Windows Blue 9364 Screenshots Show Feature Enhancements 502
An anonymous reader writes "As expected, a new pre-public version of Windows Blue (build 9364) has leaked online and it reveals a handful of features that are coming in the next big Microsoft Windows 8 update." Several sites have screenshots from the build; Hot Hardware says "Assuming this is all completely legitimate, the most obvious change pertains to the Metro UI, including greater flexibility in sizing Live Tiles and customizing the Start screen, particularly as the Personalize setting (among others, including Devices and Share) is now under the Settings charm. The Name Group feature for the Start menu looks a little more polished, too."
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Re:Idiocracy! (Score:4, Interesting)
Guess what? Consumers generally consumes content on their computers... you know, the vast majority of human beings.
And most of those consumers have already largely switched to smartphones and tablets. In a vain attempt to win them back, Microsoft has sacrificed their competitive advantage with business users – you know, the ones who actually pay the vast majority of their licensing fees...
How not to design a tiling window manager (Score:5, Interesting)
I can sort of see what Microsoft is trying to do with Windows 8. The idea is not theirs, nor is it a new idea. It actually goes back a long, long time. When GUIs were born designers wanted to implement direct-manipulation as much as possible. The user had to be able to grab anything, drag and drop and click and whatnot it. This included the windows used by programs, if the user wanted to have that giant word processor in a 50x50 pixel window overlapped by a dozen other windows then they should be able to.
Now that GUIs are old hat, all that direct manipulation is getting a bit long in the tooth. Shuffling windows around, organizing them 'just' so is just as inefficient as doing the same to text in a word processor. Why not leave all that repetitive work to the computer? That is what machines are for, after all? In short, Microsoft has discovered the advantages of tiling window managers [wikipedia.org].
The sad part is that they seem to have forgotten to study the subject before designing Windows 8. All they had to do was install one of the many available existing tiling window managers on a unix of choice and give it a whir. Xmonad [wikipedia.org] or dwm [wikipedia.org] or any of the others do an infinitely better job of it than Windows 8 does. They work with the user, not against him/her.
Re:Charms? Live Tiles? (Score:5, Interesting)
Not lost per se, but only because I had to endure a bit of a tour (my last employer was a Microsoft Premier/Platinum/Perpetual/etc partner - they drink the koolaid by the tankerload.)
All I can say is, thanks to a recent layoff and job search, I was able to quickly winnow out the intelligent IT departments from the flaming morons. The ones with intelligence are holding off on W8 until either Microsoft fixes that Metro garbage into usability, or a decent 3rd-party enterprise-ready UI bolt-on comes into play. Their explanations as to why ranged from the standard 'wait-forever-before bothering', to some very reasoned responses that made perfect sense (mostly revolving around training costs, incompatibilities, and etc) The one prospective employer I avoided with haste is busy trialing W8 among their IT folk for a push out to their users starting at the end of this quarter, but with little regard to testing with users outside their IT department.
In-depth grilling into how they think and react as a department is a must if you can do it. It reveals a lot about what you're walking into, but the trick is to blow past the buzzwords and get them to really explain it.
(My views may be a bit biased though - I'm finally going back into Linux administration with a kick-ass new employer...)
Re:Idiocracy! (Score:4, Interesting)
I use Windows 8 on my school laptop (grad student in materials engineering) and I am not thrilled with the news of this update. Everything they mention is related to metro, the touchscreen interface for Windows 8, with nothing on the desktop/laptop side. The main complaint with Windows 8 was that the metro stuff should have been optional, as it is not needed or wanted on a normal PC. With the Blue update we see that after hearing the criticism and commentary from the release of Windows 8, MS' only response is a few tweaks here and there.
I'm worried by MS' attitude more than anything else, like the idea that the desktop is just for legacy software, and that metro is the future. Metro or whatever you want to call is not the future of the PC. It not even the future of touch. It's an also-ran, second rate touch OS, and it continues to sell poorly next to iOS and Android. I've used all 3 OS' on touch devices, and even there metro is not great. Alot of buttons and controls are hidden by default, so you are always trying to toggle between different views. Maybe someone spiked the water in Redmond, because I never imagined that after winning the desktop OS wars they would just lose interest and abandon their users.
Re:Perhaps your looking at the wrong OS. (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, the Chromebook hardware looks great, if it ran a proper OS I'd be interested.
Not Google (Score:4, Interesting)
LOL. It's not ironic. It's imaginary. There's no significant move towards Google Chrome or Google anything else for that matter in the OS space. There are three players, and only three: Microsoft, Apple, and linux. Apple's got the ball right now, as their machines can run all three OS's, all at once, legally and legitimately. If you're worried about movement, worry about Apple. Google? No chance.
Re:And it still looks like (Score:2, Interesting)
I keep getting suckered into this articles just to see if the failing PC market has finally forced them to pull their heads out of their *sses and reinstate the desktop by default and the start button...
It may be my aging eyes.
But I have left the Start menu behind with no regrets and I very much like the look and feel of the best Metro/Modern Apps.
No touch screen. No touch mouse. No problems.
Re:And it still looks like (Score:5, Interesting)
their only choices other than Windows is Apple
Which decade are you living in? The #1 OS in the world right now is Android... so linux. This is a trend that will continue. Unless Microsoft makes windows absolutely free, they are dead to the world. I think Windows 9 or whatever they will call it will be their last hurrah. My company, who still uses Winxp and never trys anything new is test bedding several linux distros with some users for the first time ever. I was shocked, but the trial is going fantastically... I never thought it would happen in my lifetime but Linux may just beat Microsoft yet.
Re:Idiocracy! (Score:5, Interesting)
That screenshot doesn't show just how bad windows management in Metro is. There's actually no way to display two apps side by side. You know how you sometimes like to read a PDF on one half of the screen and an editor in the other? You can't do that. Metro application have two modes. Fullscreen or snapped into a 320px narrow margin.
It's quite telling that the Windows Blue preview advertises "you can run two apps side-by-side for better multitasking". Metro is so bad at Window management even the newest version will be nowhere near the abilities of Windows 1.0. You can't arbitrarily size programs. That might be acceptable for a phone but it's just ridiculous on a PC.
Linus Agrees :) (Score:5, Interesting)
...but loves the hardware.
https://plus.google.com/+LinusTorvalds/posts/dk1aiW4JjHd [google.com] L "I'm still running ChromeOS on this thing, which is good enough for testing out some of my normal work habits (ie reading and writing email), but I expect to install a real distro on this soon enough. For a laptop to be useful to me, I need to not just read and write email, I need to be able to do compiles, have my own git repositories etc..
"
Why all the hate? (Score:4, Interesting)
There just are so many refinements in 8 that I could never consider going back to 7.
Is it perfect? nope. But the parts that irk me are few and far between.
It really is fast, it really is rock solid stable, and it get's out of my way and lets me actually get work done.
I'm sure I am going to be modded to hell for this but it is a great OS. I'm not a shill, nor do I have a gun pointed at my head to say this. I just am a old fart who likes my PC and I really do like 8.
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