Scared of the direction of WP.

[Blkacesvf41]

Are we talking about the same things? The right-left action is different than the split-screen action. I was answering the question about right-left.

There are three left-swipe actions in Windows 8. 1) Flick in: switches apps. 2) Swipe in, but stop short without lifting your finger: brings previous task in, splitting the screen. 3) Swipe in, then reverse direction back to the left edge: show preview windows. (One can then flick one of the thumbnails rightward to make it the active task or drag it rightward a bit, pause, and release to make a split screen with it.)

Split:
View attachment 49511

Thumbs:
View attachment 49512

What that swipe in from the left does is gonna be dependent on your settings under Corners and Edges.

 

[Blkacesvf41]

By the way, how do I take a screenshot with an HP Envy x2? Does anybody know?

 

[dznk]

By the way, how do I take a screenshot with an HP Envy x2? Does anybody know?

Does it not have a print screen button on the keyboard? The key usually says 'Prt sc' if it's abbreviated.

 

[rockstarzzz]

I've always been against notification centre and that X mark to close cards. This is making WP another Android like iPhone wasn't enough and ruining it's beauty. Look what it has done to iOS7.

WP was always about minimalism and simple stuff. Power users aren't majority of smartphone users but seems their moaning and groaning one day will make WP a beautiful yet ugly android clone. That day, I shall go back to my Nokia 3320.

View attachment 49534
Let me get this straight, you guys actually believe adding notification center and few other Highly Requested features are going to mutilate the unique WP8.1 experience? Really?
http://stream1.gifsoup.com/webroot/animatedgifs4/1077759_o.gif
If anything, the notification center & these added features will enhance WP platform. I do not understand why people would be against this improvement into WP8.1.

When did you first hear about WP and when did you first buy it? Just out of interest.

If you knew WP since it's birth, you would know - what live tiles does. I totally agree with everyone out there defending live tiles.
Highly requested feature being a notification is obvious thing and sad thing. Because people are migrating from Android, they want what they had on Android. But they don't want the lag or freezes. So they like WP but want all the features they had and everything they've used on Android. That makes a WP, a sleeker Android - you have Nexus 5 for that.

What live tiles were created for, what Joe and Steve told us on stage about WP when they launched it - the hubs, the panorama, the app to app talk, the integration, the live tiles - these are what we know WP by and this was its true identity.

Hubs - never heard of it since 2010.
Panorama - apps are killing it under their "official" design - yes facebook.
Integration - Microsoft slow as snail - yes Skype.
Live tiles - notification centre, really!?

So I totally understand everyone's frustration at a notification making its way on a WP. It's definitely shaping and developing the platform, it will grow as a big family but it will change what WP was meant to be.

 

[AndreStudart]

Well.. I do think that multitasking window is great and veery needed..

I use it all the time and close all my apps by the ''x'' (gdr3 preview), and I love how it works, simple and functional, as it should be, pressing back button multiple times to close apps is just not handy, multi task window makes think much more easier.. my cousin, who was with me yesterday, was in love for wp8, how beatiful the OS is, and she talked about the multi task window, that it does look very nice and more simple as well..

as long for the notification center, let's see what's microsoft idea.. the way it is now, it's just not right, sometimes notifications doesn't arrives on the apps, or it's late, you have to look for notification, that isn't right.. making an analogy, it's like pressing the back button multiple times (not handy at all), if you could just only close it by the multitask window, which is MUCH more handy.. So, yes, they should put a notification center, it DOESN'T need to look life android or iOS versions, and It seems that it isn't going to look like that (due the leaks and all..) but this is a true need for wp8 ecosystem, and me, for example, I saw may dad's text message 5 days after he sent it to me! why? because there's no room in the lockscreen for messages, and I had no idea that he sent me a message, so, yes, IT IS NEEDED.


Wp8 is starting to be a sucess, sales growing very very fast and it won't be a notification center or multi task window that will stop it. for christ sake, be smarter guys.

 

[AngryNil]

Let me get this straight, you guys actually believe adding notification center and few other Highly Requested features are going to mutilate the unique WP8.1 experience? Really?

Some people around here stubbornly refuse to accept any change, despite the fact they are using Windows Phone, which is change in and of itself. Any added feature detracts from the "simplicity" and "purity" of the OS that less than 4% of the smartphone market chooses every quarter. They also complain whenever an app tries to deviate from the standard templates from Microsoft – "OMG it's not Metro".

I really have to congratulate these people for wanting the platform to stagnate and remain limited in functionality while other platforms continue to march ahead, taking advantage of processing power increases as they should. And I'm sorry people, but Live Tiles do not replace a notification centre. It's evidenced by the requests of many, many users and has been argued a million times. Stop repeating your tired mantras and bother to read the other side's argument for once. I'll keep my last-ditch attempt to convince you short: to get the equivalent of a toast notification's content (which is just one cut-off sentence!), I'd need to use a wide tile, which would take up a third of my screen. If you see nothing wrong with that, I give up.

 

[tgp]

Some people around here stubbornly refuse to accept any change, despite the fact they are using Windows Phone, which is change in and of itself. Any added feature detracts from the "simplicity" and "purity" of the OS that less than 4% of the smartphone market chooses every quarter. They also complain whenever an app tries to deviate from the standard templates from Microsoft – "OMG it's not Metro".

I really have to congratulate these people for wanting the platform to stagnate and remain limited in functionality while other platforms continue to march ahead, taking advantage of processing power increases as they should. And I'm sorry people, but Live Tiles do not replace a notification centre. It's evidenced by the requests of many, many users and has been argued a million times. Stop repeating your tired mantras and bother to read the other side's argument for once. I'll keep my last-ditch attempt to convince you short: to get the equivalent of a toast notification's content (which is just one cut-off sentence!), I'd need to use a wide tile, which would take up a third of my screen. If you see nothing wrong with that, I give up.

^This!^ Excellent post! There's nothing wrong with WP being different, but not to the point of losing functionality. Some things tend to morph into the same form, simply due to the fact that that's how they work best. That's why all cars appear roughly the same. And operate similarly. It's the same with smartphones. All platforms become somewhat similar for the same reason.

 

[ominaxe]

I'm really happy to see people agreeing with me. I was so sure I'd be shot down.

I think rockstarrzzz sums it up well with WP becoming a sleeker Android. That's not what I wanted when I first got into WP7. I liked the aggregation, the simplification, I liked the glance and go nature of LiveTiles, and Microsoft's innovation and willingness to try new things. After my two WPs busted I've been looking to buy a new phone and all this talk about the shaky direction of WP and the android spec 'catch-up' has really got me thinking... maybe I should switch OSes if this is how MS wants to move forward.

I don't know why, but BlackBerry is looking interesting to me right now. I haven't played with one yet, and while it doesn't seem as simple as WP, it may be the answer I need. I like the innovation and outside the box thinking BB is implementing. I particularly like the aggregation of BBhub and peek feature -- and along with the Z30s reported battery life, if it is more stable than and just as smooth as the current build of WP8, that would be perfect.

...I guess I just don't like this constant nagging feeling that I made a mistake when I made the jump from WP7 to WP8. While I like the idea of going back to it, I have grown accustomed to some applications that WP8 has available and not sure I can go back.

@AngryNil
If it ain't broke, don't fix it. You talk about marching forward, but as far as I can tell, I think it's a step back when I had to restart my 928 more times in a week than I had with my Trophy in 6 months. Why do we need quad core processors when single and dual worked fine .. especially when batteries are stagnated. My 928 barely made a day with the usage I was putting on for nearly two with my extended Trophy battery. I wasn't happy at all with the way MS was moving forward with the OS.

 

[N_LaRUE]

I'd need to use a wide tile, which would take up a third of my screen. If you see nothing wrong with that, I give up.

So sliding the screen left or right is easy (for notifications) or whatever they plan to do but flicking your finger in an upward motion is 'difficult'. I see. You're messages must be more important than mine. Than again, I have seen guys standing at urinals texting. Must be damn important that ~30 secs is too long to wait.

I've seem to have figured out a way to arrange my screen that works for me. However other people seem to find this a hard task.

You hear of people flashing custom ROMs on Android and Jailbreaking iPhones, which is a time consuming task, however rearrange that Start screen so it works, that's a tough one.

Not sure I get all that but I'm sure someone will argue with me that I'm not 'getting it'.

Don't worry you guys. You're notifications will come and whatever else you've demanded I'm sure will show up.

Yes WP is different and yes growth is something that needs to happen to it stay current with trends. However, as I've stated and others, WP is different for a reason and people coming over from Android just haven't seemed to have sorted that out yet. It's not about stagnation, it's about keeping the platform the way it should be. Sleek and modern.

 

[techiez]

If the notification center is a live tile that only shows information from apps with unpinned tiles, then this is necessary and perfect.

To the users who want a traditional notification center; get the fudge out and go back to android. This is WP. We use live tiles. If you regret switching from android, then go back to android, don't try to force your crummy workflow onto other ecosystems just because you didn't realize what you were buying into.

As we hv seen from some of the leaks, notification centre would be in line with WP design language, donr worry ms will not give you a slider top drawer if thats what you fear
notifications of unpinned tiles is a must definitely, new features are welcome but I would like MS to refine existing features first, make them bug free n then proceed with newer features.

 

[Blkacesvf41]

Does it not have a print screen button on the keyboard? The key usually says 'Prt sc' if it's abbreviated.

Thanks, yeah I knew about that. I was thinking more along the lines of volume up+Windows button kinda move like you do on a Lumia.

 

[AngryNil]

So sliding the screen left or right is easy (for notifications) or whatever they plan to do but flicking your finger in an upward motion is 'difficult'. I see. You're messages must be more important than mine.

[…]

Yes WP is different and yes growth is something that needs to happen to it stay current with trends. However, as I've stated and others, WP is different for a reason and people coming over from Android just haven't seemed to have sorted that out yet. It's not about stagnation, it's about keeping the platform the way it should be. Sleek and modern.

Yes, one gesture to get to a compact list of messages sorted in time order is easier than seeing one message (and only one for each app) per wide tile in an arbitrary arrangement. A list format allows you to condense far more information than with tiles, check out iOS & Android's implementations and look at how many messages fit on the screen. I personally think there is a logical distinction you can draw between the communication / messaging apps and the rest, and that the former group would benefit from this separate UI. The other approach is simply to aggregate toast notifications, which works as well.

Windows Phone may have been sleek and modern, but you don't stay that way by stagnating, which it has. Both iOS and Android have had overhauls since Windows Phone's launch, making strides with new interfaces, major features, multitasking scenarios, etc. Windows Phone still has the same templates from 2010, the same first party apps, a virtually unchanged interface, no noteworthy advance in multitasking, and no breakout feature addition.

 

[brunoadduarte]

So sliding the screen left or right is easy (for notifications) or whatever they plan to do but flicking your finger in an upward motion is 'difficult'. I see. You're messages must be more important than mine. Than again, I have seen guys standing at urinals texting. Must be damn important that ~30 secs is too long to wait.

I've seem to have figured out a way to arrange my screen that works for me. However other people seem to find this a hard task.

You hear of people flashing custom ROMs on Android and Jailbreaking iPhones, which is a time consuming task, however rearrange that Start screen so it works, that's a tough one.

Not sure I get all that but I'm sure someone will argue with me that I'm not 'getting it'.

Don't worry you guys. You're notifications will come and whatever else you've demanded I'm sure will show up.

Yes WP is different and yes growth is something that needs to happen to it stay current with trends. However, as I've stated and others, WP is different for a reason and people coming over from Android just haven't seemed to have sorted that out yet. It's not about stagnation, it's about keeping the platform the way it should be. Sleek and modern.

I think you're exaggerating a little bit. Even if you arrange the Start Screen to your liking, you always end up scrolling up and down in search of each tile count. A centralized option is needed simply because you go there, you see what you got and act accordingly. The way things are now, you have to scroll a lot (if you have lots of tiles in the Start screen) to get to each notification. And given that tiles can have different sizes, you may or not know what notifications matter and a proper NC helps with that if it has a brief description of what each notification is about. This is even harder to do given that the Start screen isn't sectioned. If you do a fast scroll, you can very well miss a tile count while the screen is moving up or down.

I still maintain that it can be simple, direct and metro-like. But it would require a lot of changes to the UI itself. I seriously wish that Nokia would "hand over" their Swipe UI to MS so they could adapt it to WP.

 

[ominaxe]

So why have tiles at all? Make the start screen a giant flow of notifications (a la Sense 5), then have a list of apps to the right of that. BAM. Done.

 

[MikeSo]

I'm not going to stand here and defend that multitasking is for everyone. Some people use it, some don't and that's fine. If you happen to need it, it's already there and there's no need to moan about it if it isn't. What I am going to defend is that it needs to exist simply because there are, in fact, people that use it and need it.

As for the notification centre, it's needed because everyone uses their tiles differently and some people don't even have all their apps in the homescreen. As an example, I use VIber a lot over Whatsapp and I don't have it on the homescreen. But if I get a text on Whatsapp, I don't have anything else to warn me except a toast that disappears after a few seconds.

This is exactly what I was going to write.

I use multitasking sparingly, but a phone without it would be a real nuisance at this point. And unless you pin every single app to the start screen, you WILL miss notifications without a way to easily view them. That's just the nature of things.

I just hope that the notification center doesn't create a lazy way for developers to deal with these events, so that they abandon the live tile concept and think "meh, I'll just let people check in the notification center instead".

 

[AngryNil]

So why have tiles at all? Make the start screen a giant flow of notifications (a la Sense 5), then have a list of apps to the right of that. BAM. Done.

Tiles would still have two functions for me:

• Showing information such as my agenda, the latest news story, subscription uploads from YouTube, the weather forecast, my data usage, my public transport card balance and so on. They aren't really notifications and I wouldn't want them in a notification centre, but they are still useful and work rather well with the tile format.
• Deep links into apps, i.e. secondary tiles. It's very cool that it's possible to have a particular YouTube channel, multiple weather locations, a podcast channel on SoundCloud or an artist / album pinned to the home screen. I also use this as a system-wide read later service, I'll pin something as a tile at the bottom of the home screen if I don't have time for it now then open it up later.

 

[N_LaRUE]

Allow me to stress again here. I understand that things need to change and WP needs to progress. I have nothing against that.

As for this statement, I have to disagree.

Windows Phone may have been sleek and modern, but you don't stay that way by stagnating, which it has. Both iOS and Android have had overhauls since Windows Phone's launch, making strides with new interfaces, major features, multitasking scenarios, etc. Windows Phone still has the same templates from 2010, the same first party apps, a virtually unchanged interface, no noteworthy advance in multitasking, and no breakout feature addition.

So a modern UI which other OS are copying. Live tiles, which no one else has. A hub system totally unique to the phone. Integrated apps. Integrated social networking and a different way of thinking but yet they're not 'innovative' enough and have 'no breakout' features. Yeah I see you understand WP.

Why are people adopting WP who haven't go any idea about the damn thing? You're probably the same people who winged about the removal of the Start button on W8.

 

[leo74]

I would describe myself as using my phone for business purpose only. Not a single game installed. Having said that, I am quite satisfied with the way WP works. In fact, the way WP works is why I switched from the other OS to begin with.

Multitasking is OK for what I need it. 90% of the time I need it to copy/paste something or to look up content while writing an email. The way WP works to that regard is great for my use case.

Having had notification centers, I am not really a huge fan of it.
I have the most important notifications on my start screen (having more than 5 would be nice, but I don't want to get lost in icons over icons).
As for emails, I just pin the live tile on the top of my screen and am good.
What I would like to see is a large live tile that allows me to show notification counts on this tile for a few apps and possibly even let's me access the apps with notifications via this tile (like FB, WhatsApp, Lync)
As for toast notifications (if you call the messages appearing at the very top of the screen that), I would be happy without them.

Again, my view might be a narrow one, because I am using my phone in a quite narrow fashion, but so far I have not missed anything. If one uses many different apps with notification, I would imagine a notification center would be essential. I for my part am quite happy with the way my phone works and would rather use live tiles than accessing any notification center like on Android. I found myself swiping away information that was unneeded a lot of times (app updates being one of them. I have a live tile for the store and I check when I want to and when I am on WiFi. No reminder needed there), but again, that is just me.
If they bring an Android like Notification Center, I just hope they make it in a way that I can disable it....

 

[michail71]

Well, part of the goal of a notification center is to provide a faster, lighter, simpler more straightforward way to digest incoming updates. If I've been away from my phone for an hour, isn't faster and easier to pull up a single view of recent activity than it is to jump into multiple apps (especially for toast notifications, since lots of these things just disappear into the ether)? As long as you can control what kind of notifications you get, it should be a net positive.

As far as needing to "twiddle" all the time (or not)- that is your choice. You could completely ignore the notification center (as my wife does on her iPhone. I honestly don't think she has ever looked at it; and she has certainly never cleared it out or cleaned up in a year of use). Or you could trim the apps that provide notifications to just those that are critical. With regards to multi-tasking and killing processes, again this is something you choose to do. These things are completely invisible unless you purposely engage with them. You could simply hit the Start or Home button and always launch an app from there. No need to long press or double-tap. Just ignore it. Modern mobile OS's do not need to be micro-managed; they will allocate resources or kill processes all on their own.

Wow, talking a whole lot of sense there.

 

[AngryNil]

So a modern UI which other OS are copying. Live tiles, which no one else has. A hub system totally unique to the phone. Integrated apps. Integrated social networking and a different way of thinking but yet they're not 'innovative' enough and have 'no breakout' features.

I've followed Windows Phone since February 2010, so don't pull the "you just don't get it" card on me. I do get it, and it's not anywhere as good as you make it out to be.

Live Tiles are fair. Much of their functional benefit can be replicated by widgets. I prefer tiles for consistency and they are a standard for all apps to support, so there is arguably an edge here. I wouldn't call it a killer feature, but a respectable alternative.

Oh man, I can't believe you just brought up hubs. They are the biggest disappointment of Windows Phone, the most promising yet least invested in concept. They were a focus in pre-launch 2010 but Microsoft has completely backed away from promoting them. They are underutilised and really, which ones shine? Am I supposed to applaud at the Photos hub providing me a list of shortcuts to photo-related apps? Because that's what the integration there amounts to.

If you're touting integration with Facebook & Twitter, you must be living in the past. Android provides the APIs for any app, and iOS integrates with Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and Vimeo.