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Microsoft loses control over Windows Tiles
- jacobush 8y agoVery deadpan explanation, almost like it's not a big deal. I like it.
- blkhawk 8y agoIts a German website - I would expect that ;)
- verst 8y agoAs a German I did actually get an impression of urgency / severity the way this was written. Not everyone understands how Germans communicate as I am reminded of every day for the past 14 years in the US.
- didsomeonesay 8y agoPlease share some insights about German-US communication incompatibilities from this experience, I'm curious.
- jacobush 8y agoOh I can see it - I'd like to think as a Swede I am bit in between the German way to communicate and the US way. However, now you have to excuse me, I have to go fika. ;)
- OscarTheGrinch 8y agoI've been using classic shell to completely ban tiles from my windows experience, it does a good job of returning the interface to more or less windows 7 familiarity. h̶t̶t̶p̶:̶/̶/̶w̶w̶w̶.̶c̶l̶a̶s̶s̶i̶c̶s̶h̶e̶l̶l̶.̶n̶e̶t̶/̶ I'd be keen to know if anyone else has used this or some other approach to de-candy-ify their desktop. Edit: thanks so much for the feedback everyone, the hive mind at its best! I learned from the cementers below that classic shell has been abandoned and then forked to a community project here: https://github.com/Open-Shell/Open-Shell-Menu https://github.com/Open-Shell/Open-Shell-Menu
- codetrotter 8y ago> h̶t̶t̶p̶:̶/̶/̶w̶w̶w̶.̶c̶l̶a̶s̶s̶i̶c̶s̶h̶e̶l̶l̶.̶n̶e̶t̶/̶ Seems that you copied this link with some Unicode underline characters included or something. It looks really weird in Safari on iOS 12. Clickable link: http://www.classicshell.net/ http://www.classicshell.net/
- blkhawk 8y agowell I had been using LiteStep to modify my Desktop sine late 98. Sadly Windows 8 was partly incompatible and Windows 10 fully so. I made the switch to Kubuntu and am very happy with Plasma.
- tracker1 8y agoUsed to LOVE LiteStep, used it until Windows 7, since I actually preferred it over any LS setup I'd used. Will have to check out Plasma... next machine will be a hackintosh or linux (if I can't get macos working well enough).
- Stratoscope 8y agoThe best thing I have found on both Windows 10 and Android to improve usability is to go into the accessibility or ease of access settings and disable animations. This makes both systems so much snappier and responsive. On Windows it makes the Start menu fast and comfortable - instead of having some things slide in from one direction and others from another direction, the Start menu just appears instantly. I used to use Start10, but after disabling animation and deleting the tiles I don't need, I'm just as happy with the Windows native Start menu. I mostly just use the type-and-search rather than clicking on icons, so the less fanfare the Start menu presents, the better. A couple of other settings I like in Windows 10 are also in the ease of access settings under the cursor and pointer section. I changed the cursor thickness to 3 for my high-DPI displays, and found a nice solid black mouse pointer there too - much easier to see than the default white one. Whatever OS you are on, take a look through the accessibility settings. That is where they hide a lot of the good stuff.
- GordonS 8y ago
- Causality1 8y agoIn the nearly four years since its release, I have yet to see a headline that makes me feel better about Windows 10 or happier that I'm stuck using it on my laptop. I see at least one headline a week that makes me glad I stuck to Windows 7 on my primary desktop.
- HenryBemis 8y agoBut hey, their telemetry is top notch ;) Seriously though, I am still on 8.1, (using Windows Firewall Control) and I use Acronis to backup monthly (and then upload to Carbonite) so even if MS does a sneaky thing and upgrade me to 10, I will be able to roll back relatively easy. Win10 is overall a bad bad bad OS, the only good things I hear about it is the efficiency of CPU/RAM usage, but I am not switching for that.
- DanBC 8y ago> Win10 is overall a bad bad bad OS, the only good things I hear about it is the efficiency of CPU/RAM usage, but I am not switching for that. If you're using a modern netbook witha tiny amount of disc space Windows 8 uses WIMBOOT which has a dumb problem with the way it handles updates - storing them outside the compressed WIMBOOT areas and thus taking up large amounts of space. Particularly frustrating since WIMBOOT was created for machines with small storage. Windows 10 uses Compact OS which is better. I agree that Windows 10 isn't very good.
- BLKNSLVR 8y agoI used to use a Windows 10 virtual machine in order to have a "consistent" end-user environment for the minimal day-to-day computer-related tasks I perform (primarily spreadsheets and other Office related stuff). It was specifically intended to be an almost quarantined, minimal maintenance system - I had other machines on which to install software for one-use-only and testing reasons. Over about two years that VM, with only Windows Updates being installed on it, progressively slowed to a crawl in its responsiveness, in that even entering values into a spreadsheet would have noticeable lag. I eventually created a Windows 7 VM with identical hardware settings in order to compare performance (make sure it wasn't networking or VM platform issues). The Windows 7 VM has now replaced the Windows 10 VM and is still super-responsive a year later. I can't see any value in Windows 10. I don't what it's doing with the resources provided to it, but "doing what I tell it" doesn't seem to be very high priority. As an aside: I've moved my primary desktop / on-metal system to Ubuntu, and only ever boot into Windows 10 on the rare occasions I need a windows-exclusive piece of software.
- baybal2 8y agoDoes anybody remember RSS based backgrounds of Windows Vista? I think that URLs of a lot of them are now unoccupied as well.
- nightfly 8y agoNo, but I loved the "Active Desktop" of Windows 98.
- asveikau 8y agoThe very mention of Active Desktop makes me think of the sound of a 90s era hard drive working very hard because of so much swapping. The feature wasn't kind on the hardware of the day.
- Anarch157a 8y agoI remember calls to the ISP I worked for, complaining that the computer would try to dial the modem every time the computer booted, so we had to teach the user how to disable that crap.
- jacobush 8y agoI worked for an ISP - we used to set the customers start page to the ISP homepage. Then the CEO suggested we put an autoreload on the homepage, so the modem would reconnect or keep connection open, so more minutes would be racked up. My first exercise in saying no for ethical reasons. This seems so insignificant today... the second was turning down a job to handle outsourcing of medical records. I said, with the technology you are proposing, there's just no way we can secure those records. Fun to think of sometimes in today's break-things-and-move-fast-culture. (Late 90s, both occurrences.)
- bingobob 8y agowindows 10 start menu is a complete joke it never finds anything within the apps area of my start menu
- kkarakk 8y agoyeah i've noticed i tend to start ignoring windows native explorer functionality and build my own mindspace for apps and stuff. i didn't notice until i bought a macbook and realized i could just search apps with finder when i thought of them instead of the path occupying valuable space in my mind. think the functionality broke because of them trying to include cortana results in the search. it's completely garbage now
- chrisweekly 8y agoOn MacOS, I recommend Alfred as a free upgrade over Spotlight.
- sizzle 8y agoWhat killer features does it have over spotlight that made you switch?
- kkarakk 8y agoi thought alfred was paid and closedsource?
- c256 8y agoThere’s a free (as in beer, not speech) app that does quite a lot, and a paid upgrade that’s largely about customizing it. The potential customizations from the ‘power pack’ seemed quite extensive, but I haven’t personally played with it much.
- pushpop 8y agoUnfortunately the search (whatever that navigation feature is called) in Windows was always several steps behind what Linux and OSX offered; even before Cortana was a thing.
- kkarakk 8y agoSo if you want to advertise to a decent amount of people, you can take over that subdomain now. since ms doesn't care to fix it, i guess it's even sanctioned?
- saagarjha 8y ago> The host that should deliver the XML files - notifications.buildmypinnedsite.com - only showed an error message from Microsoft's cloud service Azure. Why is this not hosted on microsoft.com, or something that is clearly tied to them such as microsoftusercontent.com?
- ulldma 8y agoWell, Microsoft often uses suspicious looking URLs for their services. E.g. Office/OneDrive connects to hosts like "oneclient.sfx.ms" and "auth.gfx.ms". So as a user you have to trust these domains and you also have to trust the domain management of the island of Montserrat.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y agoThis horrible domain shell-game is really annoying if you have to manage a DNS filter of any kind.
- notimetorelax 8y agoBecause registering subdomain on Azure is easy, no need for any approvals. While registering anything under Microsoft.com requires review and approvals - bureaucracy in other words.
- derimagia 8y agoDoesn't even need to be under microsoft.com though. Just include the word "microsoft" in it.
- coleca 8y agoI would suppose that you could do similar attacks if someone used AWS S3 as a static site backend, then deleted the bucket, since S3 bucket names are global across all AWS accounts. It would be very difficult to find a target, since it seems as though people tend to leave S3 buckets around forever (see the recent "Facebook" leak that was caused by a defunct company leaving public S3 buckets around w/PII).
- ngcc_hk 8y agoGot a German cookie warning with English content. Strange.
- slightwinder 8y agoIt's a german site, the english article is just an exception. They have on average one english article per year, so they don't bother adapting their site for other languages.
- sagebird 8y agoUm, let the bidding begin? I'll bid $200 for the domain. I'm sure there are some windows 8 machines that will never receive the patch. I don't have any nefarious plans besides perhaps setting each tile to rick roll. Ok, on second thought, in our society I am sure this would put my ass in jail. I suppose it could be considered impersonating the companies behind the tiles, damaging their brands, damaging the Windows brand, running up users network bandwidth, stealing user's computer resources, and then the liability of an actual nefarious hacker using it as a vector to attack or spam obscene advertisements. (Which is kind of what happens when you visit a webpage in 2019 without an ad blocker, but it is O.K. in that case.)
- delfinom 8y agoHe doesn't have control over the domain. It just so happens it points to Azure domain records. He then claimed "control" of the "hosting portion" on Azure on the app service as whatever was there before was gone.
- WorldMaker 8y agoThe ability to create Live Tiles for websites, including automatically based on RSS feeds, was a great feature that was a shame it wasn't hosted for long enough that people realized it existed. I used it to host a couple simple "widgets" such as a NaNoWriMo word counter that would keep NaNoWriMo statistics front and center on a live tile. Doing it via a bit of XML hosted on a webpage, and a couple API endpoints that generated a bit more XML on demand, was supremely easy. It made it simple to write "pull" notifications. I'd may see how tough it is to rewrite it with "push" Azure Functions eventually, but the raw simplicity of doing it as "pull" website was really easy.
- rando444 8y agoYou're still looking at the issue from a developer standpoint. From a client side, all tiles are generally needless clutter. Even a large amount of savvy tile developers won't resolve the problem of the general mess they create by existing. The newer desktops that have start menus without tiles finally feels like a step in the right direction.
- WorldMaker 8y agoI hugely disagree, my love of tiles came from being a user first. The tiles were great as a user. Much less clutter than the equivalent widgets and notifications systems on other platforms. With good working tiles, arranged to personal preference, the Notification Area in the Action Center on Windows is a redundant mess by comparison. Tiles gave an opportunity to see a lot of information at a glance, in a much less obtrusive manner than popup push notifications that get swept into a notification drawer. The problem with Tiles wasn't even lack of developers building good Tiles. The problem was Microsoft compromising the vision on them and weakening the Start Screen to appease people that wouldn't adapt to change. (It was also maybe Microsoft not making it easier to set Tiles on Win32 applications, which could have been enabled much sooner.) (I will mourn the Tiles if they go away entirely. Just as I mourn the Charms as being good ideas not fit for this world.)