First look at Windows 8 UI | Hacker News Reader

First look at Windows 8 UI

crunchgear.com

8 pointsabhijitr6 comments

From the video: "[The apps] are designed for touch... but of course they work well with mouse and keyboard as well if that's what you have."

Sorry, but that's not how it works. Microsoft needs to realize this. Everything he was doing there would be terrible with a mouse.

Most of his gestures were flicks to right or left as that's the only "dimension" that the Metro UI works in.

A scroll wheel could do most of them - the snapping of multiple apps being the only outlier.

All of them would work with a 2D scroll interface (trackpad with gestures, mouse with trackball/multiple scroll wheels or touch surface), and laptops are the main bit of kit people buy these days.

The main problem I have with this is the same problem I have with the horrible Xbox dashboard - The left to right sliding tiles hurt my eyes like crazy. It's like trying to look out a side car window as you are travelling along and your eyes don't know what to focus on. At least the old Xbox dashboard tiles lined up behind each other so your eyes were always in the middle of the screen, but with this, ugh my eyes hurt just watching the demo.

Do they expect the enterprise to flock to this? As a nerdy consumer, I love that they're moving forward on UI, but as someone who deals with end users, this is going to scare the shit out of people. I don't see a start button anywhere in those screenshots.

If you watch the video, you'll see the Windows 7 UI pop up when he opens Excel. What he's showing looks like it will be just another layer on top of what we're used to with Windows 7 now.

Which means that for touch systems, this will simply end up like Windows Mobile 6: pretty UIs for touch screen, but as soon as you want to be productive, you need a mouse.

Sorry MS, I would never use what's in that video on my desktop.

You realise that the new tablet UI REPLACES the Start menu and is mapped to the start button right so whenever you click start, that's what pops up? They spelled it out in the AllthingsD/Computex events, and also state as much in the press release.

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2011/jun11/06-01...

With pinning/shortcuts, people barely use the "All Programs" part of the Start menu in the current Windows 7, so the only casualty is the start menu Search/Run, which will probably be re-implemented in the new start screen when you start typing on it.

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