Pokki is a start menu replacement for Windows – and it has already been downloaded 1.5 million times for Windows 8. “Since the launch of Windows 8, we’ve seen over 1.5 million Pokki downloads on the new OS itself and users opening the Pokki Menu an average of 10 times a day. These early numbers demonstrate that users enjoy being able to instantly access and discover apps, straight from the desktop.” And this is just one of the countless replacements. Microsoft should’ve never kept the traditional desktop in there – they’ve given users the ability to escape Metro, and this will only hurt the new environment.
Pokki, hahaha. Developers must be from New Jersey.
Windows 8 is the transition OS, so there’s no way they could have left it out and expected to see a single corporate sale. And as you suggested, they might never be able to break away from the old desktop paradigm completely. I have a feeling a large number of corporate and government IT departments would rather deal with transitioning to OS X, *BSD or GNU/Linux than fight with a fully Metro, “legacy desktop” free Windows OS. The fine-grained control that they enjoy with XP and 7 (and believe me, IT managers are nothing if not raging control freaks) is what holds them to those OSes.
It worked before though, with the transition from Windows 3.1 to Windows 95.
Yes, but that was a significant improvement. I’ve yet to see what TIFKAM does significantly better than the Windows 95 paradigm.
When it comes to the user interface, going from Win 3.1 to Win 95 was a much less radical change.
In addition, Windows 95 actually offered more features and flexibility, rather than massively restricting the user. Pretty much anything that can be done in 3.1 can also be done in 95, while that isn’t true of Modern UI’s touch tablet optimised interface.
Windows 95 gave you the option to select the old 3.1 progman.exe shell when installing. (certainly in the original release, maybe even in OSR2).
Progman.exe was kept in all the 9x os’s and is even present on win XP (havn’t got a vista/7/8 machine handy to check right now). However since the explorer interface was an inprovement apps quickly tended to stop intalling things so that they appeared in progman so it was pretty useless as an application launcher.
That was before the corporate world went all-in with Win32 and .NET for internal applications.
You can’t get rid of Win32.
It just won’t happen. Ever.
Even if Microsoft broke compatibility it would be far cheaper for the corporate world to fund WINE than to re-develop all that software. Ditching Win32 is a fantasy that shouldn’t be given any more serious thought than Santa Claus.
Virtual machines.
VMs, Wine, whatever, it’s still there.
You didn’t get rid of it.
What’s with these *ASSHATS* and this overwhelming desire they seem to have to force people to use God-Awful GUI’s like this one,GNOME 3, and Unity, nevermind the fact that people have made clear they want *NOTHING* to do with them.
It’s like they can’t stand the fact that people in the *REAL WORLD* detest these UI designs.
Edited 2013-01-17 18:50 UTC
Amen! (thunderous applause).
Unity, Gnome 3, and Windows 8 are all abominations.
Unity and Ubuntu seem to be doing fine…
As far as anecdotes go: I have around some people who use & like it. Also, go through recent Wikimedia stats ( http://stats.wikimedia.org/archive/squid_reports/ ) – Ubuntu might be the the only non-Android distro really growing.
Transition to…what exactly? tablets they can’t give away? They had to cut orders for Surface in half because they have a warehouse full of ’em. Phones they can’t give away? Ask Nokia how those WinPhone sales are.
What this is is a company burning down their house in the hopes to move into a new neighborhood where they simply aren’t wanted. Gorilla arm and the crazy high markup required on large touch screens because so many come off the line bad means touch is gonna go exactly NOWHERE when it comes to X86, go into any B&M store and you’ll see they have maybe ONE touchscreen unit and that is usually an iMac clone, the rest are all non touch, and thanks to Ballmer trying to price Surface to please Wall Street its a total flop, with a broken appstore, lousy performance compared to the price you pay, and I’m betting like all Windows devices the resale will be terrible.
The simple fact is if they want a piece of the mobile pie they are gonna have to spin off the mobile division, the old “EEE” strategy is obviously not gonna work and all they are doing is destroying one of the few markets they have left for a market that doesn’t want them. Look up the sales figures on X86, the fourth quarter is always an uptick thanks to Xmas shoppers yet in the fourth quarter last year sales dropped like a stone, more than 13%. Its obvious by how many millions of users things like Pokki are getting Metro is a big DO NOT WANT and for every 1 user who knows they can hack the shell you have a dozen that simply aren’t buying a new PC at all.
Ballmer has blown over 40 BILLION in the past 5 years on failed ventures, this level of loss simply is not sustainable and if they don’t change direction but quick they are gonna end up in the same boat as Nokia and RIM, two once great corps that are on life support. You just can’t force a new UI that doesn’t work on the masses, not when there is competition. All the OEMs have killed their Surface products, it appears most are in talks with Google for ChromeBooks and ChromeTops where the OS cost won’t bleed them dry, and the users are quite happy with Android and Apple in the mobile space. The days of MSFT being able to force their way into a market are over, they either accept that and slowly build new markets like IBM did or keep blowing cash like HP until they end up in serious trouble, their choice.
Obviously a large part of users are using the traditional desktop out of habit; we are after all creatures of habit.
On the other hand, perhaps the problem lies in Metro, it’s inefficiency, shortcomings etc.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WTYet-qf1jo
Edited 2013-01-17 00:22 UTC
That has to be the absolutely most whiny review on the planet _ever_.
I still don’t get why people are still using the Start menu. Tools like Launchy make the job wayyyyyyy easier and more effective.
I personally feel the review is just about right. I tried to use Windows 8 since the “Release Preview” as my primary Windows “desktop”. And I gave up like two weeks ago, reformatted and returned to Windows 7 on my Windows box. The exact reason for this was that the “Windows 8 was unusable”. It is “so poorly designed” that I was experiencing hard difficulties which were actually “preventing getting me getting my work done”. I think Microsoft didn’t care about the input their customers gave them during the development of Windows 8. There are bazillion of things which could have been done in much better fashion.
As for your question, maybe people just like, like to see, and search, what they want, instead of remembering the name of the application or object they’re trying to find?
Learning names of the computer applications for most of the common folk is very difficult. They don’t want to learn stuff like that. They understand the system better if they can just see “a big blue e” icon which they know presents “the Internet” for them.
Honestly, I don’t really understand this mentality. If you don’t like Metro, fine. But why go back to Win7? Once you actually get to the desktop in Windows 8, it is pretty much the same as Windows 7, with some new bells & whistles. As a self-proclaimed power user, I had no trouble adapting to the Metro start screen, mainly because I use it the same as I used the start menu in Windows 7:
In Windows 7:
Press the Win key, start typing the name of the application until it is selected, and then press Enter
In Windows 8:
Press the Win key, start typing the name of the application until it is selected, and then press Enter
It’s the same damn process, but in Windows 8, it’s actually a little faster. And of course, there are tons of start menu replacements available. As for Metro itself, I find it to be mostly useless (except for the Messenger app which gives me desktop notifications when I get a Facebook message), but its use is hardly mandatory. In fact, I forget it’s even there 99% of the time. And it’s not like Metro is slowing things down either, as Windows 8 feels at least as fast as Win7 did. If anything, it’s just a little extra thing that’s included with the OS.
So I’m puzzled as to why anyone would go back to Windows 7, esp with the benefits that Windows 8 offers – native USB 3.0 support, a much better task manager, native ISO mounting, taskbars on multiple monitors, hyper V virtualization, etc:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_new_to_Windows_8
Of course, I COULD go back to Win7, but it has absolutely nothing to offer me that Win8 doesn’t. Plus, for $40 I got the Pro version (from Win7’s Home Premium), so I can remote desktop in from any machine on my LAN.
Edited 2013-01-17 03:24 UTC
Well, here’s my point of view:
I use most Start Menu features. My most frequently used apps are pinned to the task bar, my less frequent ones to Start. I use the submenus apps can create. For example, Start -> Putty -> Server is a nice shortcut. I use the shortcuts on the right side of the menu a lot.
If I’m not sure what I’m looking for and have to browse the Start menu, the new menu sucks. The large buttons mean you don’t fit much on screen at once and make scrolling slow. The default view of not showing everything doesn’t always work, and it doesn’t scale up well if you show everything.
The Win8 Start menu is hard on the eyes when it opens up – the full screen flash and all the animations as things come in. I flinch every time it opens – only a little now, but it was more drastic in the beginning.
The new desktop theme sucks. Everything is too flat. Buttons don’t stand out enough. It just takes longer to find buttons with the new subtle style.
The new Explorer interface is awful. It was much easier to use without the ribbons.
I worked with Win8 for about 6 months. I could be productive on it, but in the end, I’m far more productive on Win7. The OS level improvements in Win8 are pretty minor, but the UI changes are a pretty big setback. It’s not even close, Win7 is far better as far as I’m concerned.
You can use left bottom corner right click menu (or Win+X) for that, a nice little utility to edit it exists.
I actually prefer it over Win7 start menu and use Metro start menu only for searching apps.
Let me fix that for you:
In Windows 8:
Press the Win key, start typing AND METRO JUMPS IN AND SCREAMS HEEEEYYYOOOOOOO like annoying adware. Oh I’m sorry did I ask for playskool puke tiles to load when I wanted a program?
I shouldn’t have to see a full screen animation when I want to launch a single application. That’s freaking retarded.
Anyways “type n run” isn’t faster if my hand is already on the mouse. Furthermore I have over 50 items in my start menu at work, do I need to go memorize them all for Windows 8? Some I only use twice a year.
I also have multiple versions of the same program so “type the program” becomes an incredible waste of time as I have to hover over the icon to look at the path.
I and others listed dozens of problems that start screen causes on the Windows 8 blog. Instead of utilizing common sense as a 5 year old would do and make Metro optional Sinofsky decided to censor the most damning criticisms and force his grand vision on us.
But I guess we developers were wrong and Sinofsky was right as seen by what a hot seller Windows 8 has turned out to be. I mean what better evidence of Windows 8 being a great idea than the third party market that has been created to fix the goddamn thing.
Edited 2013-01-17 08:12 UTC
Indeed.
There are reasons we have mice. And there are delays whenever we need to swap from mouse to keyboard and back.
There are also reasons why book pages have limited width and why newspapers have multiple narrow columns of text. Similarly, there are reasons why try to avoid horizontal scrolling in web development, but allow a certain amount of vertical scrolling. Forgetting all the other UI crimes of Metro, why give us a wholly unnatural situation were we have an awkward-to-scan bloated, horizontally-scrolling menu and then ask us to scroll using a vertical scroll wheel…??
For the record, I am a happy Win8 user and have been since the beginning – at least once Start8 removed the pain of the Start screen, and once I found proper replacements for the poor out-of-the-box apps. Overall, the OS is stable and responsive, and there are a few nice touches.
Oh, no, there goes Microsoft copying Linux again!
I hate that video.
If you break down everything he says it comes out as “it’s broken because I couldn’t figure out how to do it”
I’ll concede to his review that the discoverability is pretty awful, but to say that the whole OS is unusable because he didn’t bother to find out how the new behaviours work is a bit of a stretch.
Personally I prefer win8 to win7. I realise I’m in the minority and any post I make is not going to change a single mind. But it’s an easier adjustment than I had when I first tried Linux after being exclusively a Windows user, and I had a lot less reading to do before becoming productive.
Heh. I didn’t know The Control Panel shows up in the Desktop folder (But, I know why it isn’t on the desktop itself, since it’s hidden via the display control panel by default)
But, when I want the Control Panel, I either search for it via the start screen, or go to the charms bar and click settings, or right-click in the bottom left (Where the start menu used to be). Also, the time-honored method of typing “Control Panel” into the location bar in an Explorer window.
Yeah. This guy’s review is garbage.
Now there’s an endorsement!
Windows 8…..it doesn’t require as much reading as Linux!
Windows 8
It’s not so bad
Just read the book
Don’t buy the iPad
If you read that tutorial
I’m sure you’ll find
Wait….where are you going? I didn’t finish the jingle. Come back here and buy a Surface tablet!!!!!
Edited 2013-01-17 08:20 UTC
His 4 Cs are right on the money, though. *Especially* when using Metro apps.
There is no continuity with previous versions (which is something MS is extremely bad at; just look at MS Office from 95 through 2010).
There is no context given to the information on the screen (it’s almost impossible to figure out just by looking what’s a label, what’s a link, what’s a button, etc).
I forget the other 2, but they were spot on as well.
I think the tone is way off. The review comes across as someone jumping at the chance to ride the anti-microsoft-win8 wave and make a name for themselves. It’s a whiney, non-productive review.
I concede that I’ve only prodded around a bit in win8. I am still testing things out in a VM. I have come across some weird UI refresh bugs in some metro apps, but nothing catastrophic. And personally, I LOVE how clean the Metro interface is. It’s not up to all tasks, but that’s why you are still left with the classic desktop as an option!
Then these are not people looking to be productive I suppose. Which is what I thought was the point.
The tiles in the Metro start screen are a lot more readily identifiable than a long list of menu options, imho.
Then these are not people looking to be productive I suppose. Which is what I thought was the point.
It’s time the “typers” learn to understand that “mousers” can be just as quick and productive with a good visually thought out interface as the “typers” are with their run dialogs. A good interface accomodates both types of users. Being a “typer” A. doesn’t make you a power user, B. is just a personal preference. You are not a more advanced user just because you prefer a keyboard to a mouse.
TIFKAM is not a good “mousers” interface. It’s intrusive, it has ginormous tiles on that start screen that take up valuable screenreal estate and it forces you to lose visual contact with whatever you were doing if you invoke it. We don’t need icons the size of Manhattan, the old size was damn near perfect for use with a mouse. We don’t need a start menu that eats all screen real estate and forces a cognitive context switch. Crummy as the old start menu is, it is much better at preserving the context in which you are working.
We are not afraid of change, but we want change that is significantly better. Not change that some other people can live with, because (luckily for them) it doesn’t stomp over their previously acquired workflows and doesn’t worsen their experience.
BTW, you might find http://plan9.bell-labs.com/wiki/plan9/mouse_vs._keyboard/ interesting.
Edited 2013-01-22 17:56 UTC
A 2″ blue square with a bit of white text on it, next to another 2″ blue square with a bit of white text on it, nearly indistinguishable from each other, except for a tiny little app icon in one corner, is easier to use than a menu that puts just the icon and app name on it?
Being able to see only 12-ish items on a huge monitor, in a flat layout, is easier to use than seeing a nice cascading menu showing you where things are in a hierarchy, with nearly everything viewable at once onscreen (meaning, not the crappy Win7 Start menu)?
Are people who like the Metro Start Screen using 14″ monitors or something?
I’ve watched this video a while ago and gooood, it sounded like a total rant but at the time I wasn’t using win8 so was a tad indifferent to it.
Recently I’ve finally installed win8 and guest what – now I think even less about the video/this guy… bottomline of the video is that win8 is difficult and after a while he can’t still wrap his head around how to operate it.
Well – don’t know about him but:
* after startup you have an quick introduction how to navigate (i.e. tip about hot corner) — hard to miss, displays every time you create account
* after that I don’t know what’s difficult to remember that you have to point your mouse to the corner to get to the start/switch apps…
above goes also for the one video that circulated the web demonstrating that removing of start was a mistake. Ok – the guy sat his father in front of already launched win8 in desktop and there were no indication what to do beside start app. This had a few shortcommings:
* missing introduction video again
* by default win8 launch into start screen and not the desktop
* and the last – if he sat his father that don’t have any prior knowledge of windows in front of vista/7 then the plain orb would be as informative as sitting in front of win8 desktop mode…
I tried StartIsBack, after Ars compared a few start menu replacements. It is really good, and hard to tell the difference between it and an authentic Start Menu.
After an hour or two, I uninstalled it. I’ve already gotten used to the Start Screen + hot corners, and since I’ve finally found a few Metro apps I like, it gets in the way of using those.
Edit: Ars’ review: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/01/help-ive-got-…
Edited 2013-01-17 00:23 UTC
Pokki’s registry entry is classified as malware by malwarebytes. Also it installs without confirmation when playing some flash games like PirateStorm. It is malware and i guess most installs are through this shady method.
No it’s not malware. Besides the Start Menu it offers its own environment to run HTML5 applications, as well as an app store. Pirate Storm is just a Pokki app: https://www.pokki.com/app/Pirate-Storm
Also, I actually thought about making a Pokki app once, and exchanged a few mails with one of the devs there and the guys are quite ok.
TL;DR: You don’t know what you’re talking about.
Malwarebytes still recognizes it as malware.
This doesn’t make it malware, this makes it at best a false positive.
I saw an ad for Pirate Storm in the freaking installer for my graphics drivers yesterday. This is the first time I’ve set up Windows in a while, but what the hell? Surely it wasn’t always this intrusive?
I don’t know anything about Pirate Storm, but what I know is that Pokki apps can only run within the Pokki environment. So if the author chose to promote the Pokki version of Pirate Storm, then you also have to download Pokki for the application to function.
Impressive, frankly, I didn’t think that many people cared.
I wonder what type of user is downloading the replacement. 1.5 million frustrated power users is a lot different than 1.5 million frustrated mom and pops.
I’m not sure how much its hurting Metro though. My own app has seen a sharp spike in downloads since Christmas. Same goes for average time spent in app. Went up from 40 minutes to 1hr 25 mins roughly.
I think the platform is starting to grow legs, as this is more robust growth, at a much faster pace, than Windows Phone ever had.
How would you know the average usage time without spying on your users? The number of downloads i get, but to what purpose would you spy on usage times?
It is opt-in telemetry. I only receive the data if you opt-in to send usage statistics to Microsoft at OS install-time.
If you opt-in, you send Microsoft usage statistics, crash statistics, and app non responding data. Very helpful to devs.
So perhaps a correctly phrased version would be: Of the people who opt-in to have their data collected, they spend a significant amount of time in my app.
I don’t have a break down of what % opt-in unfortunately.
Sending data to Microsoft is actually opt-out. You have to customize the default settings to turn it off.
http://0.tqn.com/d/pcsupport/1/0/m/H/-/-/windows-8-clean-install-26…
I’m unsure then, I’m going based off of their wording here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/hh967787.aspx
and I’m definitely not receiving usage statistics (or crash analytics) for every user, so I don’t really know what’s going on.
I’ll try and probe to see if any other devs I know have an answer. I know CEIP is on an app-per-app basis (which sucks) for non-Windows Store apps
Thank you very much for your explanation. I am very sorry if i worded anything too strongly before. English is my fifth language.
It might be killing Metro, but it is euthanasia. Or at least it deserves to be put out of the user’s misery.
The road to hell is paved with active tiles.
Metro is a UI for people who neither need nor can use a computer.
Metro CANNOT service the needs of people who actually use a computer for real tasks like CAD, CAM, programming, electronics, and similar activities way beyond the intellectual capacity of social media freaks who never had an original thought in their entire collective lives.
Hey! Microsoft is actually insulting you, retards. It’s saying “We are hiding what computers can actually do so you won’t be reminded you are a useless piece of crap! We just want all your money, so hand it over.”
bye dummies
It’s not that it’s for dummies, it’s that Win8 is to force users to get used to the phone UI. Desktops will decrease in market share as mobile devices are used for what they’re good at (content consumption).
Desktops will continue to rule for content creation (which includes tools like CAD, etc.) but MS will see less and less revenue from those (us) people. It’s entirely possible that we content creators will have to transition to Linux or use a server OS on our desktops.
They will probably call it Windows for Workstations and charge $100 per CPU (core) annual licence fee.
Yep, all they’ll have to do is unmothball the Windows (NT) Workstation trademark.
Actually Windows server 2012 has the metro interface too.
OTOH I can see some change also there, perhaps: touch UI could be awesome for “tools like CAD, etc.” – a computerised drafting table, in a way.
Large touchscreen can be awesome for CAD and similar – a sort of proper evolution of drafting table.
So that Windows 8 would be able to run none of the tons of desktop apps out there?
Start blocking executables, ban IPs of start menu download sites, track user movements, develop “seek and destroy” malware to take out the programs.
That’s the only way that Microsoft can enter the mobile market. It needs to be done.
There’s no other way. Microsoft has to spend billions and piss off their entire user base to gain a foothold in the mobile market. Metro NEEDS to be forced. Users will learn to appreciate Metro once it is forced on them and they can’t escape.
Fellow Microsoft fanboys let’s meet later to discuss ways we can prevent our relatives from installing these insidious programs.
Edited 2013-01-17 08:28 UTC
I won’t say anything about Windows 8 (except that I find it okay even though it’s not my main OS) but didn’t anyone find this part a bit worrisome?
“users opening the Pokki Menu an average of 10 times a day”
Call me a pessimist, but if even something as trivial as a Start Menu replacement needs to “collect usage information” it can only mean one thing: spying on users is becoming the new normal.
RT.
I haven’t installed Pokki as I don’t run Windows 8 (I have a licensed copy of 8 Pro but I have yet to find the desire to install it), so I have no idea if it has an opt-in/opt-out for collecting usage data.
If it declares the data collection policy and gives an option to turn it on or off, that would be fine. A lot of software out there does that. However, if it’s collecting the data without notifying the user or giving them the option to turn it off, it’s spyware.
It’s explained in no uncertain terms in section 2.a of their Privacy Policy at http://cdn.pokki.com/licenses/v2.0.2/privacy-policy.html but how many people actually read that stuff rather than, you know, just click through in order to to get past whatever is displayed on the screen as quickly as possible?
RT.
Well as I said, I haven’t installed it so I didn’t know if they had a policy or not.
And at least they do have an explicit policy; a lot of otherwise good software collects data without a policy or with it buried under pages and pages of legalese and no option to turn it off. On the other hand, there are a few standouts that offer this information up front and give you an option to to turn off data collection before they even let you use the program. VLC Media Player is a great example of that.
Welcome to the Post-Facebook world.
Yeah, I was thinking the exact same thing.
I would have thought they’d be more savvy than to brag about the user data they’re raping but as most people don’t care about privacy unless the implications are spelt out they know there’s next to no harm to them in grabbing usage data (for our benefit of course).
Outgoing firewalls have never been so busy.