A new Copilot key to kick off the year of AI-powered Windows PCs
blogs.windows.com
blogs.windows.com
I predict the trailing mouse effect will stop following the cursor and go on its own adventures with occasional cursor privileges, that's when amazon will invent Just-Hover purchasing and your AI mouse gf will spend all your cash.
For the presentation mode key, it used to be its own independent key, but Microsoft changed its mind and told manufacturers to make it send Win+P instead. Some laptop manufacturers made it depend on the Windows version (through the ACPI _OSI method), so if you pretend to be an older Windows version, it'll have the former behavior instead of Win+P (though doing so could have other negative consequences, see https://mjg59.livejournal.com/85923.html).
Unfortunately, this was long ago enough (or the search engines got bad enough at searching old stuff) that I'm not finding the place where I originally read about that; the most I could find was a StackOverflow answer (https://askubuntu.com/questions/62319/is-there-an-equivalent...).
I'm honestly a bit surprised we're still not seeing the emoji key on more keyboards, given how popular emoji are. Do that many people use the right Windows key? Or even the AltGr key in English-speaking locales?
Copilot key doesn't sound all that useful, but still will be much better than Office key
https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/15/23874798/microsoft-window...
The Office key shortcuts get bound by Explorer when it starts. If you bind the keys when Explorer does not run, you own them and can then free them after Explorer has started.
I look forward to being able to remap this key to something that I don't associate with extreme fatigue. to me, a copilot button is like having an "advertisement" button, or something. absolutely useless.
Arguably of a slightly worse shade than Google and Apple, though the latter have plenty in the skeleton cupboards as well.
Is this already priced into their stock price ?
Ignoring the marketeer drivel of how "excited" they are and how a single key on a keyboard would make AI any more useful, I have to wonder how many people would actually use it. People who see AI as a threat or distrust it (or just don't think it has a place in an OS) will likely ignore it, disable it, or be annoyed by it. People who are enthusiastic about it would probably be just as likely to simply put it in a prominent spot on the task bar for easy access.
Feels like, just because ChatGPT and Dall-E etc are the "hot (semi-)new thing", this is just an effort to jump on to that bandwagon. I wouldn't be surprised if Copilot (at least insofar as it is integrated in Windows) will meet the same fate as Cortana.
As a practical question (I've not got Win11 and haven't experienced Copilot on there): what does it [i.e. Copilot] actually bring to the Windows desktop experience? Does it make anything more efficient, easier or more discoverable? I can't for the life of me think of a reason I'd need an AI to do any of the stuff I use my desktop OS for. At least the Bing chatbot (while creepy) in Skype makes some sense for the interface, but that doesn't seem to have its tendrils deep into the OS.
If the key can flexibly consume whatever content is in the current context -- images, audio, text, selectable files -- and potentially have access to RAG, it seems to me that the number of potential use cases is very high.
Of course, everything hinges on "flexible" -- if it's mono-modal and doesn't access context in an intuitive way, it'll be tough for it to find a place in people's workflows.
In my opinion, the Menu key would be better repurposed as a Compose key. It is very useful for typing characters that don't have symbols on the keys, e.g: ♥ ⇒ … — × · ÷ Å Æ Ø Ü.
I have used it in Linux and Solaris, which have support for it if you just enable it. For Windows and MacOS, you'd have to use a third-party utility at the moment.
I'm still bitter that the menu key seems to have disappeared from the keyboards recently.
Trully a well designed user experience
Also you can assign custom action under quick double press.
Why would someone do that when there's already a power button?
It was almost always Cortana or index service or disk defender or something Microsoft added with very good intentions. And I would deprioritize it, or tune it, or disable it if it was optional. And every time, Microsoft would turn it back on against my configuration settings and wishes and it would start messing up my system.
The most frustrating part of this was googling and debugging and finding many other people struggling with this, for years; and Microsoft not fixing it. And it seemed like they would gaslight by saying it didn’t happen, or shouldn’t happen, or it is acceptable that it happened.
I expect that this new feature will suck so hard. I’m glad I rarely use windows these days.
As if.
You may find it difficult to believe, but the people who work at Microsoft are people just like you. They have goals and get caught up in the whims of management, who are also people who get caught up in the whims of various things at various times.
“they” is doing a lot of work in this sentence, and also none.
No one in Microsoft is like you? Or no one on the team you were part of?
I leave places when people ARE like me. I learn a lot from those that aren’t like me.
I'm gonna have to use that term somewhere in the future.
This would make me sad and fortunately, I think engineers have a lot of choice over where they work. So if people are consciously building this stuff then I think it’s more likely that they drank the koolaid and agree than they are forced against their will to be crappy.
Nag screens and ads in the OS are things which an MBA tell you to do. Do not single out Microsoft for putting ads for their own products in their own products, because Microsoft weren’t the first to do this, they weren’t even the millionth company to do this. Being an OS doesn’t make Windows immune to this, as much as you or I may hate it.
If you’re a developer you understand telemetry. If you hate Microsoft you call it spying because “telemetry” doesn’t get people angry like “spying” does, so you say “spying.”
You’re gonna need to be specific about the EEE stuff. I don’t know of an example of that since the 1990s or maybe the early 2000s.
Secure Boot itself is perfectly sensible, for the reasons you describe. What's not sensible is hardwiring a key so that not even the user itself can change it.
> Nag screens and ads in the OS are things which an MBA tell you to do [...] Being an OS doesn’t make Windows immune to this, as much as you or I may hate it.
I can't think of any other operating system that has nag screens built in (as opposed to "hey, look at this new feature" toasts, which are also annoying but at least not deliberately designed to block your workflow).
> You’re gonna need to be specific about the EEE stuff. I don’t know of an example of that since the 1990s or maybe the early 2000s.
I'll give you that. I was actually thinking about the historical stuff here, but, true, that doesn't have to reflect current strategy.
> If you hate Microsoft you call it spying because “telemetry” doesn’t get people angry like “spying” does, so you say “spying.”
I can get just as angry about "telemetry" from other companies, no worries. To a certain degree, it's a useful improvement for the development process. What I see not as legitimate is e.g. using telemetry data to train AI, or give no options to turn off collection. Microsoft does the first e.g. with handwriting recognition, the second with "mandatory" information.
You're absolutely right that all of those are industry-wide trends where the competition is no better. I think where Microsoft is currently special however is the pure manner of aggressiveness of their nagscreens. It's also a difference if you implement this stuff in an application that the user can uninstall or directly in the OS.
Users CAN change the key. If you have a motherboard that doesn’t allow that, that’s on you and/or the hardware vendor, not Microsoft.
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20110809-00/?p=99...