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Designing the Start screen | |
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| Time: 10:33 EST/15:33 GMT | News Source: Microsoft | Posted By: Robert Stein | ||
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As we wrote about in our post on evolving the Start menu, after studying real world usage of the Start menu through a variety of techniques, we realized that it was serving mainly as the launcher for programs you rarely use. As more and more launching takes place from the task bar, the Start menu looks like a lot of user interface for programs you don't use very frequently. And the Start menu is not well-optimized for this purpose. It affords limited customization, provides virtually no useful information, and offers only a small space for search results. We found that people “in the know” who valued efficiency were moving away from the Start menu, and pinning their frequently used programs to the taskbar so that they could access them instantly in one click. We see this quite a bit on professional workstations where there are set of tools that all fit on the taskbar and are all used regularly—machines used by engineers, designers, developers, information workers, etc. | ||
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| #1 By 8556 (173.29.0.3) at 10/7/2011 12:34:02 PM |
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I read the article days ago and it smelled like BS then. It still reeks of rationalizing a radical change. While it is true that most people use icons on their desktop to run programs, when a problem arises I have our customers use the Vista/7 Start menu search bar to either start a program or run a command. Sometimes to access the Control Panel. Just because the Start menu isn't used by everyone everyday is no reason to get rid of it. I don't access my car's manual often either, but want it in my car's "glove box" for when I do need to use it.
If released in the existing format Windows 8 will fail on the desktop and join Microsoft Bob as a terrible desktop experience that MS put out. At least Microsoft Bob wasn't forced on people. Let's hope that MS puts Explorer as the default desktop UI and relegates Metro to small machines with touch screens. An initial setup selection of which to use as the default, with the option to easily change, without changing a registry value to 0 or 1, would be good for the general public also. Otherwise, Windows 7 may have an XP like extended lifetime thanks to user's choosing to keep what they like instead of risking Metro on their desktop/notebook PC's. |
| #2 By 95132 (24.131.63.35) at 10/7/2011 3:40:58 PM |
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^Ditto every thing that guy just said. :)
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| #3 By 79018 (74.70.251.160) at 10/9/2011 8:34:35 AM |
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The more I use the more I like it, although it does seem like two shared OS's. The pluses for now are the fast boot time, quick install, no drivers requested on an older PC, updates come daily, so I'll reserve judgement till at least a beta release.
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| #4 By 607662 (221.3.134.115) at 10/9/2011 9:39:14 PM |
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It was very exciting! Is a good thing
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| #5 By 2960 (72.209.197.132) at 10/10/2011 12:48:32 PM |
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Why they are so intent on changing one of the few things in Windows that they got right from the start is beyond me.
The mess they made of the TaskBar in Windows 7 was bad enough. |
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