Windows 8 thread

[photon]

I wouldn't have a huge problem with the change in the interface if the new interface made any sense.. I mean OSX took a while a little getting used to but I never felt completely lost on how to do the simplest of things in it.

It just feels like a hodgepodge, rather than a coherent new interface.

But I've only spent maybe half an hour with it, so maybe I just need to spend more time.

[Notorious Honey Badger]

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/hardware/f...disaster/20706

This article really sums up my thoughts nicely

From the ZDnet article

Originally Posted by ZDnet

The bottom line

There’s a palpable fear that Windows 8 will stumble out of the door. I’m hearing this from people within Microsoft, from the OEMs and vendors, and from others in and around the industry. The OEMs and vendors feel especially vulnerable, and if Windows 8 does become ‘another Vista’ then there will be an industry-wide bloodbath. Analysts are already cutting price targets on Dell and HP, and Windows 8 is only a few months away.

My predictions are that after the initial fanfare following the release, things will play out as follows:

Enterprise will continue to demand Windows 7, because to roll out Windows 8 ‘properly’, the costs will rocket through mass purchase of touch-enabled hardware and additional user interface training;
OEMs will sell Windows 7 PCs alongside Windows 8 systems because they will find it almost impossible to present the benefits of Windows 8 on desktop systems;
Microsoft will once again find itself in a position where it has to offer longer-term support for the older operating system;
Windows 9 will look significantly different to Windows 8, and likely switch back to the ‘traditional’ Windows interface;
Depending on how Windows RT tablets sell, Metro could well be on life-support come Windows 9.

[SebC]

Originally Posted by sclitheroe

I really like the Metro interface. Speaking as dedicated Mac user, no less.

That's the problem. MS needs to stop trying to cater to Mac users, and start catering to PC users.

When was the last time MS released two hit operating systems back-to-back?

[MickMcGeough]

Originally Posted by SebC

That's the problem. MS needs to stop trying to cater to Mac users, and start catering to PC users.

I use both daily, but I'm curious - how has MS catered to Mac users?

[sclitheroe]

Originally Posted by SebC

That's the problem. MS needs to stop trying to cater to Mac users, and start catering to PC users.

I never said they are catering to Mac users. Windows 7 and OS X, and iOS (and Linux) have more in common with each other than Metro has with any of them.

I applaud them for developing a "design language" or UI concept that is new and unique (maybe WebOS cards are similar, I don't know; I never got a chance to try that platform). The tile based design has the possibility of presenting more information than the desktop metaphor of any of the current OS's with their heaps of static icons. Their implementation of "contracts" between apps to provide consistent and contextual sharing of data and tying together cross-app functionality is also quite interesting and forward looking, and could lead to some interesting possibilities when you start to aggregate application functionality (eg. install a Flickr Metro app, and via its contracts, all of your apps instantly gain the ability to publish images to Flickr)

Whether it will be popular with the masses remains to be seen, but I wasn't assessing it based on potential popularity, nor on how it caters to Mac users, since it's nothing like anything Mac users have today.

[freedogger]

You guys are all being too nice. This thing will be a big bag of poooh.

People sit down at a pc to do work, to make something. Tablets are for consuming. This is fundamental, the two different uses demand a different UI. They should rename it to Windows Wtf. Quick, someone grab that domain and profit.

[sclitheroe]

Originally Posted by freedogger

You guys are all being too nice. This thing will be a big bag of poooh.

People sit down at a pc to do work, to make something. Tablets are for consuming. This is fundamental, the two different uses demand a different UI. They should rename it to Windows Wtf. Quick, someone grab that domain and profit.

Yup, and you've got both of those in Windows 8 - nice, web integrated, visually attractive Metro apps for consumption, and a full blown, highly compatible convention desktop behind a tile for all your "ugly" productivity apps.

Fire up Windows 8, even in its incomplete form now, and you've got some really attractive Metro apps right at your disposal - the weather and sports and news apps are really attractive. The full screen IE 10 browser is nice, and quite quick. These apps have a nice built in notification system on par with Growl over on OS X, they can snap together via contracts (you can already see hints of how this all works with the messaging tied to the contacts app, which ties into all kinds of social networks). It's quite visually rich out of the box.

Contrast that with Win 7 - you get a browser, notepad, and uh..a crappy POP3 mail client? Oh and solitaire or whatever. Yay. Out of the box there is absolutely nothing compelling about a Windows or even an OS X machine. The software is either not there, or its too big and complex.

Smartphones and tablets, combined with web properties like Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, Evernote, Pinterest, Google Maps, Wikipedia, etc, have taught us something - that graphically rich apps with simple interfaces tied into large and vibrant online communities and tools for consumption and lite productivity are HUGELY compelling for almost every type of user. Metro is an attempt to bridge a lot of this to the desktop and laptop space, while still delivering the Windows we know and love to get the heavy lifting done. It also sets a common interface that is decent on a PC, and great on phones and tablets.

Sometimes big shifts and in-between releases like this one are traumatic.
But here's the thing. If you don't innovate your operating systems, you get your butt handed to you - ask RIM about iOS. And if you don't provide people with a transition path like MS is with Windows 8 and its traditional desktop tile, they won't buy your product either.

MS has to do SOMETHING to move the OS forward - we've had 17 years of the same start-bar, desktop driven metaphor.

Shift happens. People adapt.

Unless you really think that the decades old WIMP style GUI is the final evolution of computer interfaces. And if that's the case, Linux says hi, come on over, it's almost gotten 85% of that style interface refined enough for daily use

Edit: (or iOS, which is in love with screen after screen of boring, static, non-communicative or adaptive icons...HEY you can even put 12 of those icons into stupid little folders...talk about archaic)

[sclitheroe]

Originally Posted by photon

I mean OSX took a while a little getting used to but I never felt completely lost on how to do the simplest of things in it.

That's because OSX is rocking essentially the same 20+ year old GUI we've known and loved since MacOS, Windows 95, etc.

I like OS X, and I like the quality of the apps. But the UI is ancient, and surprisingly, getting worse in a lot of respects as it stops respecting its own user interface design guidelines.

[sclitheroe]

Originally Posted by freedogger

You guys are all being too nice. This thing will be a big bag of poooh.

Did you want to talk about application sandboxing, online self-healing NTFS, storage spaces, easy restore capabilities, or lower latency multimedia? There's lots of good stuff in Windows 8 if you can get beyond the application launcher

[SebC]

Originally Posted by MickMcGeough

I use both daily, but I'm curious - how has MS catered to Mac users?

I'm not an MS exec, so this is a subjective interpretation:

- UAC was an attempt to replicate Apple's non-adminstrator environment.
- Their early ad campaign for Vista/Windows Live seemed to me to be a response to Apple. With a touch of a button, your photo is automatically better sort of stuff.
- Aero's default window-expanding animation that was on by default was very reminiscent of Apple. I turned it off, I want my window-switching to be instant, not animated.
- Pinned icons on the taskbar is very Apple-ish.
- IIRC, pop-up taskbar became the default... makes switching windows two actions rather than one, I'll keep my taskbar on please.
- WMP got more intrusive/automated with Vista.
- My interpretation of Vista is that they put too much effort into making it pretty and not enough effort into making it stable.
- Windows 8 being touch-oriented seems like a response to the iPad. Looks like Windows phone, which was obviously aiming to take market share from Apple.

Ultimately what I think people want from Apple are products that are easy to use and that they don't want to have to think about it. What I want from MS is a product that supports my software and hardware, is stable, and lets me do things how I want to do them.

[sclitheroe]

Why would anyone cater to Mac users when they are only 12% of the market. And none of them are likely coming back to the Wintel platform regardless.

Another interesting observation, by the way:
Windows 8 runs fine in a gig of RAM in a VM. OS X on a gig? Unsupported.

[sworkhard]

Originally Posted by SebC

I'm not an MS exec, so this is a subjective interpretation:

- UAC was an attempt to replicate Apple's non-adminstrator environment.
- Their early ad campaign for Vista/Windows Live seemed to me to be a response to Apple. With a touch of a button, your photo is automatically better sort of stuff.
- Aero's default window-expanding animation that was on by default was very reminiscent of Apple. I turned it off, I want my window-switching to be instant, not animated.
- Pinned icons on the taskbar is very Apple-ish.
- IIRC, pop-up taskbar became the default... makes switching windows two actions rather than one, I'll keep my taskbar on please.
- WMP got more intrusive/automated with Vista.
- My interpretation of Vista is that they put too much effort into making it pretty and not enough effort into making it stable.
- Windows 8 being touch-oriented seems like a response to the iPad. Looks like Windows phone, which was obviously aiming to take market share from Apple.

Ultimately what I think people want from Apple are products that are easy to use and that they don't want to have to think about it. What I want from MS is a product that supports my software and hardware, is stable, and lets me do things how I want to do them.

The problem with vista is that the completely changed the driver model. Manufacturers finally caught up by the time windows 7 came out. If you installed vista today, it would be just as stable as windows 7. It would run a bit slower on most computers though.

Microsoft has been trying to get tablets mainstream for over a decade now. IOS simply proved that it was viable to go all out and make a touch oriented 'tablet' os.

Microsoft borrowed some polish from apple, animations, etc in Windows Vista.

UAC was not a response to apple's non-administrator environment (which is no different than the L/unix (bsd) environment on which it's based. Microsoft already provided this functionality since 1998 in windows NT. Thing is, nobody used it because it was a pain always typing in passwords. Since nobody used the non-administrator accounts, UAC was invented to make running in an administrator environment a lot more secure.

Task bar is still by default visible, even in window 8

Microsoft and Apple borrow a lot of things from each other, but usually they are features that show up from one os version to the next. In general Microsoft has a larger selection of features and more ways to do things, but Apple's user experience is more polished and consistent.

To me the primary way that Microsoft has catered to mac users is not to osx users, but rather ios users with windows 8. The arm models have a full version of ms office included. I know several people just waiting for windows 8 tablets to come out so the can trade in their iPads.

[sworkhard]

Originally Posted by sclitheroe

Why would anyone cater to Mac users when they are only 12% of the market. And none of them are likely coming back to the Wintel platform regardless.

Another interesting observation, by the way:
Windows 8 runs fine in a gig of RAM in a VM. OS X on a gig? Unsupported.

10% market share is usually the tipping point for mainstream support. 12% of a 100 million is a lot of devices your missing out on by not supporting mac. That was a legit thing to say when they were at 2.5%, but 12% is definitely worth supporting.

[TorqueDog]

Originally Posted by sclitheroe

Did you want to talk about application sandboxing, online self-healing NTFS, storage spaces, easy restore capabilities, or lower latency multimedia? There's lots of good stuff in Windows 8 if you can get beyond the application launcher

Hyper-V on the desktop.

[SebC]

Originally Posted by sclitheroe

Why would anyone cater to Mac users when they are only 12% of the market. And none of them are likely coming back to the Wintel platform regardless.

I assume they don't view that 12% as an upper limit.

[MickMcGeough]

Originally Posted by SebC

I'm not an MS exec, so this is a subjective interpretation:

- UAC was an attempt to replicate Apple's non-adminstrator environment.
- Their early ad campaign for Vista/Windows Live seemed to me to be a response to Apple. With a touch of a button, your photo is automatically better sort of stuff.
- Aero's default window-expanding animation that was on by default was very reminiscent of Apple. I turned it off, I want my window-switching to be instant, not animated.
- Pinned icons on the taskbar is very Apple-ish.
- IIRC, pop-up taskbar became the default... makes switching windows two actions rather than one, I'll keep my taskbar on please.
- WMP got more intrusive/automated with Vista.
- My interpretation of Vista is that they put too much effort into making it pretty and not enough effort into making it stable.
- Windows 8 being touch-oriented seems like a response to the iPad. Looks like Windows phone, which was obviously aiming to take market share from Apple.

Ultimately what I think people want from Apple are products that are easy to use and that they don't want to have to think about it. What I want from MS is a product that supports my software and hardware, is stable, and lets me do things how I want to do them.

- Logging into your OS as a non-administrator is a practice predates both Windows and OSX and goes back decades. UAC was an annoying answer to widespread security concerns.
- I don't remember the ad campaign but this is hardly a marketing discussion. Apple marketing has been imitated plenty.
- The only thing the default Windows and Mac OSX window animations have in common is that they animate, if you want.
- Microsoft has allowed you to stick icons in your taskbar since the IE4 shell update. I have no idea what Macs were doing then.
- OSX dock is set to "always show" by default
- What's the WMP parallel in OSX? iTunes? The default player for all media (that I know of) in OSX is quicktime player.
- I didn't know that Apple had patented aesthetics.
- Making an OS that runs on tablets would be tough without making it touch-oriented.

It's a real stretch to claim that any of these changes were to cater to Mac users. Windows 8's Metro UI takes more cues from Android widgets than it does anything that Apple has ever done, but is really it's whole own animal, in my opinion.

[MickMcGeough]

I quite like the Metro UI and I think it will be a success for personal use. MS is taking a huge risk in completely rethinking how they want their users to interact with their operating system after serving up the same UI since 95. The tablet market is still expanding and MS can grab a big piece of that pie by providing a totally seamless transition from your Windows 8 PC to your Windows 8 tablet.

That said, I don't know that the Metro UI would fit into my own workflow at all. It's cool and it's concise, but I'm not its target audience.

MS has done some serious performance work here. It runs totally snappy on a mechanical (virtual) drive, 1GB memory, and a single core in VMWare Fusion. Seems to boot in about half the time that Windows 7 takes.

[sclitheroe]

Originally Posted by MickMcGeough

Windows 8's Metro UI takes more cues from Android widgets than it does anything that Apple has ever done, but is really it's whole own animal, in my opinion.

This I agree with. It's a clean room re-think interface wise, with a clearly articulated aesthetic. In the long run, I actually think this is a better approach than what Apple is doing right now, which is to slowly (and poorly) graft elements and interactions from iOS into OS X. Ask any Mac user how they feel about LaunchPad, the faux leather calendar app, or some of the other things they botched in Lion - it definitely wasn't their best effort, and if they wanted to bring the two environments together, they'd have been better off to have both moving towards a common design rather than cross-pollinating aspects of each. We got Launch Centre in OS X now, and a useless dock and notification center in iOS. The worst of both worlds.

Metro apps, love them or hate them, should look and work pretty much the same across the desktop, tablet, and phone.

[Barnes]

Metro is not a UI, it is a design language. The tile interface uses Metro but it is not Metro.

[bomber317]

Originally Posted by Rathji

Having test run "Windows 8 Server", I can only say that it is unbelievably frustrating not being able to find simple things like, I don't know, the start button. Maybe it was just the version I was testing (a few months ago) but I was pretty aggravated after using it for a couple hours.

I downloaded the Server 2012 RC. It's frustrating that there's no start button to click on, but you can just press the start button. Doesn't make any sense to me.

Thankfully they pinned the powershell shortcut to the taskbar.