The Windows 10 Tablet Experience

[adrynalyne]

I am not saying that Windows 10 is always better, but what I see is a lot of people become accustomed to Windows 8.1's quirks.

 

As a result, when those quirks were fixed, people complain that they can't have the old way.

Agreed.

[Motor_Mouth]

 

All you've really done is show your lack of understanding continuum.

 

Then, please, enlighten me because I would really like to know how it can make my tablet work. At this stage, my easiest recourse is to wait until next week for the release version of Windows 10, then put the now useless thing up on eBay in the hope that some sucker will think he's getting something worthwhile.

 

 

[adrynalyne]

 

 

 

Then, please, enlighten me because I would really like to know how it can make my tablet work. At this stage, my easiest recourse is to wait until next week for the release version of Windows 10, then put the now useless thing up on eBay in the hope that some sucker will think he's getting something worthwhile.

 

 

 

I've discussed quite a few things to help you and all you did was tell me how wrong I am.

 

Its the case of biting the hand that feeds you. Deal with it. Or don't, it doesn't matter to me. However, I will not assist anyone who can spend 12 pages telling people how wrong they are, and yet how right they are.

[Motor_Mouth]

I am not saying that Windows 10 is always better, but what I see is a lot of people become accustomed to Windows 8.1's quirks.

As a result, when those quirks were fixed, people complain that they can't have the old way.

I'm sorry but that is patently absurd. I haven't "become used to" Windows 8, I wholeheartedly embraced it from the beginning because of all the possibilities it opened up for me. Possibilities which Windows 10 now closes off.

 

Here's how the two preview experiences went for me. I used the Windows 8 preview programme as an excuse to buy a Sony Vaio P Series on eBay, as it was a PC I had always wanted but could never justify. It came with Windows 7 but was almost unusable because of the very modest spec of the device. Even after I installed a few applications, I really couldn't use it for anything more than a bit of light web browsing. Until I installed the Windows 8 Developer Preview on it. Suddenly it was transformed into a perfectly usable, tiny PC. The difference was night and day and, after installing a few applications and seeing that they ran quite reliably, I installed the next preview on my main PC and never looked back. Windows 8 was, from the get-go, a revelation and it kept getting better and better, the more time I put into getting the most out of it.

 

I used the Windows 10 preview programme as an excuse to buy a Lenovo Yoga 2 tablet, as it was a device I had always wanted but could never justify. It seemed to work OK with Windows 8, although it was clearly not as fast or useful as my Thinkpad 8. But I took it on a trip with me and found it usable enough for a bit of light image editing in Xara Designer Pro or Autodesk Combustion. I had to delay putting W10 on it because it wouldn't just upgrade for me once I joined the Fast Ring, I had to download an ISO and make a bootable thumb drive to do it, which I did after my four day interstate trip. Far from the revelation I had experienced with the first Windows 8 Preview, my first W10 Insider Preview wasn't just buggy and unstable, but hardly any of my existing Windows 8 apps worked with it any more. Worse still, a lot of nifty features I had come to rely on in Windows 8 were gone, making the whole experience totally disappointing. But I decided to be patient and keep installing updates in the hope that it would get better. Fro a stability perspective, it has improved out of sight but beyond that it is mostly as unusable as it was a few months ago. My apps seem to work OK now, although the way some of the settings and menus have been bundled is extremely poor. e.g. Kindle has a hamburger menu which contains the original ellipsis menu it has in Windows8. Menus within menus make for a very poor user experience. I reckon I have probably put in double the effort, out of necessity, to get some kind of useful improvement from Windows 10 but all I have found is disappointment. The two experiences are chalk and cheese and nobody here has provided any credible evidence to the contrary.

 

Anyway, can you please explain to me how removing something that worked so seamlessly it wasn't even seen as a separate feature and replacing it with something more marketable, even though it doesn't work at all for the vast majority of tablet owners, is fixing anything?

[Motor_Mouth]

I've discussed quite a few things to help you and all you did was tell me how wrong I am.

 

Its the case of biting the hand that feeds you. Deal with it. Or don't, it doesn't matter to me. However, I will not assist anyone who can spend 12 pages telling people how wrong they are, and yet how right you are.

What, like showing two extremely poor uses of screen space and unilaterally declaring one "good" and the other "bad", without the slightest bit of explanation? It doesn't matter how big you make the font or what colours you use, without an explanation your point is not made. In both cases you have four windows, each taking up jus t25% of the available screen space and leaving large blank areas that could be better utilised. If you looked at the split-screen images I've shown, you would have to agree that split screen has some very powerful features that snapping windows on the desktop simply cannot match. If I am wrong, how about explaining why, instead of going off on a tangent in an effort to cover your backside? I can show you more examples of split-screen being superior to snapping if it helps.

 

Ditto for Continuum - show me where/how it is better than what just happens in Windows 8 naturally. Explain how a feature that requires a third party driver that doesn't and probably never will exist, and even when invoked manually offers almost no benefit to anyone, is superior to a seamless experience, which requires no drivers or third party intervention and just works when you need it. Because so far your argument revolves around one feature having a name and the other not, which clearly doesn't affect usability in the slightest.

 

That's the thing, I could put up with losing everything that W10 would require me to give up if they were offering something better in its place but that is not the case. e.g. They didn't have to remove the Charms Bar to put Action Centre in, they could have kept both - swipe from the right for Charms, press the tiny button in the System Tray for Action Centre. Same for All Apps, they could have put it in the useless little window for the fear-of-changers and allowed it go back to its full-screen glory in Tablet Mode. But they didn't. They could have replaced the Desktop version of IE11 with Edge and left the Modern UI version of IE 11 in for touch users but they didn't, they decided two desktop browsers was a better idea than one desktop and one touch. The list of such poor decisions is long and none of them make sense, unless you see Windows 10 as a marketing exercise, not an effort to make a better OS. It's all about appeasing people who wouldn't know better if it bit them on the nose and any actual improvements to the OS are purely incidental (or accidental). It's a con-job and, I'm sorry, but I'm not buying it.

[adrynalyne]

Here is an idea, how about you stick with Windows 8 then and stop whining like a petulant child.

[jakem1]

<snip>

 

I'm amazed by the amount of effort you've put into complaining in this and other Win10 threads.  Haven't you got anything better to do?  My advice would be to either stick to Win8 or stop using DPI settings that your tablets weren't designed for. 

[Motor_Mouth]

Why? I spend  a minimum of four hours a day in front of my PCs, often more than twice that. It's kind of a big part of my life that, right now, looks like it is going down the tubes more than somewhat. Maybe you don't care but I do and whilst the time to complain has probably passed for the moment, I am not going to passively accept a second-rate experience dressed up as something better. Sitting back and saying nothing just makes you part of the problem.

[tompkin]

The promise of Windows 10 is not going to happen the day it launches. You might say that the real promise of Windows 10 centers on Universal Apps on Windows Phone/Tablets, but also the future Internet of Things, etc.

As the "devices" landscape evolves, it is assumed that Microsoft will be agile enough to modify Windows 10 in a timely manner to take advantage of that new landscape. As this happens, Windows 10 will "probably" evolve away from desktops and more into the "devices" space.

So using Windows 10 on "Day 1" is not that important. Even being 2 versions behind, there really isn't any "must have" features that I see. But as time goes on, Microsoft is promising us that it will become more and more attractive.  

[BajiRav]

Of course it existed, I've shown you a picture of it in Windows 8, which you have needlessly reposted. So if anyone is in denial here, it is the guy who refuses to accept the evidence of his own eyes. Seriously, it is right there in front of your face, in full colour, what is it you don't get about what you are seeing? Or have we simply reached a stage now where you are just going to be contrary for the sake of it?

It existed and we never knew - including apparently Microsoft who forgot to market it in Windows 8.x? Can you enlighten us how does continuum work in 8.1 because your screenshots sure as hell don't show it.

Specifically show us screenshots of following in Windows 8.1

- Metro apps switching to windowed mode when tablet mode is off

- Click targets get optimized for touch input (e.g. notification area icons) when it detects you no longer have a mouse/kb connected

- OSK auto opening in desktop apps when Mouse/Kb are not connected

- A W8.1P connected to external display and running apps optimized to that screen.

(I am sure there are more use cases but let's start with that list)

[Motor_Mouth]

It existed and we never knew - including apparently Microsoft who forgot to market it in Windows 8.x? Can you enlighten us how does continuum work in 8.1 because your screenshots sure as hell don't show it.

Are you serious? You cannot see the All Apps button and scrollbars that appear when you plug in a mouse that are absent when the mouse is? Would it help if I drew a big circle around them in red?

Specifically show us screenshots of following in Windows 8.1

- Metro apps switching to windowed mode when tablet mode is off

- Click targets get optimized for touch input (e.g. notification area icons) when it detects you no longer have a mouse/kb connected

- OSK auto opening in desktop apps when Mouse/Kb are not connected

- A W8.1P connected to external display and running apps optimized to that screen.

 - what is the advantage of windowed Metro apps? Why would I want that when I am using a mouse but not when I am using touch?

 - which click targets get optimised in W10? It's a scattershot approach that doesn't make anything more usable but at least shows that Microsoft understand that nobody will be able to use Windows 10 on a tablet.

 - OSK has to open automatically in W10 because the button to open it manually goes away. In W8, the button is always there.

 - I need to get my monitor set up again but I can absolutely show you a screenshot of W8 optimising things for an external monitor. It was one of the very first things I noticed when I got my Surface Pro 2.

(I am sure there are more use cases but let's start with that list)

Do you really want to talk "use cases"? How about we start with you telling us what use cases make any of the features in Tablet Mode worthwhile? For example, what is the use case that makes hiding most of the icons in the System Tray from touch users? What is the use case that makes hiding half the supposedly wonderful new Start behind a hamburger menu for touch users? e.g. Why don't touch users need easy access to Settings? What is the use case that makes full-screening every application window useful for tablet users? e.g. What is the advantage to a tablet user of having Notepad full-screen, especially given that text size and menus remain the same size they are without Tablet Mode? And taking that train of thought further, if it is advantageous for touch users to have every application full screen, why does Windows 10 still have a split screen function and why does it automatically create split screens in certain situations?

 

To put it another way, isn't the continued existence of split-screen in Tablet Mode a direct contradiction of making every window full-screen, with no option to unmaximise? And these contradictions abound in Windows 10 Tablet Mode. More examples - the way the remaining System tray icons spread out in Tablet Mode shows that the developers understand the need for larger touch targets, so why is that about the only concession to that need? Why do mouse users need text labels on buttons, where touch users do not?

[Motor_Mouth]

As the "devices" landscape evolves, it is assumed that Microsoft will be agile enough to modify Windows 10 in a timely manner to take advantage of that new landscape.

I really don't see how that can be assumed at all, given that things are much better in Windows 8 and moving rapidly away from usable in Windows 10. If you were to assume anything, it would be that Microsoft have no idea how to realise their vision of one OS across every device. It is something they admit themselves on the Insider Preview site - "Insider Preview works with touch, but some things will be rough and unfinished. More touch-friendly improvements are on the way." You can read it in context on this page - http://windows.microsoft.com/en-au/windows/preview-faq?ocid=tp2_nav_faq - under "What does it work with?"

[adrynalyne]

I really don't see how that can be assumed at all, given that things are much better in Windows 8 and moving rapidly away from usable in Windows 10. If you were to assume anything, it would be that Microsoft have no idea how to realise their vision of one OS across every device. It is something they admit themselves on the Insider Preview site - "Insider Preview works with touch, but some things will be rough and unfinished. More touch-friendly improvements are on the way." You can read it in context on this page - http://windows.microsoft.com/en-au/windows/preview-faq?ocid=tp2_nav_faq - under "What does it work with?"

I heard so many arguments about how 98se was better than XP when it came out...

 

Good times.

[Mockingbird]

Here's another in-depth video showing Windows 10 on tablet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJqTq5xdtSo

 

By the way, I am not sure where this guy is from, but listening the video sounds like listening to my relatives (from Alabama) talking.

[Dashel]

If you spent a fifth of the time calmly researching, you wouldn't need to spend the other 80% ensuring no one will take you seriously.

 

Good comedy though.  I like the part where continuum is simply the addition of scroll bars to tablet apps.  I can see why your tablet workflow was so improved by it compared to the paltry changes in Win10.

[Mockingbird]

So now that I have Windows 10 install on my Surface Pro 3, I can give comments on my experience.

1. When holding the tablet with two hands, I find it particularly difficult to press the buttons on the bottom, so I've moved the taskbar to the top.

2. I also love the new split Touch Keyboard that can be slide up and down instead of stuck to the bottom. 

[MotorMouth]

So does that mean that every time you go back to desktop operation you move the Taskbar back down? Seems like a bit of a nuisance to me.

[MotorMouth]

If you spent a fifth of the time calmly researching, you wouldn't need to spend the other 80% ensuring no one will take you seriously

 I like the part where continuum is simply the addition of scroll bars to tablet apps.

Researching what? I think I probably have a better handle on things at the moment than you, judging by your comment. Otherwise you would understand that when W10 detects a mouse, that it is the only thing that happens, just like Windows 8. Continuum doesn't even seem to exist unless you have a Surface. With a BT keyboard you get the exact same experience as without - if you are in tablet mode, you stay in tablet mode. If you're not, you stay that way, too. If your keyboard has a touchpad, the touchpad will at least invoke scrollbars like a mouse, so that's it for Continuum on my tablet.

[Mockingbird]

Does this change any opinions?:

Improvements to Tablet mode: When in Tablet mode, from Task View you can now snap apps to left and right, replace a previously snapped app with another (teeter) and swipe down to close an app.