Windows 9 Changes

According to The Verge, Windows 9 is rumored to ditch the Charms Menu and introduce Virtual Desktops and floating Window Apps. :thumbsup:

Windows 9 will kill Microsoft's awkward Charms menu, introduce virtual desktops | The Verge

 

I'd prefer they continue with Charms being optional and disable-able (how they are in 8.1) instead of removed entirely. Without charms even as an option, how will Windows tablet users control brightness and other system settings? The charms menu was for Windows tablet users what quick-settings in the notification shade are for Android users, allowing you quick access to screen brightness, rotation lock, volume controls, etc, as well as a universal, touch-friendly way to access the full PC settings menus.

Will Windows tablet users have to go to the desktop now to access all the system settings that used to be in Charms?

 

That won't be a problem because according to articles already posted by tech sites, Windows 9 will AUTOMATICALLY detect what hardware it's running on and optimize the OS UI for the best user experience. So a Tablet will get it's optimized touch UI with a Charms menu while desktops won't have that feature turned on and i'm not sure or least it hasn't been mentioned if a PC will have the ability to enable certain tablet UI based options.

 

Except that some sites are reporting that Charms is going to be gone, full stop, not merely optional. Hell, it's already optional, it's just you have to manually deactivate it (in the taskbar properties menu) instead of it auto-detecting.

That means gone, not merely optional.

 

It's kind of surprising Windows never did have virtual desktops over all these years (not counting the power toy for XP, which wasn't very good compared to Linux virtual desktops). Whether it will make a big difference, I'm not sure. The target audience for it likely overlaps a lot with those who are already using a Unix-like system instead of Windows, and are power users of said Unix-like system and aren't that likely to switch to Windows.

Hopefully there's some more interesting changes coming. Windows 9 needs to be a compelling upgrade to get people to switch to it from 7 or XP.

 

Great, I just got used to it and now it will be removed!
Seriously, it's pretty handy on a tablet.

 

Problem is tablet are now stone age....it's iPad.....tablet aka surface which is now been torpedoed and gone under...lol.. is a pathetic attempt at trying to regain market shares the iPad is now holding onto. Tablet are yesterdays toys....rather they forgot to focus on the PC platform which was and still is their bread/butter market forget that and Apple OsX will take over like what the iPad is doing now.

 

Windows is not for tablet, use iPad!

 

I wonder how much "OMG WHERE DID MY PROGRAMS GO!!!" confusion virtual desktops will bring. I mean, it took years for the luddites that make up the majority of Windows users to get used to Tabbed Browsing...

 

Speaking of tabbed browsing (I still can't believe IE didn't have standard support for tabbed browsing until October 2006), it's about time Explorer supported tabs without extensions. I have no idea how many hundreds or thousands of times I've closed-all on a bunch of Explorer windows because there were too many to manage. Notepad ought to support tabs as well. And while they're at it, Notepad ought to not choke on Unix line returns.

 

Maybe Windows 9 will let you change the mouse pointer speed without paying 100 euro for the "Pro" version? I'm so stoked to find out!

 

On which home version of Windows can you not do that? I can do so (in XP Home) by going to Control Panel --> Classic View --> Mouse --> Pointer Options, and then choosing a setting along the slider for "Select a pointer speed". Windows 95 has the same option in the Mouse part of the control panel, only in the "Motion" tab instead of "Pointer Options". I can't imagine that they would've removed that option in Vista, 7, or 8, though I don't have any home editions of those to test with.

 

Good riddance.
This particular POS was among the worst offenders in a long list of UI idiocies that made up Windows 8.x.

 

iPad is too limited for my taste. I have an ASUS T100 and for a cheap little device it sure packs a lot of features.

 

We certainly wouldn't want more than one hardware and one software company involved in the tablet market, would we?

 

Try Windows 8.1 (home edition) and imagine again.

I mean, it's intended that the mouse/pointer manufacturer software should use the documented functions, of course, and that you should just use that software. That's a sound design-choice in a way, to expose the interfaces and have these maintained throughout the UI (instead of having an old interface that can't really be supported in subsequent editions, or which works somewhat but not always, etc), but not replace it and force users to have two different ways to control input depending on which one your software happens to be using.. lots of examples in Windows where some of the mouse-roll, movement interfaces are simply not exposed, or indeed controlled by two different programs, or the program itself through some workaround (that happened to be necessary at the time to even get at the function, etc).

But the net effect is that some can't actually change the mouse pointer acceleration without breaking apart the install provided by their laptop-manufacturer. A lot of Windows 8 functionality works like that - they've removed or replaced routines, without really thinking about how that functionality would be controlled. Things like having auto-connect for vpn, for example. To get that in Windows 8, you would have to edit the install with an admin/pro version. Meanwhile, when setting up the connection itself, the options exposed in the new UI are insufficient to actually connect to a non-cisco "registered" provider. For whatever reason, things like that persist with MS products.

 

<s>Gosh, that certainly isn't an incentive to use Windows 8.1. I thought that we'd been increasingly moving towards mice being plug-and-play and software not being necessary unless you had a fancy mouse with all sorts of extra features. While I don't use that particular option much myself (although I've been considering using it to fine-tune the settings for my new mouse), it's nice to know that you can plug-and-play a mouse, and if it's a different DPI than you're used to, you can just switch that setting in Windows and be set, no having to hunt down manufacturer software which may or may not be easy to find.</s>

Edit: Looks like your point about pointers may have been countered. The screenshot in S.SubZero's post looks exactly like what I see in XP, actually. It doesn't appear to have changed at all.

I never managed to get the VPN setup built into Windows to work on my Win7 Pro work laptop, and just use Cisco's standalone software when I need that. Granted, once I found out how easy it was to get it working via Cisco, I didn't really try to get it working in Windows anymore. Not that that's a good excuse for it not working in Windows 8, if that is the case, but my expectations for that aren't super-high (and I presume any employer I have where that's the only option will have the expertise to get around any setup issues that come up).

 

Windows 8/8.1 uses a very aggressive sleep wake cycle. Supposedly W9 will take it up several notches. One way around that is to create a power plan for high performance.

 

...ok. So they changed it from "hardware" to "system". And making the "mouse" properties not a searchable item.

>_-

 

None of this is correct.

 

I don't understand what this means. I was showing you that I was on 8.1 non-Pro. Much like Win7 and XP and Windows back as far as can be remembered, the mouse properties are under Control Panel.

 

Oooh. There we are. My bad.

 

Windows 9 set to include Cortana digital assistant | The Verge

 

Makes sense. It always surprised me that Apple dragged its feet in adding Siri to OSX as well as iOS; glad to see Microsoft isn't making the same mistake. I personally don't like digital voice assistants, but for people like my dad who grew up using dictation machines instead of typing anything themselves, they're fantastic.

 

I dunno, I have a couple of Macs and I am not exactly yearning for Siri on them. Siri has a 'place' on a small mobile device, since (1) you don't have a keyboard and (2) particularly with phones you frequently want info while in motion (ie. walking). With say, a MacBook Air, one is typically at least stationary and somewhat comfortable, with a hand or two free, and the laptop in front of you, so the need to be able to use voice is limited to more "assisted technology" type stuff, which Macs have had for years.

I can understand Cortana landing in Win9 all around though since like Win8 it's likely to show up in a vast array of device types.

 

OSX has made a lot of changes to make it feel more familiar for an iOS-user (notifications, LaunchPad, etc). Siri seems like a reasonable extension of that trend. Not everyone will use it, of course, but that's no reason not to offer a service that some people find very useful (particularly people who never learned to touch-type and who also use Siri on their phones to dictate all their emails).

 

Didn't OSX have a voice assistant named Pandora back around 10.5 or so? I recall seeing a friend demonstrate it circa 2008. It's possible my impression that it was first-party was incorrect, however.

 

I owned machines running 10.4, 10.5, and 10.6, and don't remember anything of the sort. However, the interwebz are abuzz that Siri may be coming to OSX soon. Apple Patent Suggests Siri-Like Virtual Assistant for OS X | News & Opinion | PCMag.com

 

I hope they've improved it since Vista:

<iframe width='420' height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/2Y_Jp6PxsSQ" frameborder='0' allowfullscreen></iframe>

 

ouch - zing! Love that girl reporter at the end "Microsoft said it was due to ambient noise, but as you could tell it was quiet until it didn't work and everyone started laughing"...