Windows 8 thread

[TorqueDog]

Originally Posted by Rathji

On my home computer, my start screen fills my monitor - on a 2 month old clean install. On my work PC, the start screen would fill my monitor 3 times over. On a touch screen, swiping over is trivial, but without it complicates things drastically. I need to either arrow key to scroll over, or click the screen to bring up the scroll bar and then use the scroll bar with my mouse. If my mouse(and I know some do) had a side scroll feature, I could see it being a lot easier though.

You don't need a side-scroll mouse. Up and down scroll the Start Menu just fine, up scrolls left, down scrolls right. I know because I just did it two seconds ago.


But I will absolutely agree with Server 2012 in a VM on both yours and Scott's points... it's a royal pain in the ass, but the Windows 8 App Store RDP client makes it a lot nicer to work with.

[Handsome B. Wonderful]

At this point in the Windows 8 life cycle I have determined that anyone who still relies heavily on the Start Menu is a moron. If you need to go in to it that often, pin the stuff you're using so much to your taskbar.

[TorqueDog]

^ Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Steven Sinofsky himself is here!

(Though I do agree.)

[Rathji]

Originally Posted by Handsome B. Wonderful

At this point in the Windows 8 life cycle I have determined that anyone who still relies heavily on the Start Menu is a moron. If you need to go in to it that often, pin the stuff you're using so much to your taskbar.

Do you have any idea how insane that would be?

Paint, Calculator, Server Manager, Hyper-V Active Directory, Exchange, DHCP, DNS, Services, WDS, IIS ... well over half the Remote Administrative Tools set, all just added to my task bar on top of Windows Explorer, Adobe Reader, Word, Excel, Visio, Outlook, Chrome, IE, Firefox, a FTP client, RDP, VNC, Cisco ASDM, CMD prompt and who knows what else?

Not everyone uses 4 programs to get 90% of their job done.

[Rathji]

Originally Posted by TorqueDog

You don't need a side-scroll mouse. Up and down scroll the Start Menu just fine, up scrolls left, down scrolls right. I know because I just did it two seconds ago.


But I will absolutely agree with Server 2012 in a VM on both yours and Scott's points... it's a royal pain in the ass, but the Windows 8 App Store RDP client makes it a lot nicer to work with.

I have steered away from it normally on my desktop, since it is only in full screen, but I will try and start using it again for just that reason. I think I might have found a purpose for Modern Mix, although I suspect that if the Metro RDP client isn't in full screen, it might not be quite as nice to work with.

[TorqueDog]

Originally Posted by Rathji

Do you have any idea how insane that would be?

Paint, Calculator, Server Manager, Hyper-V Active Directory, Exchange, DHCP, DNS, Services, WDS, IIS ... well over half the Remote Administrative Tools set, all just added to my task bar on top of Windows Explorer, Adobe Reader, Word, Excel, Visio, Outlook, Chrome, IE, Firefox, a FTP client, RDP, VNC, Cisco ASDM, CMD prompt and who knows what else?

Not everyone uses 4 programs to get 90% of their job done.

Start key, type Pai [Enter] will start Paint.
Start key, type Calc [Enter] will start Calculator.
... and so on.

I use a multitude of programs but I use Windows Key or Windows Key + R to start applications, because it's easier, faster, and I have crap to do that doesn't involve hunting through a Start Menu (Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8, doesn't matter which) for my applications.

[Brannigans Law]

Torque I really wish you'd just accept that a lot of people, and dare I say the majority (I'm willing to concede thats my personal opinion and no where near fact) don't like how the start menu looks and functions on the PCs. It's not intuitive and it's sloppy man.

[TorqueDog]

Originally Posted by Brannigans Law

Torque I really wish you'd just accept that a lot of people, and dare I say the majority (I'm willing to concede thats my personal opinion and no where near fact) don't like how the start menu looks and functions on the PCs. It's not intuitive and it's sloppy man.

Oh I accept that the opinion exists and that people hold it, but I'm not under any obligation to respect it; a majority of people being set in their ways isn't a good reason for anything. I'm critical of the hesitation to just get over it, and take advantages of efficiencies that have been available for three versions of the OS now. It's not like Microsoft just did this to make people re-learn the interface. They did it because the metrics showed that use of the Start Menu and subsequently the items inside the Start Menu, were being used substantially less over time.

Again, one only had to see how even seasoned IT people were hesitant to move from the Windows 9x-style Start Menu to the Windows XP Start Menu. Or the ribbon bar starting with Office 2007, remember the uproar that caused? I will freely admit I was one of the people who actually bought Classic Menu for Office 2007 because I was too stubborn at the time to use the ribbon. Now when I use Office 2003 (it still exists at some companies), I have to spend more time hunting around stupid menus to find what I'm looking for. This is just more of the same.

The only time I agree that the new Start Menu is a bad idea is when you look at virtual machines and/or Server 2012. That was an annoying change (Windows key isn't normally redirected inside of a remote desktop session unless it's full screen). I suspect the move was made to start selling the idea of using a single tablet interface to administer multiple headless servers inside a rack, for example, but unless you have a physical keyboard available, you're still going to piss off administrators, and how often does one really need to go into a rack to admin a Windows server anymore?

[Handsome B. Wonderful]

Originally Posted by Brannigans Law

Torque I really wish you'd just accept that a lot of people, and dare I say the majority (I'm willing to concede thats my personal opinion and no where near fact) don't like how the start menu looks and functions on the PCs. It's not intuitive and it's sloppy man.

And repeatedly going in to the old fashioned Start Menu is intuitive and productive?

[Inglewood Jack]

I was gonna mention the Office ribbon too. that scared the hell out of me and everyone I knew when it first came out and we were all begging for the old drop down menus. Now I'm a freaking ribbon wizard, and just the thought of hunting down formatting options using the drop downs makes me want to throw up in my mouth.

the Win8 interface is by no means perfect and I'm sure it will undergo a bunch of tweaks. but I after living with it for a few weeks I'm absolutely convinced that anyone who claims it makes things harder is just being stubborn. I prefer MS to at least try to innovate, even if they miss the mark sometimes. otherwise we'd all still be clicking on program manager icons to bring up windows full of other icons, because that's what everyone was used to.

[Rathji]

Originally Posted by TorqueDog

Start key, type Pai [Enter] will start Paint.
Start key, type Calc [Enter] will start Calculator.
... and so on.

I use a multitude of programs but I use Windows Key or Windows Key + R to start applications, because it's easier, faster, and I have crap to do that doesn't involve hunting through a Start Menu (Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8, doesn't matter which) for my applications.

I am talking about the changes made to the Start Menu, and how they impact my use of the Start Menu. For various reasons, mostly based on "Is my hand on my mouse or am I typing?", sometimes I use one method, and sometimes I use another.

It just means when I want to use my mouse, it is less intuitive, because as I mentioned, having everything on the taskbar or desktop isn't something I want to endure.

edit: To be honest, most of my dislike of Windows 8 interface isn't focused on the Start Menu, but on the Charms bar. I think the bulk of that is due to having multiple monitors or working remotely.

[Anduril]

Originally Posted by Rathji

edit: To be honest, most of my dislike of Windows 8 interface isn't focused on the Start Menu, but on the Charms bar. I think the bulk of that is due to having multiple monitors or working remotely.

Though I enjoy Win 8 for the most part, I share the same sentiment on the charms bar among the other picky little touch sensitive areas.

[TorqueDog]

Press Windows Key + C. It'll bring up the Charms menu on your primary monitor.

I would support bringing back a Start 'button' on the taskbar (or making it optional) to summon the Start screen, if only because it gives people something to click on rather than just darting in and out of hot-corners.

[sclitheroe]

Originally Posted by Brannigans Law

Torque I really wish you'd just accept that a lot of people, and dare I say the majority (I'm willing to concede thats my personal opinion and no where near fact) don't like how the start menu looks and functions on the PCs. It's not intuitive and it's sloppy man.

Originally Posted by TorqueDog

It's not like Microsoft just did this to make people re-learn the interface. They did it because the metrics showed that use of the Start Menu and subsequently the items inside the Start Menu, were being used substantially less over time.

I think what people like Brannigan are unaware of is how extensively Windows is instrumented (capable of reporting usage patterns and measuring interactions) and how exhaustively Microsoft does R&D in labs watching people use Windows and collecting that instrumentation data. It's done on a scale at MS that dwarfs just about any other company. All of their GUI design work is based on this methodology, including the classic Start menu, the Office ribbon, and the Windows 8 interface.

I don't have links handy, but I could easily find them, that show the immense amount of thought Microsoft puts into their interfaces.

I will concede that elements of Windows 8 are not intuitive - that is, easily discoverable without coaching, but to suggest that it's sloppy, unproductive, or haphazard flies in the face of the empirical evidence they have collected on how people actually use computers.

In many respects, the "intuitive" Mac interface is actually less well engineered from a human-computer interaction standpoint - what is easy on the surface is actually slower, more semantically complex, and less well understood from an empirical standpoint than anything Microsoft has done. One need only look at the growing hue and cry over skeuomorphism and the detrimental affects it has had on OS X productivity-wise to see that there is a lot of validity to Microsoft's approach of engineering an interface through empirical testing. Just go use the Contacts app in Mountain Lion, or the Calendar app - they are abominations to usability (or even intuitiveness, to be honest).

What would be wrong, of course, would be to say that the Metro UI and design language is the only right one, or the one that everyone should be using, or even the right one for individual users. But I don't see anyone saying that here or elsewhere. We have an embarrassment of riches to choose from in human-computer interaction like we've never had before - you've got everything from Windows 8, to OS X, to iOS, Android, BB10, KDE, Gnome, ChromeOS, and many other interpretations of how we should work with computers and interact with the internet. Choose a effing big television, choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players and electrical tin openers. Choose an OS if this one doesn't suit you.

Most of all, choose to be flexible and adaptable - the rate of change on how we use computers and where we use computers, and the types of computers we use is accelerating right now in ways that weren't predicted when the Windows 95 interface was originally designed. That's 18 years of stagnation that has been swept away nearly overnight with the rise of mobile computing and ideas about how we use computers. There's an entire generation of kids now that will have never known non-multi touch enabled machines, tablet computers, smart phones, pervasive connectivity and an app-centric view of the web. Things are shifting dramatically.

[Brannigans Law]

That's a well thought out and presented post/argument. I would counter with coca cola spending millions on R&D on new coke and how well that was received as a counter. Just because you spend a lot of money on testing and think you've re-invented the wheel doesn't mean it's always better in the end.

[psicodude]

Wow, did you ever miss the point. Microsoft didn't just make the new UI up because they thought it would be cool. As Sclitheroe pointed out, they collected actual usage data and built a UI that matches what users were trying to do. There is a massive difference between guessing where you think your users would like a specific button and collecting actual data on millions of people and knowing where the majority of them want the button.

Your problem, Brannigans Law, is that you don't like the new UI and are assuming that nobody else will...ergo it must suck. My opinion is that you, like most people, are uncomfortable with change. Everyone that I personally know that has tried Windows 8 had the exact same response as you, initially, but after a few weeks got used to it and actually prefer it now.

[sclitheroe]

Originally Posted by Brannigans Law

That's a well thought out and presented post/argument. I would counter with coca cola spending millions on R&D on new coke and how well that was received as a counter. Just because you spend a lot of money on testing and think you've re-invented the wheel doesn't mean it's always better in the end.

Empirical…empirical. It is measurably improved for the goals/objectives they set. They are a software engineering company at their core, not a taste maker.

Here is just one sample of the kind of thought and analysis they put into it, distilled down to a blog post:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2...-explorer.aspx

I'll afford you the New Coke analogy for Apple's skeuomorphic design work - that screams of "new flavour" with little regard to sound engineering and analysis. Microsoft can articulate their design goals and the measurements showing they hit them, as in the link above. Apple and Coke, on the other hand, I don't think can - it was new for the sake of being new, and definitely not measurably better.

[sclitheroe]

New Coke, btw, was a cover to allow them to reformulate "classic coke" with high fructose corn syrup

[TorqueDog]

Originally Posted by sclitheroe

New Coke, btw, was a cover to allow them to reformulate "classic coke" with high fructose corn syrup

Ohh, very sneaky Coca-Cora.

[J Diddy]

Windows Blue (windows 8 sp1?) leaked onto the web: http://www.redmondpie.com/windows-bl...11-more-video/