Hacker News Reader

Comment by SlipperySlope | Hacker News Reader

"I am very worried that Microsoft may be about to shoot itself in the foot spectacularly."

See the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=q...

Just in case you ever have to turn off someone's Windows 8 computer - best memorize this ...

"In the Metro interface, hover your mouse over the Zoom icon that appears in the lower right corner of the screen. The Charms bar should then pop up displaying several icons. Moving your mouse up the screen will reveal the names of each icon, including Search, Share, Start, Devices, and Settings. Click the Settings icon and then the Power Icon. You should see three options: Sleep, Restart, and Shut down. Clicking Shut down will close Windows 8 and turn off your PC."

Yep, Microsoft buried the shutdown option in the settings menu!

When you see one of these at your local retailer, for a laugh ask the sales clerk to shut it off.

View on HN

To be entirely fair, the normal way of shutting the computer down now is to use the start menu. Of course, everybody is used to it, but they did have to get used to it at some point. And they did. So it isn't entirely impossible.

When I used OS X for the first time, I couldn't figure out how to do basic things either. In fact, as it stands now, I am not entirely certain how to shut off an OS X computer either.

Happily I'm on Linux and everything makes sense :).

Shouldn't the normal way of shutting down these days be pressing the power button?

  > I am not entirely certain how to shut off an OS X computer either.

Open up the terminal and type:

    sudo halt

(NOTE: In Linux, OpenBSD, and FreeBSD, the man pages state that 'halt -p' should be used for a power off, but the OS X man page states that it's just 'halt' with no -p tag available.)

Yes, that would work. That's actually how I sometimes shut down my Linux machine, although it doesn't even require sudo.

I was talking from the UI/mouse-driven perspective. I'm not entirely sure where the shutdown option/menu on OS X is. Of course, I regularly don't use macs, so it shouldn't be a surprise--it's not like I have a computer which I just don't know how to shut down!

 → Shutdown…

Or, press the power button once, get a restart/sleep/cancel/shutdown dialog (shortcuts: r/s/esc/return)

Happily I'm on Linux and everything makes sense :)

Unless you're running Gnome 3, where you have to log out then shut down, since there's no shutdown button while logged in. That's one thing Unity has over Gnome 3.

You can hold down Alt and then the Suspend button magically becomes Shutdown in the GNOME 3 shell's menu.

Yes, it's not a very discoverable feature. You basically have to find out about it on the Internet somewhere.

I'm actually on KDE. Because KDE is awesome.

Also, I was being a little bit facetious. The reason everything makes sense is because I've customized everything, so I'm the one who placed the shutdown button where it is.

Even so, I'm lazy so I use reboot/halt from the command line instead of the buttons anyhow.

Press Ctrl-Alt-Del, then choose shutdown.

If you are running Gnome 3, it's probably because you prefer Gnome 3 over Unity, KDE, LXDE, CFDE or any other GUI option you have.

If they bothered to remove the Start button, why are they still keeping the same UX paradigm...especially in Metro? It makes no sense. The whole UI and UX actually looks like a mess to me, and it's very inconsistent and much more complex than it should be.

Yes. They should have saved the start button and tried to keep familiar concepts that they could then later slowly phase out in future releases.

One way that they could have gradually introduced Metro in a way that would keep familiarity of use to old users and almost total backwards compatibility would have been to replace the desktop with Metro (i.e. the wallpaper and desktop icons). They could have then kept the start menu and panel[1] at the bottom (and perhaps default it to have auto-hide on). They could have even allowed windows to open up over the metro tiles, and then the familiar 'Show Desktop' button on the panel would be how you get back to the full metro screen.

There wouldn't be two modes and they'd still have a very similar appearance to what Windows 8 actually looks like today without having to confuse people used to the old way of doing things. The tablet and mobile version would then not have the start menu and panel, but everything else would look and feel the same.

They could even have implemented it in a similar way to their ancient 'Active Desktop' technology, except fullscreen and without the traditional icons.[2]

[1] I'm using the Linux term here. I really have no clue what they call the bar at the bottom because I haven't used Windows regularly for many years.

[2] http://i.technet.microsoft.com/dynimg/IC193546.gif

I can definitely see some benefits of keeping the taskbar/panel on screen, but I think they were primarily motivated by the belief that designing the interface around apps being fullscreen would be more attractive to developers. The bottom edge is pretty important screen real estate both for touch (appbar) and mouse (scrollbar, zoom).

The start menu had to go because Windows 8 is Microsoft's big gamble to jump into the tablet market. A start menu doesn't make much design sense on a tablet or smartphone and they're clearly trying to out-design Apple with Windows 8.

Of course, everybody is used to it, but they did have to get used to it at some point

Not really. Think back to your first encounter with Windows 95. What was the first thing you noticed, the first time you opened the Start menu? The fact that the bottom-most line read "Shut down" is probably high on your list. That was all you needed to know, and you certainly didn't have to "get used to it."

Interfaces need to be highly intuitive, or else highly discoverable. It doesn't sound as if Metro qualifies as either.

I shutdown my MacBook Pro about once a month (mostly for OS updates). Simply closing the screen puts the laptop into sleep and opening flawlessly brings up the OS multiple times per day. Perhaps MS is aiming for a similar os/hardware symbiosis with their next OS iteration which would justify hiding shutdown option.

> Yep, Microsoft buried the shutdown option in the settings menu!

I never shut down my phone or my tablet. They are always connected and always ready to go. Both of those are computers. That's what Microsoft is going for. If they can break the "shutdown habit", this will be a positive development for them.

A PC is not a phone or a tablet.

Sometimes you need to shut down your laptop or mobile devices to preserve battery life on trips.

Really? My devices take a week or more to show a noticeable discharge when sleeping.

I don't have any hard data to back this up, but my MacBook Pro seems to lose 10% or so if it's battery a day when asleep.

Or to avoid being thrown off airplanes.

I don't recall when I last used the start menu to turn off the computer. I have a button on my laptop and pressing it hibernates the computer. Very handy.

Putting it in Settings is a bit odd, but I would point out that the whole first three and a half sentences of those instructions become one quick continuous motion once you've done it a few times. (It's more like "swing the mouse pointer around a right hand corner and click Settings")

You can also find the power button by signing out. Swipe up again to see the login screen and the power button is at the bottom right. It's still not as easy to find as before and I ended up finding it by accident. An accidental right-click swiped the screen up and there it was.

If you want to turn off you computer, just press the power button for 3 seconds, that cuts power.

what device do you have that complies so quickly? My understanding was explicitly eight seconds for most things.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com