Windows 8.1 Update 1: More interface concessions | Hacker News Reader

Windows 8.1 Update 1: More interface concessions

arstechnica.com

27 pointstumba57 comments

And likewise, they're still shutting down from software, perhaps unaware that the power switch will do the job, and are conditioned to do so after years of operating systems complaining when they weren't shut down properly. So maybe it's not just Windows 8 that Microsoft did a poor job of explaining to Windows users—maybe it's every version of Windows since 95.

Can't speak for Windows 8, but in Windows XP, Vista and 7 if you have an update that requires a shutdown, pressing the button won't install the update.

The author seems like someone who learned about a new feature in one version of the OS and thinks others are ignorant for not seeing the change. In this case the feature actually has a downside if used all the time.

I would hardly call Peter Bright ignorant. He is one of the most informed voices in tech journalism, and all of his articles are fairly detailed and useful.

I didn't call him ignorant, I believe he thinks it of others.

Windows 8 on the desktop, while presenting some intriguing evolutionary possibilities, seems like an unstable transitional form. I do not use touch or tablet platform and consequently, I have not seen any compelling reasons for upgrading my fleet of Thinkpads from Windows 7.

My experience managing Windows servers is rapidly improving. More and more servers are running Core and I'm performing ever more administration remotely by command line using PowerShell.

I bring up Windows Server because, on that platform, Microsoft is clearly articulating a change in their philosophy of system administration. The interactive or scripted command-line is the future of Microsoft server administration. It exposes the underlying management and instrumenting capabilities of Windows in highly useful ways and allows consistent workflows for managing traditional deployments and virtual/cloud systems. They have been clear about this direction for years, and they have facilitated a long transition by continuing to provide the option to use full graphical installs, and by providing management consoles for their major products that simply execute PowerShell commands in the background.

Maybe I just haven't seen it because I don't follow the consumer facing groups at Microsoft very closely, but I wish Microsoft would take a similarly approach for the desktop.

Whenever I read these articles, I am thankful I am not an ISV developing for the Windows desktop.

I am actively against Windows 8 in a Domain environment as the system has severe permissions issues for workstations with multiple users. It seems that the first user to install items, create directories, etc. becomes the overall master of them and this makes even basic SysPrep difficult. I am tearing my hair out trying to get terminal servers and cloning projects done, stuff that was a breeze on Windows 7 in comparison. I wish Microsoft was smart enough to differentiate between their home consumers and their business consumers.

Our guess is that the issues will continue to keep us on Windows 7 into the next school year. I get the sick feeling we will skip 8 like we skipped Vista.

Windows 8 on the desktop has failed for me twice; the home OS build had issues so was changed to Mint Linux and the work/personal laptop Windows 8.1 build broke during normal use. I have chosen to Install Ubuntu on this computer and have a Windows 7 under VMWare Workstation. That has become the greatest OS(s) for me, installing Windows 7 in the background with VMWare for the Enterprise Software and keeping Linux forefront for the rest.

The thing that gets me is the constant upgrading of Microsoft products with exuberant costs with little room to upgrade, migrate, rollback, repair or anything for that without either spending more money and/or finding ways to fix yourself. At least with Linux, the community is trying to help you out and not forced to use a script on what to discuss or share as a fix. As long as Microsoft is not listening to the community, they will go down these odd paths and continue to keep those who support them lost, trying to keep up; before finally giving up. It sucks that they along with Apple are allowed to squeeze open source of technology and not even making good use of all these patents, partnerships and agreements. Maybe these f the world guys are onto something.

If the only problem with the Windows 8 UI changes were that people had to learn a few new ways of doing things, it wouldn't be a big deal.

I think what really fuels a lot of the ongoing frustration over this stuff is that it's a new way of doing things that is much more awkward than the old way. So, not only are some of your old habits invalid, but the functionality has been replaced by something you would rather not use in the first place.

Adding insult to injury here is the fact that the main reason these changes were made in the first place was to get Windows users accustomed to the tablet interface, with the assumption that they would want to use the same OS on their tablet that they use on their desktop. It was to give Windows tablets a leg up in the market vs. iOS and Android devices; it doesn't appear to have been based on a desire to simply improve the desktop users' experience.

I'm sure they also wanted to create a market for touchscreen Windows PCs too. There were probably some marketing people that were convinced that a touchscreen would simply be a standard thing that every PC had in the future. Who knows, it could still happen I guess. If it goes that way they may look like geniuses in 10 years. I'm skeptical though.

I would actually welcome a unifed interface across all devices I use. I'm not sure if Windows is the one I would use, but the idea itself sounds pretty good to me. I haven't used anything from Microsoft since Vista was released.

Remember, Windows 8 was well underway by the RTM of 7 (July 2009). So, they made a guess that touch screens would be everywhere when they were done. Unlike Apple, until recently, never controlled the hardware they run on.

They spent a lot of the post-DOJ years trying to find a way to bully the hardware vendors without getting kicked in the teeth and never found a way. This is why "signature" failed, this is why touch screens failed, this you could even argue is why early tablets failed (way early, 6+ years ago).

MS seems to have learned this, and started building their own hardware. The Surface 2 Pro is a remarkably nice to use device (and I didn't even reinstall the OS, I am using stock... gasp), it is my primary mobile platform replacing a 2013 Macbook Air. Being able to swap it between a (very heavy, but usable) tablet, and a decent laptop is a nice combo for me... and I doodle and write notes on it in meeting, the pen is wonderful and pressure sensitive.

The author doesn't seem to realize that what may be intuitive to people used to some are not intuitive to everyone. Restarting your computer/device isn't uncommon, and relying on people to use the device's power button isn't really a good idea. Plus, there's nothing in the interface that affords type-to-search.

Especially if you remote control the PC.

Brings to mind bad memories of hitting "shut down" accidentally instead of "restart" on a remote machine...

I'm an 8.1 user. Well sort of. My desktop is on 8.1 on my workstation and I usually have a high bandwidth connection between whatever client device I'm using and the desktop and use RDP. Over the last few months I've been using a 2011MBP as a client device and occasionally the wife's iPad. On a daily basis, I deal with Windows, Linux and FreeBSD platforms from both a development and administration perspective.

What has become apparent to me is that the only thing I still use on my windows desktop is Visual Studio, the MS dev stack and HyperV. Past that, I've slowly moved to a neutral ecosystem with standard formats.

When I look at this update, all I see for me is more pain to be honest. The 8.1 RDP experience is awful compared to windows 7 because of the whole hot corners thing. And they're adding more!! You have to run your desktop full screen in case you get stuck in a metro app. This is a royal pain. More than an hour on an RDP session is stressful and counterproductive. I've managed to reconfigure everything back to windows 7 levels but its still nowhere near as usable for a power user.

So, for me, I'm dumping all this crap. I'm spending the weekend moving to VMware fusion and windows 2008 r2 as a desktop (our target platform) just to run Visual Studio and I'll can the rest. I'll use the cash from workstation sale to buy a Retina MBP and just use that as a workstation.

Microsoft are really hanging themselves with this drive to change the UI. There are an awful lot of non windows machines appearing in the last two Microsoft consultancies I've worked at and I can see why.

I wont even go into the amount of relearning and churn that you have to put up with either.

Install a Start Menu replacement like StartIsBack (http://www.startisback.com/) or Classic Shell (http://www.classicshell.net/) and voilà, you've got the productivity of the Windows Vista/7 desktop and the performance improvements of Windows 8/8.1. No hot corners to worry about.

Even if you don't use a third-party Start Menu replacement, this update will mean less pain - with power and search buttons on the Start Screen, there will be little reason to use the 'Charms bar', which eliminates two hot corners. With the Start button's return in Windows 8.1, the bottom left hot corner isn't an issue, either, and the top left hot corner is only necessary if you use Modern apps (and it sounds like you don't).

Changing the default file handlers for audio and video files back to desktop programs for non-touch users is a fantastic change and I hope heralds a small shift of focus away from Metro.

The main problem with a major change to the GUI like Windows 8 is that it destroys a vast investment people have made in learning how to use a PC. A lot of user interface is comprised of arbitrary choices. It might be the case that a new way to do it (start screen vs start menu) is marginially better, but to be worth the change it really has to be significantly better, not just different.

It's amazing that Windows 8 was released like this when it seems like a basic amount of user testing would show that people are not going to be happy about having to learn a new interface. Most people who work with PCs are actually using them to get work done, and are very pressed for time and energy.

I'm sure it was very complicated in house, but from the outside it looks like management thought "if it's good for us, it must be good for the customer!"

I remember people complaining about GUIs, how CLIs were so much better and more powerful, how the mouse and cursor are so inefficient. When you change things people are used to, people are going to complain.

They still are for anything but graphical tasks (photo editing, drawing diagrams, etc.)

E.g. what's the fastest way to get a sorted list of all the .jpg files in a directory?

Type .jpg in a search field in the Finder vs. google how to do that using grep I guess?

Why would you use grep?

You tell me

Now you want to get that list of files in a text file, so that you can email them to someone or put them in a document or etc.

This kind of comment really annoys me.

CLI: You need to memorize at least a basic set of commands. There is contextual help once you know those commands, but there is no help to find out which commands do what in the first place. Clearly intended for what we now call power users.

Win9x/NT4+ GUI: All required operations are discoverable through reading what's on screen and going through the menus. No manual or googling required.

Mac since OS1/.Net GUIs: Even better, hotkey commands can be discovered in the Menus -> users can learn how to become faster while just using the programs.

OSX since 10.5: Any program on your HD, installed or not, and any operation within these programs can be discovered through system wide search, clearly indicated by the search symbol staying in the top right of your screen as well as the Help menu. Typing after clicking on Help will even point out the command's placement in the menu such that you can memorize for next time.

Win8/Ubuntu: Trololo who needs discoverability - let's hide most of the functionality behind non trivial gestures (we heard people like them on Macs[1] so let's go all in on them) => the UI now has similar discoverability properties as a CLI - you need to read the manual or google a tutorial to get started.

[1]Note: There is currently exactly one gesture that is really needed in the default settings on OSX (which I find a bad idea btw.): Two finger scrolling.

> Clearly intended for what we now call power users.

You would think that, but in the DOS vs Mac days a lot of non-power users advocated the DOS way, I still don't know why though. A Mac is a toy, was the argument back then.

People who call Mac toys have probably never used one for a good amount of time. There are legitimate ways to criticize Macs - this is not one of them.

You did read my comment, didn't you? I was talking about the DOS days, as in 'not today'.

Yes, I did read it. I'm implying that this hasn't changed - there's enough people who still think Macs are toys and a Windows PC is the computer for serious work.

> There is contextual help once you know those commands, but there is no help to find out which commands do what in the first place.

man command or command --help

Is this an example to what I wrote or a way to prove me wrong? If it's the latter, please read it again.

You are absolutely right about discoverability. This is the major difference compared to CLIs. But what happened is that on mobile you have very popular UIs that have no discoverability whatsoever.

You can't even hover a mouse cursor over something you suspect might be a control because there is no mouse cursor and what is and isn't a control isn't always clear either. Lots of secret gestures and lots of change in every version (at least on Android).

I'm a bit baffled as well as to why this can work. I suspect it might be because people don't use these devices for productivity and hence they only use a relatively small number of features. They don't need to discover new stuff all the time and when they do it's for entertainment more than anything.

Or maybe it's because there's a new generation of mainstream users that sees everything as a kind of adventure game where discovering hard to find treasures is the whole point.

Maybe Microsoft's problem is that their technology people ignore the very message their marketing people are trying to get across: PCs are for productivity, for creating things. If you're at work trying to get things done you're not in the mood for figuring out obscure features and the latest UX fashions.

Your point basically boils down the whole issue of why Win8 is a failure: MS blindly followed Touch UI trends in a context where Touch UI is simply weaker than Mouse/Keyboard, and they threw away many of the advantages of a Mouse/Keyboard oriented UI in the process. Metro might have an advantage through its consistency across applications for Touch devices, but as long as it's being forced onto Desktop users it will continue to alienate a big chunk of Microsoft's core userbase. Considering the current developments I expect a full 180 for Win9 - even the Vista start menu might come back at one point.

I don't think touch and discoverability are mutually exclusive. I do think that discoverability is very difficult to do on 5" screens but that doesn't mean discoverability must be equally bad on a 10" or 20" or 24" screen.

Microsoft can't just do a u-turn and go back to the traditional desktop. What they need to do is to scrap the old desktop altogether and use the screen real estate that's there.

Why not implement a fully featured tiling window manager? On a small screen, you see only one or two tiles and you have no discoverability. On a larger screen you get extra tiles that show available commands and help text. Once you learned your shortcuts you can remove those tiles.

I like your idea of a new window manager. There are a few more aspects that need to be taken care of if one wants to bridge Touch and Desktop UIs IMO:

* contextual menus should still be available to speed up certain tasks. For touch screens these should be available through a simple gesture, for mouse/keyboard it's the right click as always. I'm thinking that for touch UI the menu entries could be placed in a circle around the point where the gesture has been initiated, without hiding anything behind the finger (the OS should recognize from what direction the finger has been placed on the screen).

* the concept of a program menu should be reimplemented. Every function should be accessible through this menu, even if there are contextual elements that implement them as well. However, this menu needs to be easily usable on touch screens as well.

* there's one element I'd propose to be always visible, no matter what screen size starting at 7 inch: The search. This search should be able to find application commands and data, OS commands, other applications as well as and system wide data (in that order).

It's amazing that Windows 8 was released like this when it seems like a basic amount of user testing would show that people are not going to be happy about having to learn a new interface.

It's not that surprising when you consider all of the egos and politics going on at Microsoft during the run-up to release. A lot of these decisions were a matter of pride.

It's fascinating to me that they still keep the Building Windows 8 blog up: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/ You can go back and read the justifications for all the features that are now being redone or pulled out in service packs.

edit: This post in particular is great to look back on 3 years later: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2011/10/11/reflecting-on-...

I'm using Windows 8 (and 8.1) at work a lot and never joined the hate crowd. It's reasonably good and works for me.

My biggest gripe with the Metro (or whatever it's called now) stuff is using a machine via RDP. Imagine a crappy client constellation where Win+something doesn't work and now try to use that system (bonus points for 8, not 8.1).

On the other hand: I know that I don't represent the mass market. But for me, a power button actually makes a whole lot of sense.

8.1 is amazing and these updates, like the task-bar metro icon for running apps, actually sound useful. You know Microsoft is still relevant when some unverified blog post gets 300 comments of complete anecdotal nonsense.

In what way is Windows 8 amazing?

I can't help but feel that no matter what I offer up as Windows 8 being amazing, you won't agree.

Resource usage, responsiveness. They did a lot of good under the hood work with it. Just metro ... make all the good will that would have been won go to waste.

To do that, they've been removing features:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_features_removed_in_Win... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_features_removed_in_Win... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_features_removed_in_Win...

Probably the only real performance hog here is the Aero Glass and maybe backup. I doubt that the other have any meaningful impact.

Two gripes: Task manager just sits there awkwardly before appearing. Event viewer takes like five seconds to even be usable.

They worked fine in Win2k; why are they so slow now?

Yes I was so mad when Windows 8 came out because of Metro and I thought if they had just released something that looked like Windows 7 and said, "We made it leaner, we cut the boot time by 40%. Shutdown is faster too and we made over 200 smaller improvements to make things easier." I would have happily said, "Where do I buy?"

I recently replaced Win7 with Win8 on my gaming rig. I get faster boots, and more disk space for games on my SSD. There's a setting for going to desktop instead of Metro when no apps are open. So the only time I use metro is when I mistakenly left click the start button - to shut down, you can _right_ click the start button to get a contextual menu with a shut down option.

Overall, I find Win8 better in every way, it's nothing new that you have to change a few options to make Windows usable :)

You just need to pin a lot of programs to the task-bar. And pretend there never was a start-menu.

I've really never understood the fuss about the Start Screen. Although I can use Windows 8.1 for days on end without ever seeing it, because I just use Win-Q. (The little stubs that come up when I press Win-Q and Win-P are the only parts of Metro that I see for weeks at a time, honestly.)

Well for what it's worth, what little time I have spent in win 8 has been infuriating, and apparently it has been because it has never occurred to me to try hitting win-q or win-p. Next time I'm sitting at a windows machine I'll try to remember to give them a try.

This doesn't seem like a winning UI paradigm, however.

I personally found win-c for the charms bar essential, also gonna try the win-q and win-p trick.

To be clear, Win-P is an old keyboard shortcut (it lets you switch monitor output -- I use it to disable my second monitor when I want to play a full-screen game, and enable it again when I'm done), it just has a Metro look now. Win-Q is insanely useful, though, pulls up search and you can just type the name of the application you want.

Metro in Windows 8 was entirely useless for desktop use, especially multi-monitor use, Metro apps could only use one monitor at a time (so you couldn't run, say, the Netflix app on one monitor and then pull up the Start menu or the Metro version of IE on the other) and putting multiple Metro apps on the same screen was clunky at best. Windows 8.1 made this much better -- you can put multiple Metro apps on a monitor, and run Metro on all your monitors at once. You can even run a mix of Metro apps and the desktop on a monitor, so you can run a Metro IM client in the side of the screen and have Word up in the rest of the screen. There's such a paucity of Metro apps right now that I haven't found much use for this, though, but if there WERE Metro apps I wanted Windows 8.1 makes it possible to actually enjoy working with them.

The Start Screen still brings me nothing over the menu. The way I used to use the Start Menu, was Windows Key + Type. With Windows 8, the search interface eels all wrong: the search being in the top right (awkward), search results to left of search box (awkward), thinking that your search brought up no results, only to then arrow down (Ubuntu lens) and try again.

The mystery meat navigation/control of Windows 8 is the hardest part. I remember the first time I used a tablet with Win 8, and I felt totally lost. I had to Google how to use it. And I've since forgotten all the gestures.

Sure add power shortcuts, but let us have a discoverable user interface.

Also I have Win 8 on a 32inch TV, with fonts and tile sizes increased, and it's still not very usable. I always end up on the floor in front of it cursing.

Not to mention application switching (metro and desktop) etc. It just feels like a very beta interface, and the said plasters in the update don't sound as if they change much.

(Tip: Windows D, Alt + F4, Enter to shutdown lol.)

"And likewise, they're still shutting down from software, perhaps unaware that the power switch will do the job, and are conditioned to do so after years of operating systems complaining when they weren't shut down properly."

Well, what about stuff like rebooting, switching users and the distinction between the three sleep modes - shutdown, s2disk and s2ram?

1. Press start 2. Type "power butto" 3. Press down, enter

Here you can change what the power button, the sleep button, and closing laptop lid will do, including the different sleep modes.

But I don't always want to do the same stuff, especially depending on the circumstances (am I at home, how much battery is left,...).

I am not dumb, Microsoft, please do not take choice away from me. You ain't Apple.

What i see diff 8.1 and 8 1. Click at the start icon,right click can shutdown. 2. Customize title at metro icon. 3. Logout instead shutdown as arstechnica.com website. 4. At the below bar,click at the property can boot directly to desktop without go to tile of metro application. 5. Previous Version become File History ? i cannot on it.

It still looks far too much like a "tabletisation" of the desktop.

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