It just crossed my mind that relatively few program icons are useful when I’m discovering software. Looking at my desktop, I have 66 program icons and 3 folder icons, and of the 66 programs, maybe 6-7 of them are in any way intuitive links to what the program actually does. Once I’ve used the program quite a bit and associate the icon with the program, it’s easy to pick them out rapidly by image, far faster than I can read the labels. But not when I’m first looking at a program, or looking at a program I rarely use.
That’s one reason why the humungous spaces you get with the Start Screen seem like a drawback when discovering programs, I’m still forced to read the labels. I might as well have them on a list, and I don’t find the Start Menu text too small to read, even at 48.
Unless you’re responding to someone I’ve missed, I’m pretty sure the recent discussion’s centered around starting programs you rarely use or activating features they install alongside themselves that you weren’t initially aware of–two things that scrolling lists of programs might be the only way to do. A folder-based view is almost definitively better at the latter, while folder-based versus non might be a wash in the former.
Either way, these are programs that warranted being pinned or desktopped.
Exactly. I have 3 programs pinned to my taskbar - mail, browser, and password manager. The rest of the programs that I use regularly are icons on my desktop. I have no idea where Stusser got the idea I used the Start Menu for commonly used programs, since I repeatedly said “programs I use rarely” or “programs I am discovering via the Start Menu.”
There are a fair number of programs that I don’t want cluttering my desktop. I don’t, for example, want every uninstall shortcut. If I use one, I’ll use it once.
If you go to the Start Screen “All Apps” view and zoom out the different groups will collapse into folders (well, tiles, but grouped and named the same way they would be in a folder view). Just make sure the sort order is set to “By Name” - I’m pretty sure it will stick if you set it once.
So now give me a powerful Windows tablet that is light like the new iPad Air and I will use it like a tablet when I sit on the couch, and then let me dock it and use it with my full-size keyboard and 24" monitor and mouse on my desk. And if it’s powerful enough to play Windows games so much the better. Microsoft might suck me back in and pull me away from my iPad.
Oh hey, that’s pretty cool! Yet another example of how the metro UI is discoverable. The only way to zoom without touch is to use CTRL+mousewheel or CTRL±. I never thought to try that in the all programs view. Unfortunately no, it does not stick.
It IS terrible. The Windows 7 version of the All Programs view is an excruciating, incompetent exercise in usability. Even worse is that the Windows 8 designers then looked at the declining use of the start menu for launching programs and blandly declared that this was evidence that the start screen was the way to go, when it was screamingly obvious that people were using the start menu less because they made it less usable.
Previous versions of the all programs view were terrible too. It used to cascade into menus up to 6 levels deep, where moving your mouse a few pixels to either side would lose your spot. It’s difficult to say if the win7 version (constrained inside the start menu) was an improvement or the opposite, as it sucked too. Like I said, I find the win8.1 all programs screen to be a tiny improvement, and if it supported collapsed folders properly it would be a much more definitive one.
I don’t usually focus on the awful all programs views, because I very rarely need to use them and win8.1 has lots of other problems that I actually care about. But still, if I were MS, I would look to fix it in win8.2. It just wouldn’t be at the top of my priority list.
If you have folders 6 levels deep, that’s your fault for not organizing things sensibly. In normal use even 4 folders deep is rare. As for users with shoddy fine motor control losing their place, that’s an issue with implementation. MS could have easily made a flyout folder system that was more robust to navigate.
It’s difficult to say if the win7 version (constrained inside the start menu) was an improvement or the opposite, as it sucked too.
No, it’s not difficult at all. The pre-Win7 versions let you visualize a folder hierarchy across potentially the entire screen, while the Win7 version is constrained to a very narrow scrolling window. There is nothing better about that.
Win7 could have had the same issues that cropped up on previous Windows versions, just with even less space to show the overabundance of information. WinXP All Programs grafted onto Win7 start menu with Win8’s boot time improvements would probably be the ideal Windows OS based entirely off of features we already know they’re capable of making. Which isn’t to say it’d be perfect or that heretofore unseen innovations might not be better than what’s come before. . . just that the changes Win8 made certainly were not such innovations.
Start menu rumor solidifies. The alleged internal nickname “mini-start” (as opposed to full start screen) worries me, though. Given the Win8 horror show I wouldn’t put it beyond Microsoft to just show a really small start screen instead of the real old start menu.
Actually, I found it to be an improvement, personally. Since you feel there is “nothing better about that” and Stusser feels they “both suck,” it’s an obvious YMMV issue, but I found the Start Menu a huge headache when it started going to multiple columns. Column 2 just didn’t behave well, particularly if I was opening a folder.
It was enough of an issue that I regularly re-organized my Start Menu with folders for categories like “system software” because I wanted to keep it to one column if at all possible. That all went away with Win 7, and now I don’t bother messing with the Start Menu folders at all.
I’m right with you, Gus. I manually reorganized my start menu back in the winXP days. With vista and later releases I no longer found that necessarily, instead relying on search.
Again, that’s an implementation issue, not anything intrinsically wrong with the concept of flyout folder panels. But instead of trying to fix these issues in Win7, they threw the baby out with the bathwater and replaced it with the laziest possible alternative-- a single, fixed-size scrolling panel.
Yes stusser, we get it, you prefer launching programs as if you were at a DOS prompt. That may be jingle-jolly awesome for you and everyone else with an eidetic memory, but for us weirdos who think a GUI should actually be usable for the purpose that it was designed for, squawking “Just use search!” is not a satisfactory response.
