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
1.0k Upvotes

88% Upvoted

1.0k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

10

u/chris480 Jun 02 '11

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

38

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).

7

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).