Renzatic on 28/10/2012 at 12:01

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Go under PC Settings/Personalize/Start Screen. You'll see them there.

ZylonBane on 28/10/2012 at 16:04

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Yes, so much better to have everything dumped into one gigantic toybox of jumbo icons that you must scroll-scroll-scroll-your-boat to access. Hierarchical organization exists for a reason.

It's rather telling of Metro's GUI design that so far the most consistent high praise of it I've seen is the keyboard shortcuts that allow you to avoid using the GUI. It is by far the least-discoverable GUI Microsoft has ever produced. It exists on the desktop entirely as a marketing ploy to leverage desktop consumers into buying Surface tablets, not because it's good for desktop use (which pretty much every review agrees, it is not). As such, I wish nothing but shame and failure upon it.

Albert on 28/10/2012 at 20:10

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Hmm, for that price and with a supported shell replacement, it might be worth a gamble.

Granted, that's what I said for Vista, when a friend ran in with the install DVDs screaming bloody murder. :p

(And going by the keyboard interface that ZB has informed me about now, I think it's even more worth the try, now.)

Renzatic on 29/10/2012 at 00:35

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To me, it's both quicker and easier to access. With nested menus, I'd have to hit the all programs button, scroll down, search through tiny text, then hit the folder to get to an icon for a program I buried away but still need access to occasionally. It's a pain in the ass to me. I want everything up front, ready to go right when I need it. I eventually got to the point where I never accessed anything in All Programs. If I wanted to find some obscure little program, I'd do a type to search.

Windows 8? The new start screen is more immediately accessible. I can squirrel away more icons now, organize them into nice little columns, and access them far quicker. The corner is an infinitely large target as far as the UI is concerned. I can hit it without even directly looking at it. Then it pops up with everything right in front of me. I can organize it how I want, quickly scan the screen by the shapes of the columns, and select the desired program all within 2 seconds of opening the start menu. To me, it's far faster and much easier to use.

Even type to search is better now, because it can display far more results in the larger amount of space, and I can drill down to deeper specifics than I could with the little popup menu. My only complaint with it is that it lacks an "all" category, and it defaults to applications. If I want to find a document or picture, I have to hit the down key once or twice to highlight the appropriate entry.



This I can agree with. You've got tons of added features that make it easier to navigate around Windows with, but hell if any of these features are obvious. Once you know they're there, it's all good, but you're going to spend at least a week trying to do things the old way and hating it the entire time. Minimalism only works when you take it so far. If you try to keep everything out of the way, people won't even know it exists.

And it's not like the little intro video does much to help you out. It's a little 20 second clip that basically boils down to "WINDOWS 8! CORNERS DO STUFF NOW"! Yeah? What do they do? Oh, you won't tell me. Well, I guess I'll look at it as a learning experience.

Being able to pin anything you want to the start screen for easy access doesn't help much when they don't tell you that you can pin anything you want to the start screen for easy access. They leave it to you to figure out. It's no wonder some people hate it at first.



There's no problem with Metro itself. It's easy to use, easy to navigate, and looks nice in a pretentious postmodern bullshit sorta way. Nothing stopping anyone from making Metro apps styled to a desktop environment. The biggest problem with it is that there currently aren't any desktop specific Metro apps. Right now, they are touch apps being displayed on your giant 24"+ monitor. Everything's HUGE! Big text across the top of the screen. GIANT fucking buttons. Big 'ole pictures. It's usable with a mouse and keyboard sure, but it doesn't feel right. You keep thinking they could use the space a lot better than what they are.

Thing is, all metro apps, or anything from the Windows Marketplace or whatever it's called, is completely optional. You don't have to use them. The only one I use regularly is Netflix. For everything else, I'll use the desktop equivalent. I don't consider it a detriment so much as having the option to use touch based apps on my computer if I want to.

Though I do hope MS comes to its senses and realizes there's no such thing as a one size fits all environment between a touch and kb/m setup. The start screen works alright as both, but that's because it's only an application launcher and search environment. It honestly does work for either/or. But if you want to actually work in a program, you want it to be tailored to the interface you're running it in. You don't need gigantic UI elements when you're using a mouse.

...and considering MS intends for WinRT to be the eventual successor to Win32, you better hope they do. Otherwise we'll all be running off to Linux or OSX when all Metro Windows 9 comes out. Remember, MS considers the desktop to be a legacy environment these days. Big changes are a'comin.



That only worked for the developer preview. From the consumer preview on, all traces of the old start menu have been gutted out completely. Now you either have to use the new start screen, or rely on a 3rd party app to get it back.

ZylonBane on 29/10/2012 at 02:58

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This sounds like you're describing the godawful miniaturized All Programs in Windows 7, not the proper Win95-style one with the lovely flyout menus.