*.php files for this string." Nope. The advanced search syntax won't clue you in that it won't look inside that file. You have to go look for settings for each and every extension to do this. Again, I have fallen back on junky freeware for reasonable searches. I didn't like how midway through the demo he shows MS office and you see the start bar at the bottom of the screen and suddenly it is clear that this is just glitter on top of the old windows UX. The whole new UX metaphor comes crashing down the minute it appears.Linux folks have been experimenting with full-screen and tiled user interfaces for quite a while, and they've managed to make it mostly work with programs written for normal window systems (with a few exceptions, *ahem* GIMP). So it's not entirely impossible, though it will never be perfect. I'm hoping Microsoft will do a lot more integration work before release time.
The other thing I don't like is the concept of HTML at the desktop and throughout the OS. Didn't we learn how terrible this idea was back in the 1990s when they tried to do this before and it created a security and maintenance nightmare.Entirely different ideas are at work here. Active Desktop was Microsoft's attempt to ride the Web's hype wave by integrating it into the OS. Windows 8's HTML/JS apps are all-local; the only differences from normal native apps are the UI & technologies used. It's clearly an attempt to get web developers to write software on Microsoft's locked-in platform.
but in yet another stupid usability oversight, Cleartype doesn't work properly with them. More of the basic housekeeping-level usability stuff that for some reason never seems to occur to anyone in product development at Microsoft.Like Malor said, cleartype would be physically impossible on a pivot LCD. So it's not really an "oversight"
Microsoft’s demo video shows Excel — the full version of Excel for Windows — running alongside new touch-based apps. They can make buttons more “touch friendly” all they want, but they’ll never make Excel for Windows feel right on a touchscreen UI. Consider the differences between the iWork apps for the Mac and iPad. The iPad versions aren’t “touch friendly” versions of the Mac apps — they’re entirely new beasts designed and programmed from the ground up for the touchscreen and for the different rules and tradeoffs of the iOS interface (no explicit saving, no file system, ready to quit at a moment’s notice, no processing in the background, etc.).posted by TheophileEscargot at 8:24 AM on June 2, 2011 [2 favorites]
The ability to run Mac OS X apps on the iPad, with full access to the file system, peripherals, etc., would make the iPad worse, not better. The iPad succeeds because it has eliminated complexity, not because it has covered up the complexity of the Mac with a touch-based “shell”. iOS’s lack of backward compatibility with any existing software means that all apps for iOS are written specifically for iOS.
There’s a cost for this elimination of complexity and compatibility, of course, which is that the iPad is also less capable than a Mac. That’s why Apple is developing iOS alongside Mac OS X...
But I think it’s a fundamentally flawed idea for Microsoft to build their next-generation OS and interface on top of the existing Windows. The idea is that you get the new stuff right alongside Windows as we know it. Microsoft is obviously trying to learn from Apple, but they clearly don’t understand why the iPad runs iOS, and not Mac OS X.Putting aside that he's talking about a shell rather than an OS, this thinking fundamentally encapsulates why the Apple clean-sheet approach has never taken off with people who have an existing infrastructure or just a lot of stuff.
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posted by Blazecock Pileon at 5:57 PM on June 1, 2011