seta-san, on 10 November 2012 - 14:34, said:
fine, tell me how is the start screen superior? In which way? How does taking the whole screen help you? Why does using it take several more clicks than the old start menu? It's poor design; poor work flow, not designed to making the desktop experience better but instead to promote a tablet market that Microsoft is far behind the '8 ball' on.
Here's my start screen:
https://ik8xta.blu.l...nov2.png?psid=1
(ignore the long URL, skydrive is weird about that.)
OK, so you say it's 'more clicks', but what leads you to conclude that? I pin all my main apps to the start screen, grouped, from my desktop, it's 2 clicks to open anything I use mainly. As opposed to the start screen, which is normally 4 clicks. Now the start menu can have pinned items, which are 2 clicks, but it can only have 10 items. Any more than that and it's 4 clicks using the *start menu*, which is what the start screen replaced. On my 1680x1050 display there is room for 60 items in the start screen. Now you can pin items to the task bar and desktop and launch them faster than navigating the start menu, but then why argue in favor of the start menu? Win 8 has those abilities too, so it makes sense to remove the variables on both sides of the equation and simply solve for "is the start screen more efficient than the start menu or vice versa?"
I think the average educated user would probably be well using the start screen as I do, unpin anything you don't need and pin what you do, this will probably not exceed the 60 items allowed. From there, you click in the lower left, then click the item, then you are looking at it on the desktop, seems much better to me.
Other considerations are that you get more choices on screen at once, you don't have to navigate small targets that require more clicks, and if you are so inclined you can launch many programs quickly from one place. So you don't have to go to 3 or 4 different places to efficiently launch apps, in that way it may seem like a loss to not pin items to the taskbar and desktop, but I find if I am launching everything from one place it takes less thought to make sure I don't make mistakes or inefficiently try to find things I need in the wrong place ("Was that program I wanted in my pinned items, or on the desktop, or do I need to search the start menu folders") and another benefit that I find is that I like only having running programs on the task bar so I can glance and tell everything there is running, where as in the past the clear box around pinned task bar items was not always sufficient for me to understand when something was running or not, when I was in a rush or not thinking through my actions carefully. Point is, the start screen is more efficient as an app launcher but I find only using it for launching apps has some unexpected benefits that make the experience more consistent and thus make me more efficient and less error prone.
Then there are metro apps. You can quickly and without associated problems of desktop apps, get a lot of information and so forth. Metro apps have strict power/resource requirements, so you can run tons of them and not tank your performance, they are strictly sandboxed and vetted, so the chance of getting malware is very remote compared to searching the web for random apps, and even if malware gets on the store, being sandboxed tightly it would not be able to change anything in your user account or your system. For the same reason, metro apps are safe to install and use, in that they can not corrupt your install or other apps, so you can feel free to try as many as you want without fear of messing up your system. Every time I download something from the web and run it, and it requests a UAC approval, in the back of my mind somewhere is the thought "I hope this isn't some piece of trash that over-writes the wrong thing in the registry or somewhere", etc. With metro apps, you would really never have to worry about this even if you installed thousands of them. This could be a real productivity boost and money and time saver, if you set up your users or families, and educate them to use the windows store (or force it by blocking other software with group policy), they could get many apps they need to meet their particular needs and thus increase productivity and most likely never have the system corrupted or infected. For instance, you could have email notifiers, calendars, news sources, facebook, twitter, etc. all running (my metro screen is kind of empty right now because I just re-installed because I disabled the wrong driver by accident and ended up destroying my last install), with one click you get tons of information about the world and your personal life, but when you switch back to the desktop to run a game or something, all those metro apps are suspended and not taking any CPU, RAM, disk or network resources, so you get 100% performance. If you tried that with Windows 7 it could tank your performance in a game, or even stutter your HD video, depending on what apps you used and what kind of poor programming or bugs they had, or how many you had. With metro apps, you can have an almost unlimited amount and not worry about any of this, I find that to be simply awesome and am surprised other people are not seeing the utility here.
Well there's probably more I could add, but by now if you still think it's 'horrible' (usually a term I use when I see a bad car accident or something, not for a OS even if I don't understand it..) probably you are not a very reasonable human being.
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neufuse
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