"I’ve been following Windows 8 closely over the past few months, spending a lot of time not only with the official releases but also with a number of leaked builds, and I’ve had the chance to install the operating system on a variety of hardware platforms, both old and new."
"You may think that after a while you will become immune to these annoyances the more you use Windows 8. I don’t know. All I can say is that I haven’t come to that point yet, and the depressing thing is that I don’t think I will."
I don't know about you, but if I'd felt this way about the usability of anything (desktop, smartphone, whatever) after a few months, I'd have chucked it and moved on to something else (or gone back to whatever I'd been using before). Exactly how long should he keep beating his head against the wall until he's allowed to complain?
I've been using Windows 8 since they released the consumer preview. I hated it with a passion at first, but I wanted to see if it was just because it was different, or just because it was bad, so I kept using it.
You definitely can get past most of the annoyances without too much trouble. For example, there's a start screen when you first load up the computer, a screen that comes before the screen where you type in your password. You have to hold down left click and flick your mouse up to get rid of it, which is annoying on a laptop without a mouse, which is what I'm using it on. That annoyed me for a good week or two before I figured out that you can press a key to get by that screen without the mouse gesture.
There are still some things that make me curse, though. Anytime metro goes full screen because I hovered my mouse near the top left of my screen (I'll occasionally try to click on the options in firefox and go to metro instead), any time it reminds me that I can use an annoying full screen metro app to play videos when I open videos with VLC, anytime the charm bar appears (I've never used that thing once). I also wish there was an easier way to go to my computer, because that's what I use the start menu for 50% of the time, and now I have to right click where the start menu was and spend 10 seconds looking for 'windows explorer' on a small menu every time I want to do this.
It's just a lot of little annoyances. I can live with it, but I really do hope that Windows 8 crashes and burns.
I think this is poor design choice. Why would you want to "unlock" a laptop. It is not prone to accidental touches when it's in your pocket or the bag, which is exactly what "<gesture> to unlock" is supposed to prevent.
Now, I'm worried that they've done this just to look cool and so that people go "hey, I do that on my Windows PC, and the same gesture works on my (very rarely found) Windows phone".
They've always had this. Previously it's been called "Ctrl+Alt+Del Unlock". It then takes you to the password prompt. This is just replacing that key combination with a prettier screen, and also adding a quick glance at how many emails you've received, how many IM chats, weather forecast, etc without having to log in.
Without getting into the discussion on how incredibly important a password on a laptop is, you can disable this lock screen just like you would disable the password prompt after coming back from sleep mode on any previous version of Windows.
Again, you don't have to slide to unlock. You can just press a keyboard key. And it's always been there.
Wasn't the point of having C+A+D to get Windows' attention, thereby assuring that only a valid login window will receive your login credentials? How does this handle that?
"I’ve been following Windows 8 closely over the past few months, spending a lot of time not only with the official releases but also with a number of leaked builds, and I’ve had the chance to install the operating system on a variety of hardware platforms, both old and new."
"You may think that after a while you will become immune to these annoyances the more you use Windows 8. I don’t know. All I can say is that I haven’t come to that point yet, and the depressing thing is that I don’t think I will."
I don't know about you, but if I'd felt this way about the usability of anything (desktop, smartphone, whatever) after a few months, I'd have chucked it and moved on to something else (or gone back to whatever I'd been using before). Exactly how long should he keep beating his head against the wall until he's allowed to complain?