Windows 8

[Lantyssa]

Just started using 8.1, is it really impossible to avoid having the programs menu go into full screen without adding a 3rd party patch?

Windows Classic Shell.  It's your friend.

[Pennilenko]

Windows Classic Shell.  It's your friend for old people who have lost the flexibility to adapt to change.

Fixed

[NowhereMan]

On the one hand I understand people who use Windows Classic or whatever but you know those people using CRT monitors with 640x480 resolution? That's going to be those of us that still object to fully interactive holographic UIs or whatever in 20 years 

[Rendakor]

If I had a touchscreen monitor, I wouldn't hate the Win 8 UI so much. But I don't, I use a TV Sky-style so I stuck with Win 7.

[Lantyssa]

Windows Classic Shell.  It's your friend for old people who have lost the flexibility to adapt to change IT Directors to push out to a floor of the dumbest people on Earth so she doesn't have to field constant calls on how to open up the program just like they did the day before and the day before that and all the other days since they tried to deploy it.

Fixed

Fixed your fix.

[Merusk]

Yeah 8 works very well on my surface and it's nice to navigate it there. It's just not well-suited to the at-desk PC use that the majority of us still do day to day.

On the one hand I understand people who use Windows Classic or whatever but you know those people using CRT monitors with 640x480 resolution? That's going to be those of us that still object to fully interactive holographic UIs or whatever in 20 years  

I have no fear of becoming those people. I see the ones who refuse to adapt to keyboard an mouse from Digitizer or use a ribbon instead of on-screen buttons every day.  Not just older than me, some who are 10-12 years younger, too.

The world of technology is held-back by humans.

Windows Classic Shell.  It's your friend for old people who have lost the flexibility to adapt to change IT Directors to push out to a floor of the dumbest people on Earth so she doesn't have to field constant calls on how to open up the program just like they did the day before and the day before that and all the other days since they tried to deploy it.

Fixed

Fixed your fix.

Exactly.

[MahrinSkel]

I have no fear of becoming those people. I see the ones who refuse to adapt to keyboard an mouse from Digitizer or use a ribbon instead of on-screen buttons every day.  Not just older than me, some who are 10-12 years younger, too.

Have you tried getting them to use something like this: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00DS18ZTG/ref=psdc_1292115011_t2_B00J9XCFOS

Or this, for those that need true drawing capabilities: http://www.amazon.com/Ugee-Inches-Graphics-Drawing-Tablet/dp/B00NL4P3Y0/

I've been considering getting one, seems like the ideal addon for my system, giving me a touch/drawing surface for when that is actually useful, while still giving me the ginormous ultra-wide for text-intensive work like writing or coding. Most people who are used to digitizers are doing drafting-type work, touch-screen and stylus would seem to be a good bridge tech. Wacom has their own series that my artist friends swear by, but they're very pricey (starting around $2K).

--Dave

[Merusk]

We have Wacom Cintiqs for the graphics folks and the illustrators. They're fantastic devices, and should be for the price. Take a look at them.
http://www.wacom.com/en-us/products/pen-displays

Touch doesn't work as well for drafting, mainly because of the program in question. CAD has a lot of work-arounds built in because it was developed for DOS and the interface was developed for it. Maybe there's people using touchscreens out there but I've never run across them. The fastest form of input in it remains one hand on the mouse, one hand on a keyboard knowing what shortcuts to use. Bonus if you get a KB with a keypad on the opposite side of your mousing hand, so you can do numeric inputs with that single hand too.

The problem folks in question are Autocad users who also refuse to move away from dumb-line drafting. "It's too hard" or "I'm an Architect/ Interior Designer, not a drafter" or "It takes too long to learn that" are reasons cited for not learning the program they're in 12+ hours a day. (Not coincidentally; not knowing the program is WHY large swaths of them are in it 12+ hours a day.)

One keepsthe digitizer because there's macros bound to it and he "has 12 buttons I can access"  Pointing out that there's mice with similar numbers gets a response of, "I'd have to learn a new way of doing things and that's inefficient. I'm better this way so just find a way to support it."  Given he's a VP and has support of one of the Principals I can't do much about it. *shrug*

I could also go into detail about how more than one business I've been at has been on 10+ year old software. However because Accounting or some other department knows it and "can't learn" the new version but this derail is already way off course. Suffice to say; large amounts of professionals in non-tech fields see no need to learn new interfaces and find it appalling that you insist they have to do so. 

[MahrinSkel]

Yeah, I don't get that, I've always liked messing with different input devices, back in the 90's I used CAD/CAM mice for gaming because the 'gaming mouse' hadn't been invented yet and having a dozen buttons when nobody else did fucking rocked (I also had a Space Orb).

I can't even really draw, no artistic talent whatsoever, but there are things that do just work better with a touch interface. My bitch about Windows 8 was that it tried to force us into touch interface in a desktop environment, when most people had neither the equipment nor the work-flow for it to even be usable, never mind preferable. Most of the time when I am working, I have two or three monitors all showing me different stuff (watch and debug windows for coding, references and style guides for writing), and touch does *nothing* for that. But on those occasions when I actually do need to draw, I find myself doing it on my tablet and then having to find ways to transfer it into the rest of my work environment (it's about the only thing I use my Surface for, because it makes that particular problem easier). Tablet form factors really are better for drawing than the old stylus tablets, but touch doesn't add much else to the desktop.

Touch is good for portability, not having all the input paraphernalia simplifies things, but even on my tablets I want a physical keyboard when I need to type more than a few sentences. 90% of the problems with Win8 were because Microsoft wanted to 'unify the user experience' when there are good reasons it shouldn't be unified.

--Dave

[luckton]

I felt and continue to feel bad for the poor sods at Best Buy that have had to deal with Windows 8 sales. Thank god I got out of there before it went to market.

These days I don't even know how they go about trying to sell Win8.1 computers on the "promise" that "everything you hate about 8.x is going to get fixed with the free Win10 upgrade."

That said, if they do actually come through with having 10 be the next "good" OS, I'd even be willing to give Windows Phone a shot. With the tech they've put out that allows iOS and 'droid apps to be either ported or emulated on Win10 (be it desktop or mobile), having a unified platform that ties everything together and work with all of it might actually put pressure on Apple and Google to up their game.

Or it might just all fall apart. I dunno. If anything we could at least give Satya Nadella's vision of Microsoft a chance.

[eldaec]

Using 8 a bit more, I'd have no issue with the tiles if they'd just spring out of the corner as a sensibly sized overlay menu instead of the full screen thing.

As it is it gives the same feeling you get when you run some old school ultra low res game that inexplicably refuses to run in a window.

Basically windows 8 is like trying to complete productivity tasks inside your biannual playthrough of Deus Ex.

[eldaec]

Regarding CAD interfaces, during my extremely brief drafting experience, my attitude was fuck all mice the command line is there for a reason. If you want me to do art, give me a pencil, technical drawing, a keyboard and my TI-83 will be fine.

 Until about 20 years ago when the fuckers developing every package everywhere decided CLIs needed to be hidden from the children or something, idk.