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Windows 8 First Impressions


JorgeA

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Not enough room for compromise, at the most you can have a (lousy) animated assistant, since the Office Assistants, and particularly Clippy :w00t: were bashed for years :ph34r: :

http://www.computerhope.com/jargon/c/clippy.htm

clippy.jpg

CLIPPY, my love, there you are!!! :wub:

;)

you can now only choose between Chaos and Scuzz (the other all retired in the meantime)

http://toastytech.com/guis/bob4.html

bobg2.gif

bobg8.gif

Wow, vestiges of Microsoft Bob are STILL floating around?!

--JorgeA

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youi're saying that it's not possible (or maybe not practical) to have a Windows 8 that contains both the Metro and Desktop interfaces, yet allows the user to choose which of them will show on their screen when they boot into Windows?

That's what we're all wishing for. That would make Win8 a decent OS (being able to disable Metro and keep the start menu). But at this point it seems very unlikely. We'll know for sure when the beta comes out sometime this month.

CoffeeFiend,

That would be nice, though from what I hear we shouldn't hold our breath.

That beta -- it's not available for download by just anybody like the Preview was, is it?

If it goes Metro-only, then we'll be able to pretend it didn't happen and keep running Win7 for a few years, or wait 'till they reverse their decision (hopefully). But tut if it happens, we're going to start having a serious look at porting our apps, and moving legacy stuff to vSphere/Citrix, and starting to buy Macs instead whenever possible.

Yeah. Personally, if MS insists on being obnoxious I'm already looking ahead to a Linux solution.

--JorgeA

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That beta -- it's not available for download by just anybody like the Preview was, is it?

It seemingly doesn't exist yet, so that would be a no. It should be once it's available though.

I'm already looking ahead to a Linux solution

Totally not an option for me (using Linux means giving up on almost every application that makes a computer useful), but if it works for you then why not :)

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That beta -- it's not available for download by just anybody like the Preview was, is it?

It seemingly doesn't exist yet, so that would be a no. It should be once it's available though.

CoffeeFiend,

You're right -- I should have written "it won't be available for download by just anybody..." I'd thought that you needed to sign up to get the beta, and then when the time came MS would decide whom to send it to. I'm curious to see if the beta fixes any of the problems that so many people have identified, but if I had to sign up to get a copy I doubt that they'd see any reason to choose me, as I'm just an end-user.

I had based my belief on this page, but then there is this one that says anybody can get it (scroll down to the end).

--JorgeA

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CoffeeFiend (and @MagicAndre),

So, youi're saying that it's not possible (or maybe not practical) to have a Windows 8 that contains both the Metro and Desktop interfaces, yet allows the user to choose which of them will show on their screen when they boot into Windows?

Giving the users a choice during setup is what all logical thinking people expect! I mean the MS point of forcing the users to use 1 UI (metro) on all devices (tablets, phones, PC, laptop) makes no sense. All have different needs and all need a different UI that works best on this specific platform and not 1 UI which works a bit on all. That's why I posted the knife example. You don't have only 1 knife which you use for all tasks. You have different ones which work perfect in their special usage.

Zorin is based on an older Ubuntu (11.04 Natty) so you run into issues (Gnome 2.x removed from 11.10).

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Giving the users a choice during setup is what all logical thinking people expect! I mean the MS point of forcing the users to use 1 UI (metro) on all devices (tablets, phones, PC, laptop) makes no sense. All have different needs and all need a different UI that works best on this specific platform and not 1 UI which works a bit on all. That's why I posted the knife example. You don't have only 1 knife which you use for all tasks. You have different ones which work perfect in their special usage.

Andre,

That makes perfect sense to me. But then, I'm not a MS developer or executive...

Zorin is based on an older Ubuntu (11.04 Natty) so you run into issues (Gnome 2.x removed from 11.10).

I have only "dipped my toes" into the Linux ocean, so while I know these names, I'll need to look into what Gnome 2 is exactly, or what the implications are of removing it. The Zorin developers say they are committed to maintaining their OS into the future. If it's still alive and kicking when (if) the time comes to make the switch from Microsoft Tiles 1.0 (Metro isn't really "windows"), then that may well become my new OS.

It looks like they will be updating Zorin to incorporate Gnome 3. With any luck, the change won't mess up the "Windows" look-and-feel too much.

--JorgeA

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Andre,

Well, this is definitely an improvement over what we had seen before, but I will wait till the Consumer Preview is publicly available before offering new commentary. I'm not hopeful that actual functionality (as opposed to the "cool" novelty factor) will be generally as good as Windows 7 or Vista.

Thanks very much for posting these screenshots. For those wishing to see more, here is a bigger set.

BTW, Hewlett-Packard has the right idea: a tablet UI that you can turn on and off as needed, and it'll stay out of the way if you turn it off. If only Microsoft were as wise...

--JorgeA

P.S. Like you, I consider Vista my favorite OS. In terms of sheer elegance, it's the high point for Windows IMHO. The Win7 taskbar, for example, looks flat and plain compared to the convex Vista taskbar.

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LOL. There's 2 different discussions about this on Reddit today: here and here. It turns out everyone else also hates Metro. Big surprise there! :rolleyes:

MS better fix this REAL soon, because they're going to hemorrhage developers or at the very least make them seriously consider making cross-platform apps which greatly reduces lock-in. I'm considering ditching C# and .NET altogether now, after using it since the 1.0 days with VS.NET back in 2002, and it looks like on the C++ side we'll have to replace MFC by something else like Qt. I just don't want to rush things just to see them come out with a Metro-less Win9 a couple years later...

MS is forcing a lot of changes on consumers lately (e.g. the Ribbon) and developers too (e.g. XAML), they come out with new technologies then abandon them (e.g. Silverlight), they don't support their dev tools like they should (too many examples), they're pushing for cloud services that nobody seems to want of (Azure), and now killing the desktop for the sake of phone & tablet sales which will most likely still fail. I don't foresee anyone getting a WP phone (never been popular and iPhones/Android are all the rage), and I don't see much of a point to a Win8 tablet either. A Win8 tablet with a good battery life will likely be ARM-based and as such not run "traditional" Win32 Windows apps anyway, and even if it had a x86 CPU, using apps meant for keyboard+mouse+large screen on a small tablet with only touch would suck. Seemingly they expect us to buy Tablets for Metro apps alone and that makes running Windows on it pointless. I'll sooner buy an iPad.

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LOL. There's 2 different discussions about this on Reddit today: here and here. It turns out everyone else also hates Metro. Big surprise there! :rolleyes:

I like this :

http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/pdg4r/windows_8s_next_victim_microsoft_kills_the_start/

And if you think it looks awful, you should try and actually use it. It's an unholy union of double-clicks and finger-friendly swipes seemingly cobbled together MacGyver-style using spare parts.

:thumbup

jaclaz

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MS better fix this REAL soon, because they're going to hemorrhage developers or at the very least make them seriously consider making cross-platform apps which greatly reduces lock-in. I'm considering ditching C# and .NET altogether now, after using it since the 1.0 days with VS.NET back in 2002, and it looks like on the C++ side we'll have to replace MFC by something else like Qt. I just don't want to rush things just to see them come out with a Metro-less Win9 a couple years later...

CoffeeFiend,

An intriguing point. I'm not a developer, so I'd be curious to know why developers would abandon MS. Is it because of the constantly changing programming environments and lack of consistent support that you describe?

Let me throw out two questions here that that you (and @jaclaz :hello: ) are in a better position to answer. Some of the programs that I use are programs that do not get "installed" in Windows. They don't appear in the Start Menu/All Programs or have icons anywhere on the taskbar. Instead, they sit quietly in their directories until I navigate to them and double-click on the .exe file.

Now, Microsoft seems to intend for the Desktop to disappear completely within one or two further generations of Windows. At that point, it looks like the only ways to open a program will be through a Metro tile, by typing the filename to do a search, or by looking it up in the "app" list. But as far as I can tell, programs that are not installed don't get Metro tiles and don't show up in Metro Search, and the app list contains only "installed" programs. So,

  1. What will become of programs that do not get installed?
  2. And doesn't this mean that every developer wishing to write Windows applications will have to start jumping through whatever bureaucratic hoops MS sets up in order for the public to use their programs?

--JorgeA

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If I read this antisocial nonsense I can cry:

Giz: What has the negative feedback been like? What do people not like?

SM: To be honest, you know what I think it is? When you change something—this is my own personal observation—a lot of us know how the PC works, become the help desk for all of our friends and family. Inherent in that is a sense that I know. I've got this expertise now, I've got this power. We've changed something now, and leveled the playing field for all those personal help desks, so they're no longer the guy. It's human nature

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