Windows 10 preview: A glimpse of our desktop future
Windows 10 preview: A glimpse of our desktop future
The Windows 10 technical preview program started off cautiously. The first few builds could almost have been mistaken for Windows 8.2 — which is to say that they featured some solid changes that helped address the obvious shortcomings of Windows 8 and 8.1, but not much else. That’s changed with the latest preview (Build 9926), released by Microsoft only days after Terry Myerson and Joe Belfiore showcased many of the expected highlights of Windows 10.
We are finally getting to experience the outline of the next generation of the Windows OS. The new hybrid Start menu is in place, Cortana has taken its first bows, and we have been introduced to Continuum — Microsoft’s answer to the tablet versus desktop confusion of Windows 8. With all these new technologies come a lot of rough edges — which has madeevaluating the new preview release more challenging than previous versions. But spending a few days working with it on a variety of devices has provided a good view into what will be the future desktop — and perhaps mobile — OS for many of us.
The Start menu rises from the dead: Will you welcome it back?
In a valiant attempt to be all things to all people, Microsoft has re-created its Start menu as a massive hybrid of application list, live tiles, suggested help topics, and “Everyday apps.” Once you get your head around it, the design is fairly flexible. The tile portion can be re-arranged just like the Start screen in the Modern UI of Windows 8.
The Start display (its not quite correct to call it either a menu or a screen, and it isn’t exactly a window) can also be shown either fullscreen or as a smaller version more similar to the old-fashioned Start menu. Purists will quickly notice that the actual menu portion only displays a few items (Places and Most used items) by default.
To get to a complete list of applications, you need to press the small “All apps” link at the bottom of the list. Unfortunately, in my case at least, that link was often obscured by the Taskbar, but I assume that will be fixed in future versions. A larger issue with the all apps display is that it is just one long list. If you have a touch screen you can move up and down the list fairly quickly, but there does not seem to be any equivalent to the popular cascading-menu design featured in Windows 7.
Cortana may have had a few too many drinks before her debut
As promised, Cortana has been integrated into the Taskbar, but it isn’t very useful or easy to use yet. In theory, when you hit the Windows key and start typing, your keystrokes will go to Cortana. It (she?) will then handle the (hopefully) very quick search for matching applications (e.g. if you type Word or OneNote or Control Panel) and also more sophisticated questions (ala Siri or Google Now or Amazon’s Alexa). From having used Windows Phone 8, I know Cortana is capable of quite a lot. But the implementation in Windows 10 is currently really broken. Sometimes typing does nothing, other times Cortana is confused. And it doesn’t have nearly the sophistication of the Windows Phone version. Its ability to answer questions also seems to vary from hour to hour.
Presumably all of that will get sorted out before the product ships, but I hope early users not familiar with what Microsoft can really do with Cortana don’t get turned off by the current implementation. Microsoft has covered its user-experience bases here as well — you can type, click the microphone icon, or turn on recognition of “Hey, Cortana” to get the AI’s attention.
A bigger complication of integrating Cortana into the Taskbar will be the inherent ambiguity of replacing a quick system lookup function with a complex AI-powered search tool. Windows 8’s integration of Microsoft Search into the simple command lookup function got a lot of pushback, and the integration of Cortana risks making that worse. There are lots of possibilities for confusion. Typing “Time” for example, wound up getting me the New York Times crossword puzzle at one point. At another, typing, “What is the time?” brought up the Windows Clock application. Cortana also has the sort of attitude that people might not want from a computer that doesn’t understand what they just said. For example, one of the canned answers when Cortana doesn’t understand how to deal with your question is “A circle is infinite, but my answers are not.” It made me wish for the return of Clippit.
Despite the teething pains in this early version, if Microsoft can combine the convenience of a voice-activated interface like Amazon’s Alexa with context-sensitive desktop search, then users will definitely benefit. Think how nice it would be to be able to simply ask your PC to play a different song or add a reminder to your calendar while you are still typing a Word document or playing a game.
With Windows 8 versions running across desktop, laptop and smaller mobile devices, Microsoft essentially invented the problem of having a single OS span every possible device. The jarring clash of traditional desktop and Modern (nee Metro) interfaces didn’t make anyone very happy. With Continuum, it is trying to fix that problem. I suspect that Microsoft’s vision of Continuum is fairly grand, but the implementation in the current Windows 10 technical preview is straightforward. Your computer or device can switch between a Desktop mode and Tablet mode. In Tablet mode applications (including the Start menu) are by default full screen (in fact, you can no longer get the window sizing options for Modern UI apps when you are in the Tablet mode). Swiping in from the left still provides a way to switch between all your running applications, and lets you use the Taskbar, so it is not nearly as limiting as the old Modern-only UI.
You can switch to Tablet mode manually, using an icon on the Taskbar, but Microsoft has provided a way that OEMs can switch the user automatically when a keyboard is attached or detached. For example, on my Surface Pro 3, detaching the keyboard popped up a dialog asking “Do you want to switch to Tablet mode?” It wasn’t totally intuitive, as there weren’t any “Yes/No” buttons, but touching the dialog activated Tablet mode.
In Tablet mode, various system icons are also made a little larger and easier to activate using touch. Cortana’s search box in the Taskbar also disappears, and is replaced by a simple “O” you can press to type or speak to it. This is a big step forward, but hasn’t addressed all of the issues. For example, if you want to run your tablet in Desktop mode to take advantage of the more powerful windowing available, the touch keyboard no longer pops up automatically. You need to switch to Tablet mode for that. It’s not clear to me how some of these finer points will be implemented in the final release.
The best news is that Microsoft is listening
An under-reported segment of Microsoft’s event, and of Windows 10 preview, is the very extensive user feedback system built-in. Microsoft has taken great pains to explain that it is trying really hard to listen to users about what they want to see (and not see) in Windows 10. I can already hear many of you exclaiming, “It’s about time!” or “Likely story!” but it seems like it really is trying to shape Windows 10 to fit the needs of its users. On one hand that is a little sobering, as it means that Microsoft itself is heavily conflicted about its vision for the future of Windows, but if Microsoft can successfully incorporate all this “bottom-up” feedback into a coherent product, Windows 10 will not only be what most of us hoped Windows 8 would be, but will go far beyond it.
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