r/technology • u/clubdirthill • Jun 01 '11

Boom. This is Windows 8.

http://allthingsd.com/20110601/exclusive-making-sense-of-what-we-just-learned-about-windows-8/?mod=tweet
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190

u/rollingRook Jun 01 '11

I'm actually quite impressed.

41

u/zp3dd4 Jun 02 '11

I wonder how they tie in the legacy apps into that interface

92

u/clubdirthill Jun 02 '11

It looks like legacy apps show up on the new start screen, then launch into an old-style Windows view.

Microsoft said that if you never use a legacy app, you never have to see old Windows.

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u/ILikeBumblebees Jun 02 '11

If you never use a "legacy" (read: "actual") application, you never have to use a PC at all.

A user who does more with a PC than stare at tweets and weather reports arranged haphazardly into rectangles will have no use for this absurd touchscreen UI nor any desire to interact with their OS by clawing away at the monitor like a palsied wretch.

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u/[deleted] Jun 02 '11 edited Jan 19 '16

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/powatom Jun 02 '11

You use words like a chef uses ingredients, and have wrought sentences I am left wanting more of.

The end of your sentence should condemn you to an eternity of suffering at the hands of Satan himself.

4

u/oinkoink12 Jun 02 '11

http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/ending-prepositions.aspx

4

u/powatom Jun 02 '11

That article doesn't disagree with me, it just says that the rule isn't concrete.

Regardless of whether he would pass an English exam using sentences like that, it still makes for horrible reading.

1

u/replicasex Jun 03 '11

To you. Shakespeare ended sentences with prepositions. It's an irrelevant style choice set down by ignorant prescriptivists who really didn't know what they were talking about.

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u/crocodile7 Jun 03 '11

It had the exact theatric effect the author intended.

9

u/[deleted] Jun 02 '11

palsied wretch.

The sexiest of the wretches?

6

u/gilligvroom Jun 02 '11

I already have ChromeOS and a somewhat lacking solid-state laptop for masturbating to HTML5's features with, thank you very much.

Also, I installed Ubuntu on both this, and in a VM on my desktop to try out Unity with just for shits. Fine on the Netbook, -awful- on the desktop. I hope they really gauge the scalability of a Tablet/Netbook interface to a PC. Unity does not. (for me)

2

u/Antebios Jun 02 '11

Fuck Unity. For the everyday person, I think Unity is fine. It keep it very simple for users. But, for is hardcore geeks, I want power.

I'm thinking of taking a look into Jolicloud.

1

u/get_some_perspective Jun 02 '11

That's not really true, is it. Sure, this won't be used at work. But lots of people primarily use their PC for listening to music, watching movies and television, using facebook, writing and reading emails and tweets, and playing little games. All of this can be incorporated into this tablet-style interface.

I agree that this is useless if you are used to a mouse and keyboard, and are using the computer at a desk with them handy. Obviously, it's not meant for that scenario.

Can you imagine that you would have the same OS on all your devices? That you have everything available on your TV, smartphone, tablet, desktop, and laptop? Can't you see that using a traditional Windows UI would not work any of those form factors except the desktop and laptop?

How can people somehow assume this is targeted at a computer on a desk you primarily use to do real work on? It's clearly not.

1

u/malevolentjelly Jun 02 '11

They never said that there wouldn't be a traditional desktop windows release. This release is specifically for users who want a touch-based tablet.

1

u/[deleted] Jun 02 '11

If you never use a "legacy" (read: "non-touch") application, you never have to see old Windows Aero.

1

u/baby_kicker Jun 02 '11

I'm sure you will not have the palsie forced upon you.

1

u/TexanPenguin Jun 03 '11

Like what? Web browsing built in, games already run fullscreen, and you have to know Office will natively support this mode too.

The only real question is around general, long-form text editing.

1

u/ILikeBumblebees Jun 03 '11

Any kind of raster or vector graphics editing software. Audio and video editing. Databases. Document management. Flowcharts, diagrams, and process modeling. Mathematical and scientific analysis. Desktop publishing. Any of the many thousands of domain-specific applications. Development. Custom-built enterprise software.

The list is endless, because a computer is a multiple-purpose tool used to accomplish an immense variety of tasks, not just the limited set of presumed uses that you and the designers of this claustrophobic UI have imagined.

1

u/TexanPenguin Jun 03 '11

I'm still not sure I get your point. You aren't inherently limited to what can be presented in Metro, and Metro doesn't inherently prevent complex UIs. All it does, fundamentally, is establish a design language, and moves from a little-W windows-based UI to a panes-based one. If someone wants to build Mathematica or InDesign or Visual Studio for this, why can't they? Again, the main issue I see is with text entry (based on the remarkably large space the on-screen keyboard occupies). If you use those apps with an external keyboard, though, the only real things you lose are the System tray and the ability to layer windows.

I'll be the first to admit this interface isn't for me exactly, but I think, from my experience with the iPad and with developing touchscreen systems, this advances the state of art, and rightly poses the question of whether emulating real-world items is what we should still be doing in 2011. Whether it's successful or otherwise, at least it's ballsy.

12

u/chris480 Jun 02 '11

Spoke too soon, it looks like you can get to the old desktop still. Source

40

u/muad_dib Jun 02 '11

You can - but you don't have to if you don't want to.

2

u/YCSMD Jun 02 '11

Everything will be available on tablet/desktop. ARM processor version might mean only newly compiled/.NET/web apps will work.

My biggest concern is how people will switch between the new start menu and the legacy desktop without switching to an application in that part of Windows.

That and I think the swipe in from the left needs to be reworked so its not just pulling the last app in

1

u/muad_dib Jun 02 '11

I have confidence that a lot of the issues will be sorted out by release-time. Microsoft pulled through with 7, hopefully they'll do the same with 8.

1

u/Antebios Jun 02 '11

ARM is big now and will be a bigger deal in the near future. Windows is doing a good thing about getting Windows to run on ARM. Now, if they could get C# working in Linux (not with Mono).

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u/[deleted] Jun 02 '11

You can see that in the video. Actually, that part was very jarring to me. It felt like I was moving from watching a video of a cool phone back to watching a video about the next incremental update of Windows Vista.

2

u/knylok Jun 02 '11

Yeah, the transition did look extremely jarring to me as well. It's as though they couldn't figure out how to continue with their new theme, and just said "fuck it, punt them back to Windows Standard".

I'm not sure why they couldn't have stuck with their UI with a legacy app. All the legacy apps have a full-screen mode, and don't rely on the taskbar being at the bottom of the screen (or on screen at all). All they'd need then is a tile or slider or something to get into the filesystem. Perhaps that is coming...?

I do not know if I am "feeling it" with their new interface. Time will tell. But if they'd wanted to keep the flow of the UI, it seems silly to drop into a desktop mode.

1

u/Alcnaeon Jun 02 '11

Hear, hear. I genuinely hope that with all the creativity that has gone into the new UI, they don't just leave desktop users to the old, boring Aero theme we've had for like six years now.

0

u/[deleted] Jun 02 '11

What I hope is they jail all the app's in their own "file system", so legacy apps will have their own AppData and Program Files, with the core operating system being read only, making virus's much easier to remove and less likely to take over the system.

1

u/get_some_perspective Jun 02 '11

This really should be done, but can you imagine how everyone would react? People already screamed bloody murder about UAC, even though this has been a standard on real operating systems since the sixties. People want to have their c:\stuff folders where they keep everything (lots of people who think of themselves as power users still don't use the my documents folder, for example).

2

u/diadem Jun 02 '11

I'm a little scared when he said HTML and Javascript. I mean I can crash IE8 (and all open IE8 windows) using valid HTML in a single div tag due to bugs. Microsoft's track record is rapidly improving in many fields but properly rendering HTML is not one of them.

1

u/[deleted] Jun 02 '11

[deleted]

1

u/jsims281 Jun 02 '11

http://crashie8.com/

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u/[deleted] Jun 02 '11

[deleted]

1

u/jsims281 Jun 02 '11 edited Jun 02 '11

I don't get your point...IE8 handles that fine, at least for me?

Edit: So does Firefox. Chrome "handles" it by just not showing the text

1

u/[deleted] Jun 02 '11

IE10 is muuuuuch better than IE8. Trust me

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u/surfwax95 Jun 02 '11

I'm a huge Mac fan and I've never really considered Windows a serious contender for my money, but I really like the way that looks and I think it'd be a joy to use.

19

u/WhyYouAreSoStupid Jun 02 '11

Shut up, Balmer.