Creating the Windows 8 user experience

Re:Creating the Windows 8 user experience by bitwize on Friday May 18, 2012 @04:50PM (#3993876)

Where Microsoft used to primarily focus on reducing memory consumption, now we are also laser-focused on improving battery life while still delivering a fast and fluid user experience.

If Microsoft's previos focus on reducing memory consumption produced prior versions of windows, their new focus on increasing battery life should produce Windows 8 tablets that last a half an hour, tops.

While I'm at it, in general, fuck Windows 8. The UI may be nice, but Microsoft is taking such a massive power dump on developers and users alike with this turkey that they have a tough road ahead of them if they want to even get within spitting distance of the iPad in terms of mindshare.

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Re:Creating the Windows 8 user experience by glhaynes on Friday May 18, 2012 @05:02PM (#3993953)

Microsoft products often annoy me, but "too much memory consumption" is pretty low on the list. Does Windows 7 really demand a substantially higher amount of memory than similarly-capable competing systems in most categories? (Linux running FVWM isn't comparable for most categories.)

I agree that Windows 8 is so far rather unconvincing with regard to providing a realistically strong competitor to the iPad in market terms; but if I were to hear that the Windows team was focusing on some technical aspect, I'd expect, based on history, to see them have pretty good success with it.

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Re:Creating the Windows 8 user experience by sliverstorm on Friday May 18, 2012 @05:13PM (#3994026)

"too much memory consumption" is pretty low on the list.

The reason it isn't high on the list is because they already tackled that for Win7. You may not remember, but it was a growing problem before 7.

They aren't saying here that they need to reduce memory consumption further; they are saying that they will do the same thing with battery life for Win8, that they did with memory for Win7.

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Re:Creating the Windows 8 user experience by glhaynes on Friday May 18, 2012 @05:20PM (#3994070)

I think you've misunderstood my point which was that Microsoft engineers are very capable of reducing memory usage if charged to do so (and, as you say, history bears this out) and that I would expect them to likewise be able to reduce power usage [within the constraints provided by environment and hardware requirements].

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Re:Creating the Windows 8 user experience by lusr on Friday May 18, 2012 @06:41PM (#3994401)

There's a big difference between reducing memory pressure/performance (which kind of solved itself once applications stopped increasing memory usage faster than the price/Mb dropped, and the move from 32-bit to 64-bit helped a bit too; handling stupid things like XP swapping everything out to disk overnight were easy wins as well) and improving power efficiency (requires application and OS redesign, which Microsoft have done and judging by the moaning about WinRT in this thread by developers the uptake will be a challenge; even then if you improve efficiency people just keep using the damn devices even more so it's really difficult to win whereas with memory there's a typical usage value that changes safely relative to RAM increases as applications grow over the years, whereas battery capacity isn't improving as rapidly).

I'm throwing another 12GB of RAM (making 24GB total) into my system tomorrow when I install Windows 8. Together with my new SSD it'll help crunching through some large data sets so that I can hit 100% CPU utilization. It cost me $100 USD to do so in a country where we often pay double for electronics. Few "normal" people can utilize all of that during the normal course of using a PC. Memory pressure is an easy problem to solve.

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Re:Creating the Windows 8 user experience by metrop0219 on Friday May 18, 2012 @05:27PM (#3994116)

Memory is cheap. There's probably better things to focus on then squeezing more bits out of the memory usage.

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Re:Creating the Windows 8 user experience by rbanffy on Friday May 18, 2012 @05:55PM (#3994231)

> The reason it isn't high on the list is because they already tackled that for Win7

It's not tweaking memory management that solved the problem - it's that our computers started coming with 4 gigabytes of RAM.

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Re:Creating the Windows 8 user experience by sliverstorm on Friday May 18, 2012 @06:02PM (#3994256)

I dunno, Win7 runs just fine on 1GB, and while XP can be installed on 128MB I'm not sure it will run that well.

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Re:Creating the Windows 8 user experience by rbanffy on Friday May 18, 2012 @08:37PM (#3994732)

> I dunno, Win7 runs just fine on 1GB

That's not what I experience with VMs. Unless you restrict yourself to the desktop and Windows Explorer, it doesn't feel good.

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Re:Creating the Windows 8 user experience by sliverstorm on Saturday May 19, 2012 @06:50PM (#3997318)

Dunno if VMs are the ideal reference case.

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Re:Creating the Windows 8 user experience by geetee on Friday May 18, 2012 @04:52PM (#3993893)

The memory reductions in 7 were pretty drastic. Give some credit where it's due.

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Re:Creating the Windows 8 user experience by rbanffy on Friday May 18, 2012 @05:56PM (#3994239)

Either that, or the memory increases in Vista were enormous and 7 brought it down to the kind of hardware that was available at the time.

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Re:Creating the Windows 8 user experience by drivebyacct2 on Friday May 18, 2012 @05:18PM (#3994058)

My favorite part was where you didn't justify or substantiate any of your angry rant.

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Re:Creating the Windows 8 user experience by metrop0219 on Friday May 18, 2012 @05:25PM (#3994102)

In what way are they screwing developers? I feel that the three avenues for writing apps (C#/xaml, c++, and html5/js) are actually pretty good for us.

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Re:Creating the Windows 8 user experience by bitwize on Friday May 18, 2012 @06:36PM (#3994384)

By giving you a crippled, nerfed WinRT API to develop to instead of Win32. Apple's iOS APIs are crippled, too, but the iPad is so much cheaper, niftier, and more pleasant to develop for (seriously, Cocoa APIs are pretty awesome). The key advantage of Windows -- backwards compatibility with prior versions of Windows -- is going to be to some significant degree, lost with WinRT. In short, Microsoft is going to have a hard time attracting a critical mass of developers to this new platform without... incentives[0].

[0] http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2000/10/23/

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Re:Creating the Windows 8 user experience by drivebyacct2 on Friday May 18, 2012 @07:26PM (#3994564)

You're just all over the place aren't you? WinRT APIs are available on ARM, so the devices will eventually reach price parity. Otherwise, WinRT APIs are neither that crippled given their target usage (Metro apps), they're designed to be power friendly from the start and you can choose any language that there are projections for.

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