
Windows 10 live tiles reportedly getting killed by Microsoft - benryon
https://www.laptopmag.com/news/rip-windows-10-live-tiles-reportedly-getting-killed-by-microsoft
======
xeeeeeeeeeeenu
The weather app was literally the only UWP application I was using of my own
free will and it was because of its live tile. I liked being able to check the
weather by opening my start menu.

I hate the other UWP apps. They're slow, they lack features, they have
horrible UIs and they don't integrate well with the rest of the OS. The only
reason why I'm using the new "Settings" app or the new calculator is because
Microsoft forced me to it.

It's such a shame that Microsoft refuses to acknowledge that UWP was a mistake
and keeps porting apps to it.

~~~
cptskippy
I don't have a problem with UWP and I really like the new Calculator. Being
able to pin the calculator on-top and resize it so that it's touch friendly
really boosts productivity for me on a laptop without a 10key. If you're not
using a touchscreen then I can see the improvements not being that big of a
deal but I'm not aware of any regressions in functionality.

~~~
airstrike
I'm sorry, but I find the Calculator app woefully unimpressive.

I can't even type a simple expression with parenthesis. There's no RPN option.
There isn't a "financial" setting (only scientific and programmer, for some
reason). The list goes on; I'm sure I'm not alone on this one.

It is so, so, so basic it's essentially useless, I end up being forced to open
Excel, run Python in the terminal, go on Wolfram Alpha or, worse yet (!!) grab
pen and paper to perform basic math.

I know this is unrelated to UWP, but I'd rather they focus less on improving
an UI that is inevitably trivial (little boxes with numbers arranged in a grid
within a bigger box) and instead added some much needed features.

The fact that I am using a _computer_ must be lost on whoever decided to green
light this abomination as the default calculator in any OS ever, let alone one
released in the 21st century.

~~~
WorldMaker
Feel free to try contributing if you think it that trivial to add "much needed
features":
[https://github.com/microsoft/calculator](https://github.com/microsoft/calculator)

~~~
grawprog
So become an unpaid Microsoft employee to re-add features that used to exist
and that do exist in nearly every alternative? Don't they make enough money
off of os sales, subscriptions, forced ads and telemetry? They need free
labour to fix their broken software too?

~~~
pjmlp
Many people love to be FAANG unpaid employees, why should it be any different
for Microsoft?

~~~
grawprog
Why not put those efforts towards an actual open source calculator project
that could really use the volunteer efforts and doesn't already have an army
of paid employees?

[https://qalculate.github.io/](https://qalculate.github.io/)
[https://bitbucket.org/heldercorreia/speedcrunch/](https://bitbucket.org/heldercorreia/speedcrunch/)

~~~
chaorace
Is that a rhetorical question, or do I really get to argue the benefits of
contributing to one of the most installed calculators on the planet?
Contributing to small projects is good, but it's not for everyone and you're
definitely kidding yourself if an MIT licensed software on Github doesn't
qualify as "actual open source".

~~~
grawprog
Yeah I tend to consider moral and ethical implications of my decisions also, I
forget not everyone does.

I feel time spent working on projects for a company that hasn't spent the
better part of 3 decades trying to dominate and control the entirety of the
computer market using strategies that destroy competition and supress
innovation, that tracks and monitors its users, that has such a small amount
of respect that it will inject ads into a product most customers are forced to
purchase should they wish to own a computer, is more valuable in that it makes
the world just a slightly better place, rather than a slightly shittier one.

~~~
pjmlp
For a moment I thought you were talking about Google.

------
notjustanymike
Good. When I open the start menu, I'm trying to do something. I'm seeking, not
browsing, and the live tiles are inappropriate for my current task.

~~~
dbbk
Windows is designed for all types of users though, not just yourself.

~~~
qzx_pierri
Windows seems to be designed for people who aren’t savvy enough to use Linux,
and don’t want to buy a Mac. They get away with egregious design practices,
because the OS is ubiquitous and the common user has no other choice.

Mac OS on the other hand, has kept a fairly consistent design, mostly due to
the obvious barrier to entry for most people ($$$), so any mistakes that would
impact usability could easily give someone a reason to not spend $1k on a
laptop or even more on a desktop.

Microsoft needs more competition. What’s stopping them from re-skinning
Windows 10 to resemble Windows 7, and add actual functional improvements?
They’ve done that recently, but they didn’t need to redesign their start menu
to add workspaces (just one example).

~~~
BrandoElFollito
> Windows seems to be designed for people who aren’t savvy enough to use
> Linux, and don’t want to buy a Mac

25 years of IT, developed for the Linux kernel in 1994.

I tried to use Linux on the desktop for years and years and it is dreadful,
marginally unusable.

Windows just works great with my hardware and monitors.

I would not use a Windows machine as a server (mostly because I do not know it
enough, but also because it does not seem right) and a Linux for desktop.

------
badsectoracula
Nice. Now kill UWP[0] and bring some actual improvements to the base Win32 C
API that any application written in any programming language and available
from any source (direct downloads form author pages, repositories like GitHub,
eshops such as Steam, etc) can use.

[0] of course for backwards compatibility reasons this cannot be totally
removed, though considering that 99.999% of the applications made for it were
obtainable through the online Microsoft Store there is an assumption of
internet availability so it can be installed on-demand like older versions of
.NET framework.

~~~
pcwalton
> Now kill UWP[0] and bring some actual improvements to the base Win32 C API
> that any application written in any programming language and available from
> any source (direct downloads form author pages, repositories like GitHub,
> eshops such as Steam, etc) can use.

People said the same thing about Carbon on macOS—"why do I have to use this
new Cocoa thing?"—but now nobody misses it. The Win32 API needs to go away (at
least as the main way to develop apps) sooner or later. (It already is gone to
a major extent: when was the last time a new Win32 app, written in Win32 with
C++, made the news?)

~~~
badsectoracula
I don't know what people said about Carbon, but i do know that many people do
miss it - like the Lazarus developers that had to throw away years of work.

> It already is gone to a major extent: when was the last time a new Win32
> app, written in Win32 with C++, made the news?

Every single PC game made since the mid90s?

Also why the restriction to C++? A big benefit of Win32 is that being in C it
can be used by many other languages since pretty much every language has some
FFI that speaks the platform's C ABI.

~~~
pjmlp
That is what COM is for. C is on its way out as it should have been long time
ago.

------
majkinetor
Now we only need option to install windows WITHOUT ANY APP PINNED IN THE START
MENU - and while we are at it, option to not actually install anything but
kernel + most basic stuff that can't be removed - explorer, shell & friends -
no candy crash, maps, movie maker and other useless garbage that one could
install via Store anytime anyway

The first thing I do is to remove them all with powershell script.

~~~
1ark
Mind sharing that script?

~~~
Agenttin
One of the first I ever saw was Tron Script, here's the subreddit:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/TronScript/](https://www.reddit.com/r/TronScript/)

------
typescriptfan1
Bring back the classic start menu and UI and call it a day. The Windows UI is
so inconsistent, tedious and un-metaphorical today.

~~~
bob1029
Who remembers how snappy the experience was on a fresh XP install?

Sure, everything loaded slow off disk, but once you got your basics into RAM
it felt so much faster by comparison to how Win10 responds today. Explorer.exe
in particular. What a gem that implementation was. I could play folder tetris
at lightspeed with that thing, because it actually felt faster than I could
ever go. Today, I am sad to report that despite my reflexes not being what
they used to, I now wait upon file explorer to do its thing on a regular
basis.

To see what I'm talking about, just run something extremely lightweight like
mspaint, then right click it in your task bar. Be sure to have a stopwatch
handy. It might take a little while for the context menu to appear and you
don't want to lose track of your _seconds_. It's the perfect amount of delay
right between complete disengagement (e.g. walking off to get coffee) and
proper instantaneous feedback. I sometimes wonder if psychologists working at
Microsoft have specifically tuned this delay to be as misanthropic as
possible. I used XP not too long ago and I recall a visceral emotional
experience due to the realization that we will never have a UI that feels that
snappy again branded by Microsoft.

I realize I can probably get my low-latency UI fix with various Linux
installs... Anyone have any recommendations? Who has the fastest window
manager these days? With .NET Core working on Linux and any code targeting it
being largely portable... I could maybe get used to a new normal on Linux for
purposes of software development, which is also when I'm looking for a snappy
UI. Visual studio on windows being the bloated nightmare it is... Some days I
spend a few minutes writing specifications for a new IDE just as a means of
catharsis. There is zero excuse for the kinds of delays I regularly see
between keypress and UI feedback.

~~~
agumonkey
Even the nicest Linux desktop has more lag than ~KDE3 days. I think that's a
global shift in how rendering is done, it used to be crude and glitchy but
extremely cheap cycle wise, now you have compositing ... smooth matrices but
maybe (I never wrote code for composited DE) this cause a fixed offset in
response ?

~~~
alxlaz
Most of the latency you see in modern Linux desktops comes from the tech
stack, not the compositor. E.g. Plasma, and lots of other KDE components, are
QML-based. You can see ths if you disable compositing. For example, you can
run KDE with Openbox, without compositing, and lots of things are still laggy.
Same thing with XFCE, where it's possible to disable xfwm4's compositor.

Not picking on KDE specifically -- I'm mentioning it because I use it on a few
machines and it's the one that I'm most familiar with.

Compositing will inevitably give you _some_ lag, but there's cap on how much,
depending on the Vblank time. Extra lag is entirely self-inflicted :-).

~~~
agumonkey
thanks. I only mentioned composting because that's the only change I know
happened since 90s gui engines, so I thought it would have an impact.

~~~
alxlaz
And it does! Even when it's the only form of lag in existence, it's still
noticeable -- see
[http://www.lofibucket.com/articles/dwm_latency.html](http://www.lofibucket.com/articles/dwm_latency.html)
for the notes of someone else who's noticed it.

I usually disable it on my work machine, too. I don't use flat themes
anywhere, so I don't really need shadows, and I'm more than happy about the
reduced latency.

------
cheschire
It takes 5 minutes to whip up a VisualElementsManifest.xml and a custom PNG to
make your own static tiles for applications, and we can't even get companies
to adopt that. Steam should have had a full win10 static tile ages ago.

So if they can't even adopt static tiles, no wonder the live tiles have
received nearly zero traction.

------
indymike
Somewhere in the past 10 years, Window has devolved to the point the UI is at
parity with your favorite Linux desktop environment... mixed with another
Linux desktop environment.

------
_bxg1
I get it, but it's also a little sad to see the end of one of the last
visually-distinctive aspects in any modern OS. Nothing has personality
anymore.

~~~
B1FF_PSUVM
Live tiles were great on mobile - to this day I look at iOS/Android and feel
I'm back in the past century ...

~~~
ptx
Don't Android's widgets provide the same functionality? And they aren't forced
to fit into the space of a tile but can be resized.

~~~
freeone3000
Not quite; it's more like a cross between a widget and a shortcut. The idea
being that instead of having a Weather Widget and also having a shortcut to
the weather app from the app drawer, the icon for the weather app would just
_be_ the widget. It feels different.

~~~
ptx
The details are a matter of taste of course, but Android widgets do kind of
provide this as well: the home screen has a mix of shortcuts and widgets
(corresponding to pinned apps in your app drawer, I guess?) and clicking the
right spot in the widget usally brings up the app, so usually I use the
calendar, weather and notes widgets as (or in preference to) shortcuts to open
the apps.

------
whalesalad
I discovered 'Open-Shell' and have really been enjoying it on my Windows 10
test VM. My start menu looks like Windows XP now.

Link: [https://github.com/Open-Shell/Open-Shell-Menu](https://github.com/Open-
Shell/Open-Shell-Menu)

Screenshot: [https://i.imgur.com/ujspeiD.png](https://i.imgur.com/ujspeiD.png)

Ignore the shit font rendering, I have every option toggled for max
performance over RDP.

------
ambitito
Reading the comments I suppose I am the only one who saw some use for them,
particularly the Weather app. Farewell then I suppose.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
The Weather app and maybe News were the exceptions where these actually were
nice to have. Though sometimes they updated on a significantly delay, and
clicking a news item didn't even bring you to that news story. Vista's Gadgets
were nicer because you didn't have to open the Start Menu to see the weather.

However, the tiles largely were duplicative of... just having a desktop
shortcut (if you don't want a desktop shortcut, just being in the start menu
is good enough).

Add the fact that Microsoft never really fully backed off pinning things like
Candy Crush to this even for domain account users, and I won't really miss it
much.

~~~
WorldMaker
Even when it was "just desktop shortcuts" you could never get a desktop as
clean or orderly as the tiles (without 3rd party tools like Fences).

Live Tiles at their best made the Notification Center redundant. Have all your
notifications in the "same place" every time and at-a-glance easy to read.

> Vista's Gadgets were nicer because you didn't have to open the Start Menu to
> see the weather.

Windows 8 had the right idea in making the Start Screen the default and making
the Win32 Desktop "inside it" rather than the other way around. There just
wasn't enough courage to let Windows continue to innovate after they lost the
initial PR war. (Charms were a really good idea, the execution just needed
cleanup. A tiling window manager by default was a really good idea, but they
needed to sell the execution by better bringing Win32 applications into that
world/window manager without the bulk of the rest of the desktop having to
hobble along.)

------
cpascal
Thank god. The first thing I do on a new Windows 10 install is disable all
that crap.

------
type0
Oh, but how else will I remember that there's Candy Crush available on my PC?

------
k0dede
first thing i did every times when I setup windows 10 is to unpin every tiles
in start menu

~~~
mxschumacher
it makes me mad when non technical friends or family members of mine give me
their Windows machines to "fix" something and I see all the garbage they are
exposed to in the start menu.

Invasion of privacy and leeching of attention.

Not as bad as the boot times and the overall performance I suppose, but still
...

~~~
ansible
> _Invasion of privacy and leeching of attention._

Oh gosh the visual noise! I couldn't stand it the moment I saw it.

What is all this stuff, changing every second? It completely disabled my
ability to focus or find anything.

------
bobthepanda
Is there a Chrome/Firefox equivalent of tiles for the homepage? I didn't
appreciate tiles when they screwed up the Windows 8 Start Menu but I think a
nice use case would be a browser homepage. (And something with more
flexibility than just "here's your most recently opened windows").

------
Havoc
Maybe dump the crazy mix of metro control panels and classic control panels
too while we're fixing insanities

~~~
nitemice
The majority of the control panel is metro now.

~~~
Havoc
Yeah sorta.

It's most noticeable in the network settings > status...there are like 8
buttons leading to 5 different styles of windows. The whole thing is just
bizarre. Even the back button doesn't do what it says on the tin.

Status > Change network prop. Now click back. Do you got back to status (i.e.
last page you were on like a browser)? Nope...goes to wifi.

Now click Dial-up then ethernet. If you guessed the back button takes you back
to dial-up...nope goes to status page.

The whole thing is just jarring.

------
twalla
The sad thing is that with things like WSL, VSCode, chocolatey/scoop and .NET
Core, MSFT has done a good job of fostering a decent platform on which to do
modern software development but then completely squandered a lot of that
goodwill by turning Windows 10 into an ad delivery platform.

~~~
non-entity
64bit Visual Studio would be nice, but I think I may have read that that's
basically never going to happen.

~~~
fdfffff
[https://docs.microsoft.com/en-
us/archive/blogs/ricom/visual-...](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-
us/archive/blogs/ricom/visual-studio-why-is-there-no-64-bit-version-yet)

------
theiz
And now it would make sense again with that folding thing, they stop it. That
is Microsoft for you.

------
tasogare
Finally. Live Tiles were awesome on Windows Phone, yet totally useless and
distracting on Windows.

------
nzgrover
Seems like a good place to ask if anyone has a "go to" script to
remove/disable Windows 10 unnecessary extras? For example, telemetry,
Shop/onedrive integration, unneeded services for home use, etc.

~~~
toxican
[https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10](https://www.oo-
software.com/en/shutup10) has been my go-to for a while now. Even lets you
export your settings so you can import them on additional computers.

~~~
LeoPanthera
Yeah Shutup10 works very well. Make sure you keep it up to date to keep up
with new Windows "features".

------
Fnoord
Here is a source which won't forward immediately to cc.html because it has
detected an adblocker (while lying they "don't mind" about) [1]

[1]
[https://web.archive.org/web/20200225190518/https://www.lapto...](https://web.archive.org/web/20200225190518/https://www.laptopmag.com/news/rip-
windows-10-live-tiles-reportedly-getting-killed-by-microsoft)

------
Fej
I use custom tiles to display art of Steam games, which makes my Start menu
look quite nice, but I acknowledge that's a niche use. The tiles open their
respective games.

The weather and calendar widgets are useful. Not a whole lot else though, in
my experience.

------
insulanian
I often remember my excitement about Win7, and how well done it was.

I've switched to Mac after they started destroying and bloating things with
Win8 an later versions, but am still sad to see what this OS has become.

------
partiallypro
I like the idea of live tiles, but the lack of buy in from developers really
killed it.

------
RedComet
That's a good start. Now do mandatory reboots and mandatory spyware.

------
StreamBright
Imagine a world where Microsoft cares and does not force people to use
something like this at the first place. It would be trivial to A/B test if
tiles were a good idea, if they are unsure.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Or give people an option, even. Not everything needs to be all or nothing.

------
sys_64738
You know they're running out of ideas when they introduce this stuff to begin
with. The tank is empty if they're considering removing it.

~~~
ptcampbell
The tank was empty introducing it. I don’t think removing it reflects poorly.

------
pcdoodle
Kill the whole OS and go back to win32 with security patches. We only want one
control panel.

------
thrower123
Now the struggle will be to not forget how much these sucked, so that they
don't come back in slightly different guise in five years, when the wheel has
turned and a new generation of designers starts to think it is bright idea.

I wouldn't mind seeing the Desktop Gadgets from Vista and Windows 7, which
were killed off in favor of Live Tiles, make a comeback.

~~~
i80and
There was a period of UI design in the late-2000's (late 90's, if you include
BeOS) where desktop gadgets caught on, and I thought that was a pretty good
implementation of the general idea.

Then it all vanished for some reason.

~~~
velosol
The iPhone.

That's a little generous, but the rise of smartphones (and their data
connections) brought widgets and gadgets to the handheld, with-you-everywhere
device and a little advertising on top didn't hurt. The motivated persons who
developed the gadgets for free or donation moved to apps because it worked
better for them _and_ they were able to get some extra money on top.

Then you have MS playing catch up and trying to merge mobile and desktop in
all the wrong ways with 8 and the userbase shrunk. What was left was OS X and
I'm not sure what happened there.

------
dpcan
I switched it back to the normal menu-only view the minute I switched to Win
10 and haven't looked back.

I don't really understand how having a handful of huge icons helps anyone,
especially when you can pin icons of apps you actually use to your taskbar.

------
m0zg
How about they get rid of the remnants of Win 95 UI which pops up every time
you dig into anything administrative or system settings related? Would that be
possible?

~~~
flohofwoe
Given that the old control panels are more feature complete and one can
actually find the stuff one is looking for, I'd rather vote for removing all
the new settings panels since they don't seem to improve much despite Win10
being out for 5 years now.

~~~
lozaning
The way they've fiddled with all the network settings and how you navigate to
the place where you can set them drives me nuts. I did it the same way for
like 20 years and now it's buggered up.

Maybe this is a sign im finally getting old.

~~~
vezycash
>Maybe this is a sign im finally getting old.

Nope. You're just fine. The current MS is just nuts. Imagine the breaks,
accelerator, wind shield, steering for cars change positions for each new
model.

It wouldn't be your fault for feeling disoriented.

------
at_a_remove
Now if we can just get rid of the big letters at the head of each section of
the alphabet, we would be making some more progress.

~~~
kingpiss
The headings in the list of programs? I guess they're a bit redundant but do
they really bother you?

~~~
at_a_remove
Yes. Yes they do. Quite a lot. They take up space reminding me how the
alphabet works. This "C" is to indicate that the following programs begin with
the letter C. This "D" shows that the next items have names where _D_ is the
common starting character. And so on, and so forth.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Actually, I just looked at this .. and they have a function (who knew??). If
you click then it shows the alphabet as a block in a dialog and you can jump
to a different letter!

I'd still get rid of them (or push/float the app links to the right) and save
the vertical space.

~~~
bchanudet
The behaviour you found out is an inheritage from the good old Windows Phone
7.

I use it quite frequently, because when I'm going through the list it's
usually because I couldn't reach to the program I wanted by just typing the
name. So if what I need it's under "W", then it's a way to be quicker.

------
noja
Can they remove all the spyware while they're at it too?

~~~
enitihas
The spyware might be making them money, so I doubt it's going to get removed.

------
mxschumacher
the world will be better for it

------
zarmin
Good freakin' riddance.

