Time for a new thread?
Release Preview is out now.
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/w...elease-preview
Am I the only one who doesn't get this whole Metro thing for desktops? It seems very well suited for tablets, and maybe even laptops, but I don't want full screen apps on my 27" monitor. I want windows so I can see what's going on in email at the same time as I'm browsing and have WoW in the background (full screen, windowed).
No, that is a very common response. Microsoft magnanimously took 11,000 words to explain why we're wrong in their latest blog update. Win8 is basically WinMe3 (or WinVista2 if you prefer). Astonishingly, even microsoft zealots for decades like Paul Thurrott are unhappy with it and willing to say so publicly. Reading Thurrott criticize Microsoft is such a huge disconnect that I still have trouble reconciling it with reality.
I guess the new rule of thumb is, odd Windows versions are good, even ones are bad. Windows XP (Windows 5) = good. Vista (Windows 6) = bad. Windows 7 = good, Windows 8 = bad, etc... Windows 9 should be quite good.
That doesn't work all the way back, though. Windows 95, 98, 98SE, and NT4 were all fine. WinME was terrible, Win2000 great, WinXP great (although saddled with an unfortunately ugly fischer-price UI), Vista terrible, and 7 great.
When does the release preview OS expire? I can't figure this out easily, unlike the Consumer Preview (expires Nov 2012, I think).
Really are we going to make a new thread to write the exact same complaints.
Anyway installing it on the spare computer that has the consumer version, reading on the web it mostly tweaks, the biggest change are the improved Metro apps that are still not final.
Also some important stuff is still not there, the new desktop look, more metro like, and also new trackpad gesture support. Windows 8 will ship with driver support for new trackpads that will make it easier no navigate the Metro interface, a very important change given that using the current trackpads in Metro is a clunky thing, however current trackpad support for these feature will be up to the hardware maker.
Well, I installed the x64 in virtualbox with guest extensions giving it 2 cores and 4GB of ram. It seems it run ok. I'm seeing how much I can stay out of the metro interface. Pinning the run command to the taskbar helps. Same with the control panel.
Trying some media stuff and it seems VLC runs pretty well. Media player Class HC crashes pretty hard (32 bit). Not sure if that's virtualbox or win8 though. ffdshow tryouts and haali seem to work ok with playing MKV's along with VLC mentioned above. .net framework 3.0/3.5 is missing by default but my app worked fine after windows automatically found and downloaded the required files.
Where is storage spaces? That's one feature I really wanted to play with but I can't seem to find it.
UPDATE: metro apps are incredibly unstable for me though I'm sure part of the blame is virtualbox (how much I'm not sure). Apps like the store, weather, stocks, xbox, cut the rope, etc run fine sometimes. Other times they load for a while and then I'm back at the metro desktop. Rebooting doesn't help. Full screen vs windowed on virtualbox didn't help much either.
Last edited by ARogan; 05-31-2012 at 03:43 PM.
I don't want to read 11,000 words and I don't even know where MS's blog is anyway. Can you sum up Microsoft's argument for why desktop users need to go to the Metro UI instead of using the Start menu?Originally Posted by stusser
I'm just curious. I can't imagine I will use Win 8 for years unless I get a tablet PC and opt for it. Even then I'm not sure why I'd prefer a Windows tablet over an Android tablet or iPad. I am curious about Microsoft's reasoning behind forcing desktop users to use the Metro UI at times.
It's a branding and user experience thing. They want the experience to be consistent across platforms. Desktop, tablet, laptop, phone, 360. They want them all to look and feel the same. Ease of use. No retraining or learning a new way to do stuff with every device, etc.
I can see the logic. I don't personally agree with it.
Quit thinking of the Start screen as "the Metro UI." Think of it as the Start screen. When you push the Window key or click on the Start button, instead of bringing up this teensy little menu in the lower left of your screen, it uses all the screen real estate available to show you the programs available to you.
Is there any reason you WOULDN'T want it to do that? Can you really think of a use case for making the Start menu a teensy-tiny little rectangle instead of using all the screen real estate available?
(The rationale for not having a Start button is entirely different: There isn't one. It's a stupid decision. But that's a totally separate issue, really.)
So Microsoft's argument is that the new Start screen is better than the Start button? I guess I can understand that as an argument even if I may not agree with it.
One thing I haven't seen pointed out... If you use the Start menu the way I use the start menu 95% of the time, Metro essentially becomes just a full-screen replacement for that pile of icons on your deskop, and a start menu that takes up your whole screen briefly.
Usage scenario:
- Pin your most-used apps to the Metro desktop, the same way you'd have dropped them into toolbar, pinned them to the Start menu, or left icons scattered on your desktop.
- Here's how I typically start most programs: Hit the Windows key, and start typing the first few letters of the app I want to run (Pho for Photoshop, Wo for Word, etc..) When the app I want to run gets highlighted, hit Enter. On Metro, that looks different, but works exactly the same way -- there's no functional difference.
So for my usage, the desktop/quick launch scenario is different, but the Winkey/typing method of launching programs (which is what I most frequently use) is key-for-key identical with Windows 7.
I was surprised to find that after about a day of using Win 8, as a program launcher for traditional desktop apps it looks different than Win 7, but is able to function nearly identically.
(Obviously, if you're the type to launch programs using just the mouse and Start menu navigation, this doesn't apply. But just pointing this out for the benefit of those who use keyboard filtering along with the most-used apps pinned, as I typically do.)
No, the argument is that the new Start screen is better than the Start MENU. Which I think is hard to argue with, given how badly Win7's Start menu sucks (like most of us, I never use it, and always just search). The Start BUTTON is a separate issue; I don't think they've given a rationale for removing it.
Essentially, their argument is that people mostly use Windows on laptop PCs to connect to Facebook and other social networking sites, therefore they should make Windows optimal for that user experience. (Okay, okay, so that's drastically simplified and probably not -really- fair to what the blog post says, but that was the takeaway I got from it). This has nothing in common with how -I- use my PC, but apparently people like me don't count.
It's not just the start screen, metro is all over the UI. It's about more than metro; the UI is also very touch-friendly-- which means it's mouse and particularly trackpad unfriendly. And you can't avoid that stuff.
This guy goes into a fair amount of detail. He used to work at Palm and Apple before that, so he may be biased, but I basically agree with what he's saying. Check out his youtube video.
Very few of the 11,000 words are justifying why it's there, and no one is "telling you you're wrong.
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2...xperience.aspx
The entire point of the blog is to explain the background to how the product was designed. Some people like to read about that stuff, some people don't. Whether you agree or disagree with the end result, it's a completely genuine and unfiltered look into what Jensen Harris is thinking. I saw him speak about this stuff a couple years ago when we first started on this, I've talked with him since, and he wrote this post, not some marketing group.
If you're using a mouse and keyboard, the start screen is just a replacement for the start menu, with live tiles added to it. Normal desktop gadgets still work, but live tiles are a good simple replacement for many of them.
That's the menu. The start button was removed because it doesn't make sense for Windows 8. If there's any hope in training new people how to use Windows 8, then people need to have a consistent experience across the whole OS. Use the corners for a mouse, swipe in from the sides using touch. Putting a start button that exists only on the desktop makes things inconsistent.
As for that training, it appears that Paul Thurrott got his hands on a build with some of it in there:
http://www.winsupersite.com/article/...s-setup-143041
Look to the bottom.
That's quite the false dichotomy. Trackpads particularly are covered extensively by all the Release Preview coverage so far.
I've felt that way pretty much anytime I've had the misfortune to read something from him (usually due to an "expert" quotation served up in someone else's writing, so I wasn't able to just avoid it to begin with).
Dear God, LMN8R, watch where you link! Think of the children...
NOTE: url changed to protect the innocent
In that very well-written (and very long) blog, Jensen agrees that win8 is confusing to use and a real paradigm shift. His response is essentially "tough titties, this is better, and change is hard".
But of course it's not better. Hot corners are not discoverable, and his spiel about windows95 having the "click here to start" comes to exactly the wrong conclusion. You don't need the "click here to start" in windows 98 because people learned it in windows95. And even without the "click here to start" scrolling across the taskbar, it is literally a button with the word "start" on it.
Dragging is more difficult with a trackpad than a mouse, and much more difficult than touching the screen with your finger. It's particularly difficult with a clickpad, which are all the rage these days.
The new flat color UI is not better. Skeumorphism is not necessarily a bad thing. Things like dropshadows on windows and color on buttons makes them easier to see and use. He dismisses Aero like it's an archaic piece of garbage, but I like Aero. OK, maybe not the default aero with high degrees of transparency and little white clouds around titles in the taskbar, but when it works well, the design language is clean and gets out of the way. I don't feel strongly either way vis a vis aero vs the new metro-inspired desktop UI, but the way he says "this is better, we're not letting you use the old stuff, don't like it? Tough titties, ladies" that pisses me off.
Offer a button to disable the metro shit and I'm perfectly fine with win8. Most people are. But MS absolutely and categorically refuses to do this. And again-- that pisses me off.
Actually, the UI is growing on me. It took awhile, but once I understood the combination of mouse gestures and keyboard shortcuts, the Start page seems pretty neat. I've already caught myself hitting the Windows key to try to bring it up on my Win7 system ;-)
I've read that thing. The dude is hyperbolic. I mean, he's right that people will hate it -- people hate every piece of change they ever encounter -- but that doesn't really mean anything.
But to the question at hand, there's nothing in there that indicates that you hit Metro UI during normal desktop tasks, except for the Start screen (where it hardly matters if it were Metro, a grid of Windows 3.1 style icons, as in MACOSX's Launchpad, or a grid of large icons as in GNOME's Activities screen -- and the fact that the other two major desktop OSes already have something like that start screen ought to indicate that it's not some nefarious tablet-driven thing).
Where else is Metro "all over the UI" on the desktop?
Had you actually read any coverage about the Release Preview instead of rushing to judgement using the exact same criticisms you offered for the Consumer Preview, you would have learned that trackpad support will be improving enormously. Notably - gestures to scroll, get the charms, get the app bar, etc. You won't need to click and drag using the trackpad, so complaining that it's difficult to do on metro is irrelevant.
The Windows 95 comparison is extremely important. Double-clicking was not discoverable at all. Not a single person on earth would sit down at a computer and think to double-click the mouse on anything without being explicitly told to do so.
Double-clicking isn't hard. The corners UI isn't hard. Both require a split-second of training to learn how to use, and once you learn them, it's instantly intuitive how to learn everything else from there.
You need to use metro to shutdown, search, switch wifi hotspots, etc. Lots of filetypes open in metro apps by default, like pdf files.
Double-clicking is not discoverable, but you didn't need to double-click to start programs in windows 95. You single-clicked on the start button then single-clicked on the program.
Also OSX does indeed have that launchpad thing, but nobody uses it and it's widely seen as a misstep from Apple.
And lastly, I do feel the start screen is inferior to the start button for one very simple reason-- horizontal scrolling. I hate horizontal scrolling. It works fine on a tablet with touch, but there's no easy way to do it with a mouse. If the start screen scrolled vertically, I'd have much warmer feelings about it.
1) Yes. You have an identical, consistent way to shut-down, search everything, and connect to networks whether you're in a metro app or the desktop. The network icon is still in the tray on the desktop, so you can click that too if you wish.
No files open in Metro by default. There is a "select which app to use" dialog the first time you open a file of a certain type. There is also a heavily-improved Control Panel to reset default programs to a different program if you wish, far easier than with Windows 7.
2) Picking nits. People will be trained how to use the corners the first time they log in, and/or a billion other ways. Double-clicking is vital to a ton of top-level, irreplaceable Windows 95 scenarios. You cannot adequately use a Windows 95 machine without learning how to double-click.
3) "Widely seen" needs some data to back it up
4) Why is horizontal scrolling inherently inferior? It's functionally identical in method and application to vertical scrolling. Most people have wide-screen monitors these days, horizontal scrolling simply makes sense. The mouse wheel works perfectly too. Or you can simply push-scroll using your mouse - no click/drag or scroll wheel at all.
I didn't install the release preview, if PDFs (and other files) no longer open in metro by default that's great.
You really think OSX's launchpad is successful? Heh.
I didn't know push scroll worked in the start screen. Does it work with multiple monitors?
And lastly, I feel we're getting pretty adversarial here, and I don't want that. I'm not taking any of it personally and I hope you're not either.
In OS X, I wasn't referring to launchpad, I was referring to the trackpad improvements they have, how you can use gestures to scroll, Exposé, etc.
Launchpad is indeed not great. I think the implementation in OS X is pretty bad, since it's just one layer of a grid of icons overlayed onto another layer of a grid of icons, and it adds a second metaphor for "folders" on top of physical directory structure folders.
Metro is a full replacement of the start menu. Not an extra layer of a list of applications meant to perform the same things you can already do. Plus, live tiles.
Push-scroll doesn't work with multiple monitors, but scroll wheels do.
So if I scroll down on my wheel, it'll go to the right? That would be OK. As long as it's not the "lean your mouse wheel to the right to scroll right" thing which sucks hard.
Installing the release preview on my developer tablet now. For fun, I'm going to hook this up to my 27" monitor as a multi monitor and use it for a couple days with mouse only to see how it goes. I'm SURE I'll buy a retail copy for the tablet. For my gaming PC? Not so sure.
While I'm no Paul Thurrott, I've been known as a bit of a Microsoft apologist on a few forums (including this one), and I totally agree. Metro would be fine if they saved it for touch usage (say, the tablet mode of an ASUS Transformer style Win8 box) but it feels stupid on a full blown desktop.
Win8 is fine once you switch to the desktop mode and pin all the apps you want to run to the taskbar and pretend like it is Windows 7 with some cool new features, but the Metro shit sucks on a non-touch device and they really need to back off on trying to jam it down the user's throat. If I can't set an option to default to booting directly to desktop in the final version I am not buying it.
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