Seriously. From everything I'd seen, I didn't think it was going to be much good but I decided to install it and give it a whirl before making my mind up. So I bought a used tablet from eBay and installed it yesterday, only to discover it is so much worse than I thought it would be. OK, it's only been 36 hours or so but I haven't found so much as a single thing about it that feels better than Windows 8. It is all worse. Terrible, even.
Firstly, they seem to have completely destroyed the tablet experience. And I mean completely destroyed. When you open an app in landscape mode and turn the tablet into a portrait orientation, the app only takes up the top half of the screen and you can't reach the maximise/restore button in the top-right corner. You have to restart the app to get it back to full screen. Interestingly, when you go the other way, you can hit the maximise button and it will go properly full-screen and behave normally from that point on but that is hardly a great UX. I also hate vertical scrolling in the Start Menu and in apps, although that's just a personal preference, I suppose. But what is a real issue is not knowing where the scrolling area on the Start Menu starts. In portrait mode the dead area is almost half the width of the screen. Again, it is extremely poor UX design and frustrating as hell to use.
Getting rid of the Charms Bar, which was beautifully designed, and replacing it with the ugly and oversized Notification Centre is also a bad choice, especially the way it is connected to items in the new, oversized System Tray.
Now that we see apps alongside everything else on the Desktop, how are we supposed to know what's an app and what's a proper desktop application? Without the distinction, useless apps like Photoshop Express seem like a complete waste of disk space. To be fair, they probably are but it's not going to help sell the overall experience when you can't tell what is going to have good, responsive UI design and what is only going to work in the traditional desktop way.
I'm going to persevere until after the next build, because that seems to have some good features, but if the overall experience doesn't start to gel for me, I'll be back on Windows 8 for good.
Firstly, they seem to have completely destroyed the tablet experience. And I mean completely destroyed. When you open an app in landscape mode and turn the tablet into a portrait orientation, the app only takes up the top half of the screen and you can't reach the maximise/restore button in the top-right corner. You have to restart the app to get it back to full screen. Interestingly, when you go the other way, you can hit the maximise button and it will go properly full-screen and behave normally from that point on but that is hardly a great UX. I also hate vertical scrolling in the Start Menu and in apps, although that's just a personal preference, I suppose. But what is a real issue is not knowing where the scrolling area on the Start Menu starts. In portrait mode the dead area is almost half the width of the screen. Again, it is extremely poor UX design and frustrating as hell to use.
Getting rid of the Charms Bar, which was beautifully designed, and replacing it with the ugly and oversized Notification Centre is also a bad choice, especially the way it is connected to items in the new, oversized System Tray.
Now that we see apps alongside everything else on the Desktop, how are we supposed to know what's an app and what's a proper desktop application? Without the distinction, useless apps like Photoshop Express seem like a complete waste of disk space. To be fair, they probably are but it's not going to help sell the overall experience when you can't tell what is going to have good, responsive UI design and what is only going to work in the traditional desktop way.
I'm going to persevere until after the next build, because that seems to have some good features, but if the overall experience doesn't start to gel for me, I'll be back on Windows 8 for good.
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