Windows 10 live tiles reportedly getting killed by Microsoft
laptopmag.com
laptopmag.com
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.
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.
Use Scientific mode and parentheses work fine
I've not used a physical for some years, but even then the Casio ones had a backspace, and had apparently done so for a good few generations.
https://qalculate.github.io/ https://bitbucket.org/heldercorreia/speedcrunch/
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.
Though I didn't just mean patches from "contribute", it could also mean voice/ideas/discussion: instead of pseudonymously complain on HN, there's Feedback Hub and GitHub Issues. As an option that's available.
Anyway, for instance, you could see that RPN is on the radar: https://github.com/microsoft/calculator/issues/128
I don't think this sort of argument works.
The reason it's open source is most likely because it's got nothing of value to competitors but lets them point and say "see, we've changed, look we make things open source now"; aka marketing.
Fwiw, it seems to go far beyond marketing that Calculator is open source, as community contributions have made it into releases and Calculator has seemed to benefit from more (and more diverse) development resources than it had in XP/Vista/7.
Here is what i use as a calculator on Windows: http://runtimeterror.com/tools/calc/calc.hta.txt
It looks like this: https://i.imgur.com/eWZfcXB.png
and not only is much faster to open than Windows Calculator (ironic, considering it loads an entire browser engine) but also more compact and doesn't waste any screen space (100% of its window is dedicated to its actual functionality instead of being an obsolete skeuomorphism that was originally made to help people associate desktop calculators with the virtual desktop metaphor used on the Macintosh back in 1984 when actual physical desktop calculators could be found everywhere).
I bet a lot more than 1% of Windows users have touch screens at this point, since they've become more-or-less standard on high-end laptops.
Mind, it still could easily be < 10%, given how many people have old/cheap PCs.
I don't quite know what the solution is though. The last thing Windows 10 needs in addition to its two separate control panels, command lines, and web browsers are two separate calculator apps.
Even on iOS I use the search field for math & unit conversions rather than the Calc app, since it's easier to refine/fix your formula
However, I really like the live weather tile, and I use it every day, sometimes several times a day by just pressing the start button, looking at the forecast, and pressing it again to go back to my app.
It was not intrusive and helpful. I also used the live calendar and mail that way (I hate notifications) -- and the photos too to see if new pics had been synchronized.
I'm afraid Windows 10 is going way from Windows 8, and closer to Windows 7. I don't think this is progress.
My biggest gripe is that startup times are just too long. So many times I've gone to launch something like calculator only to have a beefy machine hang for almost a second, if not a full second. It's likely an engineering obstacle that can be overcome but it just makes UWP look like a bad move perf wise.
Do you feel the same about the macOS Carbon-Cocoa transition? Nobody misses Carbon anymore, and Win32 is as old as the classic Mac Toolbox.
Eventually they have to shed the old API.
Microsoft understands that the Windows API "is so deeply embedded in the source code of many Windows apps that there is a huge switching cost to using a different operating system instead".[1] If they force companies to incur that cost by dropping Win32 support, that gives companies the chance to make their application cross-platform at a much smaller additional cost, and shed their reliance on Windows.
Windows licensing fees are still quite a large chunk of Microsoft's revenues, so I think that they will not make this move any time soon.
1. https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-wed-have-been-dead-a...
The comparison between Apple and Microsoft vis-à-vis backward compatibility is illuminating, but not in the way you seem to believe it is.
This does make me wonder if the transition from Carbon to Cocoa is analogous though. Win32 comes off as more of a "functional" approach to programming (C) and UWP is looking more object oriented (as to C++). It makes me wonder what kinds of conceptual advantages are being brought on board by moving from win32 to UWP. I think that conceptually I am in favor of the transition, and I'd wager that all the issues that arise are common to a functional to object-oriented transition.
But that real questions: What are the benefits? Is it conceptually easier to grasp thus promoting more developer interaction? Are we expecting speed benefits (are the performance losses expected and in range?) Is it a false dichotomy to only look at Functional vs OO? Maybe a context-oriented data approach is more appropriate?
Dunno.
> They're slow, they lack features, they have horrible UIs and they don't integrate well with the rest of the OS.
This is the case with almost all android apps too.
[1]: https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows8_1...
One other problem the store has is that it handles poor network horribly. Or rather, it just can't work with poor internet.
Play store on the other hand is a master piece. It will open even offline (I tested it right now). It will show a cached page from last time.
Even settings work offline. And finally, the play store will alert you when you're back online.
MS store on the other hand will throw an incomprehensible ERROR Code at you.
From that point of view it makes perfect sense.
What it did not make sense was creating an incompatible .NET runtime for it, or the way it was introduced with device specific APIs (Win 8, Win 8.1), using shared code folders.
I dont see any advantage of win calculator over it.
I think the approach they're taking to refactoring the Control Panel into the Settings App is smart. They're dog-fooding the Frameworks they're expecting others to use, slowly migrating functionality that's relevant to a modern Windows platform, and keeping existing functionality around until they've replicated it.
I also like that the apps are responsive. I use the snap feature a lot and it's nice that the Apps will adapt to the dimensions I relegate them to.
I literally have no idea what Microsoft is doing anymore. Sometimes it feels like Linux was 10 years ago when I would accidentally install Konquerer on Gnome and all of a sudden I had two desktop systems installed and my root drive had doubled it's consumed harddrive space. It basically worked, but it was a terrible experience.
Also, drivers? o-O
I’ve definitely enabled/disabled the tiles on an individual basis. I just don’t recall whether it’s universally available to all programs, or a particular subset.
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).
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.
[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.
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?)
> 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.
Windows 10, for example. And the compiler stacks for Windows. I can go on forever.
All major new APIs since Vista are based on COM, with UWP being COM vNext.
WinUI is becoming the basis of React Native for Windows, and is the only Windows UI toolkit with a roadmap beyond bug fixing.
Win32 ("WinAPI" nowadays) is the API everyone will keep using (plus .NET for higher level).
Make a sandbox/container for Win32 apps and that's it.
It is kinda/sorta possible to do that now using something like VirtualBox, but you need to create a full Windows 10 installation (which takes several GBs), it takes time to install (you can save some time by exporting a fresh installation to an appliance - at expense of more space - though you'd also need to disable networking otherwise after a while the moment it notices internet will start upgrading) and it can't use the computer resources properly (it runs much slower, you have no access to the GPU, etc). A properly integrated Windows 10 solution would be to map existing files to VM so that it reuses 99% of the stuff that would be the same and, if needed, do a copy-on-write in cases where these files are altered inside the VM (it could also help to see what exactly the programs inside the VM touch, sort of a system-wide diff... though that can also have false positives if the changes are by the OS itself).
The first thing I do is to remove them all with powershell script.
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.
LXDE (the original, not LxQT) is still well-supported on Debian Stable, and that's probably the closest thing to a 'XP-like or better' experience on Linux these days. Xfce is not far behind, though. Or you can experiment with more niche stuff such as WindowMaker, Fvwm95, IceWM and whatnot, but you're more likely to run into unimplemented stuff and these are simple window managers, so utility programs must be installed separately.
Of course, you should be mindful of RAM requirements. A modern Linux install will need at least 1GB to feel really snappy, which is far above the typical XP machine.
Mint + XFCE is really a fine combo.
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 :-).
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.
>I'm looking for a snappy UI.
Problems like these I think stems from poor design decisions made at Microsoft as a whole.
Take ARC compared to Garbage Collection as an example. Not sure why Microsoft chose a Garbage Collector design when implementing .NET, but given how Garbage Collection works, there's always risk of it causing UI stutter when it's doing its thing. Apple in comparison chose an ARC design when implementing Swift to avoid potential responsive UI issues... even if ARC is overall less performant.
Then you also have the decisions to support backwards compatibility and you have a mess on your hands.
Frankly, I hate it somedays when I click on my windows calculator app and it opens a blank window and just sits there. I have to kill it and restart it 2-3 more times before it actually opens up. Stuff like this should never happen!
Same UI issues can happen in reference counting with deeply nested data structures.
Sorry you're right, I meant tracing garbage collection.
>Same UI issues can happen in reference counting with deeply nested data structures.
Only if done poorly. The difference is this is deterministic and therefore an issue you can control and avoid with ARC (albeit at a cost to overall performance). The point was that ARC doesn't have the potential for a uncontrollable random process kicking in, stopping your app and causing UI stutter as it cleans up memory, whereas tracing GC does.
A good comparison: http://developer-toolbox.blogspot.com/2017/12/garbage-collec...
No, what happened is Microsoft placed a bet on us moving to a multi-platform future where there are many fewer PCs and more tablets, hybrid devices, whatever, all with the need to use touch, pen as well as keyboard for input. The existing start menu and taskbar would be hideous on mobile devices.
The problem is they were wrong. But I'm not going to blame "designer types". If you ever used Metro UI on a Windows Phone device you'd see that it was a truly remarkable system... that was bent to fit a task it didn't fit.
For choice, they finally relented with windows 8.1 and allowed people to boot to desktop directly rather than the start screen. Windows 10 took off the start screen completely.
Choice matters. I liked the start screen but the horizontal scrolling killed it. Like pouring salt in Tea.
Too many changes.
Facebook's learned this lesson well. They no longer do large overhauls. Small changes at a time and in a few months, it's a whole different interface. Only infrequent users would notice.
That's what they are doing with Windows 10 - many small interface changes. The little changes are mainly minor inconveniences.
One last thing.
When they released windows 8 - hardware support was almost non existent. Touch screen PC from that era really sucked. Now with detachable screens, Win 8 style pc interactions might be cool.
> The problem is they were wrong.
They weren't far off either. While PC sales haven't crashed as many feared, the majority of growth in larger form factor computing has been iPads & Chromebook. That plus the fact that a big percentage of desktop software has moved to Javascript/ Electron.
I admit being sad that Metro was wasted though because it really was very nice on phones.
To me, the "advancement" of the human-computer interface came to a screeching halt at that time. People grok menus. Memorizing sequences of Mnemonic accelerators is natural when overlaid on a haptic path created by mouse movement/menu navigation.
Then you take everything and throw out the baby with the bath water by trying to put every past bit of functionality on screen at the same time when what one needs is to be able to set up a work bench quickly, and just do your work, and if necessary save said work bench state to return to later.
I've seen more and "better" advancements in UI design in exactly 1 place, in all the different software suites I use, and that is in IDEs. Ironically, the one place that programmers have to make due day in, day out.
It makes me wonder whether anyone who presides over these programs is actually proficient in the non-computing version of said task. A Typesetter/document composer for instance. Nothing about the modern interface leads me to believe that any actually invested individual is involved, and that the design was pushed by the need for someone at Microsoft to be seen as needed in order to change something.
Then again... Can"t judge 'em for that. We all want to be wanted.
What I hate is the save / options / preference / file menu of office 2016 upwards. It's a nightmare - just too many steps to save a simple file to disk. Even after using it for years, I still need to pay full attention in this menu rather than muscle memory.
Just because they are pushing OneDrive.
Even after years I prefer menus and toolbars over the ribbon. With them you can scan in one direction whereas with the ribbon you have to up and down, left and right. I find it really difficult to find something there.
Unfortunately that’s not what Windows does any more. It lags. It does weird stuff. It keeps moving things around.
This isn’t just one installation. I’ve installed W10 a few times over the past few years and the lag, weirdness and cheese-moving continue in whatever installation I try to get along with.
There are plenty of useful things that can be done below the surface that would make Windows better over time. Breaking the interface due to incessant fiddling isn’t adding value: it’s removing it.
And yes, these are the main reasons I’m currently sticking with MacOS everywhere. I just need the OS to work and let me run my stuff in peace.
Besides a shit UI, the creepy phoning home and ads created many a defector away from MS.
So if they can't even adopt static tiles, no wonder the live tiles have received nearly zero traction.
Link: https://github.com/Open-Shell/Open-Shell-Menu
Screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/ujspeiD.png
Ignore the shit font rendering, I have every option toggled for max performance over RDP.
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.
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.)
Invasion of privacy and leeching of attention.
Not as bad as the boot times and the overall performance I suppose, but still ...
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.
God, I remember the near instantaneous boot of 7... I was giddy when I had that way back when. Now? I'm just angry at all the garbage.
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.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20200225190518/https://www.lapto...
The weather and calendar widgets are useful. Not a whole lot else though, in my experience.
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.
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.
Then it all vanished for some reason.
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.
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.
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.
It's a trick. The Microsoft I know never - NEVER, ever recreates an existing software completely before retiring it. And they'll retire the incomplete replacement with something less functional soon after.
It will be impossible (or at least wildly impractical) to attempt to do this all at once. Iterative releases is entirely the correct approach to a problem of this scale.
Personally, I still prefer the old control panel but I also know it's a little intimidating for the average user. Having a mobile-phone like settings experience is going to b be less surprising for the majority of users.
Changing this stuff would be equivalent to burning an appreciable portion of the internet to the ground. Not even counting the work involved in updating the UI and ensuring that equivalent functionality was retained, the amount of documentation that would need to be updated gives me the willies.
I'd still get rid of them (or push/float the app links to the right) and save the vertical space.
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.
Only a minor issue though compared to the search being so utterly broken after so many years.