'Dated and cheesy' Aero ripped from Windows 8

Wow, I think you noticed it...

"Using journalists as your defence while expressing a problem with the negative comments of your actual audience on the Windows 8 blog? Things must be worse than we thought."

My thoughts exactly. Is this not what happened with the Mass Effect Game? But that's ok, as MS can patch Windows with an extended ending too. :D

(Anon, because it's only an opinion, the OS could end up good after all...)

Everything is supposed to look grey, flat and boring instead now?

This is part of the problem with Windows. It's can't simply evolve gradually, Microsoft have to keep knocking it down and rebuilding it all the time. Have they not learned from Facebook that a good number of people don't like drastic change?

Win 7

I'll be sticking with Windows 7, I just don't want to have to get used to the way Windows 8 works, it feels overly complicated, having to go through a billion windows just to add a user (who needs a windows live account) is a pita. Can see it being good for touch screen though but touch screen for a desktop isn't exactly an upgrade over a mouse.

Gnome Locker on Youtube though seems to detest Win 8 on tablets, got his father using it and his old man was all "yeah, if it's the same price as an iPad I'll go Windows on a tablet" so he led with questions where the only answer would be "oh, I'd go iPad". So, if a tablet comes with Windows 8 and is the same as or cheaper than an iPad, get it.

Er

wasn't highly rendered glass and graphically complex textures cheesy and dated when Aero was launched?

has it ever been anything other?

Microsoft: Please U-turn!

I was at a recent tech expo and a bloke from MS previewed a load of their up-comming technologies. For a start, I was very surprised that they worked, and worked well, even though they were all in preview state.

Beyond that, I thought they were great ideas, even though they had all been done before (in other OS's etc), with one exception: Metro. It is great on a "slate" or anything with a touch interface. Using it with a mouse feels clunky and awkward, a bit like using Windows without a mouse attached. I could see the benefit of a single interface accross all their consumer platforms (phone, "slate" and PC), but this is not the way to do it.

I for one will be giving Win8 a miss till touch screen monitors for PCs come down to a reasonable price (and I've tried it out to make sure it's not too awkward).

General consensus

We all seem to agree that Windows 8 (train-wreck edition) is going to bomb. But will it unseat Ballmer?

Aero vs a pig wearing lipstick

Many of us find Metro fugly, partly because it looks so bloody plain. It's like a visual tranquiliser fighting the stimulant of brash fugly colours. Microsoft have to simplify the desktop UI to a plainer, more metro like style, otherwise users might just choose the prettier desktop version to use over Metro and ruin the whole convergent cross promotional plan.

Maybe they should resurrect the old Win3 look, remembering to disable any window decoration customisation and impose a monochrome look&feel. That might just be enough to drive despairing users to Metro.

He better be looking

For a new job. He should have been working on something that was new and revolutionary and not pulling out Bob 1 and forcing it to mate with iOS to come out with this bastardized Bob 2 interface. While I really don't like to see anyone fired or put out of work this is one guy that clearly needs to boot put to his ass and hard so he catches some major air as he leaves MS.

Windows 2012

"With millions of people using the Consumer Preview for their daily work, we’ve seen just as many points of view expressed. Many people – from David Pogue of the New York Times to Mat Honan from Gizmodo and many more – have been quite positive, and others less so, most notably in the comments on this blog, where we’ve seen the rich dialog we’d hoped for."

"So that's all good."

Same old, same old

I'm looking forward to Windows 9 then.

Except by the time that arrived I'll probly have switched to OSX.

Report from the future

" and we are dropping the Metro interface, which may have been teh shizzle in the day, but is now looking dated and cheesy..."

What instead?

What do we get in desktop mode - back to W95 style or some new thing altogether?

http://www.eatliver.com/img/2012/8525.jpg

Microsoft's drive to bring about the mythical year of the Linux desktop seems to be progressing nicely.

Personally I think windows from vista onwards has been great and I am really looking forward to this next one.

All the reviews have almost tempted me to actually go back to back to using a windows OS just so I can have a good moan too.

Metro is a disgrace. Maybe Ballmer or Gates sex friends designed Metro UI ?

And I mean, really.

There is no other possible explanation of committing such a clear financial and marketing suicide killing Windows8 with such an awful interface as Metro UI really is.

Such a bad design not even a little kid could have come up with.

Metro UI is being forced by Microsoft everywhere, not only Windows8 consumer/desktop editions but even on server edtions! THAT IS ABSOLUTELY INSANE.

They even tried pushing Metro UI lame concepts inside the upcoming new Visual Studio!

Metro UI sucks on Windows Phone already, that is the main reason why Microsoft is non gaining any market percentage.

Pushing such an awful badly engineered interface that Metro is everywhere it's going to be a huge disaster for Microsoft.

Only people paid by Microsoft would tell you that Metro is cool. Otherwise anyone using their PCs or mobile or servers for work first but even for gaming would tell you that it sucks. Because it sucks. It's just that simple. Metro UI sucks. It doesn't work. it's flawed at the core. There is nothing to fix. Only fix is getting rid of Metro UI.

My thoughts

I tried out Windows 8 as a virtual machine on my MacBook. It is certainly faster than Windows 7, and about the same speed as XP, which is what I usually use When I need to run a Windows-only prog.

But, the start menu replacement just doesn't work for me. Having to scroll through hundreds of icons to find the program you want to run, with no way to organise them in a logical fashion is no good. Having to find the relevant pixels to click to get the dammed thing to appear is frustrating, and pretty much impossible if you are running it in a window, either a VM window or as a remote desktop session, or if you have set up OSX to use that corner of the screen as an active corner to activate a screensaver or similar.

For a fondleslab, it might be an improvement on the current start menu, but it is like iOS before they introduced App folders that you can organise things into.

Just bring back the windows XP UI on proper desktops.

The post is required, and must contain letters.

Channeling Canonical and Ubuntu then. Sounds like the usual 'it'd be a great place to work if it weren't for the *&^%%^ customers.'

Wait, what?

Did I read that right? Metro is going to be the only interface choice for Windows 8? I must have misread something, because the only way that could happen is if Microsoft wanted the age of the Windows desktop to end. It's not a bad interface for mobile, but it's terrible on a PC. What the hell are they thinking?

Same Old

I think Metro looks modern and decent, frankly - in terms of visual appearance. Obviously, it's an ergonomic nightmare and inconsistent mess for using with a keyboard/mouse or with traditional desktop software. Should be very nice on ARM tablets though, where it's restricted to Metro apps only.

People have moaned about every new version of Windows since the dawn of time, in this case it's probably a bit more justified, but still. At the end of the day it'll be sold on all new PCs regardless and most people will put up with it until Windows 9 comes around and we repeat the process all over again. I actually think Microsoft might well have sorted out most of the issues in Windows 8 for whatever version comes after it, as they did moving from Vista to Windows 7.

Awww..

I like aero. Reason being it works much better than classic (xp style) interface when you are doing CG stuff, because it uses the much faster GPU instead of the CPU.

This has to do with how the framebuffer is used/accessed. Compare doing "playblast"s on Maya with it on and off, and you will see. Aero on Win7 causes less artifacts and works faster.

From a design standpoint I don't care either way. As long as the UI has fewer steps to accomplish my goals (and can be made to be in dark somber colors) I'm game.

I don't care about the (potential) battery hit at all. I'm using a dual CPU with multiple HDDs config anyway.

New and intuitive

Personally I'm ready to welcome the new smartphone metaphor

There area couple of 1000 commands in one of the 3D modeling programs I use - it takes forever to find a little used function in the menus or toolbars.

Now that there will be a single intuitive and obvious touch gesture to select between optimising hole placement by tool path as opposed to tool change time my life will be much easier

It's the new Coke but not as we know it!

Remember the new Coke recipe - After the public uprising against it Coca Cola went back to the original recipe....and sales actually rose better than any ad campaign they'd ever done. I think Microsoft will also revert *but* I think heads will roll at MS and the long term damage will already have been done. Developers are already cheesed off with the way MS keep changing the technological ball every few years and so maybe this will accelerate their looking at other technologies more WEB centric. Long live HTML 5 :-)

Another reason why I use eComStation

I've been an OS/2 user since 1990 or so. The Workplace Shell (the "desktop" in Windowsspeak) is funtionally the same interface now as it was when Warp 4 was released in '96 or so, with enhancements added over time. Thus, once I got past the initial learning curve (and my other users did), we coyld focus on more important things, such as RUNNING THE SOFTWARE.

Aero is hideuous, and Explorer is hardly object-oriented (whereas the Workplace Shell was designe from the ground up to be an OOUI and not a GUI).

I'll stick with what I know and with what works.

Reality check

Microsucks is going to get another one.

Icons and GUIs

Anyone want to speculate on which version of Windows will be preceded by a MSDN blog post saying that whilst the text-only paradigm of Metro is absolutely wonderful, research has showed that people often find it easier to identify coloured images at a glance quicker and more easily than monochrome text, and MS now feel it's time to evolve Metro into the next generation of user interfaces by introducing a revolutionary new concept - Icons!

From now on, there will be little colourful images on many of the buttons and toolbars, which can be clicked just like old-style Metro text buttons!!

Then, before the next version of Windows after that, there'll be another blog post saying that the feedback on the new coloured icons was so overwhelmingly positive that MS intends to continue evolving the concept by making all the toolbars and other chrome/widgets all colourful and tactile, with lots of gradients and 3D styling.

Some hardcore nerd will leave a single comment under this blog post saying "But this is exactly what Windows XP looked like decades ago!?", but no one will notice it. In fact, it'll probably get a load of down-thumbs for being so nerdy and mentioning Windows XP, whatever that was. QED dictates that anything from the last century surely existed in black and white, was primitively rubbish, took three hours to start up due to slow single core processors and RAM literally measured in mere MEGAbytes, and was operated by people in top hats who spoke like Noel Coward...

Aero interface

Theres me using Vista and the W7, and did not know I had an Aero interface. I thought Aero was a chocolate bar with bubbles in it.

Maybe bubbles are banned in Win8, along with the start button. All the corporates I have spoken to have said that they are not prepared to pay the mega bucks needed to retrain to use Win8, which means it may have the same uptake as Vista

Hello Windows 3.1. I have wondered where you've been.

Preview version...

I tried in. I want to call it an incomprehensible mess. But that would be unfair to other incomprehensible messes. What that on earth are microsoft thinking. it's just an awful mess, how can they possibly be thinking of releasing this

After much thrashing around and downloading of Classic Shell et al I've finally managed to make Win 7 work more or less the way I want it to ... ie with the Win2000 user interface. It is not as good as Win XP was due to some upleasant behaviour from the file manager but it is tolerable.

I don't want a new interface every time I get a new computer (which is about the only time I change the version of Windoze). The classic interface does everything I want the way I expect it to. It is not the best interface in the world but it is familiar. If I try to learn Win 8 it will have changed again long before I am half as comfortable with it as I am with Classic.

And the funny thing is....

By the end of the day that it launches Win8 will be running on a larger number of PCs than Linux has been installed on. Just saying.

And I am loving the weird, yet confused, mixture of emotions on this thread. There is a fear of change mixed with a bizarre sense of schadenfreude, (from the usual haters,) which is somewhat misplaced as the product has not actually shipped yet. These are the same people that proclaim every new MS product a failure before it ships but time after time they get proven wrong.

Me? I am going to wait and see what the finished product looks like.

Win8 probably aint bad...

...and long overdue for tablets but for a desktop user there are no reasons to chose it over Windows 7.

I really cannot imagine someone buying an upgrade from vista or 7 to 8 and definately not for the amount of money that they are charging.

"Many remain in the dark as to how programming for this thing will work." Euhm Install the developer tools and get programming?

For your own good

The people have spoken and Microsoft have listened. People no longer want a grid of static desktop icons and a start menu leading into silo'd applications they want interactive live tiles bursting with useful information that only the Windows Metro Interface can provide. This is the future people embrace it

Metro is nasty.

If you want a small sample, use a patches xbox 360.

Unfortunately as I am in computer support I will have to use but it but I really do not want to.

It Will Fail

I have installed it and played with it. It is a disgusting mess and it will fail. I wouldn't want it on my phone. I certainly do not want it on my PC. Besides all the other faults that have been pointed out, it lacks style and dignity.

Ye right on microsoft because what looks like a not too bad UI on a 4" or less touchscreen is automatically going to scale up to a 24" plus monitor using a good ole mouse and keyboard? Why not leave aero in and let the USER decide which shell they want to use! If I wanted the metro interface I would have bought a windows phone, but instead I bought an android!

Didn't notice windows Aero.

The first thing I did, was swtich it off and go to windows classic, with the coffee bean (tiled - so I could defocus and turn it into a sird to save my short range eyesight,)

I also switch off all the other stupid stuff their marketing staff have come up with in the last 5 years, such as menus that don't show you everything (deliberately done I think, to remove any advantage of memory muscle.) and all new features that are style over content, such as "Combine all buttons to one on the taskbar."

My dream would be a restore of the Up button, and the removal of the Ribbon, which sucks the sweat of a dead man's balls.

There should be a simple switch. "Make this look like a really fast, really powerful, windows 2000 installation, that shows you everything, doesn't pseudorandomly change the relative positions of things relative to each other and so on, and doesn't remove features because cocaine addled marketing types don't need them personally." which does exactly what it says on the tin.

Cheesy

These pointless glass effects have looked cheesy even when they were introduced.

And they where completely non-functional: Because the main part of a window needs to be easily readable, they only made the outside border transparent, while the rest of the window stayed opaque. That looked idiotic. And even on the outside border, this caused problems, e.g. for the window title. So they had to add drop-shadows to the text of the title bar, etc.pp. Jut a bad idea that they tried desperately to fix, but it did not work because it was a bad idea right from the start.

Of course power users used the "classic mode" on Win7 because of this. I am glad that MS understands this and will fix it.

Windows 8: no choice

Why does it matter to Microsoft if Aero is in Windows 8 or not? Surely this is a user preference. If there's a performance problem on a specific implementation, it seems to me an appropriate course of action is to make the default something other than Aero. Maybe no one uses Aero? I do. How many Windows 7 users will this affect?

So I'm cheesy, huh? But then I have about 2 billion CPU cycles per second free so squander. How much effort does it for Windows to process key clicks (that's what my laptop does most of the day)?

Even modern A10 chips run at nearly 2Ghz (I know CPU speed is not always a good proxy for processing speed but we don't have anything else). So another question is: what is Windows 8 doing to consume so many cycle that it can't paint the screen? Maybe malware is built in to the OS?

On the plus side, VDI

it'll save a lot of moans from Xendesktop / VMware view users who currently don't have the pointless-but-cool Aero whizzyness that their craptop wielding colleagues do.

Bye Bye Windows, Hello Linux :-D

See title

To all the people saying Vista was Windows ME 2

Are you basing this on any long-term exposure to service-packed Vista, or are you saying it because some men on the internet said it so it must be true?

The latter, I suspect.

I like aero.

Linux and MacOS will thank this

If Win8 goes into production like this, a huge number of users will migrate to Linux and MacOS on the desktop. What Vista couldn't achieve, Metro will.

This will safely put MacOS to 10-20% of desktop market share and catapult Linux to 5-10% which will actually make it a relevant desktop OS. Apple and Linus will send a big thank you to Balmer.

(Unless a Win8 SP1 comes out in a couple of months and quickly makes it possible to switch Metro off completely.)

Will they never learn

People don't want an OS that just looks cool, they want one that WORKS.

MS refocus your efforts on making it work and leave the UI alone.