Please restore the Start Menu

[AWS]

After almost a month fulltime on the official release of Windows 8 Professional, I still find that there are too many places where I can't find a workaround that is as fast or faster than what we had previously.

The Metro Modern UI is an excellent interface for touch devices. However, it is necessary to understand the characteristics of different devices and optimize accordingly rather than implement a common denominator or be biased toward just one class.

Touch has tremendous bandwidth. One swipe of a finger is several tens of Mbps, but it is not precise, and your fingers can't do much else such as typing. It is a trade-off. The mouse (or similar pointing devices on the notebook PC) generates a much lower bandwidth, but it is much more precise. So for touch (and no keyboard), you require huge cartoon icons and can have all on a flat list and swipe the start screen to look for what you want quickly. For a PC user, laying out giant icons is a pure waste of space, and having them in one flat list across multiple screenfuls makes aiming for the right icon take a much longer time.

For touch, having cascading menus is harder because the gigantic icons to cater for the huge finger hotspot takes up too much space and leave little room for cascading menus to be practical. For PC users, we don't want icons (we have since graduated from kindergarten), and often, we use fast keys (because we have a keyboard) to jump to a menu item, and grouping and cascading menus is a time-tested excellent scaling solution. Textual lists are easier to search as they can be in sorted in alphabetical order. What is the sort order for icons? Colors? Picture complexity? Faced with a 1920x1080 screen of icons, I have a hard time locating what I am looking for. For the type of work I am doing, the difference between 0.2s and 2s is 10X, a big number.

I am not asking for removing the Modern UI. I am all for it, and tablets need it. I am changing my methods to adapt to it, but there are simply too many situations where I cannot find an equivalent as fast as previously.

Right now the Metro Modern UI is unsuitable for the PC. As an example which I face many times a day, I press the Windows key and type in something, the letters I type are shown on theFAR RIGHT of my 1920x1080 screen. The search results of what I type appear on theFAR LEFT of the screen. But the thing I want is under Settings instead of Apps and so I have to swing to theFAR RIGHT of the screen to select Settings. Then my attention has to switch to theFAR LEFT of the screen for the results. And if I right click an item shown, the context menu is not in context but at theFAR BOTTOM of the screen. Don't you think this is a giant leap backward if not comical?

My type of work requires a multi-tasking PC. I have to monitor several on-going tasks during certain intense periods. But if I press the Windows key, my desktop is completely blocked. This is disruptive and affects productivity as I have to re-synchronize my visual context all over again.

It is wrong to force fit the desktop UI onto a phone, as seen in the big difference between the usability of the iPhone and Windows Mobile. And it is also obviously wrong to force the phone UI onto a PC or server.

Microsoft, until the day PCs play a minor role in the world, please bring back the PC desktop for PC applications.

 

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