Infinisearch
Veteran
I don't have room on my taskbar for my pdf, djvu, and image viewer type programs so I was hoping for a return of the MRU lists with the option of excluding some or all documents with shortcuts on the taskbar.
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Indeed. I know what I use most often, so I'd prefer that I pin my own "frequently used programs" to my own areas of the UI. I like Metro for that reason exactly, but pinning them to the task bar I find to be reasonably equal in capability. Having Windows 8.1 boot directly to desktop made it pretty handy for the quick access to pinned apps and their quick list for recent docs.
Blazkowicz
Legend
I tend to hate such dynamic things, but now Firefox has done it on the "new tab" page (after other browsers). It very quickly puts the web sites I'm always visiting there and you can easily pin them.
Yet, for applications on PC desktop that doesn't play too well with the fact they're meant to be document-centric. Xerox, Macintosh, Windows 95 : the GUI "revolutions" were about working with documents instead of programs. We still double-click a .pdf, an .odt or .doc file or a picture or a movie etc. (the extreme would be to only create files with right-click and selecting "New word document", "New text file", "New archive" etc.)
The workaround with recent documents in "jumplists" is interesting but that makes move it a bit towards application-centric.
Metro GUI, just like cell phone GUI is application centric and that's perhaps why it is so glaringly different and alien. Live tiles allow to bring data into such an interface. But at worst, applications may be sandboxed in a way they can only access their own data (that's the html5 model at least)
Yeah, "Recent documents" with filtering may be a good idea (location and file types, so work items show up and not porn, "guilty pleasure" entertainment and too personal files)
Yet, for applications on PC desktop that doesn't play too well with the fact they're meant to be document-centric. Xerox, Macintosh, Windows 95 : the GUI "revolutions" were about working with documents instead of programs. We still double-click a .pdf, an .odt or .doc file or a picture or a movie etc. (the extreme would be to only create files with right-click and selecting "New word document", "New text file", "New archive" etc.)
The workaround with recent documents in "jumplists" is interesting but that makes move it a bit towards application-centric.
Metro GUI, just like cell phone GUI is application centric and that's perhaps why it is so glaringly different and alien. Live tiles allow to bring data into such an interface. But at worst, applications may be sandboxed in a way they can only access their own data (that's the html5 model at least)
Yeah, "Recent documents" with filtering may be a good idea (location and file types, so work items show up and not porn, "guilty pleasure" entertainment and too personal files)
I broke my MIni10v's Windows 10 load a few weeks ago by force-installing Intel's Wireless "ProSet" features that really weren't intended for W10. Now I have no network connectivity at all, LOL. I'm going to reload it with the current 10xxx build that I downloaded last night.
It looks to me like almost noone has posted pictures or notes from their own Windows 10 installation on a Mini 10v, which doesn't specifically surprise me but makes me want to get to sharing info. Really, for as old and decrepit as this machine's constituent parts are, the performance under Win10 is very good. I also just rescued an ancient Thinkpad X30 laptop that I have half a mind to try installing Win10. It has the ancient AMD Radeon 7500 chipset if I recall correctly, which might even be more performant (overall) than the Mini10v
.
It looks to me like almost noone has posted pictures or notes from their own Windows 10 installation on a Mini 10v, which doesn't specifically surprise me but makes me want to get to sharing info. Really, for as old and decrepit as this machine's constituent parts are, the performance under Win10 is very good. I also just rescued an ancient Thinkpad X30 laptop that I have half a mind to try installing Win10. It has the ancient AMD Radeon 7500 chipset if I recall correctly, which might even be more performant (overall) than the Mini10v
.
hoom
Veteran
I mean, I'm sure its handy for people who are often re-using/updating files.
But neither at work or home do I have that as a significant usage or they are very specific ones & I prefer to Shortcut or Shortcut the Folder.
Yes it will support it, but the question is will it support it well? From what I've read ATM win 10 is just like win 8.1 (considering it will be avialable in a few months this should of been in the previews builds early on)
I don't know if you've seen it on a 4k screen high DPI screen. If you havent Heres whats happens with any program eg windows explorer
say a font is 12 point, instead of using ~20 point font (and the text looking nice and sharp and dark (*)), it still uses 12 point font but just blows up / zooms the text so it looks terrible and blurry, so your high DPI screen doesnt look any better than a normal DPI screen.
(*) Like web pages, view them on a high DPI phone, the text looks nice, close to print quality
I don't know if you've seen it on a 4k screen high DPI screen. If you havent Heres whats happens with any program eg windows explorer
say a font is 12 point, instead of using ~20 point font (and the text looking nice and sharp and dark (*)), it still uses 12 point font but just blows up / zooms the text so it looks terrible and blurry, so your high DPI screen doesnt look any better than a normal DPI screen.
(*) Like web pages, view them on a high DPI phone, the text looks nice, close to print quality
From the tests I've been able to do with Win10 on a high-DPI screen I tend to agree with zed, it's not encouraging. Granted, this is from running Win10 on.a VM on a retina Mac laptop, nevertheless it's not looking great at this point. Maybe that will change, maybe the VM is messing things up. But I'm not hopeful.
Hmmm that is wierd, you would think this being such a large change, it would be one of the things they would sort out first. i.e. you cant pop it in a month before win 10 releases
I appreciate its quite difficult but they could have 3 options per program
A. native
B. render native then scale that window to desired size
C. scale images etc but borders, fonts, icons etc substitute higher res versions for higher DPI screens
and let user choose between A,B,C per program
at the moment we only can choose A or B
eg heres a program everyone will know here & how it looks like on my screen
I appreciate its quite difficult but they could have 3 options per program
A. native
B. render native then scale that window to desired size
C. scale images etc but borders, fonts, icons etc substitute higher res versions for higher DPI screens
and let user choose between A,B,C per program
at the moment we only can choose A or B
eg heres a program everyone will know here & how it looks like on my screen
Blazkowicz
Legend
Please try the scaling under that OS?, if you're so interested in the hi dpi problem.
It's Linux Mint LMDE 2, with Cinnamon 2.4 as the GUI.
http://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=2781
I had a quick look at it, but it was the live USB on an old PC and setting the CRT monitor to 1600x1200, so I didn't test much software and an emulated 800x600 is quite limited.
It does seem to work well with perhaps some UI elements staying small or looking weird.
Perhaps the 2048x1536 mode on a highest end CRT would be pretty usable, if a bit silly.
It's Linux Mint LMDE 2, with Cinnamon 2.4 as the GUI.
http://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=2781
I had a quick look at it, but it was the live USB on an old PC and setting the CRT monitor to 1600x1200, so I didn't test much software and an emulated 800x600 is quite limited.
It does seem to work well with perhaps some UI elements staying small or looking weird.
Perhaps the 2048x1536 mode on a highest end CRT would be pretty usable, if a bit silly.
Blazkowicz
Legend
If you can disable subpixel font anti-aliasing, that should look less like that bloody mess.
Silent_Buddha
Legend
Something like that is always going to be a problem with legacy apps that don't code for the possibility of resolution independent rendering.
Apple have the luxury of at certain points telling users and developers that after X time programs before Y date will no longer run in the OS and these are the new programming guidelines to use. They also have the luxury of basically dictating to their users THIS is the resolution/DPI of your screen and you can have no other resolution. That allowed them to originally just make their screens 4x the previous standard screen resolution/DPI (2x on each axis) which made things really easy.
Windows doesn't have that luxury. It's main strength is that it can support programs written decades ago. It's main weakness is that it can support programs written decades ago. One of its strengths is that users can program any way they wish. One of its weaknesses is that users can program any way they wish. One of it's strengths is that you can use any hardware you want. One of its weaknesses is that you can use any hardware you want.
Because of that, Windows doesn't know whether something is intended by the developer or not intended by the developer. Programs developed with an eye towards a DPI independent future will likely look a lot better than programs that weren't developed with an eye towards a DPI independent future. Microsoft can't make any assumptions about what resolution a user is running their desktop in. Is it 1024x768? 1280x1024? 1680x1050? 1920x1080? Hell, that's 4 different aspect ratios already. 4:3. 5:4. 16:10. 16:9. Not to mention still supporting resolutions from 800x600 to 16000x10000 (or higher) if the user wanted. And any DPI under the sun.
Yeah, it's going to be messy. And it will always be messy when it comes to legacy applications coded with legacy coding practices. But I prefer that to programmers/users not having the luxury of programming any way they wish.
I can always choose not to use them or to use them. Versus the potential for some programs to just plain not exist anymore.
Regards,
SB
@Silent_Buddha
NeXT had all this figured out decades ago now, by using Display Postscript to create a fully scalable, vectorized user interface (although I think the intent wasn't so much to cater for DPI-independent graphics back then, as high-DPI screens were pie-in-the-sky technology; launch systems used greyscale 1024*768 monitors IIRC. It was probably printing consistency that was the real intent.)
Anyway, some of this tech may also have been absorbed into OSX (Apple bought up NeXT when Jobs made his messianic return to the company), which may have aided the creation of "retina" graphics modes on newer Macs. For example, the mouse pointer is fully scalable on recent OSX versions.
NeXT had all this figured out decades ago now, by using Display Postscript to create a fully scalable, vectorized user interface (although I think the intent wasn't so much to cater for DPI-independent graphics back then, as high-DPI screens were pie-in-the-sky technology; launch systems used greyscale 1024*768 monitors IIRC. It was probably printing consistency that was the real intent.)
Anyway, some of this tech may also have been absorbed into OSX (Apple bought up NeXT when Jobs made his messianic return to the company), which may have aided the creation of "retina" graphics modes on newer Macs. For example, the mouse pointer is fully scalable on recent OSX versions.
In what became my first "big" windodws-based GUI application that I wrote from scratch, my "pilot" testers complained about certain laptops with high-rez screens being difficult to read because the text was small. However, if the user had changed the font scaling to 125% (pretty much all you could do back in XP days) then it broke my text output -- the bottom and right edges of all text was cropped and thus unreadable.
I spent a day figuring out how I should attack the problem, and then almost a week recoding and debugging all my GDI raster elements to use the new method. Scaling text wasn't difficult, but scaling the entire interface was a bastard, mostly because I'd never done it before.
The hard part wasn't single-resolution displays, not at all. The hard part was when you have a 14" 1080p laptop screen that then also supports an external 24" 1080p monitor. On the laptop it looks tiny, on the external screen it looks huge. Windows has WMI objects to query for DPI per screen, and keeping the interface consistently readable across screens is a nightmare. I ended up making my app requery on every reposition, and if it spanned two monitors simultaneously, it would "snap" itself to the monitor where the majority of the UI was placed.
Thus, it would re-scale itself anytime the UI was moved between displays. It worked out very well, but it was a bitch.
I spent a day figuring out how I should attack the problem, and then almost a week recoding and debugging all my GDI raster elements to use the new method. Scaling text wasn't difficult, but scaling the entire interface was a bastard, mostly because I'd never done it before.
The hard part wasn't single-resolution displays, not at all. The hard part was when you have a 14" 1080p laptop screen that then also supports an external 24" 1080p monitor. On the laptop it looks tiny, on the external screen it looks huge. Windows has WMI objects to query for DPI per screen, and keeping the interface consistently readable across screens is a nightmare. I ended up making my app requery on every reposition, and if it spanned two monitors simultaneously, it would "snap" itself to the monitor where the majority of the UI was placed.
Thus, it would re-scale itself anytime the UI was moved between displays. It worked out very well, but it was a bitch.
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