Windows 8

edit: huh, I didn't think I'd posted a comment about Hotmail in the Windows thread, but the forum software sure thinks I did.

Eezy_Bordone wrote:

Windows key + C Open Charms bar
Windows key + I Open Settings pane
Windows key + Q Search Apps
Windows key + F Search Files
Windows key + W Search Settings
Windows key + period Snap current app to right side
Windows key + Shift + period Snap current app to left side
Windows key + comma Peek at the Windows desktop
Windows key + Z Display app bar for Metro style app

Almost every key on the keyboard + WinKey is used for a shortcut in Win8.

It's nice that they're there, but I keep coming back to UI chrome and 'discoverability' of actions. Unless I read a manual (does windows have a manual?) or have a list of shortcuts shoved in my face as a general user you're not very likely to find out about those shortcuts. Compare that to 'old windows' where you can press alt to get a list of menu items underlined to show what the shortcuts are, and pretty quickly I learn alt - F - X is to close it, or alt-F4 in the corner menu, etc. Looking for system settings doesn't automatically generate a "Win+W" link in my mind.

Anybody notice the PinballFX in the store shots they showed at the demo yesterday? Anybody see what table is in the CP yet?

I'm probably going to install over the weekend.

I posted a couple of comments on MeFi, and figured I'd reproduce them here:

Well, after playing with it a little, I see Microsoft is following a rather unusual recipe for success:

1. Change everything.
2. Instantly make 17 years of UI training worthless.
3. Hide basic functionality, like, say, turning the computer off.
4. Be careful not to include any kind of prominent Help button (or, as far as I can determine after a couple of minutes of searching, any help whatsoever.) And definitely, definitely don't include any kind of prominent tutorial to show users what's changed.
5. Make sure that the old ways to search for things no longer work, and hide any new method carefully.

It's brilliant. I'm sure it will be very popular in its target demographic. As long as you just want to push the shiny buttons, it appears ideally suited. It does, however, strike me that making an OS for people with frontal lobotomies may be a bit too small a niche.

I used to be down on Microsoft for the Fisher-Price look. Now they've got the Fisher-Price feel.

As far as I can tell, Windows 8 is a gigantic insult. Microsoft thinks you're a f*cking idiot, and can't be trusted with a computer. It's rubber safety scissors, a pat on the head, and a cookie, when what you wanted was a tool.

That's a sin OS X has never really committed; they make things easy, but still powerful. It has always remained a highly useful tool, and I've never felt insulted by using it.

With Windows 8, I most emphatically do.

And the second comment, immediately afterward:

Oh, I finally figured out how to shut off the VM -- you have to float your mouse to the lower-right corner (each corner does something different), and then go to Settings, and then Power, and only there can you find a button to turn the bloody computer off.

Yeah, that's intuitive.

Customers are weird, and products succeed all the time in spite of nerd predictions to the contrary (like "No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame." from Slashdot, about the iPod, one of the most successful products ever.) So prophecies of failure from geeks like me are something to ignore as often as not.

But, for what it's worth, I think there's a very good chance that this will be the most epic disaster in Microsoft's history, even more of a debacle than Vista. I can't imagine lobotomizing my PC with this piece of sh*t. I thought I hated what the Ubuntu guys were doing with desktops, but wow, this makes them look brilliant.

Part of my poor reaction may be because I'm running it in a VM, so the graphics aren't as fast as they would be on real hardware. But even if it were glossy and smooth and gorgeous, as opposed to the kinda choppy results I get with VMWare, I still couldn't DO anything with the computer. All my existing workflows and processes and just ways of getting around the system are gone. They've completely removed the freaking Start Menu, for God's sake. They could do that in, say, two or three revisions, but they can't just do that all at once and expect people to cope. That's just insane.

Microsoft has always been the bastion of backward compatibility, yet in just one generation of the product, they are completely throwing out their UI, only keeping the absolute bare bones of the old stuff, just enough to let old programs run, and that's it. I just don't see how the market is going to accept this... it's too much change, too quickly, and from what I can see, most of the changes are once again for Microsoft's benefit, not mine.

I mean, FRONT AND CENTER on the new desktop are at least a couple of ways of giving Microsoft money -- but NO HELP BUTTON.

That should tell you all you need to know about their priorities. Only a monopoly could pull this kind of sh*t and expect to survive.

Oh snap. Maybe I'll stick to Windows 7...

Well, it's free to try, fire it up in a VM if you like. But unless they make some fairly major changes, there's no way I'd buy or use it.

BNice wrote:

Oh snap. Maybe I'll stick to Windows 7...

Me too. Without changing metro to not suck for mice, they really need to implement two modes, that are separate. Tablet mode, and a mouse mode that doesn't keep flipping back to tablet mode.

Heck, if they charged a small fee for a Win7 "ultra servicepack" that brought all the core bits and pieces up to Win8 level, I might actually buy that, but not Win8 as it's currently shown.

I played around with it for a good 3 hours last night, and I like it. A lot. I agree that they may have gone a little too far in throwing out the traditional Windows experience, but I didn't feel like there were things I couldn't do. It felt a lot like when I got an Android phone and had to learn a new OS. I spent a lot of time exploring and reading tutorials online to figure it out. The only problem is that people have expectations going in that this should be like the Windows we've known all along, which it's not.

As for feeling like they threw us into Win8 with no tutorial or help, I can only hope that since it's a preview, they're just not including that stuff. Maybe they assume that the folks who are techie enough to download an ISO and install the OS have probably been following along and have some idea of how things are going to work. I read a couple of articles yesterday and was zipping around fairly quickly.

I really like being able to log in with my live account and have it know who I am based on everything I've set up with Windows Live, email, skydrive, zune, xbox, etc.

It's going to be a hard sell, but I like it so far.

Again -- multiple ways to give Microsoft money on the START PAGE OF WINDOWS, but no Help button.

f*ck that.

Malor wrote:

Again -- multiple ways to give Microsoft money on the START PAGE OF WINDOWS, but no Help button.

f*ck that.

That was in the back of my mind when I fired up the xbox app. It doesn't (currently) really let you do anything cool, but it does let the put the same ads on windows as they have on the 360 dashboard.

I gave it a shot on the virtual machine. The Metro style is alright but completely useless right now.As of right now unless its a windows official application it will just be a boring shortcut on the screen. I assume in the future developers with be able to make these.

It is definitely going to take some getting used to when I want to go to the control panel or my computer settings. Does anyone know a way to get W8 to start up with the desktop rather than metro?

Something I wonder is how many people will attempt to make the CP their 'main' day-to-day usage OS rather than whatever else they use. For previous releases I've noted a fair few people do try and get good use out of it. I just can't see myself using W8 though.

Scratched wrote:

Something I wonder is how many people will attempt to make the CP their 'main' day-to-day usage OS rather than whatever else they use. For previous releases I've noted a fair few people do try and get good use out of it. I just can't see myself using W8 though.

I did with Win 7 after using it as a "production" HTPC machine for a couple of months. I didn't plan to use it as my main desktop, but I had a motherboard die, and it seemed a good risk to take on the reload, as Win 7 seemed really solid.

Don't have plans to do it any time soon on Win 8, but I haven't loaded it on the old box yet.

Already had a student walk in today with the CP loaded on his laptop.

Malor wrote:

Again -- multiple ways to give Microsoft money on the START PAGE OF WINDOWS, but no Help button.

f*ck that.

Are you trying to tell me that MS is a money grubbing monopoly that doesn't really care about your user experience? Blasphemy!

One of my co-workers has found that, yep, it's still Windows after all:

IMAGE(http://img51.imageshack.us/img51/6800/uploadw.png)

After a few goes around with virtualbox and win8, I'm making liberal use of snapshots for win8.

Is it the RC or RTM version?

I do not want to have to type in my Windows Live account password in order to unlock my damn desktop.

I use a random password for online accounts like that (would be longer if not for MS's 16 character limit) and I use a password manager to access those.

So, along with nerfing passwords to only 16 characters, I now have to further nerf my Windows Live password to something I can remember, because I can't get to my password manager when my desktop is locked?

EDIT: Did "Switch to local account", but of course now the Xbox Live apps and stuff are useless. Is it really so hard to have my local account "associated" with my online account, instead of forcing them to being the same thing?

They're calling it the consumer preview (CP), similar to the developer preview (DP) last year. I think most would equate it to a beta.

One thing I'm not sure on is how 'finished' it is or close to what the final will be. Originally I thought the DP had metro front and centre to make people use it and get used to it, but with the CP it seems they might just be going with it as "what windows is like" now. A beta to me says "feature complete", a close estimation of what the finished product will be. It looks to me that MS are serious about this and there's no (official) 'old windows' switch.

*Legion* wrote:

I do not want to have to type in my Windows Live account password in order to unlock my damn desktop.
...
EDIT: Did "Switch to local account", but of course now the Xbox Live apps and stuff are useless. Is it really so hard to have my local account "associated" with my online account, instead of forcing them to being the same thing?

Yeah, that seems like real fun, linking an online account to getting into your computer. I'm sure I'll never have a problem with my account and being offline (in any capacity). I'd say going for a local account and missing out on a small handful of services is a payoff I'm willing to make, but that locks me out of the app store and a lot of metro stuff, so at that point why bother with win8?

I guess a lot of people won't mind and the accounts will work fine, but I do get the feeling that just as San Francisco seems to an outside observer to have it's own reality where they think everyone has a tablet, smartphone and a wide range of social network accounts, Redmond is getting their own reality.

*Legion* wrote:

EDIT: Did "Switch to local account", but of course now the Xbox Live apps and stuff are useless. Is it really so hard to have my local account "associated" with my online account, instead of forcing them to being the same thing?

Did you switch to Local then log into your Live ID? That's what I did for my domain account and it works like you want: I log in and unlock with my domain account but I'm attached to my Live ID.

I also installed W8 ("wait?" hehe) in a VirtualBox VM last night. I kept getting the "Windows Recovery Environment" screen that *Legion* posted while the ISO was loading -- I found that it worked a lot better by enabling PAE/NX on the VM definition. I only had a chance to play with it for about an hour, but I think it'll take me a while longer to get used to it.

Malor wrote:

Oh, I finally figured out how to shut off the VM -- you have to float your mouse to the lower-right corner (each corner does something different), and then go to Settings, and then Power, and only there can you find a button to turn the bloody computer off.

Yeah, that's intuitive.

It's a fairly reasonable approach, once you accept that Windows 8 is really designed as a tablet OS, and never really meant to be actually powered down. I assume Windows 8 will respond to a 2- or 3-button press-and-hold to power off, similar to an iOS device.

It's a fairly reasonable approach, once you accept that Windows 8 is really designed as a tablet OS

But, oddly enough, I'm not running it on a tablet.

I haven't tried the current build yet, only the consumer preview but based on my experience with that, I won't use Windows 8 and won't use it at my work either. Microsoft has been rightly criticised for hanging on to certain features too long to improve backwards compatibility but this is ridiculous. This new interface is completely unintuitive and I am not prepared to re-train my entire user base to learn the wheel again and neither would any big company I worked for. Enterprise will reject this outright and given that's Microsoft's bread and butter, talk about a bad move.

I can't stand many elements of Mac OS but honestly, if my only choice became using this as Windows, Mac is better without question. My desktop is not a tablet, stop trying to force it to be! I think this UI would work fine on a tablet but what's wrong with just giving desktop users the option of using a classic environment? Give people the choice, everyone's happy, especially since you already have the desktop environment in the system. I easily taught my Mom how to use Windows 7 but it would be a nightmare trying to explain the forced Start Screen to her.

I really hope the public feedback on this is strong enough that it makes Microsoft reconsider, even if it means a delay for Windows 8. I won't touch being forced into the Start Screen with a 10 foot pole. And I say this as someone who welcomed the switch to the Start Menu with open arms.

Something I find interesting is to see people on other forums defending it for desktop along the lines of "just accept it, this is the way it's being done now" and "it's simple, you now use windows in this way which is completely different to current versions and for the last 17+ years"

I can see it for tablets with no problem, but it just gets to me that there's no middleground. If anything, the popularity of things like Rainlendar should show that there is a place for metro apps/tiles on the desktop, essentially widgets that don't suck. Kind of like this. Make the desktop not just about a pretty picture and a collection of icons.

There's nothing wrong with a desktop with active information on it. Microsoft tried that, long ago, with Active Desktop, and I think all that code still works. (at least up through Win7, anyway.)

But the Metro interface is absolutely terrible for a desktop. All your old software breaks. That's just not acceptable. I mean, it still runs, but only in a ghetto that's been lobotomized to artificially make it less attractive than the Metro screen. Microsoft wants you to use Metro because you might give Microsoft money that way, not because it's actually better. They see the Apple walled garden, and they want in so bad they're creaming in their shorts.

And users? FCUK the users. The ultimate goal, I think, is to force users into the same walled garden approach, where Microsoft determines what runs on your machine, and you pay toll to Microsoft forever and ever, amen.

And if you don't like it, you can shove it up your a**. Microsoft has monopoly market power, and you will comply.

Would it be that difficult to create a base code and then apply various UI elements that tailor your experience to Tablet as well as Desktop OS? I get the biggest problem of application compatibility but are we really just creating a problem to try and then solve it? I think the vast majority of tablet users would be perfectly happy with a tablet based Office suite that allowed them easy and quick access to documents they get through various means (email, dropbox, corporate intranet etc..)

I honestly don't think having different OS's is that big a problem to most.

LiquidMantis wrote:
*Legion* wrote:

EDIT: Did "Switch to local account", but of course now the Xbox Live apps and stuff are useless. Is it really so hard to have my local account "associated" with my online account, instead of forcing them to being the same thing?

Did you switch to Local then log into your Live ID? That's what I did for my domain account and it works like you want: I log in and unlock with my domain account but I'm attached to my Live ID.

After I switched and went into the XBL app and tried to click Sign In, I was presented a message saying that it would not work with a Local account.

I'll go back and try again, signing into Live *before* using the XBL app.

Ah, it may be that they've decided that if you're just using a Local account there's no reason you can't use a Live ID account instead rather than in addition.