News Windows 8.1 could allow for Start Screen bypass

And how exactly does it feel like that? What part of touching or clicking on an nice, easily identifiable icon to launch the program you want feels like a slap in the face?

 

Nice, didn't know you could do that +rep

 

FTFY

You have to remember how much more functionality the start screen has over the start menu. For example,at a glance I can now see how many unread emails I have, and that I can also see much more applications in one go than before, while also being able to ort them easier.

 

Windows 8 as default changes the way the user interacts with the OS, how you claim that is someone blowing it up to huge proportions is beyond me, just a color change would be exactly that, a color change not a change in the way you interact with the device.

Trying to claim the modern UI and the rest of the changes are akin to changing the color or the interior of a car is laughable
And to claiming someone hasn't used it is ridiculous, next you will be telling people you know what they had for dinner last night

But afaik where hud's are used in cars they still have conventional dials, thus giving the user a choice. And from previous discussions on the subject most people probably know that the start screen and some metro apps is not the only significant change with 8.

 

Ah yes, my Geforce 6200 card works because nVidia made it with using Windows 8 in mind…

Windows, whether you like it's interface or not, is an amazing thing, if only because it's made to run on almost everything. Nexxo and GoodBytes are absolutely right. The price is also exactly right: your OS is the program you run the most, if not all the time.

Well, I have all of that right on my desktop (+Fences) and taskbar, don't even have to open any Start menu thingie.

 

Pretty sure I interact with Windows 8 in exactly the same way as I interacted with Windows 7. I see things on the screen which I click with my mouse and I type where necessary with my keyboard. Windows 8 may have changed the location of certain things or presents things in a different style but it hasn't changed the manner in which I interact with the system. And yes, people are blowing the change from a start menu to a start screen up to huge proportions; it really isn't as big a change as some people like to make out.

 

How's that driver from 2004/2005 working out for you. Or are you using the one which was released nearer to the start of this year?

 

It's using the default Win8 driver from when it was installed. (not my pc btw)

 

Try opening a PDF on a clean install of Windows 7. Oh wait, you can't!!!

In both 7 & 8 you need to download a third-party PDF viewer such as Adobe Reader to open PDFs in the desktop.

 

You can sign the drivers yourself...

http://www.deploymentresearch.com/Blog/tabid/62/EntryId/63/Sign-your-unsigned-drivers-Damn-It.aspx

 

Oh come on, even the bios can get any video card showing an image on a screen. The generic driver doesn't really say much for windows being compatible with every product out there.I have never had any operating system windows or otherwise (I'm talking obscure linux distros on weird OEM laptop graphics cards) fail to get a graphics card to display an image.

The point is. If you make a device. You write a driver for it, not Microsoft. There are ways and means to then get that driver included with Windows itself. If Microsoft changes windows and that breaks your software, you fix it, not Microsoft. You change your software to suit Windows. Microsoft doesn't change Windows to suit you.

Its not Microsoft that makes windows compatible with everything, its simply all devices(well most of them) are written to run on Windows.

Wasn't there a whole driver thing when windows switched from XP to vista? The O/S core changed and suddenly a bunch of drivers won't work.

 

If you want to use a mouse+keyboard strictly speak yes you still interact with the OS in the same way, but why use a mouse+keyboard with a OS designed mainly for touch enabled devices? why not just use a OS designed with those controls in mind in the first place.

The point is metro suffers because its focus on visuals is at the detriment of functionality, a point that it seems Microsoft maybe finally admitting by hopefully including a way to go straight to the desktop.

 

Please give me my start button back!

I dislike classic shell

 

http://forums.bit-tech.net/showthread.php?t=234999
Ninite link there you will fin Start8 free ware for your start menu and Direct to desk top needs.

If you like the thread pleas asked for it stickied

 

Well, tbh, who used the start menu regularly anyway? All people I know have what they frequently need as icons on their desktop anyway.

I know, software developers think we have an empty desktop so we can see the purrrty background better, but no, we actually didn't.
Only difference is, now the icons are tiles, huge and live.

 

+1

 

Very little has changed in Windows 8. There's a Start Screen, which is more of an addition than a replacement of Start Menu; the rest is still used and accessed in the traditional ways (try it). Input methods are added, not replaced.

You object to having to install a Start Menu-alike? Why? I couldn't get on with Start Menu so for years I used RocketDock. You didn't hear me moan about it --I just downloaded, installed and got on with it.

You don't like the Metro paradigm? You can ignore it. You're a geek; you should know how. Your objections seem to me emotional more than rational. There's nothing wrong with that (mine often are too) but be honest about it and just install Windows 7 and let others get on with 8. Horses for courses and all that.

 

Im aware there is software to do that in win7, but my argument was that its there by default. Also if you want to install extra software, you can get start8 anyway.

 

Having used Windows 8 since the consumer preview release I'm pretty happy that it's been designed with mouse and keyboard controls in mind. I've yet to find anything I can't do on Windows 8 that I could on Windows 7. And I've not felt at any point that I'm missing out on anything by not using it on a touch-enabled device.

If the functionality has taken such a back seat as you seem to be making out how would MS removing the need to click a single tile, or (if you have put it as the first tile) pressing enter, when first logging in fix those issues? What functionality is it restoring?

 

theshadow2001: Let me tell you why you're wrong, and Windows is both over-priced and seriously under-priced. As an aside, I dislike the new start screen immensely. It has both good points and bad points, and the bad points outweigh the good. Most of it centres around how you have to move your mouse a LOT more just to select related options. But I digress, onto how incredible Windows is behind the start screen:

The driver model you have in your mind is the same one DOS had. Manufacturers would write a driver (actually a library - piece of code that abstracted the hardware into a programming environment). Programs would then integrate the driver and be able to use the hardware to its full potential. You may be wondering why DOS could display to the screen if there were no drivers in DOS itself? Well, that's down to hardware instructions that were settled upon by IBM - all IBM graphics cards would accept these specific instructions that would let you display text to the screen... and not much else. It's why most DOS programs made their entire UI out of text rather than get into the driver hassle.

Now what is this driver hassle? Surely programs could just include the driver and that's the end of it? Sadly not, each driver from the *same* manufacturer would have a slightly different interface. The interface was radically different between manufacturers. This meant you had to program your application for each specific product (ie. the various Sound Blasters, the various graphics cards, etc. etc.). If any of the supported device drivers had a fault, you had to release a whole new program just to fix that one device that maybe only 5% of your customers had.

Suffice it to say making programs for DOS mostly involved messing about with hardware interfaces, and not much actual program. Microsoft realised that it would be really cool if programmers could spend their effort making brilliant programs, rather than messing with drivers all the time. So what they came up with is an abstraction layer. Basically they made an interface that modelled 'an graphics card' or 'an sound card'. The tricky bit was the interface had to work across any device in that category and be as extensible as possible so that OEMs could differentiate their products. If every sound card had to be exactly the same, the OEMs wouldn't buy-in and we'd be stuck with the DOS model. Eventually Microsoft came through with these abstraction layers, and the software that OEMs made to interact with the layer was dubbed a 'driver'. This mean that programs made for Microsoft's operating system were more fully featured (good for the customer) and faster/cheaper to make (good for the developer). Everyone won.

Microsoft also noticed that developers were spending all of their time making the user interface code. Wouldn't it be great if they could integrate this code into their OS so that a) Developers didn't spend all of their time making the same UI code and b) so that all programs look the same, giving a consistent look and feel across the entire computer. MS went beyond just making a UI library, they made a whole UI system (desktop environment, window manager, low-level UI calls, the lot). This meant that programmers now didn't have to worry about the hardware they were running on, or even how to draw the individual UI elements. Now they could work on their business logic rather than technical trivialities.

Later on MS realised that applications sometimes mis-behaved and could break the entire OS forcing the user to reboot. This is long before 'sandboxing' was even heard of. Instead they decided the OS would manage the memory for the application. This meant if the application tried to write to memory it didn't own, the OS could stop it (we're talking the old 'Illegal Operation' dialog). Now when a program did something naughty, it would be closed and the rest of the computer would still run. Sure the user would lose their data for that program, but none of their others. Additionally by tracking the memory, MS realised that they could enforce it was freed too. So now when a program was closed, all of its memory could be reclaimed - no more memory leaks!

Microsoft also realised that setting up hardware was way too complicated for the average user. They spent far too long trying to figure out IRQs, driver installs, IRQ conflicts, etc. So what MS did is talk to the manufacturers and come up with a protocol that would let the OS (with some help from the BIOS) configure the hardware automatically. This protocol was called 'Plug 'n Play', and it meant if you bought some new sound card, you could just plug it in, and it would work. Windows would even install the drivers automatically if it shipped with them. Next time you plug in a new piece of hardware and don't have to spend a few hours in the BIOS - thank MS.

MS have constantly been improving the computing landscape, they've had such a massive impact I'm not sure you could even quantify it. The things I've mentioned have been at a really high level, and are a small fraction of what Windows and MS do. They're constantly moving repetitive boilerplate functionality away from programs and into the core OS or MS-produced (for free!) libraries. If MS could cut away legacy support the way Apple do, the amount of work MS does would be much more visible. For example OSX does not support genuine resolution independence like Android does. Windows through WPF and WDDM *does*. If you use the Modern UI only in Windows 8 you are seeing this resolution independence in action. To a developer it's almost transparent, yet the OS and MS technologies mean a program can scale to any DPI and support almost any screen size. However, if this feature were added to the old Win32 (we're talking Win 9x UI code here) API your existing applications would break.

So in terms of what MS do, Windows is ridiculously cheap. If someone said 'I want Windows' (and it didn't exist), you'd be looking at hundreds of billions of £ to make it as it is now. Quite frankly I suspect that's what MS actually has spent developing it over the years.

However, at the same time I would say it's also over-priced. For Apple OSX is cheap because it's just another feature to make you buy a Mac. Want OSX (like I do)? Gotta buy a Mac - and if you go the Hackintosh route you'll suddenly realise how much effort MS spent on compatibility. Windows is much like that, it's a gateway into the Microsoft world. Windows 8 is clearly a step in the Apple-like vertical integration MS can get away with now the anti-trust monitoring is over. MS are adding a lot more consumer-facing functionality, things like Skydrive, Outlook, Skype and their own hardware. It's all about lock-in, and it'll be interesting to see how things work out.

The biggest problem MS have, is they don't know how to ease into things the way Apple do. Apple do have a direct analogue of the Start Screen called 'Launch Pad', and it's the default option on new installs. However, if you upgrade the old menu in the dock remains, and you can still manually put Applications in the dock even with new installs. There was some fuss over Launch Pad, but since it was a gentle push the venom has been nowhere near as bad. Apple then integrate their App Store with it cleverly to gently nudge you the Launch Pad way from time to time. Apple's App Store was also a nice 'also' feature when it was first released, you could still install programs from elsewhere easily. As newer OSX revisions come out, it's slowly getting a teeny bit harder to do that (like now the app has to be signed with a developer cert, or you have to know how to bypass the screen - which Windows 8 now has btw). With WindowsRT MS made the app store the *only* way to get apps onto the device. Instead of a gentle push, it was a sledgehammer.

Now the biggest problem I've got with MS in the last few years is a steady decline in the quality of their output and a clear reluctance to listen to the community. I'm now going to put my developer hat firmly on. The ASP.NET team are really integrated with the community and output some great stuff - in fact I'd say they're a beacon of how MS should operate. The new TypeScript language is similarly super-impressive in how open it is to the community and how useful it is - yet totally free by MS despite not requiring anything MS at all. Now if we shift to Silverlight (now dead) things take a turn for the worse. Normally with MS dev tools, if an error occurs it will tell you exactly where and why. It's programmer-speak, but super-helpful. With Silverlight, across all 5 versions, you can easily end up with a generic error that requires you slowly removing code until the problem goes away, then adding it until it comes back and then you know what you did wrong. Silverlight died slowly - MS just stopped talking about it. No one knew until fairly recently if it was actually dead or not, no comment from MS. The WP8 SDK came out the same time the devices launched... hardly ideal if you want to cultivate an app store to rival the iPhone one.

So when Windows 8 came out, it was hardly a surprise that the control panel was split across two different UIs, that the two different UIs were badly integrated and that despite outrage at the removal of the start button it was left out. It's a slow decline MS have been in since Bill Gates left and now it's visible in their most prominent OS.

Can MS bring Windows 8 back from the brink? Undoubtedly, they've got the skill and the finances to do it. Apple came back with far less available to them. Personally though, I think it's going to require a culture shift. At the moment MS seems to be in a copy-Apple culture of 'we know best' without having the attention to detail Apple have. If MS can change it so they listen to the community, and pay attention to the small details; they'll be unstoppable. Some of the feats they've accomplished are astonishing, and I hope they can get back into their groove and start doing incredible things again.

Well that turned into quite the ramble... congrats if you've read all of this - now go outside.

TLR: Windows is an incredible engineering feat, shame Ballmer is destroying MS and doesn't care about developers any more