Organizing Start Screen Tiles


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Ever since I started using Windows 8 I have found organizing tiles on the Start Screen to be mind blowingly awkward. It's as if the designers, not only want me to lay things out in their strange manner, but also want it be a challenege too. Getting the tiles where I want in the place I want can certainly be quite the challenege.

 

Here are two examples using small icons:

 

swapvshift.jpg

 

 

 

iconshift.jpg

 

 

How do others feel?

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Not having those issues. Moving never meant switch or whatever. At least I never looked at it like that. Works as expected to me so far.

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Not having those issues. Moving never meant switch or whatever. At least I never looked at it like that. Works as expected to me so far.

 

So in my second example you would have expected the result? & if you did, do you think it's a useful way for the icons the move? It seems dumb as hell to me.

 

 

Tiles stack in two columns. Dragging a tile from one spot to another moves it there and the others fill in the empty space.

 

Well small tiles stack in squares, that stack in two rows. Which certainly does not make for easy organizing as per my examples...

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Took 2-3 tile moves to figure it out and adjust from there, not hard really once you get the hang of it 

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I would never expect them to swap places, that would make no sense.

 

what I do hope/expect to happen eventually is that windows will adapt the way WP works and that the blocks can be half height. so small icons stack in 2x1 rows and they can stack unevenly. i.e. a big block can start again, right below two small ones without a gap.

 

WP also has a better flow when moving tiles. 

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Took 2-3 tile moves to figure it out and adjust from there, not hard really once you get the hang of it 

 

I mean, I get what's happening & how it shifts, but I just it makes quite impractical.

 

Take my second example, where I wanted to move the Recycling Bin to iTunes's spot. How would I do that without having it all shift away?

 

 

 

I would never expect them to swap places, that would make no sense.

 

Wierd. To me that would make perfect sense, because if they swap it means nothing else shifts, so you don't ruin the placement of the other tiles.

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I agree with the OP, it's fairly awkward to organize. What's more is if you sync between systems and some applications (with tiles on the start screen) are missing on some of the systems, the entire organization is thrown off. I largely gave up being pedantic about the organization after finding out the latter. It simply wouldn't display the way I wanted it on all of my systems regardless of what I did. In any case, I mostly open applications by typing the names anyway.

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Well another thing I expect they'll adapt from WP that will fix that problem is to allow empty slots. 

That would pretty much solve the issues with syncing.

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Keep up things like this. The more "noise" that gets made about the way stuff works, the more likely I'll get changed. Maybe include an option like there is on the desktop for sorting icons. Like you can have it where icons automatically sort to the left and move up to fill spaces, or have it so they are placed freely.

 

I agree with you OP, of was awkward to organise it at first.

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FWIW, if you want to exchange the positions of two (same-sized) tiles while leaving everything else in the same place, you can always do it in exactly two moves like this:

 

1. Drag tile A from its original position to tile B. Tile B will move out of the way, and perhaps a bunch of other tiles will shift. But don't worry, just ignore that and

2. Drag tile B back to where tile A originally was. Not only will this finish swapping the two tiles, but all the other tiles that got shifted in step 1 will end up back in their original positions - you won't have to readjust any of them yourself.

 

I somewhat agree with your point in general, though. It's tricky because the alternatives I can think of (mainly, just not auto-packing the tiles) have their own problems (mainly that you'd potentially have to spend extra time manually packing them).

 

Personally, whether they change the packing behavior or not what they REALLY need is an Undo command. Especially with the more powerful (and dangerous) multiselect abilities in 8.1, it's painful not to have that.

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One part of Windows 8 I have never liked to be honest. Big fan of the start screen but it was painful to organise and still doesn't look the way I would really like. Sometimes you just have to live with constraints.

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I mean, I get what's happening & how it shifts, but I just it makes quite impractical.

 

Take my second example, where I wanted to move the Recycling Bin to iTunes's spot. How would I do that without having it all shift away?

 

 

 

 

Wierd. To me that would make perfect sense, because if they swap it means nothing else shifts, so you don't ruin the placement of the other tiles.

 

You'd just ignore the shifting away and move iTunes back to where the Recycling Bin initially was. Everything else that shifted in the first move would shift back after the second move. Not saying this is intuitive :)

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1. Drag tile A from its original position to tile B. Tile B will move out of the way, and perhaps a bunch of other tiles will shift. But don't worry, just ignore that and

2. Drag tile B back to where tile A originally was. Not only will this finish swapping the two tiles, but all the other tiles that got shifted in step 1 will end up back in their original positions - you won't have to readjust any of them yourself.

 

 

You'd just ignore the shifting away and move iTunes back to where the Recycling Bin initially was. Everything else that shifted in the first move would shift back after the second move. Not saying this is intuitive :)

 

Thanks I didn't realize this. Though it doesn't seem to be completely consistent:

 

For example, in the first below image, if I move iTunes to Recycling Bin & then The Recycling Bin to where the iTunes was it works as you say, but if I do it the other way around, move the Recycling Bin first, it won't shift back when I move iTunes:

 

 

switch.jpg

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