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Windows 8: Thrown into a multi-tasking mosh pit
Does Windows 8 improve upon Windows 7 for the use cases that my real world customers and users demonstrate? After a week of tinkering with the consumer preview, the answer is far from simple. Now that's what I call multitasking (click to enlarge)... First up is the ribbon. For new users to a product, my experience correlates …
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A content consuming platform
Interesting. This is exactly the reason why I don't care for tablets: they are for consuming not working.
I hope MS will back down on Metro and make it optional the same way Windows Media Center is optional.
search box
The search box is still there and still works as a run box. Hit the windows key or click the non existent start button and start typing. They've messed one thing up though, in windows 7 you can load programs, documents or control panel just buy hitting start, typing the thing you're after and hitting return. In Windows 8 if you're looking for a control panel item, e.g. you're after power settings so you hit start type "power options" and hit return. On windows 8 if you do this you're told there are no results because by default you can only select the programs loading a control panel item or a document requires a click of the mouse.
I disagree with the author about the metro start being better for finding apps, where are the nested folders?
Re: search box
"I disagree with the author about the metro start being better for finding apps, where are the nested folders?"
For that matter, where is the full text of the program name? MS seem to have managed to use up more pixels and yet display less text. No wonder the damn thing needs half a dozen screenfuls to display what previously fit into a tenth of that space.
I somethimes think I'm the only person in this building who doesn't maximize their applications
It drives me to distraction, but most non IT-types I see seem to believe that applications are supposed to fill their windows, and some of them are still closing their e-mail so that they can open a spreadsheet.
I'm not looking forward to the brave new world of Metro apps - it's not that I object to change for the sake of change, it's that in this case, there is a very obvious cost to this change, without an obvious benefit.
Maybe...
They think the 15" 4:3 and 17" 16:9 and larger high resolution screens we have had for 10 years are vanishing and we will all be using 4" to 12" screens on PADDs.
No Roddenberry Icon :-)
Re: Maybe...
It could only have been designed by the
BORG
we will assimilate you all!
There are alternatives...
...but I don't see myself switching to a Linux desktop, not unless Windows 9 turns out to be as anti-user as Windows 8 seems to be.
And I don't see that adding third-party utilities is likely to be very helpful. When Microsoft removed the filesize/properties option from the explorer status bar they also removed it from the APIs. None of the utilities that try to restore that function can do it with Windows 7. When Microsoft remove a function, it stays removed.
Re: There are alternatives...
Honestly, why not? I switched years ago and kept my productivity ;)
Even better, this linux install on this pc is now 4 years old and still as snappy as the day I installed it. Got a new pc at work at around the same time, using xp, and by now it has become slow as hell.
Re: There are alternatives...
It's funny you should say that.
On my most powerful PC at home, I am using Linux Mint, and only that.
I don't like the way Ubuntu is going, and I don't like the way Windows is going.
My experiences with Mint? Some things work well, and some don't. Some things are better than in Windows 7 and some things are worse. I'm doing real stuff with it and not just playing around. I have Windows 7 on my laptop.
On the whole, the people behind Mint seem to be the only people left who are making an operating system that is truly usable without trying to make it look flashy but extremely limited. It's only fair to say that I do not have experience or knowledge of MacOS, though. But it's time to wean myself off the drug.
The way I see it, if the IT department won't use it, then they won't have the experience to support it properly and as such uptake in most organistations will be slow. For most businesses money talks and for a major upgrade there must be returns, if those returns are financial and time based losses then it should be shot down.
I asked my boss (not of the pointy-haired variety) to shut down my Windows 8 CTP box, it took him nearly 10 minutes to find where the shutdown button was (on the menu that pops out to the right and under settings). He is far from anti-change and knows his way around most computers but was amazed that they had removed such intuative features.
If you want a fun game, get a non-techie and a techie user to race against the clock to shut down the box (without using Ctrl+alt+del as that method at least exists still) - this could even make it into the olympics and provides great entertainment for a Monday afternoon.
Change is good, except bad changes, those are bad.
Hmmm
People still don't get whats going on. The Metro shift isn't just a change of START button and UI. Its a shift into a different platform and thats inclusive of things like Kernel and power management. Its not jusdt apps looking different. Its a change of the actual platform, and a death of Win 32/x64 as it stands in the older desktop.
In desktop terms, its abysmal. Its taking high powered gear and lobotomising it. Who the hell would want a phone style single apping nature in such devices? And the jarring crash to desktop for legacy is just as abysmal, miserable and the removal of the start button is a lasting piece of vandelism to try and force users back to Metro.
Few people understand why tho. That enforcement of Metro has to happen to allow Metro on ARM. I'm not calling this garbage Windows on ARM, because its not. Its at best Metro on ARM.
I have nothing good to say on Windows 8. Its a vandelising job on what was Windows, seemingly to try and shoehorn an ARM build of windows in some foul cludge. 99% of applications remain legacy, win32/x64, and these applications today remain superior to Metro in every way.
What I am surprised is how much latitude the Metro nazi's have managed to get inside Redmond and from the press. They deserve none in either case.
Microsoft should make Windows 8 Metro optional on the desktop, and primary on tablet/ARM, and they should break this down now. There is no reason whatsoever to deciate Win32/x64 this way, and beyond that, I can see Win 8 being a complete train wreck outside of tablets/ARM.
Worse, without showstopping Metro applications, its coming in very late against IOS and Android, and it may be a train wreck there too.
Re: Hmmm
I keep getting told by 'younger viewers' that "It's all about the thousands of wonderful Metro apps that are coming!" and by staying with Windows 7 we will be denying ourselves computing nirvana.
Well I have a few issues with this.
1. As we have seen thousands of apps means nothing if the quality isn't there. Usually it isn't.
2. On any App store only a dozen or so apps really count, the rest are copies or trash.
3. So will SAGE/ACT/insert any major corp or enterprise app here be turned into a Metro app? Nope, I doubt it.
4. Who is going to buy a Windows Tablets anyway when Apple have pretty much blitzed it already? Yes there is Android too but which type of tablet is the CEO and his pals already going to have? Aint going to be a Archos is it! We've already seen the iPhone creep in as corp phone of choice over BB so the iPad as corp choice of tablet is pretty much there too.
Not going to be MS is it?
Re: Hmmm
I believe Microsoft have bought into their own post-PC meme. Faced with a world where the tablet dominates, Microsoft are trying to leverage their desktop OS monopoly to force their way into the tablet market. The only tool they have is acclimatising users to Metro on the desktop and so Metro must be forced onto their locked in users, who they hope will stick with what they know.
If that screws over some PC users they simply don't care, they have an effective monopoly and it doesn't matter how much they annoy us, they'll still have that monopoly. There's little hope they can convert existing iOS or Android users and Metro is so dumbed down even the majority market (media consumers) don't really have any compelling reason to use it on all their devices. Most of the apps they'll ever use come preinstalled in every OS already, run from the cloud and are platform agnostic.
With Win8 so late to the market it seems just a matter of time till MSFT have to acknowledge its a failed landgrab and revert out the collateral damage of Metro on the desktop. Maybe that collateral (from both imposing then reverting Metro) will remind 'consumers' that they really do have a choice.
Re: Hmmm
"Faced with a world where the tablet dominates, Microsoft are trying to leverage their desktop OS monopoly to force their way into the tablet market."
This is perhaps the smartest observation I've seen on El Reg. There's no question Microsoft is using this strategy, in hopes it works as well as it did for IE, among other products. If the US Govt had decided to break up MS like they did AT&T, there would be no discussion of this ridiculous strategy being reused over and over.
Too bad it won't work for them this time. Too little, too late.
Re: Hmmm
-- "I believe Microsoft have bought into their own post-PC meme."
It's not a meme; it's a viral. (Memes are of the people; virals of the corporations.)
What to do?
Buy all the copies of Windoze Family Pack you can afford. Win 7 looks to be the next XP, chugging on forever. Or, in the Roddenberry vein, only the odd numbered ones are worthwhile.
Re: What to do?
On all my machines, XP is the next XP. (Except a new netbook with Win7, which is merely irritating).
Re: What to do?
After fighting Vista then Win7 on my brothers laptop, XP is the future. Just need to find a VM with acceptable DirectX acceleration for an XP client and I can continue gaming, the only thing I really need Windoze for.
Itt's been bugging me...
but, why "metro"? Naming it after a small car that wasn't exactly reliable. Then again, we're going back to DOS Shell with a GUI, and that wasn't exactly reliable either.
Re: Itt's been bugging me...
Surely it wasn't named after a small car, but a free newspaper? I agree that both were/are rubbish.
Re: Itt's been bugging me...
Nah. Metro because it needs to be hidden underground. :-)
Re: Itt's been bugging me...
Not that either. The Paris Metro works fine, and even the name of the line tells you which direction you are going.
Superman's or Fritz Lang's Metropolis?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolis_%28film%29
*Metropolis is set in a futuristic urban dystopia".
Dystopia says it for me.
Re: Itt's been bugging me...
could be worse - "allegro", anyone?
Re: Itt's been bugging me...
'Microsoft Austin Ambassador Y Reg'
Multiple desktops, mate. Been doing it for a decade
F1 brings up my main editing screen. F2 is the web. F3 is for spreadsheets. F4 for drawing and stuff etc.
I can flick to another context instantly and not worry about all the windows getting in eachothers' way.
This is on Linux, which generally has had the best desktop for years and years,
Re: Multiple desktops, mate. Been doing it for a decade
Back to the future, mate - we all did that in DOS before Windows was even released.
I love how Microsoft say those who don't like it are just afraid of change, fans of Ubuntu said the same thing just before the distro was knocked to 2nd place in favour of Mint (Yes I know it's a flavour of Ubuntu). I for one am not afraid of change, for example: If they do the same shit with Windows 9, I'll probably buy an Apple Mac and that's after using Windows as my main OS for over 10 years.
Wow - the author hit the nail on the head
Windows 8 Metro looks like a spectacular operating system for a media consumption device, where you're not multitasking and aren't doing anything complicated.
But it's just not going to do it for productivity tasks, where multitasking is critical, and people run multiple applications side-by-side, run remote desktop clients, and so on.
Microsoft DOES have a problem with every other version of windows.
Win 3.1 was good, and was the standard for years. Then win 95 came, and it was buggy and slow and unstable. Win 98 was a big improvement. Then they made WinME, which cannot be accurately described in polite company. Then WinXP came out, and it was great. Then Vista came, and it sucked - slow, buggy, and unpopular interface changes. And Win7 came and was good.
If you look at the kind of interface changes they made in WinME and Vista, they're the same kind of things that are in Win8 (only on a much larger scale in Win8)... "Make it easier for home users, who we know are idiots", trading functionality of the interface for form, and poorly planned security measures that cause problems that should have been forseen and avoided. Will they ever learn?
Re: Wow - the author hit the nail on the head
"Windows 8 Metro looks like a spectacular operating system for a media consumption device, where you're not multitasking and aren't doing anything complicated."
Not even that really. Win8 metro *manages* that use-case, but if all you want to do is consume media then you could create a stripped-down platform that was about 1% of the size of a full Win8 installation. If you ask me to install a 10GB operating system, I want to be able to do more than surf the web and spend money in your built-in store.
Re: Wow - the author hit the nail on the head
Difficult to give much credibility to a windows history that doesn't mention NT, the original XP....
Re: Wow - the author hit the nail on the head
The key to Windows XP for me was that the new dumbed-down Fisher-Price aspects of the UI were easily enough reversed to a Windows NT-style desktop fit for tech users - we could get back square windows, the classic desktop and start menu, etc. It's still possible on Windows 7, though a bit more fiddly. If they're going to make it impossible to do it on Windows 8, then it's not fit for purpose - end of.
Tablet UIs on work PCs...
Bad Idea.
This is going to be the Microsoft Bob of the new century. Someone in Marketing has decided that the UI should be the same across platforms. Someone in Apple Marketing has seen what Someone in MS Marketing has done (or vice-versa) and someone in Canonical Marketing has decided likewise.
What they have all missed, is that people do not use a Desktop/Laptop the same way they do a tablet or a smartphone. And they never will. Desktops (which may look like laptops or tablets with an attached keyboard and mouse) will always exist, because they offer more than a tablet can: more storage, more ergonomics and more CPU horsepower. The use of a Tablet/Smartphone UI on a desktop is just plain silly. It doesn't make you more efficient, it makes you LESS efficient.
Re: Tablet UIs on work PCs...
> people do not use a Desktop/Laptop the same way they do a
> tablet or a smartphone
Microsoft has a serious problem and forcing Metro down everyone's throat is how they intend to fix it.
Metro on WP7 is almost non-existent and is only a phone OS it cannot be used on tablets. Windows (XP, 7) on tablets is almost a non-event, it is expensive, doesn't work well and has been bought in only tiny quantities.
The 'standard' GUIs for phones and tablets is iOS and Android.
A Jazz musician was on the radio and his view was that if you played enough Jazz to people who didn't like it then they would like it, eventually. He set out on a tour of schools with his Jazz group to play concerts for free. ie force it down their throats.
Microsoft seems to think that the same will happen with Metro. They said that it will soon be the most familiar UI on the planet. The expectation is that eventually everyone will like it and want it on their phones and tablets.
The failure is that it will take several years before Windows 8 (or 9, 10) will have as many users as XP does today. By that time iOS, MacOS, Android and Linux will also have developed and many will be wanting those UIs on the desktops (or on what has replaced their desktops).
Android is already appearing on TVs, in cars, and on cameras (real cameras). Windows (and DOS before that) always has been in catch up mode, copying features that first appeared years before on DR-DOS, GEM, Apple, BeOS and many others. Previously when replacement of machines was of the order of 3 to 5 years this was not too much of a problem. People waited for MS's vaporware for months or years while MS wrote the code to catchup to their competitors.
Now with replacement cycles for phones and tablets of a year or less to 2 years maximum, being over a year behind the rest of the market is complete failure. Buyers aren't going to wait until next year for a Metro (Apollo) phone or tablet, they will buy an iPad or Android, especially as an iPad2 is now cheaper.
Buyers also aren't going to buy a WP7 phone (maybe a few will) because WP8 will make them obsolete, there will not be an upgrade of current phones to WP8. WP7 phones are single core and WP8 will require dual core.
The other problem is that MS will require licence fees for Windows 8/WOA and for Office which will price them at least $100 above that for iOS or Android on equivalent hardware. For Windows 8/Intel tablets these may be even more expensive.
Re: Jazz music
Jazz music sucks and I don't think I'll ever come to like it. I'm trying to educate myself by "reading the articles" in jazz magazines, though.
Once again
MS is showing that they don't quite get this. I was leery of Apple saying that they were going to pull interface features from iOS into the OS X desktop. However, they didn't do a whole-hog-smoosh, which would have been bad, and they didn't take away the established methods. Where an iOS feature made sense to add, they added it. Where they didn't they left it out. This made the desktop OS X a better interface, and I considered it superior to other GUIs before that.
Metro, however, ... I'm far from convinced that MS are doing this right.
The sky is falling
I love the extreme language: "If so, many of us many find that it is one we are unable to adapt to. "
Windows + R is sooooooo hard OMG lolz.
I work with elevendybillion apps n' doc per minute! HOw canz you stealzz my start buttons??!
I took me 4 hours to adapt to multi tasking with 4 monitors, visual studio, RDP, and a Gajillion docs per hour.
I don't think reality is nearly as dramatic as we wish it was.
Re: The sky is falling
I did not downvote you btw. Some people never close anything. If their hardware can handle it, then let them. It looks like madness to me. I use a ton of shortcuts, and minimize/maximize with the keyboard, as well as moving windows between monitors.
To our dear author, may I suggest Sysinternals Desktops for grouping things? You can effectively quadruple your desktop space. That is if you are running on Windows, otherwise you have the built-in multiple desktop linux feature. Other than that, man I feel your pain getting Xterminals working properly with disparate versions of linux/unix especially over multi-hop ssh. Sounds like you work with new machines all the time so setting it up is just not practical. Have you gotten into scripting or coding some of the key combinations yet?
Re: The sky is falling
Thanks for the suggestions, but I feel they may not work. THe issue with a multiple workspace solution (such as sysinternals) is that you still can't putthree or four windows beside one another and look at information on them while you enter information into the other. (Or into the "run" command...)
Frankly, the past week has involved a lot of testing with other OSes, and I find that after only a week I have already adaped to a post-Windows desktop client quite well. It is not for myself I worry; but my clients. I try not to let my personal choices influence them, but I do encourage them to try the next generation in use before commiting to an upgrade.
That said, I have three meetings next month regarding enterprise Apple deployments, so maybe the suport burden will simply fizzle.
Cheers!
Re: The sky is falling
My point is that I have a hard time sympathizing with the author when I read that Win+R is just too hard. It's just too much emotion crammed into an unemotional topic. Maybe that just saps all the fun out of it though...
Re: The sky is falling (part 2 reply)
one more bit, I think you misread this article Mlc. When you have nested terminals open like our author is discussing at one point, it becomes a serious headache to type commands, and sometimes a real nightmare to type a password, much less pull a CTRL+ALT+DEL out of your ass. Holding down a key (like Windows + commands) is also very different than typing it (assuming you want to send ASCII in combinations.) Look up "ALT+ASCII keyboards" to understand what is happening with keyboard filters, and why they get buggered up. Also look up C++ Send commands to see how you can write a short bit of code to send a command to a window. You can do it, but most of the time (at least as far as passwords are concerned) it is easier to plink on the keyboard until you find the right keys in a txt file and then copy and paste. If Xterminal is configured properly. :)
Re: The sky is falling
"Thanks for the suggestions, but I feel they may not work. THe issue with a multiple workspace solution (such as sysinternals) is that you still can't putthree or four windows beside one another and look at information on them while you enter information into the other. (Or into the "run" command...)"
I'm confused. Is this an issue that you are trying to resolve/work around in Win 8? I do this all day long with win 8.
On the flip side I have relegated the Metro UI to just an app launcher / search tool. I don't use any metro apps. If I was to give MS any advice I'd say roll metro to the tablet. Then in win 9 or win 8 R2 roll it to the desktop after they get more feedback.
Re: The sky is falling (part 2 reply)
I must of. When I re-read it I see that the author is doing this from a phone. I don't know if that is what I'd call a core scenario.
As with the ASCII stuff I was able to repro that in win 8 just fine. I am confused about the comment you made regarding "Windows + commands" I was under the impression this was regarding being up the run box and then typing a command. Once the run box up it is business as usual where you can use ALT + num-pad to enter ASCII chars.
Re: The sky is falling (part 2 reply)
Windows+r etc are OK if you are in one desktop.
If you have multiple terminals, VMs, remote sessions, etc, that sort of keyboard shortcut only works in the main session.
So you're connected to a remote PC via RDP you hit win+r and it opens a run dialogue on your PC, not the remote host.
Re: The sky is falling (part 2 reply)
Okay, now go back and re-read it again. You missed some additional windows. (cough!)
Another scenario is having multiple windows open to multiple machines. And some of those are VMs. And some of those are gateways to other machines. Sometimes more than two levels deep. Now who 'owns' the Win key?
Oh, and did you notice those sessions required setup, and can't just be hotkeyed open at will. Oh, and the need to reference from one window to another while peering at another while checking results in another? Your multi-desktop froofroo is just fu when you gotta see multiple windows at the same time, y'kno simultaneous like?
Re: The sky is falling
Winkey+R is not hard but it is unintuitive.
That sums up the problem with W8. They've radically changed the user interface so that experience with previous versions doesn't work. They then compound this by removing all the visual clues one would expect. That is why the START button said start, menu bar showed at all times, and the little X closed things.
W8 appears to have replaced the familiar Windows interface with gestures and a telepathic interface.
Even Microsoft can't be this belligerent to release W8 in this half-arsed format.
I'm sure they've only released the preview under the misguided belief that any news is good news.
Re: The sky is falling (part 2 reply)
Nope. Just reproed it. It opens the run box on what ever RDP session has focus. The RDP session has to be full screen but that is how the Window key it behaved on win 7 / server 2008 RDP clients.
Re: The sky is falling (part 2 reply)
@Notas BadoffNot really sure what we are talking about now. I'm pretty sure "who owns the windows key" has not changed with win8. I have tried to repro a scenario with the windows key in win 8 that is different from win 7 / 2K8 in terms of focus / ownership.
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