And done right?
Metro was great on Windows phone. I still miss Windows phone 7 & 8.
Then no one would have noticed and sysadmins everywhere wouldn’t have their PTSD triggered by the words “charm bar”.
Shit, now I need whiskey.For those of us not in the know (or who have suppressed it), wtf is a charm bar? All Google points to is 90% jewelry and 10% generic metro stuff.
I didn’t use Win 8 or 8.1 for long, though. And i’ve only used 10 and 11 via work, set up by a pretty reasonable admin.
It was the auto-hiding replacement for the task bar. You opened it by moving the mouse pointer to the upper right or lower left corner. But unless you remembered where it was at, you’d get stuck asking, “where the fuck is the start menu”. It especially sucked when you were a normal version of windows and RDP’d into a Sever 2008 box and couldn’t use the Win key.
You opened it by moving the mouse pointer to the upper right or lower left corner.
in the corner and then gesturing the mouse up or down. The fact they put this abomination onto the server version, trying to do that at in an RDP or VNC window was the worst. We moved as much as we reasonably could off Windows Server at the time, and rushed standardising on server 2012 for the stuff we couldnt when it came out just because of how toxic interacting with Server 2008 was. I mean a Win for EoL software, but still
Remind me what Metro was again?
This design language
I’m using it as a skin on my Android device now. It’s a great UI. But it was built for an unwanted platform.
What r you using for the skin
Square Home. I think I had to pay $3 for lifetime access to some features. It’s worth it, IMO. Has widget support and a few other nice features.
I tried Square Home and the other one a few times years ago and I just couldn’t make it work for me what with the clashing of simulating WP on top of Android quirks.
Maybe I should try it again
Using a chain saw to hammer in nails is always going to be shit no matter who designed the chainsaw.
It’s the wrong tool for the job on desktops.
Oh fuck, I forgot about how awful this was.
Wasn’t that the UI overhaul that started with win8 and persists to a lesser degree to this day? It’s impossible to make an UI that works efficiently for both desktop and tablet. They’re two different platforms that are operated in different ways, and as such different UI designs are needed.
If so, I’d say it couldn’t have been done “right” by anyone else either, as it seems that a core element of its design is to make information as vague and short as possible, while padding it with a lot of dead space.
Example, if I want to change the thingamajig-ratio of the skoodleblurp, utilizing the brumblebork method:
- Linux: skoodle -s thinga 50 (brumblebork is assumed by default unless something else is explicitly defined via --method=)
- msdos 6.0: skoodleb /thing 50 /brumblebork
- win95: can’t do that
- win2k: after right clicking my computer it’s a setting hidden somewhere in the hardware tab
- win98: same as win2k, except a reboot is required
- XP: same as win2k, except a defrag is required
- win vista: back to rebooting
- win 7: finally they made it an easily accessible thing in the control panel
- win 8: uh oh, the control panel of ye olden days is no more. We have a new thing going, so there are two way of doing it. The newer method isn’t quite as flexible as the control panel.
- win 8.1: They fixed the new panel, but you can’t fit it on a single screen due to excessive dead space padding. And sometimes you get told to contact the sysadmin. For your computer. That you own.
- Win 10: It fits on one screen now, you just have a million sub-menus to navigate through; control panel -> network -> advanced -> skoodleblurp -> advanced -> thingamajig -> advanced (yep, again) -> ratio slider -> apply -> OK -> submit -> execute -> “are you sure?” -> (three minutes of that spinning circle that replaced the hour glass) -> Fuck, you forgot to check the brumblebork box half an hour ago
- Win 11: you have to log in to support.microsoft.com with your Microsoft account and hope it has detected that you are running an OS that supports this. Then you can download a service patch that may or may not be relevant. Either way it changes your default search to Bing.
I think I got a bit carried away there… but my point still stands. It was an awful design choice, and the awfulness was part of its core functionality.
Hmm… In my mostest most humblest of opinions, no, you didn’t get carried away. You explained it in just the right amount. Maybe even stopped too soon, would have loved the version for Mac.
You missed
winMe: you can’t change the thing because the OS already crashed.Thanks for reminding me of that abomination. I edited in my own take on that inOperable System
What would you consider “done right”? The main problem with it was that they used it on a desktop computer operating system. I’m sure it was just fine on Windows Phone.
Worse, they even forced it on Windows Server 2008 (and 2008R2). That interface had no business being on servers which many times only were only accessible by narrow higher latency remote links and many times without mice.
Why would you even consider using Windows without a mouse, though?
It is argued by “some” that a GUI has no business being on a server.
2012, 2012r2*
2008 was “vista”, r2 was 7.
