Metro breakdown! Windows 8 UI is little gain for lots of pain
The public preview of Windows 8 has won "rave reviews" according to the Daily Mail, the newspaper that claims to reflect Middle England and is proudly conservative in every sense of the word. The Mail, it'll have you know, is a feisty opponent of "change for the sake of it". So not only do I fear that somebody has spiked the …
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Re: Problems with Metro do not mean Metro is bad
You're saying like W95, this is a paradigm shift? Corporate users won't have upgraded by the time W9 is released anyway, so in a way MS can afford to have a "missed generation" on the desktop market, I feel.
Re: Problems with Metro do not mean Metro is bad
Why on a PC do I only have 2 window size choices - full and half? I thought that was fixes in Windows 2.
Why on a PC is a supposedly better start menu less efficient at using space?
If its not that big of a deal, let MS admit defeat and make it optional.
Re: as touch-based systems become the standard
Touch control works really well for media consumption, often better than keyboard+mouse and the physical advantages of the form factor far outweigh the infrequent annoyance of virtual keyboards.
Most of the consumer purchased PCs and laptops are bought to consume media (that includes browsing the Internet) with negligible content creation. Updating your FB wall or answering email isn't exactly demanding. No wonder laptop sales are moving to pads, it's a better consumption device. Touch or gesture based systems will become standard for media consumption and Metro is just late to the party.
For anyone creating content (AKA working) touchscreens are between sub-optimal and completely fscking useless, depending on the task. And that's the point here, to satisfy the bulk of the consuming market Microsoft has screwed over those of us trying to *work* on our machines.
And BTW: Andrew has made it very clear he loves Metro on his WP7 phone, of course he's not going to say dump Metro. I personally find it fugly as hell and more about Microsoft's branding than any good design principle.
Re: as touch-based systems become the standard
Paul, I'd argue that MS are fucking over all users. Who these days doesn't have a digital camera of some kind? You can't store all those photos on a tablet, they just don't have the space. Cloud? Whatever. So I would repeat the age old argument that tablets are additional purchases not replacement ones and that those customers will likely have a laptop or desktop as well. They will therefore be pissed all over by this stupid change.
Tablets are popular due to battery life, instant on and the fact you can surf/play whilst having your arse welded to the couch. I don't believe they can become the "standard" (i.e. the owner does not need possess a single other computer in addition) due to them being useless at most creation/storage tasks. Said tasks may not be the majority of your use but they are still necessary.
Re: Problems with Metro do not mean Metro is bad
A lot of the people that remember Win2 are retired now, or are too young to remember it well. I'm nearly in the latter category myself as my memories of Win2 are fuzzy, but using Metro I'm reminded of the olden days. I agree that this is a throwback/retro interface to 1986/87. Kinda like fashion I suppose. Wait long enough, it'll come back. :)
Re: Windows 2
Or deleted to make more room on the hard drive.
Yes I found it over 20 years ago on a work PC.
Meh, Win7 was fine. The underlying Vista was badly unoptimized and poorly designed as they went back and picked up where NT3.51 left off for driver model. The big issue was that the hardware that was Vista certified wasn't anywhere NEAR compatible with Vista's bloated Aero. Had that debate with my MS Rep well prior to Vista's release, and when pressed, he finally relented about how well Vista *could* perform on the cheap hardware given the Ring3 display drivers combined with the Aero interface.
My recommendation at that point (which wasn't followed obviously) was to introduce Aero on top of the NT4 based XP, or keep the standard Cairo interface while reverting back to the NT3.51 driver model. Just do Baby steps while waiting for hardware to catch up like MS used to do (shorter upgrade cycles with smaller deltas). And that's part of the reason Metro is such a mess. It requires a paradigm shift both on hardware and user training that doesn't appear like its going to happen anytime soon. Companies are still retraining for and deploying Win7. No budgets for anything else anytime soon.
Every other one
Like Star Trek films, every other Windows release is crap. Vista was crap, but Win7 good. This means that Win8/Metro will be crap. #oddevenlaw
Re: Every other one
Er, no... Like all of the Star Trek films, all of the versions of Windows were/are shit - except the last one.
Remember when Shakespeare said "First, kill the lawyers"?
Maybe he meant UI designers, because this makes Ubuntu Unity & Gnome Shell look well thought out!
Re: Remember when Shakespeare said "First, kill the lawyers"?
What did you expect. The writing was on the wall as soon as Steve Sinofsky was moved (fresh from his success with the Office 2007 ribbon) to lead the Windows division.
Presumably he was explicitly *asked* to re-invent the UI. He has done this. Presumably Gates and Balmer are happy. (I dunno, presumably Mr Gates still has *some* say in any proposed total re-invention of his company's flagship product.)
Over to Linux for me
After playing on Win 8 for a couple of very painful days, I ripped it off my system and installed the Ubuntu 11.10 and it is great, the new interface is far better than Metro on a laptop - no not perfect but it isn't bad. Couple of minor issues to overcome, one might be overcome with Wine, not sure about the other as it has to do with running multiple monitors and a piece of software I use which is available under Linux but doesn't like multiple monitors.
If only they had allowed non touch users to leave it in classic mode.
Re: Over to Linux for me
So because the new version you don't have to buy isn't to your taste, you somehow figure the obvious choice is not to simply stay with W7 which you already have, but make an even more drastic change?
Re: Over to Linux for me
Why is it that whenever there's a story about Windows, all of the Linux bores come out to tell us how wonderful Linux is? One of the things that makes Linux so unspeakably awful is the "community" of Linux users, who are constantly wittering on about it.
Re: Over to Linux for me
Just returning the favour.
Why do all the Windows bores come out of the woodwork when ever there is a minuscule hiccup or niggle with Linux?
Could it be to gloat when the other guy is down?
If so.. Why do you get all the fun? I mean.. It isn't our fault you have no options like we do..
Re: Over to Linux for me
I don't think open sorcerers are ever going to stop telling you that you're weird for using Microsoft software.
It just looks odd, like your computer has been plugged into... the Twilight Zone!
Re: Over to Linux for me
Windows bores and Linux bores sound similar to me. When Windows 7 was in RC and I was saying how much I liked it all I heard was XP was just fine and Vista was crap so Windows 7 must be crap. Turned out to not be crap. I gloat now about my positive reviews.
btw Ubuntu is installed, and I use it too. Why do folks have to be such freaky football fans about their OS? It is simply a tool in the box. Use what you want, but you better know it all.
You can turn metro off
Edit this key: edit this key to disable metro and get the normal desktop UI
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer :: RPEnabled = 0
To be fair to microsoft this is a pre release version and I wouldn't expect the option to be so hidden in the future
Disclaimer: This info is 2nd hand info and I haven't tried it.
I haven't downloaded Win8, and I don't expect to acquire it until I want to run something that requires it.
Re: You can turn metro off
Sadly this is for the developer preview only - it has been removed from the consumer preview. I don't know if anyone has figured out a way to get a Win7 style interface back yet.
Re: You can turn metro off
The trouble with Windows is it seems you can't do much without messing about in the command line...
tsk!
How long will Windows 7 remain available?
Thanks to the author for the excellent article, and to the posters for some flashes of insight.
My question is: How long will Windows 7 remain available, not just as a boxed edition, but as an OEM-installed system? I will grab a high-end Windows 7 laptop just before Windows 7 gets phased out (by then it will be Windows 7 SP2, nice and stable).
And can you "downgrade" to Windows 7 after the phaseout?
Re: How long will Windows 7 remain available?
You could buy XP for ages, so it will depend on how much fuss everyone kicks up.
Re: How long will Windows 7 remain available?
> You could buy XP for ages
From what I hear, in China you still can and for only around $5.
Re: Downgrading
I imagine downgrade rights will be granted. If they weren't, a clever clogs could argue that Microsoft were refusing to accept their money (*), and therefore Microsoft's *loss* on an unauthorised install of the older version was $0. Since copyright is a civil, not criminal matter, MS can only expect a court to consider losses, rather than the perceived naughtiness of the act.
(* Since there certainly are machines out there that will run XP but not, say, Vista, Microsoft cannot claim that the latter is an equivalent offering. Also, even where technically feasible, the marginal cost to a large company of upgrading just a few users to the new system would be horrendously large and MS would be open to the charge that they were exploiting their monopoly in the desktop OS market, effectively gouging customers.)
Of course, MS might *want* to spend the next few years in court losing another anti-trust battle. It doesn't seem to have hurt them in the past.
Dunno yet - it's still installing...
in a Virtual Box. There's just a pic of a fish blowing bubbles, two hours now. So far, underwhelmed. More later...
Re: Dunno yet - it's still installing...
Two hours? What's your underlying hardware? It took around 20 minutes on my Q6700 with 8GB on XP x64.
Paris, underlying hardware.
Re: Dunno yet - it's still installing...
About an hour on my old x64 Toshiba laptop. Only one bluescreen 'DPC_WATCHDOG_VIOLATION', solved with a reboot and then 7 updates listed (one Tos-specific). Password- and start- screens are ridiculous, but desktop once found is redolent of Win7, with cosmetic plusses and minuses. I'll stick with XP.
Re: Dunno yet - it's still installing...
Dude. Have you thought that it might just be a problem with VirtualBox? I had problems with VirtualBox on one machine, and finally got it to work on a newer laptop with a Core i7. I still cannot get the VirtualBox Tools installed so the overall virtual experience with a mouse and poor video resolution basically sucks. A friend of mine also called into question the VirtualBox ATAPI adapter, versus an IDE. And don't forget that VirtualBox abstracts the processor (32bit installs but I have 64 bit systems.)
I have decided to stop my tests on VirtualBox pending RC and a bit of time. I also want to understand the touchscreen + mouse. If I hate it, at least I can say why. Right now, all I can say is that Oracle VirtualBox sucks dogs bollocks for testing this OS...and you ought to have figured that out by now.
Another problem for sysadmins...
I was looking at Win8 to verify my previous statements and well... Remote desktop connection anyone ?
By default this is a Metro app. So total suckage when it comes to usability; simply because in many cases you /need/ to be able and look at your own screen. For example; not all programs allow you to use the clipboard (copy/paste) to enter serial numbers.
What I usually do is keep the remote session in one end of the screen and my OneNote window (where I store all this info) on the other. So now I can easily type it over.
In Windows 8 this has become MUCH easier (/sarcasm off). After you started the remote desktop app. you need to enter the name and credentials and such and then you're in. So far, so good. Now to get back to OneNote. err.... Yes; alt-tab or go back to the Metro screen and fire up the desktop. Happy alt-tab switching between desktop & remote desktop !
To make things even more easy (less confusing perhaps?) Windows 8 has also removed the jumplists. Example: In the "inferior" Windows 7 the remote desktop app. sits on the list of my most used apps. One click and I can connect. Better yet: a mere hoover and I have my 2 Win2k3 servers pinned at the top and I can immediately connect with some recently used customer servers.
This has become MUCH better in Windows 8. Because now the confusing jumplists are gone, and it gives us a simple "recently used" list. Of course only /after/ you started the application, why would you know up front where you'd want to connect to ?
TIP: "mstsc.exe". This is the previous remote desktop app and it still exists in Win8. So instead of searching for "remote desktop" search for "mstsc" and fire that up. Now you end up on the desktop with the normal rdp client application.
Unintuitive
Having installed and played around with the preview yesterday, I was left feeling that it's a real struggle to use on a desktop PC. Apart from running the tiled apps, nothing is intuitive, and I still haven't found how to shut it down. No doubt that's explained in the documentation, but any GUI that can't be used without RTFM is a failure.
Looks lika a brushed up Win 3.1 UI
Now what - a cluttered icon graveyard is not bad UI design, it's a modern feature? And you have to pay for that pain? I for sure wont be queuing around the block in freezing rain for that. Pass that Ubuntu CD, at least Unity is free.
Gave it a spin last night
I agree pretty much completely with the write up and comments. I built a VM using the latest version last night. Installation was completely painless and then I met metro and it all went downhill from there. There are little tiles with words on them which on a tablet would be single click to activate but here there double click.
So I doubt click on IE and browse a bit. And then spend the next five minutes trying to work out how to get back to the desktop to do something else. And fail miserably so in the bin it went.
OK so this is going to get some people's goat but the way Apple have introduced some of the themes from iOS into Lion has been completely the reverse. Fullscreen is there if you want to use it, and I do, and the gestures are fine and enough like iOS that you learn them once. But I don't like launchpad, so I don't use it. And I don't need to, the old ways of working are still where you expect them.
Someone needs to give the guys at redmond a shake or this could be another Vista/Windows ME...
Hate to do this
But it's just a preview, still riddled with fairly obvious bugs and halfassedness, I expect a lot of these grievances will get ironed out before release.
Or maybe not, never can tell with MS, but I can't fault them for trying something new and visually interesting, as a Mac fanboy since '91 this is the first time I've seen anything from MS that I'm actually looking forward to playing with, rather than dreading having to use.
Here's hoping they get it right.
Thanks for that Mr Orlowski. I decided to check out the Mail website to see the original source, and now my eyes are hurting. It's just a vast wall of randomly selected content squeezed into little square boxes with no sane way of navigating your way around it. No wonder they rate the new Metro UI so highly.
Cultural Revolution
Hey don't knock the value of re-education.
I got it from the horse's mouth, confirmed by dispassionate observers, that for most intellectuals out picking potatoes surrounded by intrigued peasant girls, it wasn't re-education - it was Sex Edication.
Cheers (to the lucky sods).
Screen width
One of the biggest improvements to the user interface that most people can make is to rotate their screen 90 degrees. Unless you're using large video images, you're probably much better off with a tall screen than with a wide screen. Most people who discover this and use a quality display will be loath to use a monitor that can't be rotated.
I'm typing this on a large 24" monitor, rotated to 1200x1920. It's great. But now "Microsoft specifies a minimum screen width of 1366 pixels for Windows 8." My large monitor thus becomes officially too small for Windows unless I rotate it back to landscape mode.
This is the sort of thoughtlessness that brought us Vista.
Re: Screen width
As was already pointed out, 1366 isn't the minimum width (search the comments)
Re: Screen width
Oh the irony... Have you tried buying a 1920x1200 monitor? The idiot screen manufacturers want us to all use the 1920x1080 letterbox. A quick search of a coupld of hardware sites shows about 30 monitors using 1920 width, but of them only three use 1200 height.
Bloody fashionistas. Don't they ever do any real work?
Btw W8 (ohh, that's wait!) will be pretty crap on a projector running the standard XGA 1024x768.
Microsoft have eloped with the fairies.
Upgrading is optional
There's always Windows 7, upgrading isn't essential. If a computer doesn't have touch screen capabilities then why upgrade it to an OS that has an interface driven by touch screen interaction?
The very latest is not always the greatest, it all depends what it's intended to be used for. Windows 8 caters very well to Microsoft's attempt to get into the tablet and smart phone markets, but for desktop systems and existing laptops it's probably best to stick to an OS designed for that generation of hardware.
Until the Metro apps start coming in...
Now, Office probably got the OK to stay desktop because it was already in development, but how much longer do you think Microsoft will continue "traditional" development to continue unhindered? Perhaps at some point there will be a push to go Metro, and then we'll REALLY see some fireworks, since for many it'll become a "rock and a hard place" problem. And if it happens to be a business-critical app that doesn't run anywhere else, well...
Re: Until the Metro apps start coming in...
You could have made the same argument about managed code (.NET) ten years ago, but apart from the VB crowd who were bulldozed into it, .NET and Silverlight were never terribly popular outside MS.
The 'we know best' crowd have been in charge at Microsoft for several years now.
Indeed. Starting with the ribbon and windows 7, although it was creeping in even at XP. Menus? You can't have them, things that look like menus but are buttons - have some of that. Where's the print option? sorry we hid it under the "everything else" button. Start menu where all your programs are there in one view in the order you knew they were yesterday? Not any more. Quicklaunch? no you don't need that either. Programs on the taskbar in the order you opened them? no chance.
These things that have gone missing were all put in because at the time they were a good idea. Why is it then a good idea to remove them and - critically - not put an option back in to restore them? All win 7 (and win 8 by the looks of this article) need is a "GUI works like XP" option surely? Winners all round, those that like new stuff get metro, those that just want to get on with stuff but on a newer (better?) OS get something that works and looks like XP.
Actually what am I talking about? MS have been doing this for years, like mashing every single function of your PC down into one button in the very bottom left of your screen, while leaving the entire rest of the screen estate to a glorified file manager. Oh and disabling ctrl-alt-delete for the purposes it was meant.
Re: The 'we know best' crowd have been in charge at Microsoft for several years now.
FYI, the process manager is at Ctrl-Shift-Esc now.
Nice GUI, but how do you get any work done?
Used to be that you booted the computer up, logged in and started work ... looks like those days are long behind us now.
Thanks for the first decent review of METRO that I've seen.
Have a look at the server
Yes, Metro is also forced on to the Windows 8 Server. Now there's a real WTF !!!!
Who is going to be running Server on a touch screen tablet ? On normal PC hardware it's incredibly difficult to find out where all the server management tools are.
Apparently, this is part of a push by Microsoft to deprecate the use of the desktop on the server altogether and force everyone to use PowerShell.
Re: Have a look at the server
I haven't yet installed Server, but i had feared this. I also notice that in TechNet, Hyper-V Server 8 is available for download, and I almost cringe thinking about what's happening there.
Paris, cringing...
Re: Have a look at the server
Are you kidding me?
I was thinking, hey, at least the server version won't have Metro. Maybe I can just turn on a few of the desktop features, turn off some of the server features, and use the server version as a desktop without Metro.
Because not a second did I think they would put Metro on a server.
You've outdone yourself this time, Microsoft.
@mark
I owe you an apology (not that I said anything bad or something) because well... At first I didn't really believe what you said; then I looked it up this evening. This is (IMO) ridiculous...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rt0isrUIm2A (not my video mind you).
In 1:20 and 2:40 you can clearly see the "improved" design. I don't get this at. all. I mean; us sysadmins don't need a "hand guided" start menu because we /know/ that we can tweak and configure it. Commonly speaking, but us sysadmins usually don't have a start menu the size of the mount Everest.
This is bad IMO. Because now we no longer have any option to group certain tools together. Instead of groups /everything/ will now be thrown onto this big heap called Metro and we'll just have to try and sort it out.
Oh this is going to be SO much easier when a rookie takes over for a day... "Yes, you'll find the admin tools for the rdp control in the 3rd section of tiles. No; that's the 3rd section, you know; there's a little space between them. What's that? No; its not a named section, MS decided to remove all that because it was confusing. Just remember; the third group of tiles".
So back to creating desktop clutter then...
Re: @mark
i like the idea of metro/desktop combo on desktops but your concern over desktop clutter i agree with, theres a work around over here
http://windows8beta.com/2012/03/enable-start-orb-and-start-menu-on-windows-8-consumer-preview
but im going to keep at this for a bit longer incase ive missed something.
Im thinking that metro should stick to what it does best and thats provide a snap shot of live tiles + fancy "apps" leaving real work to be done on desktop, this makes sense and would be easy for everyone to get the hang of.
For example, Turn on your PC, bam, snap shot of anything you think thats important, > desktop / metro apps for some work > quick flick and you can review all your important tiles in one go > another flick an back to work.
Seems pretty efficient if you ask me, but as you say, the groupings / start menu is concerning
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