
Living with the Windows 8 Start screen  - evo_9
http://www.extremetech.com/computing/135762-living-with-the-windows-8-start-screen
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51Cards
Perhaps I'm too resistant to change but I don't really see why the Start Menu
had to be removed. The new Metro UI is great for touch based interaction but I
can't believe it would have been that much work to retain the start menu as
well and place the default option in a setting somewhere. If you're primarily
a desktop user then you keep the familiar UI and can flip to Metro as desired.
If you're a touch user then Metro is a no brainer as the default. In the scope
of an operating system I can't imagine that would have been all that much more
work?

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molmalo
It's not that it was so much work. It's exactly the opposite, in the first
leaks, the start menu was there. At the moment, someone from MS explained that
if you give people a new and an old way to do something, they prefer the old
way. So, to promote learning the new way, they had to remove the old one. It's
the same that they did with the Classic Start Menu (win 95 style). There was
an option in Vista, but they removed it in Win 7.

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fjorder
User interfaces are necessarily shaped by the input devices we use to interact
with them. I'd be interested in seeing some reviews of Metro from people who
are using the MS Touch mouse rather than a standard mouse. Perhaps Metro is
designed with them in mind, so complaining about metro sucking with a standard
mouse might be a little bit like complaining that the earliest versions of
Windows were hard to use with just a keyboard!

The move from DOS to Windows was very much one based on the addition of a
mouse. Sure, some DOS applications could use a mouse, but it was not a
necessary device for interacting with the operating system. Windows changed
that. Yes, I know you could do almost anything in Windows with keyboard
shortcuts, but it was painfully counter-intuitive to try doing so. Since then,
the mouse and keyboard have remained more or less unchanged. The underlying
technology has improved (e.g. optical vs ball mice) or deteriorated (most
modern keyboards vs an IBM Model M), but their capabilities have remained
almost frozen in time. The last major degree of freedom to be introduced and
widely adopted was scroll-wheels. Some mice have other degrees of freedom,
such as horizontal scrolling capabilities or zoom wheels, but none of these
have become standards across all mice. Interfaces have gradually coaxed richer
interactions out of those existing degrees of freedom, but that's it.

Touch mice offer new degrees of freedom that traditional mice do not have.
e.g. Gestures. If MS is smart, they are planning to develop Metro along lines
that will exploit those new degrees of freedom. It will likely take years or
decades for touch mice to reach their full potential but, if the people at MS
have done their job well, there should already be compelling advantages to
using them with Windows 8.

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barney54
Another way to deal with it is to merely hold down Enter when you login. If
you hold down Enter as you login, you bypass the Start Screen and it dumps you
straight to the desktop.

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markkat
So it sounds like the best feature of the start screen is that it isn't too
hard to avoid it?

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mariusmg
Winkey +D

That's how i deal with it.

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jinushaun
An entire article defending the Windows 8 start screen only to tell you how to
disable it at the end? Win or fail? Saying you "only see the much-reviled
start screen a handful of times so what's the big deal?" doesn't sound like
much of a defense.

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tjtrapp
using the metro interface was totally annoying for me. i disabled it
immediately and the rest of the experience was ok.

fortunately my iMac doesn't force me to use the same UI as my iPhone, or I
would be disabling that too. but then again, apple !== microsoft.

