voice commands are not going to be anything but a novelty until they can be used with sub-vocal sounds. I really don't want to be anywhere near a plane or train where everybody is talking to their computer. I can type faster than I can talk to Siri, anyway.
Now, I won't buy Windows 8 because I won't give Microsoft money (for reasons that don't have anything to do with the quality or lack thereof regarding their products. It's political. But I'm glad to see that somebody is thinking about computer interfaces that can be used to make something, not just buy something. Apple doesn't seem to be doing it, but they're apparently too busy being the richest company in the world by making products that are for consumption-only. That's not a knock on them. I just need tools more than I need home shopping network on steroids.
Re:How ergonomic! (Score:5, Interesting)
WTF? If that's better then why are they wasting everybody's time developing something that serves only to make everybody turn it back off?
Money. Microsoft probably doesn't give a crap what people actually want. Imagine you take all Windows users today, and push them into an environment where the primary access to everything is through an app store model you control. Now think about how Apple makes money on everything that happens within their iPad/iPhone devices, etc.
I don't think Microsoft wants you to use the desktop anymore. It probably doesn't matter how much you bitch about it, there is probably too much money on the table.
Re:Please read this (Score:5, Interesting)
You may disagree with the vision, but you can't disagree that there is a method behind the madness.
The problem with Microsoft, and a lot of us have been around long enough to see it repeatedly, is that when they decide that something is shiny and new, they drop all ongoing development of everything else like it doesn't even exist any more, even if the new thing is not a suitable replacement for the old thing.
When Microsoft decided that XAML was the "Way Forward" for rich web applications, they moved all but one guy off the IE team and into the Visual Studio and Expression teams to develop things like the improved XML editor, the designers, etc... Now, as a developer, I find those improvements very useful, but meanwhile there was one guy left of the IE 'team' doing just security fixes for years. This is why there was such a huge gap between IE6 and IE7, and why IE7 was such a small improvement compared to the progress made by Firefox and WebKit in the same time period.
Now, if you're a XAML-only programmer, then Microsoft was being innovative and moving forward. To HTML-based web application programmers they were being stupid and counter-productive, dragging the entire Internet down to the lowest common denominator that was IE6. That made a lot of people very upset with them, and rightly so. There was no way XAML could ever replace HTML, because it was tied to the .NET Framework in practice, which is not cross platform. A HTML replacement has to be cross-platform. That didn't stop them from ignoring HTML for half a decade.
With Windows 8, Microsoft is doing the exact same thing again. If you're a phone or tablet programmer, then Microsoft is innovative and moving forward. For desktop users -- Microsoft's biggest market -- they are being stupid and counter-productive, dragging the entire Desktop world down to a lowest common denominator with limited devices that don't have keyboards and mice. The walled garden of WinRT applications can never replace desktop applications, because the APIs are deliberately limited to suit the tablet environment. They have to be, otherwise apps would kill battery life or introduce vulnerabilities. A new framework has to be more than just a Tablet API or GUI, but that won't stop Microsoft from ignoring "classic" Windows applications for the next half a decade.
It's not just the GUI, Microsoft's other technologies have been suffering too from a lack of newness an shinyness. For example, their C++ standards compliance is woeful: the next release amounts to little more than some additional header files -- basically whatever one of their interns could whip up in a month, instead of a real revamp of the core compiler technology to have significantly new features. This is because they were too busy coming up with yet another bastardised non-standard version of C++ so that they can call WinRT APIs efficiently. Don't even think of asking for C99 support!
Sure, nobody is being forced to use WinRT, or tiles, or tablets, but if you're not using them, then you're using APIs and systems that will basically stop dead in the water, which in the computer world is the same as going backwards. Microsoft is atrocious at "seeing things through", because of their short attention span. For example, did you know that both Vista and Windows 7 natively support higher color depths than 24-bit, and GUI scaling? Had Microsoft kept going with that, our desktops could have had "double resolution" just like tablets, 36-bit deep color, wider gamuts, 200 DPI, and a bunch of things by now. But nooo... it was shiny then for a couple of years, and then Microsoft got bored and dropped all ongoing development of that as a feature. They even have a JPG-like image format that supports all of those better color features, but they never had more than some demo code written. Meanwhile, Apple demonstrated the value of technology that Microsoft had been sitting on for years, and suddenly everybody wants an iPad 3 with a Retina Display. Sigh...
Re:Please read this (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe the entire problem is that MS is introducing something radically new when the current OS is still new. It feels like just change for the sake of change. They really should have a Windows Tablet versus Windows for Real People and keep them separated. Integrating them is silly, and will result in silly things like people wanting to get touch monitors.
Re:Nobody actually uses tablets. (Score:5, Interesting)
Having recently finished backpacking across Europe and South America for 6 months, my experience of wifi users in hostels is
(a) iPads are more commonly owned US travellers than other nationalities. More hipsters?
(b) It's rare to see Android tablets
(c) Netbooks are more common than full size laptops by a factor of 3:1 - portability
(d) Netbooks outnumber iPads by 10:1.
(d) smartphone users check a couple of things but jump on a full sized desktop whenever a machine becomes free.
So netbooks are still popular with the traveller. Keyboards haven't gone the way of the dinosaur for those that want to type lengthy messages to folks back home. Netbooks predating the iPad craze and the cost of choosing a new machine is also a factor, obviously.
The future, for Apple competitors, is to reinvent the netbook as Asus have done with the Transformer. Tablet AND lightweight laptop in one device. Stick Win 8 on these things and MS have a touchscreen tablet that runs Word and Excel when docked.
The gap in the price of capacitive touchscreens over regular netbook displays just narrowed with the new iPad's retina display. As soon as MS have Office ready on ARM, it's game over for the Atom as Transformer-like devices running Win8 retail at netbook prices ~ $US300.
So MS is releasing this preview for x86 desktops but the real prize is claiming a share of the tablet+keyboard market from Android and wooing business customers that a Win8 tablet can run Office when you need to 'get real work done'.
Re:Please read this (Score:5, Interesting)
Have you paid attention at all to the Microsoft astroturfing that has showed up here in the past few years?
Articles even slightly critical of anything Microsoft are met with a large copy-paste of some pre-written text within minutes. This is especially apparent when it becomes the first post. Like in this thread, itself. Go look at the first post.
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BMO
Re:How ergonomic! (Score:5, Interesting)
My fundamental problem with Unity and all of the hellspawn UI's that copy OSX is that they conflate the two concepts of "make window XYZ the active one, and maximize it if possible" and "launch an instance of program XYZ". These tasks really have nothing to do with each other, other than both resulting, at the end, in program XYZ being on top.
The most common window-manager task I do is to switch from one window to another. GNOME, very sensibly, gives me a taskbar with all of the things running, and I can click on the one I want, and see at a glance what I've got open and how many instances of each. This is important -- this is the main fucking thing I want my window manager to do for me, is fucking manage my windows.
I don't need a giant list of all the programs on my computer lying around on my screen waiting for me to click them, especially if it takes away from my ability to do the above. On the rare instance when I want to launch a new program, I'll fish around in a menu for it, or hit some magic keystroke (like alt-f2) and type its name. If I really want a big list of my common programs, I'll hit Ctrl-Alt-D and pick one from the icons that I've put on my desktop for that purpose. Or I'll even program a hotkey for it (ctrl-alt-T shits out a new terminal window on my system).
This is even worse for Unix folks, half of whose programs tend to be terminals. How people use OSX for scientific computing is beyond me. Just show me my fucking taskbar and get everything else that I didn't ask for out of my way.
Re:How ergonomic! (Score:5, Interesting)
Terminal in OS X supports tabs. I don't have to use the dock that often to switch terminals. I'm in a terminal constantly and it doesn't get in the way. I'll agree that iOS is not a good desktop UI, but OS X has not (yet) turned into that. Apple hasn't made the Microsoft mistake yet.
I think the real problem is that many people who design user interfaces have given up on desktops prematurely. There will always be a need for a real desktop for development and several other tasks. it might be the minority, but it has a place. If you think about it for a minute, it's obvious why all these UI idiots are jumping at the bit for reinventing the wheel, it's something new. They can actually do something significant that might get them fame or credibility if it's a success. It's the biggest opportunity since the graphical user interface. Of course, the GUI never replaced everything and we still have terminals. When the tablet people realize that the traditional desktop isn't going away, maybe they'll get better at accommodating people like me who still want a desktop GUI and a terminal along with the touch interfaces in places it makes sense.
Re:How ergonomic! (Score:2, Interesting)
Riiiiight. OSX, which gets basically everything out of the fucking way of what you're doing, is bad. Expose, which shows you all open windows only when you ask it to is bad. Except when its concept is implemented in some slightly different way on another system. Then its exactly what you're looking for.
If you want a window manager to manage your windows.. perhaps you'd like to use the window managing functions of your window manager? Crazy talk, I know..
Re:Nobody actually uses tablets. (Score:4, Interesting)
tablets are being used to turn the computer from a content creation & consumption device. to just a consumption device no different then a tv or radio.
Re:Please read this (Score:2, Interesting)
Can't agree more. This new UI has to be the most unintuitive GUI i've used on a desktop. Although I'm sure it's fine on a touch screen, it was painful to use with a mouse, took me 20 minutes just to find common items, a few mins to find the login options, etc.
This from a geek. I can't imagine what my folks would do with this, other than to turn ape like, beat not he screen and make lots of jarring screeches in frustration.
I agree, it is also very annoying to use even with a mouse. For example, if you are on the desktop and want to see the "charms" or go back to the start screen, you have to move the mouse pointer to one of the corners. As soon as the mouse pointer is there, an icon pops up. But you cannot click the icon right away, you have to move the mouse pointer a little bit to select it. But if you move it a few pixels too far, it goes away again and you click whatever is behind the icon (e.g. another icon to start an application). It really is super annoying, because it honestly is a question of "move 2 pixels and you can click it, move 4 pixels and you're out of luck. What was so wrong with a "Start" button which was just there and which you could click all the time? Why do we have to play hide and seek?
Searching... (Score:4, Interesting)
What I don't get is the obsession for "search" in new desktops. Must I now use search to find my apps too?
I never use the file search tools either, as my files are nicely enough organized in directories. Well, maybe the unix "find" command is nice sometimes.
Re:How ergonomic! (Score:4, Interesting)
Please hand in your Ctrl, Alt, and Sysreq keys in at the door. Clearly they are the product of bad UI design and you should not have the ability to shortcut anything. Oh that's right running a separate program like top or ps is what people should be doing to see what is running.
Sarcasm aside I could not disagree with you more. If anything we need MORE keys and more keyboard shortcuts to streamline effective tasks. You dislike the windows key, but when I start a program I hit the windows key (that's Ctrl+Esc for the handicapped), type in the first few letters of the program and hit enter. This is the pinnacle of UI design. It's fast, straightforward, and allows you to not remove your hands from the keyboard. In fact is just as effecient as typing the first few letters of a program in the command line, hitting tab, then hitting enter.
Bring on more keys and more easy to remember shortcuts!
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)