fuchikoma

I'm curious why you think that. Care to explain? I think this is one of the best new features of Windows 8. You easily collect a lot of junk on your system, even if you are careful. The fact that it doesn't (based on your post, I had no idea it worked this way) wipe your Metro apps have something to do with how Metro apps work and installed (in a sandbox and all). But why would it suggest a dark future? It might also be good for non-professional tech support, like when your friend messes his up, just tell him to backup his documents and whatever and restore. EDIT: I looked it up and there are two modes for this - one keeps settings and metro apps, the other wipes all clean. Do you remember when Windows started pointing out that some drivers weren't officially certified? Then either in Vista or Win7 64-bit, people started having to employ workarounds and special measures to run uncertified drivers? What I see happening is the ghettoization of traditional Windows applications in favour of Metro apps. While more savvy users can easily manage both kinds, less experienced ones, who make up a clear majority, will just know that Metro apps are safer because MS has checked them out, and that they're more convenient because they don't have to reinstall them when they do a Refresh. So as long as Metro apps can meet their needs, the other ones will become obsolete because they're just seen as a risk and a pain in the ass. ...which will mean that most of the time, people will get their software through Microsoft's walled garden. MS will reap ridiculous profits (20-30% of all sales), but more importantly, what if you want to run something a little unconventional, like a port scanner, a wi-fi discovery tool, an unofficial firmware flasher for a device, etc. and find out that they are banned as "hacking tools?" (Maybe you could get some network diagnostics in a $300-5000 admin tools package from an approved vendor.) In this generation, you could just switch to the desktop and run them, if you're not on WinRT, but what about one or two generations down the road? It seems they're already technically poised to cut Win32 loose and move entirely to Metro, so once the opposition to that gets small enough, they could seize full control of what we're allowed to run on PCs. So switch to Linux? Sure, if you can find a PC at that point that doesn't use UEFI that only allows for installation of Windows. If this is allowed to go far enough, alternative OS users will pretty much have to make their own kind of PC to run on and then compete with the biggest player in the game to stay profitable. Provisions of TPM may even make it non-viable to hack your OS to allow you the freedom to install what you like again. Also, when the Windows App Store gets really busy, I wonder if we'll see the same complaints we've seen on XBox Live about slow, expensive certification keeping patches out of the hands of users. Maybe a developer can't afford to certify an update and decided it's nonessential. Or it takes a few more weeks than it would if you just downloaded it off their website.

No, guys, say it like you mean it...

I think intuition in products will almost always have to include some acceptance that most users will have prior knowledge though. Is it intuitive to use a faucet? Pretty much anyone in the world knows how to use one, but they were almost certainly taught how they worked since you don't normally run around and try to twist plumbing fixtures. So maybe nothing's intuitive, and the best you can design for is ease of use? Books have improved, of course, but at least personally (even as a newspaper hater...) I don't feel the spine-bound design of books is old fashioned when I use it. I feel another analogy coming on... The change from Start to Metro is sort of like if when ebook readers came out, they became the only way to buy a book, and only displayed 40 point text in 3 inch columns, when print books had supported a range of formatting options all along. WinRT doesn't support the desktop as I understand it? And I wouldn't put the fate of the platform on it, but I would say the value of the platform is probably diminished by lacking wallpaper. To many I'd imagine it's like buying a modern phone and not being able to set custom ringtones. I think what you've said about the tablet market and MS' ambitions are right on. And despite my opposition to this interface on the desktop, I don't mean that it's all bad - just inappropriate. I expect this tablet and phone push will not dominate, but be reasonably successful for them, and end up pushing more people into their development environment making Windows Runtime apps. I actually suspect that's one reason they're pushing so hard to make seemingly everything they make Metro styled. The bigger they can make this thing, the more MS-trained developers there will be, in turn strengthening any or all of their platforms. Of course, you could say that for any platform, but I think the thing is, they're making three(?) look like one big one and even if development isn't identical between them, they all get more people using MS' dev tools. Devs may feel more confident in the platforms with the appearance of Metro holding them all together. I think it's actually a pretty smart way to leverage their brands to buoy up a more fledgling platform like the RT/app store model. (Though that quick restore mode that wipes non-Metro apps suggests a dark future for general purpose computing on Windows...)

@FDS I think the problem most of us have with the UI isn't failure to understand, but disagreement about its usability on a "full fledged" computer. The "start" menu could be made to display a huge list of things at once, and its successor still managed a pretty quick, compact, continuous list, but the current replacement is massively overbloated size-wise, making it feel quite crude by comparison. Sure, you scroll or swipe through it and tap an icon to launch - we get that. List vs tile is a huge difference, especially if you have RSIs and actually use the menus. It's like the difference between going to the store down the street and the one across town. Something that is intuitive, if you don't know what you're doing, and you try what should work, does work. I had to qualify it a bit because certain processes become common knowledge after more than a decade, like driving, WASD, the start menu, turning volume and channels up and down on a TV, etc - there is some training up front, but it's expected that most anyone would know how they work. Win8 may reach that point by 2023, but it cannot claim it yet when it's a new change that has hundreds to thousands of (or more?) people searching the Internet to find out how to shut their computers down. I'd say a typical Windows interface looks dated in the same way a pen does. The design is so understated that it doesn't really have much to stick it to a particular time. That's probably why Win95 still looks a fair bit like 3.1, Win7 still looks a lot like 95, and MacOS, OSX, OS/2, Gnome, KDE, Workbench, GEM all look pretty similar - spaced icons with text, in grids, in folders, with widgets to close or modify folder windows. If you break down the distinction between folders and screens, you can throw PalmOS, iOS, and Android into the same mix. Certainly, it's an OLD design, but so are books. Do books need to be reinvented because they're dated? Maybe they should all open from the top, or be entirely gatefold, because this is 2012, dammit! When I crack a book I can't shake that feeling of "My word! I'm back in 700 CE perusing manuscripts!" But more seriously, it's the garishness that dates it. It's like how if your house has white interior walls, it doesn't make it look old-fashioned, but if it has tacky old wallpaper it looks quite dated. Speaking of wallpaper, I don't know if you've noticed, but almost anyone likes to customize their interface. The most PC-phobic users I worked with still had custom wallpaper of their kids, their motorbike, funny pics they got in email, etc. It's used on most iOS devices, and probably most Androids (the ones I've seen at least.) Imagine how well that will work with tiles covering 90% of the screen. Or how good most wallpaper will work with bright primary colours pasted all over it. It's an interface for marketing screenshots, not users. Once again, it'd be great if it were changed for the better, but it appears to be changed for changing. What should they have done to market to average people? Why not do what's made them so much money up until now? Release another OS with improvements under the hood, and the interface people expect. Make Metro an app - like, really an app, something you have to turn on or launch from the desktop, like the Win98 Active Channel Bar. What we have now is just a channel bar (figuratively) that you cannot turn off, disingenuously poised to herd people toward Microsoft's app store so they can start collecting big royalties like Apple has done. Can't blame them for trying, but also can't really appreciate it as a user. [edit: "common knowledge" is more accurate than "cultural institution."]

Yes, I think that is well understood about it, but that is problematic. You see, iOS runs on iPhones. iOS runs on iPads. OSX runs on desktops and servers. The information density on the Metro tile system is far too low for these platforms and rather than being "easier," it is simply cumbersome. Like Bob,, Sugar,, or At Ease. My desktop (or even laptop) is not a smartphone. It's not a tablet. It's not even an appliance. It's a multipurpose data management system, and I prefer an interface that is more optimal for sitting at the screen and clicking on items instead of sitting across the room on a couch or thumbing through a list on a phone. You must have seen Programs menus that take up 2-3 columns of text or more, right? I would much rather that not equate to 10 screens of mostly empty boxes and background processes I do not need running, fetching data and updating displays to tell me the news and weather in my program list. Careful you don't get so smug you lose your perspective. I used to jump on the anti-MS bandwagon... until I tried alternatives. OS/2, BeOS (actually quite good), Finder (MacOS), Workbench, GEM, QNX, a range of RedHat and Mandrake Linux, DragonLinux, PhatLinux, Gentoo, Ubuntu, Mint and others... so yeah, comparing to other OSes, Windows 7 is damn intuitive, unless you hold it up to iOS or PalmOS, neither of which are really comparable in functionality or use. Also, in the world we're in, it's not that usual to see someone who is about to start using Windows 8, but hasn't used any other versions of Windows since Win95. So while it's a little unfair to consider experience in intuition, for something like this, it's like driving a car. To a driver, it's intuitive for the pedals to be laid out as clutch, brake, gas - not clutch, brake, with a throttle lever on the wheel, even though some people could learn it quickly with no prior experience. Or more realistically, an auto shifter that goes "PRNDL" as opposed to "DNRL" with "park" on a button on the dash - totally workable, but a needless reinvention for the sake of change. Did you just say putting shutdown in the charms menu was intuitive? Even after I posted pages and pages of apparently much-needed tutorials for finding it, along with people who couldn't find it? It's infamous at this point. Look, you should know I take things issue by issue, and there are a bunch of things in Win8 we should all get... but to stand up for the shutdown change is really defending the indefensible. A "list" view for one. Something to take the humongous tiles down to small one-line text descriptions with small icons. Then it was never a shortcut to begin with. You are just arguing semantics at this point, but the matter being discussed is whether it was removed from the UI. It was not. It was changed from an icon on the left, to a box on the right, and it does the exact same thing as before. That's not really something that's been borne out by my experience. It wasn't a bitch to figure out what was what in Win9x/XP/Vista/7. For one thing, alphabetical order makes it very predictable, though I can only imagine what would happen if you auto-sorted 8 pages of variously-sized tiles alphabetically after the fact. Even in DOS (MS, PC, DR) it's very clear what is what, and the only colours are grey and black. Using colour in design can be useful, but it's how they've done it that is an issue. It looks like they're just doing it to draw attention to their cobbled-together tile design, which IMO, is a mistake. If anything they should try to make it look less chaotic, but maybe they tried that and failed, so they decided to go the opposite way and make it look deliberate? Colours in game design are a good thing, especially when you want to convey something playful and vibrant. Using them haphazardly in a UI though is like writing a manual in Comic Sans MS. Flamboyant colours are also very good at making sure a design is not timeless. Just look at some 70s stuff with the orange, brown, white, darker greens, etc. To me, what they've done here makes it already look dated, since it feels like the colour schemes they were pushing with WinXP. It's a trip back to 2000. As Dean pointed out, they also reuse colours that are used arbitrarily to begin with, so if anything it would slow you down looking for "the blue one" instead of looking for a full colour icon of something (though at least some users are working on bringing icons/pictures to the tiles.) Colours were useful for distinguishing icons, but now icons are white. Yay, colour. I'm afraid the big issue is not that they have changed things, like you keep implying, but what they've changed and how. Too much feels like they've just reinvented the wheel to claim some originality, and left us driving on hexagons. But... Windows seems to alternate between creative and sensible versions. This is the Vista, ME, 98 first edition variant, and I'm sure Windows 9 will carry many Windows 8 improvements along with a more broadly palatable interface based on user feedback and sales numbers.

"It's a brilliant design, people are just too dumb to use it" is a lame argument. If you design something to be usable, and most people can't use it, it's not because it's too brilliant for them - it's because it's a bad design. That's why guys like Dieter Rams or Jony Ive are so famous in industrial design. That's one of the reasons the iPad caught on like it did. It boldly dared to give users less flexibility and fewer options than comparable tablets, but because it was simple, it had mass appeal because it was usable to non-geeks. While it holds almost no appeal to me personally, I have to admit, that is a great design for what it is, because... it took an old idea that never took off no matter how it was pushed, and made it a must-have thing. Taking something that has been quick and intuitive for the last 18 years and obscuring it, especially when an analog of its former location remains, is bad design - unless maybe the new design quickly makes the process much more efficient, which it does not. "I know! Why not change sun visors in cars so that you crank them down with a little handle on the door? That would be so innovative..." The "magical button" was called "Start." Seriously? Your copy of Windows 7 uses a Windows logo button if you're all into Aero. Shut down the PC? Start. Open the control panel? Start. Launch a program? Start. Manage printers and devices? Start. Get help on the OS? Start. Access your documents? Start. Search for something? Start. Run something? Start. and so on... So yeah, it's "the button that does every major task." Having not only multiple menus, but multiple paradigms to access the menus, just for the basics, is backwards. It's stupid. It's incongruous. It's kludgy. No amount of being able to use it once you're taught how changes that. You're arguing past anyone who disagrees with you. None of us are saying all change is bad, even if you're saying that's what we're saying. We're saying these particular changes are less efficient, less intuitive, and not for the better. Change is fine - we're on a video game forum - and while the medium slowed down a lot when 3D became easy, change is still the norm. Change is not automatically good either though. It's funny you claim the show desktop shortcut was removed, and in the next sentence you point out where it was moved to. If it's still there, it was not removed. But somehow knowing that makes you an "old man afraid of change." Can't argue with logic like that... just as you can't cross a bridge that wasn't built. FWIW, the Metro tile design looks bad. It looks kind of cool on a Lumia, but on anything bigger, it looks very Fisher-Price. Big, chunky, colourful, simple. Give me a grid of icons over wallpaper instead of that anyday. Colour is nice, but I don't go to dinner in a cobalt blue coat, bright green pants and vermilion shoes - I'd look like a clown. Basically, it's the icon or program list version of one of these:

Why would I assume to press Win + C though? That's a function that's never been needed before in Windows, and a shortcut for a thing that was (is?) really of questionable utility in the first place when there's a supposedly better alternative to the Start menu presented at the same time. It only makes sense to do that once you know it inside out. On the other hand, if you can find the console, it's quite intuitive to type "shutdown /?" even if you don't know there's such a command, to see whether you can get some help on it. It worked like a... *cough*... charm. And if shutdown isn't hidden, but in an area that makes a ton of sense, then why did it cause such widespread confusion and condemnation from people testing it? It made so much sense that almost universally, it's been criticized for being hard to shut down. Because the Internet changes quickly and the product has shipped, mostly I'm finding the hundreds of tutorials on shutting it down now, not the forums full of confused people from a month or two ago. It's still a very visible issue for many users though because it's gone from the simplicity of using the button that does every major task, to a process about on par with changing recording input devices. http://www.shutdownwindows8.com/ http://features.techworld.com/howto/operating-systems/3406048/how-shut-down-windows-8/?intcmp=ros-md-acc-p-hwt http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/how-to/software/3405667/how-shut-down-windows-8/ http://www.askvg.com/how-to-log-off-restart-and-shut-down-windows-8-pc/ http://news.softpedia.com/news/Windows-8-Shut-Down-Process-Needs-Some-Streamlining-225173.shtml http://superuser.com/questions/335431/how-do-i-shutdown-restart-windows-8-preview http://superuser.com/questions/491008/how-do-i-shutdown-windows-8 http://www.windowsitpro.com/article/windows8/shutdown-windows-8-140937 http://www.neowin.net/forum/topic/1099037-sigh-how-do-i-restart-or-shut-down-the-pc-in-windows-8/ http://www.forumswindows8.com/general-discussion/how-shut-down-windows-8-a-5539.htm http://www.forumswindows8.com/general-discussion/how-shutdown-computer-windows-8-a-5292.htm

I'm guessing what FDS is getting at is that we have a lot of labelling that suggests environmentally friendly/sustainable/pesticide-free/fair-trade etc practices, but if the wording is not just right, then it doesn't necessarily have to be certified to claim it. Also, lots of taking advantage of ignorance, like the assumption that organic crops wouldn't have had pesticides used, when it really just restricts it to certain ones and so on. Or maybe things like "and $0.10 from every purchase goes to plant trees in Brazil" making little overall difference compared to the product itself, but giving the consumers something to feel good about for "making a difference."

The Safeway chain in Canada, and some other chains have used coin-lock carts. They just take a quarter, rather than a whole dollar or more. I think there have also been versions that take two quarters, and maybe ones that take $1 by now since that's still doable here... but I'm not sure because I haven't really used them in ages. It seemed like more of an early-mid 90s thing and now most carts are "free" again. (Free to wander parking lots and ditches it seems...)

Song's nothing new, but the video's surreal

Two vids... I don't see why not, but if someone likes it, you'll never know which one they're responding to. I'm happy to post 2 at once, but that's because I could go on almost endlessly. I try to keep it to one for my own posts most of the time. Speaking of anime music, this one's been in my head lately... I start too many series and stall halfway to start another but I'm trying to curb that, so I'm trying to push decisively through Shana II so I can start something else.

As eleven said, iOS sort of reclaims programs as needed once you leave them. If it doesn't, it can use the RAM image to relaunch them quicker. It's sort of like how deletion works in a FAT filesystem. But I have an iPhone 3GS, so it often gets sluggish or runs out of memory these days. It could just be iOS 5, which is sluggish at the best of times. Definitely agree. MS usually gives a few ways to do something for flexibility and ease of use, but this time they've thrown out a lot of mainstream users' habits to support their new vision. Things like hiding the shutdown menu, making right-click menus appear away from the cursor, or making the "Start menu" a humongous tiled multi-screen mess (because we've never seen a multi-screen minimal text Start menu?) just seems counterproductive and deliberately obfuscates normal functionality. MS has been pushing tablet "enhancements" since at least WinXP, and it's been no secret Bill Gates loved tablets even if he was the only one... but now that he's not running the show, it seems like MS is trying to force everyone to use tablets, just as almost no one has agreed to do in all the previous generations. Restarting is a great example because it's so fundamental. In previous generations I'd press "Win, U, R, Enter." Win7 messed it up a little, so it became "Win, right, right, R." Then I tried Win8... "Win... no, that's not it... Is it this menu? Nope. That one? Nope. Maybe it's in settings? Come on... it has to be pretty clear where it is... Poke here. Poke there. Are you kidding me? There's not even a way to shut it down?" At which point I searched online and found dozens of others with preview builds searching for the same thing. Eventually I ended up using a console command to issue the shutdown as if I was running a server. That is not good OS design - it may be a new low point. It's like the return of MS Utopia.

I don't use Android, but I do have a friend who was aghast to see how much crap ran by default on a Galaxy tablet he got when he used a real task manager instead of the bundled one... I was actually referring more to the app-babysitting mess that iOS became after version 4. Usually you can forget about what you're running and just switch and it'll smoothly slip unused apps into inactive memory and reclaim them as needed. However... sometimes things get sluggish or big games need more RAM, you fire up the app-killing bar and fire away... at like, 20-30 unclosed apps. I also ended up with a ton of apps open in the background a long time ago, messing with some Windows Mobile demo units, but the paradigm seems totally different these days. In fact, it might have even been WinCE back then... Exactly! Great example. These days it's less of an issue since the dockbar is like a taskbar and if I remember right, it puts a dot by running, permanently docked items. Still... I've often seen systems of users I was supporting who had closed all visible windows on multiple programs, but I could still switch tasks and quit each one from its application menu.

I can't criticize too much since I've basically just played with release candidates and noped out of there after trying for an hour to shut down... But I do forsee one big thing: Like with many smartphones, I bet we're going to see more users now who have a dozen or more programs open at once because they used them, then switched to something else and "made them go away" thinking they were closed. The taskbar was actually quite a nice revolution in that, and even then, things that hid in the systray often ended up invisible to people.

Using the power button to shut down isn't so bad. It's been alright since Win98 or so since ACPI became standard and it just became another software button. I always use it on my laptops - basically it just signals the operating system to shut down all apps, flush disk caches, etc and shut down in an orderly manner. Maybe at worst, the calls to shut down programs would come at a higher priority?

Didn't they change the final version to force booting directly to Metro so you have to start the desktop manually? That would make it seem like just an app... Also, since you've spent so much time using it, how strong is the push to use cloud services? Do you use the Windows Live/Passport/online ID login? Any noticeable loss for not using it?

Oh definitely if you take it seriously. It was angry rhetoric to respond to an absurd issue. Even in Italy I'd think it'd just be more of a chilling effect on Earth sciences and warning services. I also don't expect the ruling to stand, but frankly, I wouldn't expect it to get this far either.

Wow. Convicted of non-clairvoyance. If that doesn't get overturned... it would almost herald a new dark age.

I've done it in Gran Turismo 4, Forza 3, Forza 4, Wipeout HD and Wipeout 2048. Wipeout Pulse also had something like that, but it was pretty much just setting up the camera position for a normally rendered in-game shot. Still, I was kind of thinking of FPS when I suggested more games use it. I remember in Counter-Strike there was a killcam mod on some servers that would save screenshots of headshots you got. It'd be cool to go back through a replay though and set up the camera with real, advanced photography settings and take some nice photos of memorable moments.

Coming out of sim racing, I have two suggestions: Rewind button - I don't know many games that use this. I've heard of PoP: Sands of Time, and seen a sort of rewind-until successful mechanic in Linger in Shadows, but mainly I'm thinking of the Forza Motorsport games. Have you ever played a really long race in Gran Turismo, like 6+ laps (which is nothing compared to some races...) and you're doing everything right, but on the last corner, some mindless AI spears you off the track, costing you the whole race? When that happens in modern Forza games, you press a button and it rewinds the action a few seconds and flags your lap time as not clean. So basically it'll hinder you if you use it to set record times (the slowest clean lap still beats the fastest "dirty" one,) but it doesn't ruin the entire race for one mistake. It also lets you experiment with different approaches until you find the one that works, so it's a great learning tool. I'm not sure how this could be broadly applied to other games, but I think it could definitely be explored more. Allow it in cutscenes and non-combat scenes to catch lines people said that you missed, for instance. I'd also love it in games like Unit 13, where I have a grenade, I see a double doorway a few feet away - any idiot could make that throw - so I aim the crosshair between the open doors, throw, and the grenade bounces off the doorframe or the box I'm hiding behind or some other stupid place, landing at my feet and killing me. What? Why should I be punished for not even making a mistake? Rewind could save 15 minutes of retreading so many times. Photo mode - A camera emulator for taking enhanced screenshots. Typically you'd find this in a replay mode. Pause the replay, move the camera to the best place to set up the shot, adjust camera settings like exposure, focal aperture, shutter speed, etc and shoot. Then it renders a high-res, enhanced rendering of the scene. It's a little thing, but it's kind of fun for fans of a given game, and it generates all sorts of nice, enhanced rendering screenshots of the game to act as word of mouth promotion. Also, I've really developed a taste for a certain kind of retro-themed game the last few years: Unforgiving games with no lives and quick restart - Things like Super Meat Boy, VVVVVV, The Impossible Game, IWBTG, etc. Sure, it SEEMS hard, and feels satisfying when you beat a level, but the difficulty of these games is really tied to your patience level since it will never slam the door in your face with a "game over" screen. I find this allows for a nice mix of high challenge and low stress and really, there's little need in most places to do the old ceremonial arcade ritual of stopping everything, showing you you've lost a life, and starting the level up again, and least of all to stop the game and tell you you can't play anymore in your own home. "Oh, I did badly, so I should feel bad and reflect on that while I spend the next hour getting back to where I was when I lost before..." A lot of people don't have time for that kind of thing, but also don't want games with a win button or big flashing indicators telling them everything they need to do to beat the game on the first try. So there's the niche for quick, brutal, streamlined games that offer a challenge, but let you make the most efficient use of your time and effort to clear them.

Can't help there, but have you looked into small Bluetooth keyboards to augment other phones? I know it's not optimal, but there must be a thumbboard or something you could just stack onto half the screen and type away with?

Is this thread broken for anyone else? For me, the first post says "Yeah, I have subtitles turned on for that reason. [...]"

It wouldn't be very good for me if a game required the sensor portion of that. "Please pick up the controller and hold it firmly." already holding it "Please pick up the controller and hold it firmly." squeezes the controller "Please pick up the controller and hold it firmly." I can't help it if my hands are room temperature, dammit!