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Comment by bunderbunder | Hacker News Reader

's funny; one of the screenshots is used to call out the Charms bar as an example of great UI. For me - as a user of Windows 8 on a desktop - it has become something of an icon of just how poor Windows 8's UI is.

On a tablet, you swipe it out from the left edge of the screen. Makes sense - so much sense that Apple copied the idea in iOS 7.

On a PC, you bring out the charms bar by frustratedly wiggling your mouse against the right edge of the screen for a few seconds before remembering that to make UI widgets appear out of the middle of the screen's edge, you inexplicably need to move the cursor all the way up or down to one of the corners.

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Shooting the mouse into a corner is actually one of those gestures that is hardest to get wrong, which is why we've placed the window's close button up there for decades. Your mistake is aiming for the side instead of the top right corner of the screen; you can't overshoot it, so it never takes more than one physical gesture.

You can also swipe from the right edge of your touchpad as if it were the screen.

What's the equivalent of the right edge of the touchpad if you're using a mouse? Do I need to stand up and walk over to the side of my room so I can start from the wall?

On my monitor, the charms appear really far from the corner of the screen. It's true that it's an easy target to hit. That isn't the only way in which I find interacting with the charms bar to feel like throwing hatchets at the side of a barn. The arm motion's remarkably similar, too.

> What's the equivalent of the right edge of the touchpad if you're using a mouse?

Moving it up and to the right. You may remain seated.

This doesn't work so well when you have two monitors.

It works as well as any other corner interaction on multiple monitors; closing a window on the rightmost screen isn't a novel movement. The charms bar can be on the right screen as well, so it's still a corner gesture you can't overshoot.

Opening the charms bar on a desktop computer is a rare event anyway. The buttons it exposes are primarily touch interactions used when holding a tablet running a Metro app. In a classic application, you wouldn't be using its search/share/device buttons, and it's faster to just press the Windows key to do a system/web search.

I have 2 monitors, but they aren't the same size. I aim for the bottom corner, since I have the tops of each monitor aligned. Works great.

It works fine with two monitors. There's a "sticky" spot in shared corners that makes opening the sidebars easy: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2012/05/21/enhancing-wind...

It's not hard to get wrong. It's almost impossible to do correctly. I have three monitors on my desk at work. At home I use Mouse Without Borders to connect to my laptop. It flat out stinks.

> Your mistake is aiming for the side instead of the top right corner of the screen

His mistake or just UI design so bad even a techie can't figure it out?

The amount of "you're doing it wrong" when it comes to addressing Windows 8/Surface UI issues is mind boggling.

Yes, and inexplicable why they carried this behavior over to Windows Server 2012. It is not likely we will see touch interfaces in rackmount servers any time soon.

It is nearly impossible to hit the charms hot corner inside a windowed RDP session when the window is not full screen.

It's perfectly explicable. You will manage your servers using RDP from a surface.

Gestures and multitouch carry over RDP in Windows 8.

I've read the article talking endlessly about the corners as the easiest place for users to reach and I can accept that they are correct on their own terms.

The problem is that on a laptop people are used to both visual and kinesthetic cues for their action. Just as much, any mouse "gesture" effect has to leverage our intuition about physical things... when a gesture in one place (a corner) causes something to happen elsewhere (a side), it feels unnatural and is going to keep feeling unnatural no matter how many fan boys wiggle noses and say "you're doing it wrong, this is really easy no matter hard you're claim to find it...".

Edit: The point is the bar appearing on the side cues the user to go to the side, regardless of their great dexterity at going to the corner if they happened to remember to do that (as the gp actually implies).

The biggest issue for me is that there's no visual cue with the charms gesture, which is pretty necessary if there's going to be any kind of delay in my mouse being there and the charms appearing.

It's not exactly difficult to overshoot a window's close button. I don't run everything maximized; that would completely defeat the purpose of a large screen.

I've found the least annoying way to bring up charms on my desktop computer is Win+C.

this. Also Win+X is a nice one for the desktop.

Do you know if you can disable bringing it up with the mouse?

Dunno, it's never been an issue for me. I'm used to edge-activated features from OS X, and slamming the mouse into the corner to call up the menu always seemed like a simple, efficient user interface to me.

It's a bit weird when you use a computer via VNC, though, because you have to move the mouse more precisely.

I found the gesture really natural, myself. I quick flick and swipe up, and you don't really need to do it precisely.

What does one use the charms bar for? I've been using win8 as my main OS for over a year and I literally don't think I've used it once. The only obvious things the charms bar does I find easier and quicker to do with keyboard shortcuts.

For the record, I despise all the Metro stuff and would cut it out if it were easy to do so.

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