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Microsoft's Must-Have List for Windows 9

pcmag.com

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Re: Microsoft's Must-Have List for Windows 9

#11

Post by Already__Taken »

guidopallemans wrote: post #3

https://www.readability.com/articles/6w09uyph 1. Fix the file system. The company promised it would develop a database-style file system that would allow for easy and super-fast searches for keywords within the structure of the file. This means it should quickly retrieve every .doc file containing the words "Android OS." The biggest problem with such a file system would be the indexing costs. It is likely that a giga…

Pinball at least was some ridiculous hand-crafted assembly written for fun by a dev I'm sure I remember reading that on here or Reddit.

I can't find that source on my horribly censored network I'm afraid.

Re: Microsoft's Must-Have List for Windows 9

#12

Post by InTheSwiss »

guidopallemans wrote: post #3

https://www.readability.com/articles/6w09uyph 1. Fix the file system. The company promised it would develop a database-style file system that would allow for easy and super-fast searches for keywords within the structure of the file. This means it should quickly retrieve every .doc file containing the words "Android OS." The biggest problem with such a file system would be the indexing costs. It is likely that a giga…

1. Yeah WinFS would be nice but it seems to be out of reach still from a development point of view. Perhaps if it were a totally new file system and not having to maintain some kind of backwards compatibility with NTFS? Who knows I am not a file system developer but I do know Microsoft put some serious development work into WinFS back in the pre-Vista days and it was just too difficult.

2. God yes! Why the hell did they get rid of the connection center they had in Vista and 7 and turn it into a god damn side bar thing!?! Networking is painful on 8.

3. I miss the games too. It is bullshit that Microsoft made them ad-based Modern apps.

4. It is depressing to see how far things went backwards with these shitty fullscreen apps in Windows 8. They are nice on a tablet yes but on a desktop or laptop?! Horrible.

5. My biggest issue with the start screen is that they removed features that were present in the start menu. If the start screen were a full replacement to the start menu it wouldn't be such of an issue but how it is at the moment isn't nice for anything other than just launching an application. I don't agree with the ribbon comments. I find the ribbon to be fantastic and always have. I love Office with the ribbon and hate having to use LibreOffice with all the options lost in menus and sub-menus. The ribbon makes so much more sense and is far more user friendly and is one of the best UI features to come from Microsoft in years.

Re: Microsoft's Must-Have List for Windows 9

#13

Post by Pxtl »

namlem wrote: post #5

Am I the only one who hates the old Start Menu? I find it tedious and useless. I'm all for re-adding a start menu, but it should be one that doesn't suck, like the one in Kubuntu. Also absent from this list is an updated console. Windows 8 still uses the old DOS shell. You can't even resize the window past 80 characters. It's embarrassing.

Microsoft is trying to push Powershell as a replacement for venerable old cmd, but it's not really a good one - Powershell is an attempt to bolt OOP onto the shell language and interop with the .NET framework.

The problem is that it's horribly confusing to work with - the syntax is bizarrely inconsistent as you switch back and forth between "commandlets" and .NET methods, and the part of the power of plain text is that it's self-documenting and forces simplicity of API. Powershell allows full OOP, which doesn't map well to the need for things to be simple when doing command-line scripts. Also, the Powershell interface lacks the various tools you'd expect from an OOP IDE that let you learn about the objects/methods/whatever.

I do like the absense of the start menu. To me, the big failing of Win8 wasn't replacing the start menu with a fullscreen pseudo-desktop, it was the schizophrenic relationship between the fullscreen pseudo-desktop and the "classic" apps, as well as the bizarre "charms" things and the lack of a conventional taskbar when using fullscreen apps.

Desktops and larger notebooks have enough real-estate on the screen for an always-visible task-switcher, and the "Charms" thing is too touch-oriented.

Re: Microsoft's Must-Have List for Windows 9

#14

Post by cyphax »

namlem wrote: post #5

Am I the only one who hates the old Start Menu? I find it tedious and useless. I'm all for re-adding a start menu, but it should be one that doesn't suck, like the one in Kubuntu. Also absent from this list is an updated console. Windows 8 still uses the old DOS shell. You can't even resize the window past 80 characters. It's embarrassing.

It's a bit off-topic, but you can actually make the window larger than 80 characters if you want. You cannot expand it beyond the maximum amount of characters horizontally but you can increase that to anything you want; it's not limited to 80, really. :)

More on-topic: I don't quite hate the Windows 7 start menu, but it could be made better. Unfortunately, Microsoft chose not to improve on a good concept and, in my opinion, ruin things with their new interace. It is one of the main reasons I don't want to switch to Windows 8. I've been a Linux user at home for a long time now, though, it's thankfully only my work laptop that I need to have Windows on. I have a game computer that has Windows XP and will probably be upgraded to Windows 8 but I couldn't really care less about the interface there: I just want to start games on that machine, nothing else.

Re: Microsoft's Must-Have List for Windows 9

#15

Post by [deleted] »

namlem wrote: post #5

Am I the only one who hates the old Start Menu? I find it tedious and useless. I'm all for re-adding a start menu, but it should be one that doesn't suck, like the one in Kubuntu. Also absent from this list is an updated console. Windows 8 still uses the old DOS shell. You can't even resize the window past 80 characters. It's embarrassing.

[deleted]

Re: Microsoft's Must-Have List for Windows 9

#16

Post by sp332 »

The "miserable counter-productive "ribbon" interface on Microsoft Word" was the result of a lot of actual user testing. I could understand people disliking it just because it was new, but it's been years now... How long does it take people to realize a better interface is more productive?

Edit: oh I just noticed it's Dvorak. Never mind.

Re: Microsoft's Must-Have List for Windows 9

#17

Post by Pxtl »

guidopallemans wrote: post #3

https://www.readability.com/articles/6w09uyph 1. Fix the file system. The company promised it would develop a database-style file system that would allow for easy and super-fast searches for keywords within the structure of the file. This means it should quickly retrieve every .doc file containing the words "Android OS." The biggest problem with such a file system would be the indexing costs. It is likely that a giga…

I think they could avoid the Start Menu. What do you want from the start menu? The ability to launch and search for programs. Launch is on the Metro screen now - that's covered. A full-screen start menu like the Metro desktop is fine - the start-menu kept growing absurdly anyways.

I think Metro could be made to work if you made sure it was operable with a mouse - that is, no auto-hiding, no gestures. Give me a single, consistent always-visible taskbar instead of schizophrenia and that "charms" crap, and on-screen always-visible buttons to launch an app-search-bar or to hit up the

I can see the logic of moving away from the old days of letting windows overlap (including the start-menu) - this served no purpose. Why would I want to partially obscure another window? But having more than one window visible at once isn't optional. Give me the means to slice up the desktop like the old Photoshop cut tool.

The Metro UI could be adapted to play nice with the desktop, but they have to admit that it's a desktop and desktops have different needs from touchschreens. Unifying this mess isn't out-of-reach if they are willing to compromise on unifying all the details.

Re: Microsoft's Must-Have List for Windows 9

#18

Post by kfk »

bdfh42 wrote: post #2

A nice rant from John C. Dvorak. First though surely MS have to work out what a Windows PC is for in 2014 and beyond. (I accept their true response would be something like "make money on every PC sold like we always did"). Chromebooks have demonstrated a minimalist PC for our age. Now what value can Windows deliver on top of that? I think that is difficult to answer from a consumer's point of view. There might be a b…

Ms Office, really. Take that away and businesses will move to other OSes. Everybody is tired of the constant poor quality of Microsoft products.

Re: Microsoft's Must-Have List for Windows 9

#19

Post by theallan »

networked wrote: post #7

Allow me to take this opportunity to address something related to a minor point from the article: >To me an app is a small bit of code for an iPhone to do something cute. Are we going to call the massive SAP suite an "app?" Lately I've been hearing many people complain about "serious" desktop applications being called "apps". Do you think this is a valid complaint? (Myself, I'm not sure; I won't disclose my reasoning…

Interestingly this is something I was thinking about the other day. I was trying to explain to my parents that they wanted to download and run a program on their Windows company - I called it an "app". They were confused as that is the term for things that you install on a smart phone.

Like yourself, I'm not sure. It does seem a bit of a disservice to call something as complex as AutoCAD or Photoshop etc by the same term as a stupid fart app. But then, it is an accurate term - they are both applications, so I tend to use it as such.

Re: Microsoft's Must-Have List for Windows 9

#20

Post by dmboyd »

Already__Taken wrote: post #11
guidopallemans wrote: post #3

https://www.readability.com/articles/6w09uyph 1. Fix the file system. The company promised it would develop a database-style file system that would allow for easy and super-fast searches for keywords within the structure of the file. This means it should quickly retrieve every .doc file containing the words "Android OS." The biggest problem with such a file system would be the indexing costs. It is likely that a giga…

Pinball at least was some ridiculous hand-crafted assembly written for fun by a dev I'm sure I remember reading that on here or Reddit. I can't find that source on my horribly censored network I'm afraid.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2012/12/18/10378...
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