Wednesday, July 29, 2015

Surface 3 and Windows 10

I hope Windows 10 and this awful shade of lime green grow on me.

First off, I want my horizontal scrolling back. In tablet mode, I know the few of us that have windows tablets, I liked side-to-side scrolling. When you think of it, side-to-side scrolling on a widescreen device makes sense, since you are using the full width of the screen for selection. Making the live tiles in tablet mode go up and down is just lame.

The groups are too narrow, I need an extra medium tile in each one to fill this incredibly wide gutter space between them. Now that tiles are the start menu, I feel that we are stuck with narrow tile groups forever. Also, there is now less information on my screen in tablet mode because of the supersized gutters. Why have live tiles?

I liked the multi-colored tiles too. Back in Windows 8, I would have love to been able to pick colors rather than have them assigned to me at random, but I made due and I had a bunch of fun colors arranged for apps how I liked. Now, all of my apps are the same damn color of lime green.

Later on, I discovered you could change the tile back color in Personalization. They auto-set the color based on the background, and it came out the worst shade of lime green that ever graced a computer screen. I still want to be able to customize them individually.

Do you know how long I took getting my tiles back the way I wanted them? Seriously. And all my file links for PDFs and web pages were turned into store icons. It's like paying someone to come in and mess up your house.

Why did you take away the desktop app in tablet mode? I liked being able to work in desktop mode, switch out to the Windows 8 UI and do some things, and then do back to my desktop and work there. Now, I have a layer of live tiles between me and my desktop all the time in tablet mode.

The bottom-left corner is too cluttered! From the bottom going up I have Windows button, all apps, and then power. It is too easy to press the wrong one. Left swipe in tablet mode is a task manager with preview windows, and not a swipe-between-open-apps. I was used to the old way. There's another triple-line thing in the top left that looks and feels like the same as "all apps". Strange. One way to select and launch apps, please.

I will get used to it, but I dislike change. Windows 8 made sense on a tablet, and I am sad to see it go in that context. Now, it seems the desktop world has taken over, and made Windows tablet use more uncomfortable, at least for me. My strong recommend? Ugh, let's drop that to a normal recommend. The ease-of-use for Windows 10 tablets has suffered, at least for me.

Stop laughing, desktop users. Today is a good day for you.

My first thought was, wow, even the Kindle Fire UI is a lot easier to use and more straightforward. Yes, I need this to act like a PC at times, but no, I don't want desktop stuff forced on me. Not on a tablet. This feels complicated-y and confused-y. In the world of Android, Amazon, and Apple tablets, they are designed for touch, with PC-like devices and add-ons supported. This feels like a desktop OS forced into a tablet mode, like the old Win7 and XP for tablet operating systems.

Maybe I will get used to it.

But really, that's never a good thing to hear.

Or maybe...tablets will never be great productivity devices, and be for entertainment only. Are there too many hacks and tradeoffs to get a tablet to work like a PC? I am slightly depressed at all this, but give me time, I will figure it all out.

Windows 10? Strong recommend for desktop users, and an initial-impression soft recommend for tablet users.

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