RE: VS 2012

Did you have problems selecting text via touch in Windows 7 or Windows 8?   The Windows 8 touch text selection experience is *way* different, and *much* easier to select text with confidence.

I worked on the touch text selection experience (in IE/Trident) for Windows 8, and overall I'm quite proud of it.

Eric

From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Herb Warren
Sent: Monday, September 17, 2012 5:16 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [OT] VS 2012




On Mon, Sep 17, 2012 at 5:03 PM, Mike <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:


At all times, the desktop is just a Win+D away.  So I'm not worried about power users at all.  Ordinary users will probably rebel, but that's OK, they'll just stay on Windows 7 and be happy.

In the meantime, tablets and Windows 8 will evolve.  The desktop slowly goes away as Metro evolves into something more sophisticated yet still easy for consumers.  All of us get used to using Windows 8 on tablets and start wanting that experience at work as well.  Tablets and touch everything have become cheap unremarkable commodities.  Nobody wants to use a mouse anymore.  All this is probably only a year or two away.

Something about the phrase "Nobody wants to use a mouse anymore" is bothersome - maybe it's just so ingrained in me, but I've use touch screens & tablets, and the precision of my finger sucks, frankly, compared to a mouse. It was surprisingly difficult / annoying to do things like select text, or do file manipulation with any confidence in a positive outcome.

In other words, Windows 8 is too advanced for people and hardware at this moment, and that's OK, because Windows 7 is just fine for now.  Instead, MS skated to where the puck will be very soon.

I think you're nearly right, but I think "very soon" is probably "someday". It feels too radical - it's all but unusable on the desktop, and that's where MS gets a good chunk of it's money - the corporate world, where uptake is likely to hover around "0" for quite some time. Everyone is acting very much like a technology apologist - "just a little retraining", and "the desktop is easy to get to", and on and on. It's not usable in the enterprise, for standard, humdrum business use. Further news flash: the economy sucks. Nobody is buying their people tablets to use in addition to, and certainly not as a replacement for, their desktops. So I'm less convinced that even if people buy Win8 tablets that there's gonna be any serious corporate uptake. I'm sure we'll hear of a smattering of examples, and they'll be in small-medium sized businesses in niche markets.

People in this group - s/w developers and the like - like it because it's the new shiny, and we're pre-conditioned to want to like new and shiny. Hell, people here were happy about Vista when it first hit, hailing it as the second coming.

Maybe just grumpy because my cheese has been moved? Maybe; I *like* finding new cheese, though. I'm much more concerned now than ever the following MS's roadmap will end in tears, though. If they've misguessed where the puck is going in a few years - even by a little, it feels like it'll have gone very ugly.

Herb.