I would have preferred them to work on these new ideas to make them work better.
The idea of modern UI was good. The traditional freely movable windows are usually not using the desktop space very efficiently unless you spend a lot of time positioning them or use some third party utilities and configure them properly. I have a feeling that especially "normal users" very seldom use for example two windows side-by-side - even though this might be good for productivity.
The modern UI style was more like a tiling window manager. 8.1 made it possible to split the screen vertically among n applications. It would have been nice to see them explore this further to allow other kind of configurations as well.
The main problem with modern UI from my perspective was the lack of application. There was only few modern UI apps available and most of them pretty useless, tiny utilities. Now Office (even Outlook), no Visual Studio etc. A "simple" fix would have been to allow users to run the old applications the same way as modern UI apps.
As a tiling window manager it could have been very good. You could have had slots that matched the Windows Phone aspect ratios instead of dividing the screen vertically. The slots could feel like a mobile app whilst the rest of the screen would feel like a normal windows desktop.
I make use of unnaximized Windows all the time. You don't need to see the whole window to use it. For instance when debugging a prism I only need to see the "output" panel portion of my ide window.
Some people only use one program at a time. But the win7 system already works well for that. If they want to change how windows work it should be after some testing and exprimentation. Don't just change it to be different.
Sold my beloved SurfacePro on eBay last week. It is a great piece of hardware, but .. in one word: Windoze8, alas
As a grown up PC fanboy, I found myself work/dev more efficient with less frustration on mac nowadays. Operating system is a productivity tool, and Windows has turn into this emo teen girl I can not recognize or share an easy conversation with anymore.
Picked up a refurbished MBA to keep me coding on the move.
What were you productivity issues? What made coding so difficult?
I use a Surface Pro 2 daily. Its like a Netbook replacement for me as it is very mobile and still capable and with the docking station at home i have a full keyboard and big screen.
My 2011 MBP has 16Gb of RAM and my 2014 HP Z420 has 32Gb of RAM.
I can barely spin up our product on a machine with 8Gb of RAM without killing everything else I'm doing on first. Then SQL Server doesn't give the RAM back inevitably leading to the service being restarted to release it. Granted this is a big product but in this day and age, 8Gb shouldn't be the cap for anything.
Also both the keyboards were shitty and the thing crashed occasionally (blue screen) when I tried plugging it into my desktop monitor - an old 22" Dell TFT.
The big thing for me, is that I actually had a better experience using my Android tablet with a keyboard/mouse plugged in and remote desktop to my workstation in the office. That kills the massively powerful portable computer use case dead for me. Was perfectly usable over a 3G connection as well.
Maybe a solution would be to have SQL Server on a virtual machine, or use an Azure SQL instance (in my very limited trial latency was a bit annoying though).
It's merely personal opinion based on personal experiences. Since it's a sunny day outside I'd like to expand on this topic here:
[1] Window management/Apple touch pad:
UX on window/workspace management, Cupertino did it right. As advanced users we open a lot of windows, not like my mom who would simply freak out when there are more than 2, she only look at one full screen window a time. Win8's metro app is natural for her but optional at best for me.
Mac:
Four finger up for Expose then pick the Terminal/Sublime/Browser window;
Four finger swipe left/right for virtual desktops;
I am flying through workspaces over that single 5 inch physical square, much less effort and drama than surface: fiddling through touch keypad/10.6" touch screen swipes/dropping and picking surface pen constantly.
One trick on mac is that I usually swipe a little to quickly sneak peak: say inbox list or server dashboard on my right virtual desktop to quickly check up on stuffs.
[2] Local search
see comments above
[3] Windows Update
A feel of being bullied, simply put. It prolong when you need it start up and do sth quick. It shut down when you dont want it to, and it never tell you what's changed, what is updating and how long it is going to be.
[4] Hibernate/sleep/Power button.
Redmond never got this right and never do I see them willing to. Out of my 2 years experience with surface, I would say at least 5 time it crashed while waking up from hibernate. at least one time I remembered vividly because I lost several hundreds lines of arduino code.
Many time right after switching off, then I realized I missed something: have to wait at least 5 seconds to switch it on again. Stressing that power button would only make it worse.
Surface has sensitive power button to the outside: every other day or two, I found my bag frying hot and surface drained all its battery inside, making it useless for the rest of the day if on the move.
[5] Color tone
This maybe picking bone out of eggs. But I would say those Disney like highly saturated UI palette are somewhat distraction (blue bars/amber buttons/red squares), compared to OSX's neutral gray color tone which let you easier focusing on the content working on.
EDIT: Guys, just because typing "Visual Studio" works for you doesn't mean I'm lying - I just made the mistake of saying "Visual Studio" instead of "Visual Studio Express", I really do need to type "VS" to find it. Typing "Visual Studio" nets me one shortcut: "Try Other Visual Studio 2012 products". I can share a screenshot as proof if you want.
My biggest (actually, only real) issue with my Windows 8.1 installation is with the type-to-search feature not being good enough.
Let's say I want to start visual studio. You'd expect Windows Key + "Vis" + autocomplete to work. Nope. Visual Studio uses "VS 2012" as the shortcut name. Visual Studio is the name of the start menu folder, but the shortcuts themselves have names that are very unclear and unsearchable on their own.
This is not limited to Visual Studio, lots of software (old and new) does this.
Similarly, a lot of older software seems to simply have "uninstall" as a shortcut, without the name of the program. So typing "uninstall" will give me dozens of icons without any context about what program it belongs to. If I want to uninstall a program (without going through "Add or Remove Programs") I have to manually look up the start menu folder and click on the uninstall icon.
The fix is easy enough: include start menu folders in the searching. First as labels giving context to search results. Second as search queries that can be done directly, or (ideally but more difficult to implement) as contextual information aiding the search. So something like "[program name] uninstall" resulting in the program name folder, the contents of which are then filtered to the shortcut with "uninstall" in the name.
I never noticed this. When I type "vis", I always get VS 2013, 2012, etc ... shortcuts.
In win 8 you have to explicitly search for files vs control panel items, and in 8.1 they removed that annoying feature, so you can just use win key + s for everything. It just works.
Yeah, this is a pain in Linux too. The menu item "Document Viewer" was actually "evince." Say what? You could hunt the menu to see the command to be able to call it. Until Ubuntu did away with the menu.
I'm liking MacOS X. It's had "preview" in it since day one and it just works. It also displays PDF ToC nicely as well and allows annotations.
Ubuntu always confuses the crap out of me from a desktop perspective. Fortunately I only have two machines deployed with it on now and they are headless servers.
It doesn't "just work". Yes, it's fairly good in most cases, but it only goes 90% of the way and for an interaction designer like me that last 10% is infuriating and trivial, basic interaction design that a big company like Microsoft should not have screwed up. I already explained half of the issues before, but I'll repeat it here: the search only cares about the shortcut name. If the shortcut name does not match the program name you're screwed. For many programs, the shortcut name does not match the program name, instead limiting that to the start menu folder name. If they added folder names into the search results, where you would jump to the folder/label in the start menu if clicked, that would greatly increase usefulness of searching.
Similarly you are not given enough context what the search results belong to. Typing "update" gives me FOUR "Check for Update" icons, with only the icons themselves to give me any semblance of context. If not for familiarity with those I would not know what belongs to what. Java is recognisable because of the icon, another I recognise as the Metro version of windows update, but then there's two windows update icons. One of which turns out to be for legacy XBOX360 drivers instead of the general windows update. But I have to click that first to discover that. The fixes for this issue are trivial:
- show (clickable, see above) labels between icons like you would in the regular start menu, indicating where they were found
You probably replied before my edit, but to answer your question anyway: because I meant Visual Studio Express, not Visual Studio. The naming of the shortcuts is inconsistent between the versions.
This is, in my opinion, the most unfortunate thing about just replacing the start _menu_ with the start _screen_.
We have nearly 2 decades of software installations that were designed with a hierarchical folder/menu layout in mind, including all of Microsoft's own development tools. Now it's changed and there is no more hierarchy.
My start screen is pages upon pages of shortcuts to HTML/text docs, CHM files, cmd prompts, uninstallers, helper programs, etc. You can't find anything because the hierarchy is gone, and as the parent describes you can't search for many of these things because everything has the same name or is inconsistently named.
It's telling that Microsoft's own software installation still isn't revised to take this into consideration.
The thing is, the information that was stored in the hierarchy is still kinda represented: folder names are used as separator labels. It's just that that is not enough. It shouldn't be impossible to find an elegant, workable compromise that uses both the look of the new UI while maintaining hierarchical folder information of the old.
Or just give us the damn start menu back! I'm a visual person. I know what icon I'm looking for and where it should be. Windows 8 is a nightmare for me. I can never remember the name of the screen capture app I use... 'Cap...', 'screen...', 'rox...', 'img...?', 'snag...' Ahhh, finally, Snagit!
Words can't describe how much less effective I am trying to use the windows key or gigantic start screen.
I don't know why you say goodbye,
did I say hello?
Here's hoping that Windows 9 will be good enough for me to move away from 7. I just want to dual-boot it for gaming, I have zero patience to deal with their new UI paradigms.
What I do is I boot to windows for gaming (I use it for more than that, but as an example), on top of that I run VM with Fedora. No drawbacks as far as I can tell, yet multiple benefits like pausing the machine, snapshots (in theory), just alt-tabbing to select OS, ...
So Microsoft will get you to pay for something that's essentially Windows 7 SP3, and it's biggest feature is that "it looks like Windows 7 again"? Even if I liked Windows 9, I wouldn't buy it in principle.
OSX got people to pay for the same OS, slightly updated, for a decade and a half. Only recently did they make updates free. Windows is quite exclusive in making major changes between OS releases (and now quite exclusive in charging for them).
Similar state of affairs here. I installed windows 8 the day it came out, found it to be a pile of tripe, swore at it and rolled the machine back to 7 and vowed never to touch it again.
Then our hand was forced with an 8.1 upgrade at work (built in HyperV saves us a ton of VMware licenses) so I ended up knocking that back to 7's UI as best as possible. Occasionally it still pokes me with Metro so I tend not to use it much even though the machine is a beast.
I tended to work on my laptop at the time, an old T400 ThinkPad running Windows 7. The keyboard failed on that so I switched to an i7 2011 MBP I had lying around as a test machine. Chucked 16Gb in it and an SSD and it's very nice even though it's got a 1280x800 screen.
So I'm sitting here now on a 2011 MBP on 10.9 with a Windows 7 VM and am relatively happy, the only persistent problem being that the quote and at keys are the wrong way round.
Nice move Microsoft. Even the most platform tied of us are easy to lose!
There are already strong rumors that multiple desktops will be a feature in the new windows9.
In an interview on the /build/ 2014 some MS devs said that now that they have made a dumb-ui for the common consumer they can finally improve the desktop to the needs of power-users
It works great for the Win8 'Apps', but not regular windows applications (Firefox, Adobe, etc) for my setup. Probably something taking over my shortcuts.
Now if only Windows would "remember" these snapped window positions after you close and re-open a window/app. It remembers windows that you manually size, but not ones that you snap. Sigh.
Considering you didn't list Windows 98 SE (which was a stand-alone release) and called Windows 95 "shit" (which is laughable if you were around in 1995 when relatively speaking it was far from "shit," pretty groundbreaking frankly), no.
There is no pattern, people just alter history because they want there to be a pattern. We also have to ignore NT4, 2000, and the servers also.
Not my graphic, however I agree with it as I used to be on the student helpdesk at college when we had to support 3.1, 95, and 98. Naturally our individual call center team's experience is an insignificant sample size.
I don't think anyone believes it is actually every other exact release (hence the original quotes), but the feeling/humor is shared. Sorry you disagree.
You're not waiting for a bug fix but for a feature to be implemented. A feature that might have compatibility constraints, some cost attached to it and might lead to another feature being cut because there's only finite time.
How many average users see and use a console window regularly?
Ugh, yet another version of windows I need to help my dad transition to. He was happily using Windows XP until a month ago, when his computer stopped working and I finally convinced him to switch to the new Windows 8 laptop I got him for Christmas last year.
He's a very smart guy, and yet switching from Windows XP to Windows 8 was incredibly unintuitive for him. Now just when he's getting used to it, he needs to switch to another version?
Microsoft is doing a great job of alienating its users by forcing them into new releases with constantly changing, unintuitive "features." Most people I've talked to who use windows were perfectly happy with Windows XP, and the subsequent releases have been definite downgrades in terms of usability.
How long before non-Enterprise/government Windows users just start switching to Mac? If Apple released a $500 laptop, I imagine they would capture a massive percentage of the non-Enterprise Windows market. It's only a matter of time before Apple opens its doors to budget consumers. Personally, I can't wait.
55 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 98.9 ms ] thread> Update: Your author is a moron. Microsoft did in fact promise this [running Metro apps in windowed-fashion] in the future. I had my wires crossed.
Relevant fragment:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4S5F0Ckrc8
The idea of modern UI was good. The traditional freely movable windows are usually not using the desktop space very efficiently unless you spend a lot of time positioning them or use some third party utilities and configure them properly. I have a feeling that especially "normal users" very seldom use for example two windows side-by-side - even though this might be good for productivity.
The modern UI style was more like a tiling window manager. 8.1 made it possible to split the screen vertically among n applications. It would have been nice to see them explore this further to allow other kind of configurations as well.
The main problem with modern UI from my perspective was the lack of application. There was only few modern UI apps available and most of them pretty useless, tiny utilities. Now Office (even Outlook), no Visual Studio etc. A "simple" fix would have been to allow users to run the old applications the same way as modern UI apps.
As a grown up PC fanboy, I found myself work/dev more efficient with less frustration on mac nowadays. Operating system is a productivity tool, and Windows has turn into this emo teen girl I can not recognize or share an easy conversation with anymore.
Picked up a refurbished MBA to keep me coding on the move.
Not enough RAM!
My 2011 MBP has 16Gb of RAM and my 2014 HP Z420 has 32Gb of RAM.
I can barely spin up our product on a machine with 8Gb of RAM without killing everything else I'm doing on first. Then SQL Server doesn't give the RAM back inevitably leading to the service being restarted to release it. Granted this is a big product but in this day and age, 8Gb shouldn't be the cap for anything.
Also both the keyboards were shitty and the thing crashed occasionally (blue screen) when I tried plugging it into my desktop monitor - an old 22" Dell TFT.
The big thing for me, is that I actually had a better experience using my Android tablet with a keyboard/mouse plugged in and remote desktop to my workstation in the office. That kills the massively powerful portable computer use case dead for me. Was perfectly usable over a 3G connection as well.
Maybe a solution would be to have SQL Server on a virtual machine, or use an Azure SQL instance (in my very limited trial latency was a bit annoying though).
I need a full data volume available as a lot of the stuff requires heavy performance testing.
[1] Window management/Apple touch pad: UX on window/workspace management, Cupertino did it right. As advanced users we open a lot of windows, not like my mom who would simply freak out when there are more than 2, she only look at one full screen window a time. Win8's metro app is natural for her but optional at best for me. Mac: Four finger up for Expose then pick the Terminal/Sublime/Browser window; Four finger swipe left/right for virtual desktops; I am flying through workspaces over that single 5 inch physical square, much less effort and drama than surface: fiddling through touch keypad/10.6" touch screen swipes/dropping and picking surface pen constantly. One trick on mac is that I usually swipe a little to quickly sneak peak: say inbox list or server dashboard on my right virtual desktop to quickly check up on stuffs.
[2] Local search see comments above
[3] Windows Update A feel of being bullied, simply put. It prolong when you need it start up and do sth quick. It shut down when you dont want it to, and it never tell you what's changed, what is updating and how long it is going to be.
[4] Hibernate/sleep/Power button. Redmond never got this right and never do I see them willing to. Out of my 2 years experience with surface, I would say at least 5 time it crashed while waking up from hibernate. at least one time I remembered vividly because I lost several hundreds lines of arduino code. Many time right after switching off, then I realized I missed something: have to wait at least 5 seconds to switch it on again. Stressing that power button would only make it worse. Surface has sensitive power button to the outside: every other day or two, I found my bag frying hot and surface drained all its battery inside, making it useless for the rest of the day if on the move.
[5] Color tone This maybe picking bone out of eggs. But I would say those Disney like highly saturated UI palette are somewhat distraction (blue bars/amber buttons/red squares), compared to OSX's neutral gray color tone which let you easier focusing on the content working on.
My biggest (actually, only real) issue with my Windows 8.1 installation is with the type-to-search feature not being good enough.
Let's say I want to start visual studio. You'd expect Windows Key + "Vis" + autocomplete to work. Nope. Visual Studio uses "VS 2012" as the shortcut name. Visual Studio is the name of the start menu folder, but the shortcuts themselves have names that are very unclear and unsearchable on their own.
This is not limited to Visual Studio, lots of software (old and new) does this.
Similarly, a lot of older software seems to simply have "uninstall" as a shortcut, without the name of the program. So typing "uninstall" will give me dozens of icons without any context about what program it belongs to. If I want to uninstall a program (without going through "Add or Remove Programs") I have to manually look up the start menu folder and click on the uninstall icon.
The fix is easy enough: include start menu folders in the searching. First as labels giving context to search results. Second as search queries that can be done directly, or (ideally but more difficult to implement) as contextual information aiding the search. So something like "[program name] uninstall" resulting in the program name folder, the contents of which are then filtered to the shortcut with "uninstall" in the name.
In win 8 you have to explicitly search for files vs control panel items, and in 8.1 they removed that annoying feature, so you can just use win key + s for everything. It just works.
I'm liking MacOS X. It's had "preview" in it since day one and it just works. It also displays PDF ToC nicely as well and allows annotations.
Ubuntu always confuses the crap out of me from a desktop perspective. Fortunately I only have two machines deployed with it on now and they are headless servers.
Similarly you are not given enough context what the search results belong to. Typing "update" gives me FOUR "Check for Update" icons, with only the icons themselves to give me any semblance of context. If not for familiarity with those I would not know what belongs to what. Java is recognisable because of the icon, another I recognise as the Metro version of windows update, but then there's two windows update icons. One of which turns out to be for legacy XBOX360 drivers instead of the general windows update. But I have to click that first to discover that. The fixes for this issue are trivial:
- show (clickable, see above) labels between icons like you would in the regular start menu, indicating where they were found
- show the full path when hovering over the icon
I'll back this up.
Visual Studio Professional above appears in the start menu as Visual Studio Professional so if you type "Vis" it appears.
However the Express SKUs are called VS Express so you have to type "VS".
This is the inconsistency I assume that is being displayed here.
It's bloody annoying to be honest as I use VS express at home for a couple of things but Pro at work.
We have nearly 2 decades of software installations that were designed with a hierarchical folder/menu layout in mind, including all of Microsoft's own development tools. Now it's changed and there is no more hierarchy.
My start screen is pages upon pages of shortcuts to HTML/text docs, CHM files, cmd prompts, uninstallers, helper programs, etc. You can't find anything because the hierarchy is gone, and as the parent describes you can't search for many of these things because everything has the same name or is inconsistently named.
It's telling that Microsoft's own software installation still isn't revised to take this into consideration.
For example, if you hit Windows key + "pref" in Ubuntu, "System Settings" is one of the items that shows up in the list.
Words can't describe how much less effective I am trying to use the windows key or gigantic start screen.
Here's hoping that Windows 9 will be good enough for me to move away from 7. I just want to dual-boot it for gaming, I have zero patience to deal with their new UI paradigms.
Me to, that's why I don't use it in Windows 8. Windows 8.1 can trivially work like a better windows 7, and the new UI is entirely optional.
Then our hand was forced with an 8.1 upgrade at work (built in HyperV saves us a ton of VMware licenses) so I ended up knocking that back to 7's UI as best as possible. Occasionally it still pokes me with Metro so I tend not to use it much even though the machine is a beast.
I tended to work on my laptop at the time, an old T400 ThinkPad running Windows 7. The keyboard failed on that so I switched to an i7 2011 MBP I had lying around as a test machine. Chucked 16Gb in it and an SSD and it's very nice even though it's got a 1280x800 screen.
So I'm sitting here now on a 2011 MBP on 10.9 with a Windows 7 VM and am relatively happy, the only persistent problem being that the quote and at keys are the wrong way round.
Nice move Microsoft. Even the most platform tied of us are easy to lose!
{Windows Key} + {Arrow Left}
{Windows Key} + {Arrow Right} (hit multiple times, to transfer a screen from left to right)
{Windows Key} + {Arrow Down}
{Windows Key} + {Arrow Up}
I seriously don't care about any of the other windows tools as i don't use it.
Can only move "sideways" though, so even if you have screen on top of each other, one have to move windows sideways.
Also, I would love it if Microsoft implemented a way of having multiple desktops, so I could switch between them with a shortcut like those.
I am sure there is a possible 3rd party solution though?
Do you use any productivity enhancing system tools?
I've held back on win8 initially. I was going to try 8.1 once I found free time but now I feel like waiting for the beta of 9
There is no pattern, people just alter history because they want there to be a pattern. We also have to ignore NT4, 2000, and the servers also.
I don't think anyone believes it is actually every other exact release (hence the original quotes), but the feeling/humor is shared. Sorry you disagree.
How many average users see and use a console window regularly?
http://www.hanselman.com/blog/ConEmuTheWindowsTerminalConsol...
He's a very smart guy, and yet switching from Windows XP to Windows 8 was incredibly unintuitive for him. Now just when he's getting used to it, he needs to switch to another version?
Microsoft is doing a great job of alienating its users by forcing them into new releases with constantly changing, unintuitive "features." Most people I've talked to who use windows were perfectly happy with Windows XP, and the subsequent releases have been definite downgrades in terms of usability.
How long before non-Enterprise/government Windows users just start switching to Mac? If Apple released a $500 laptop, I imagine they would capture a massive percentage of the non-Enterprise Windows market. It's only a matter of time before Apple opens its doors to budget consumers. Personally, I can't wait.