Wednesday, February 29, 2012

Microsoft redefines just about everything

MS is making a Consumer Preview of Windows 8 available for download, installation, rebooting, and rebooting once or twice more today. The company has made major changes to the clunky UI that's been around since the days of Windows 95, including some innovative features that make win8 the first OS to catch up to a few of the features that have been around in OSX, iOS, and some Linux UI managers for a few years now.

With Metro, gone is the tired, old metaphor of clicking on full-color square icons to run a program. The new hotness involves simply tapping on monochrome square tiles to interact with an app! Clicking these new tiles to run an app, er... that is, tapping icons to interact with programs is just a paradigm shift in outside-of-the-box thinking when it comes to streamlining my computer synergy, especially compared to the old method of clicking on squares to run... uh... apps, I guess. In retrospect, the user experience of all the shitty old windows versions (everything before 8, I mean) was just really dreadful.

Surely that's all going to change, this time for sure, with all the new definitions and no more of those distracting multiple colors.

I haven't tried out this amazing piece of software yet, but I can report on some anticipated changes that are likely to debut in windows 8:
  • Users can tap on tiles using either a FeelSurface or their gerbils.
  • Apps can store data in one or more boxes, arranged in various drawers in the computer's main shipping container.
  • The Start Menu has been replaced by a list of apps that can be started via the new Launch Cookbook.
  • Gone are the awful days of the Blue Screen of Death. The functionality of the unpopular feature is now handled by the Full-screen Indicator of Unscheduled Coffee Break.
This changes everything! Users who've been screwed over by Microsoft for decades now, time after time, might just want to give MS one more chance yet again to try to not rape them. Eight just might be your lucky number for not getting raped. If not, be assured that the Picayune Tech Squad is the place to be for hopeful speculation about 9, after 8 turns out to be more of the same crap that we've always seen from MS. Surely it's all going to change, with Nine for sure!


Update, March 13, 2012: We broke the story first! The mainstream news is catching up to the realization that 8 is going to be crap but 9... maybe 9 will be good! Slashdot is confirming that 8 will be a mistake. "The company needs to learn from its mistakes as quickly and nimbly as they can — and then turn around and make Windows 9 exceed all of our expectations."

If not, then 10. Or 11. It is statistically impossible for Microsoft to deliver with perfect consistency such utter useless shit every time. Eventually they will slip up and accidentally make something that doesn't make their users' lives hell.

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