28 ms·

Windows 10 live tiles reportedly getting killed by Microsoft

126 points by benryon 7y ago

majkinetor 7y ago
Now we only need option to install windows WITHOUT ANY APP PINNED IN THE START MENU - and while we are at it, option to not actually install anything but kernel + most basic stuff that can't be removed - explorer, shell & friends - no candy crash, maps, movie maker and other useless garbage that one could install via Store anytime anyway The first thing I do is to remove them all with powershell script.
- Krssst 7y ago
  Windows Server is pretty close to that, just three times as expensive.
- 1ark 7y ago
  Mind sharing that script?
  - Agenttin 7y ago
    One of the first I ever saw was Tron Script, here's the subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/TronScript/ https://www.reddit.com/r/TronScript/
zarmin 7y ago
Good freakin' riddance.
typescriptfan1 7y ago
Bring back the classic start menu and UI and call it a day. The Windows UI is so inconsistent, tedious and un-metaphorical today.
- insickness 7y ago
  Classic Shell app for the win! http://www.classicshell.net/ http://www.classicshell.net/
  - ptx 7y ago
    Or the actively developed fork linked to from that site, Open-Shell: https://github.com/Open-Shell/Open-Shell-Menu https://github.com/Open-Shell/Open-Shell-Menu
- typescriptfan1 7y ago
  I'll go on... the 95/XP UI was meticulously crafted. It solved some real usability problems by drawing on metaphors to aid discovery. It was close to a language. I think what happened was eventually the designer types got their hands in there and started making changes here and there to make specific things look good. Now we're here.
  - vezycash 7y ago
    Busy work - that's what they are doing.
  - salawat 7y ago
    That's exactly what happened, and it all started with the damn ribbon BS in Office. To me, the "advancement" of the human-computer interface came to a screeching halt at that time. People grok menus. Memorizing sequences of Mnemonic accelerators is natural when overlaid on a haptic path created by mouse movement/menu navigation. Then you take everything and throw out the baby with the bath water by trying to put every past bit of functionality on screen at the same time when what one needs is to be able to set up a work bench quickly, and just do your work, and if necessary save said work bench state to return to later. I've seen more and "better" advancements in UI design in exactly 1 place, in all the different software suites I use, and that is in IDEs. Ironically, the one place that programmers have to make due day in, day out. It makes me wonder whether anyone who presides over these programs is actually proficient in the non-computing version of said task. A Typesetter/document composer for instance. Nothing about the modern interface leads me to believe that any actually invested individual is involved, and that the design was pushed by the need for someone at Microsoft to be seen as needed in order to change something. Then again... Can"t judge 'em for that. We all want to be wanted.
k0dede 7y ago
first thing i did every times when I setup windows 10 is to unpin every tiles in start menu
- mxschumacher 7y ago
  it makes me mad when non technical friends or family members of mine give me their Windows machines to "fix" something and I see all the garbage they are exposed to in the start menu. Invasion of privacy and leeching of attention. Not as bad as the boot times and the overall performance I suppose, but still ...
  - salawat 7y ago
    I'm glad I'm not the only one. You have reminded me I need to go see my aunt to see if a fresh install of Linux mint will solve her usual computing needs though. Or at least to figure out how to kill some of that trash. God, I remember the near instantaneous boot of 7... I was giddy when I had that way back when. Now? I'm just angry at all the garbage.
  - ansible 7y ago
    > Invasion of privacy and leeching of attention. Oh gosh the visual noise! I couldn't stand it the moment I saw it. What is all this stuff, changing every second? It completely disabled my ability to focus or find anything.
mxschumacher 7y ago
the world will be better for it
thrower123 7y ago
Now the struggle will be to not forget how much these sucked, so that they don't come back in slightly different guise in five years, when the wheel has turned and a new generation of designers starts to think it is bright idea. I wouldn't mind seeing the Desktop Gadgets from Vista and Windows 7, which were killed off in favor of Live Tiles, make a comeback.
- i80and 7y ago
  There was a period of UI design in the late-2000's (late 90's, if you include BeOS) where desktop gadgets caught on, and I thought that was a pretty good implementation of the general idea. Then it all vanished for some reason.
  - velosol 7y ago
    The iPhone. That's a little generous, but the rise of smartphones (and their data connections) brought widgets and gadgets to the handheld, with-you-everywhere device and a little advertising on top didn't hurt. The motivated persons who developed the gadgets for free or donation moved to apps because it worked better for them _and_ they were able to get some extra money on top. Then you have MS playing catch up and trying to merge mobile and desktop in all the wrong ways with 8 and the userbase shrunk. What was left was OS X and I'm not sure what happened there.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - zozbot234 7y ago
    Windows 98 had its own flavor of network-powered "desktop gadgets", with its Active Desktop. It was supposed to download updated Web content in the background, with a homegrown RSS-like technology. It was quite modern for its time.
ambitito 7y ago
Reading the comments I suppose I am the only one who saw some use for them, particularly the Weather app. Farewell then I suppose.
- ocdtrekkie 7y ago
  The Weather app and maybe News were the exceptions where these actually were nice to have. Though sometimes they updated on a significantly delay, and clicking a news item didn't even bring you to that news story. Vista's Gadgets were nicer because you didn't have to open the Start Menu to see the weather. However, the tiles largely were duplicative of... just having a desktop shortcut (if you don't want a desktop shortcut, just being in the start menu is good enough). Add the fact that Microsoft never really fully backed off pinning things like Candy Crush to this even for domain account users, and I won't really miss it much.
  - WorldMaker 7y ago
    Even when it was "just desktop shortcuts" you could never get a desktop as clean or orderly as the tiles (without 3rd party tools like Fences). Live Tiles at their best made the Notification Center redundant. Have all your notifications in the "same place" every time and at-a-glance easy to read. > Vista's Gadgets were nicer because you didn't have to open the Start Menu to see the weather. Windows 8 had the right idea in making the Start Screen the default and making the Win32 Desktop "inside it" rather than the other way around. There just wasn't enough courage to let Windows continue to innovate after they lost the initial PR war. (Charms were a really good idea, the execution just needed cleanup. A tiling window manager by default was a really good idea, but they needed to sell the execution by better bringing Win32 applications into that world/window manager without the bulk of the rest of the desktop having to hobble along.)
  - lostmsu 7y ago
    Weather, News, Mail, Finance, Skype, etc, etc
- Ididntdothis 7y ago
  I think the start menu is the wrong place. Desktop widgets or the notification area make more sense to me.
tasogare 7y ago
Finally. Live Tiles were awesome on Windows Phone, yet totally useless and distracting on Windows.
cpascal 7y ago
Thank god. The first thing I do on a new Windows 10 install is disable all that crap.
m0zg 7y ago
How about they get rid of the remnants of Win 95 UI which pops up every time you dig into anything administrative or system settings related? Would that be possible?
- wvenable 7y ago
  They're working on it. I'm surprised so many developers complain about Microsoft's approach here. They're slowly moving over settings from the control panel to the settings app a little more with each Win10 release. It will be impossible (or at least wildly impractical) to attempt to do this all at once. Iterative releases is entirely the correct approach to a problem of this scale. Personally, I still prefer the old control panel but I also know it's a little intimidating for the average user. Having a mobile-phone like settings experience is going to b be less surprising for the majority of users.
  - zachwood 7y ago
    Windows 8 came out almost 8 years ago. A decade to restyle some GUI panels seems a bit extreme to me.
    - WorldMaker 7y ago
      It's not just a restyle though: it's in most cases a complete rewrite. At the very least in almost all cases it is a very new UI framework compared to anything the control panel was previously written in (WinRT/XAML versus organically grown madness across mixtures of MFC/ATL/Win32-by-hand/other forms of macro soup). But if Old New Thing and other Windows blogs make anything clear, it's also a ton of new testing, because Microsoft has no idea ever what sort of changes might domino into some user's beloved fifteen year old application that no one realized instead of using the right API for its job was instead scraping the pixels of the control panel for the right shade of purple.
- ocdtrekkie 7y ago
  The Settings app does get a little more serviceable with each Windows 10 release. I am not sure all of those legacy UIs will ever completely fully disappear, but they're certainly becoming less necessary over time.
Fnoord 7y ago
Here is a source which won't forward immediately to cc.html because it has detected an adblocker (while lying they "don't mind" about) [1] [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20200225190518/https://www.laptopmag.com/news/rip-windows-10-live-tiles-reportedly-getting-killed-by-microsoft https://web.archive.org/web/20200225190518/https://www.lapto...
notjustanymike 7y ago
Good. When I open the start menu, I'm trying to do something. I'm seeking, not browsing, and the live tiles are inappropriate for my current task.
- dbbk 7y ago
  Windows is designed for all types of users though, not just yourself.
  - qzx_pierri 7y ago
    Windows seems to be designed for people who aren’t savvy enough to use Linux, and don’t want to buy a Mac. They get away with egregious design practices, because the OS is ubiquitous and the common user has no other choice. Mac OS on the other hand, has kept a fairly consistent design, mostly due to the obvious barrier to entry for most people ($$$), so any mistakes that would impact usability could easily give someone a reason to not spend $1k on a laptop or even more on a desktop. Microsoft needs more competition. What’s stopping them from re-skinning Windows 10 to resemble Windows 7, and add actual functional improvements? They’ve done that recently, but they didn’t need to redesign their start menu to add workspaces (just one example).
    - BrandoElFollito 7y ago
      > Windows seems to be designed for people who aren’t savvy enough to use Linux, and don’t want to buy a Mac 25 years of IT, developed for the Linux kernel in 1994. I tried to use Linux on the desktop for years and years and it is dreadful, marginally unusable. Windows just works great with my hardware and monitors. I would not use a Windows machine as a server (mostly because I do not know it enough, but also because it does not seem right) and a Linux for desktop.
xeeeeeeeeeeenu 7y ago
The weather app was literally the only UWP application I was using of my own free will and it was because of its live tile. I liked being able to check the weather by opening my start menu. I hate the other UWP apps. They're slow, they lack features, they have horrible UIs and they don't integrate well with the rest of the OS. The only reason why I'm using the new "Settings" app or the new calculator is because Microsoft forced me to it. It's such a shame that Microsoft refuses to acknowledge that UWP was a mistake and keeps porting apps to it.
- fultonfaknem42 7y ago
  They have obstacles to overcome, and then there is just the glaring fact that they had so much momentum with Win32. My biggest gripe is that startup times are just too long. So many times I've gone to launch something like calculator only to have a beefy machine hang for almost a second, if not a full second. It's likely an engineering obstacle that can be overcome but it just makes UWP look like a bad move perf wise.
  - WorldMaker 7y ago
    There was a brief period in Windows 8 where (proto) UWP apps launched smooth and fast and the Win32 desktop took several additional minutes to launch. With so many stacks living side-by-side on Windows it seems an interesting trade-off between past apps, present apps, and future wishes.
    - badsectoracula 7y ago
      I hope future wishes don't involve adding yet another stack though. They need to fix the stuff they have (without breaking them), not introduce new stuff.
      - WorldMaker 7y ago
        That's part of my sadness in seeing so many posts here talk bad about the UWP. The UWP barely had half a chance to live, and with Microsoft having to spend so much time in the Chromium codebase and working on Android code, with Electron and React Native seemingly becoming the most common development platforms for them, the future for Microsoft already doesn't seem to be UWP.
type0 7y ago
Oh, but how else will I remember that there's Candy Crush available on my PC?
dpcan 7y ago
I switched it back to the normal menu-only view the minute I switched to Win 10 and haven't looked back. I don't really understand how having a handful of huge icons helps anyone, especially when you can pin icons of apps you actually use to your taskbar.
at_a_remove 7y ago
Now if we can just get rid of the big letters at the head of each section of the alphabet, we would be making some more progress.
- kingpiss 7y ago
  The headings in the list of programs? I guess they're a bit redundant but do they really bother you?
  - at_a_remove 7y ago
    Yes. Yes they do. Quite a lot. They take up space reminding me how the alphabet works. This "C" is to indicate that the following programs begin with the letter C. This "D" shows that the next items have names where D is the common starting character. And so on, and so forth.
    - pbhjpbhj 7y ago
      Actually, I just looked at this .. and they have a function (who knew??). If you click then it shows the alphabet as a block in a dialog and you can jump to a different letter! I'd still get rid of them (or push/float the app links to the right) and save the vertical space.
      - bchanudet 7y ago
        The behaviour you found out is an inheritage from the good old Windows Phone 7. I use it quite frequently, because when I'm going through the list it's usually because I couldn't reach to the program I wanted by just typing the name. So if what I need it's under "W", then it's a way to be quicker.
  - flukus 7y ago
    Yes. It seems to breaks up the list and my brain doesn't seem to process it as being alphabetical for some reason. Only a minor issue though compared to the search being so utterly broken after so many years.
StreamBright 7y ago
Imagine a world where Microsoft cares and does not force people to use something like this at the first place. It would be trivial to A/B test if tiles were a good idea, if they are unsure.
- pbhjpbhj 7y ago
  Or give people an option, even. Not everything needs to be all or nothing.
twalla 7y ago
The sad thing is that with things like WSL, VSCode, chocolatey/scoop and .NET Core, MSFT has done a good job of fostering a decent platform on which to do modern software development but then completely squandered a lot of that goodwill by turning Windows 10 into an ad delivery platform.
- non-entity 7y ago
  64bit Visual Studio would be nice, but I think I may have read that that's basically never going to happen.
  - fdfffff 7y ago
    https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/ricom/visual-studio-why-is-there-no-64-bit-version-yet https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/ricom/visual-...
badsectoracula 7y ago
Nice. Now kill UWP[0] and bring some actual improvements to the base Win32 C API that any application written in any programming language and available from any source (direct downloads form author pages, repositories like GitHub, eshops such as Steam, etc) can use. [0] of course for backwards compatibility reasons this cannot be totally removed, though considering that 99.999% of the applications made for it were obtainable through the online Microsoft Store there is an assumption of internet availability so it can be installed on-demand like older versions of .NET framework.
- jfkebwjsbx 7y ago
  Yes, please! Win32 ("WinAPI" nowadays) is the API everyone will keep using (plus .NET for higher level). Make a sandbox/container for Win32 apps and that's it.
  - badsectoracula 7y ago
    I'm not sure if this is what you have in mind (because sandbox/container can mean several things, including things i wouldn't like to see like limiting what applications can do to each other) but one thing that i'd like to see is something like a "desktop chroot": being able to right click an EXE (or zip/installer/msi/whatever) and select "Run this in fresh Windows 10 VM" where the application runs in a VM (either inside its own window or seamlessly, could be an option) as if it was the only application installed in a fresh Windows 10 installation, optionally with a way to make this VM permanent as a desktop shortcut, until you decide to delete it and remove the entire thing as if it never existed. This would make it easy to experiment with applications you do not fully trust or simply trying out applications in an environment that wont affect your real working one. It is kinda/sorta possible to do that now using something like VirtualBox, but you need to create a full Windows 10 installation (which takes several GBs), it takes time to install (you can save some time by exporting a fresh installation to an appliance - at expense of more space - though you'd also need to disable networking otherwise after a while the moment it notices internet will start upgrading) and it can't use the computer resources properly (it runs much slower, you have no access to the GPU, etc). A properly integrated Windows 10 solution would be to map existing files to VM so that it reuses 99% of the stuff that would be the same and, if needed, do a copy-on-write in cases where these files are altered inside the VM (it could also help to see what exactly the programs inside the VM touch, sort of a system-wide diff... though that can also have false positives if the changes are by the OS itself).
theiz 7y ago
And now it would make sense again with that folding thing, they stop it. That is Microsoft for you.
partiallypro 7y ago
I like the idea of live tiles, but the lack of buy in from developers really killed it.
_bxg1 7y ago
I get it, but it's also a little sad to see the end of one of the last visually-distinctive aspects in any modern OS. Nothing has personality anymore.
- B1FF_PSUVM 7y ago
  Live tiles were great on mobile - to this day I look at iOS/Android and feel I'm back in the past century ...
  - ptx 7y ago
    Don't Android's widgets provide the same functionality? And they aren't forced to fit into the space of a tile but can be resized.
    - freeone3000 7y ago
      Not quite; it's more like a cross between a widget and a shortcut. The idea being that instead of having a Weather Widget and also having a shortcut to the weather app from the app drawer, the icon for the weather app would just be the widget. It feels different.
      - ptx 7y ago
        The details are a matter of taste of course, but Android widgets do kind of provide this as well: the home screen has a mix of shortcuts and widgets (corresponding to pinned apps in your app drawer, I guess?) and clicking the right spot in the widget usally brings up the app, so usually I use the calendar, weather and notes widgets as (or in preference to) shortcuts to open the apps.
cheschire 7y ago
It takes 5 minutes to whip up a VisualElementsManifest.xml and a custom PNG to make your own static tiles for applications, and we can't even get companies to adopt that. Steam should have had a full win10 static tile ages ago. So if they can't even adopt static tiles, no wonder the live tiles have received nearly zero traction.
bobthepanda 7y ago
Is there a Chrome/Firefox equivalent of tiles for the homepage? I didn't appreciate tiles when they screwed up the Windows 8 Start Menu but I think a nice use case would be a browser homepage. (And something with more flexibility than just "here's your most recently opened windows").
whalesalad 7y ago
I discovered 'Open-Shell' and have really been enjoying it on my Windows 10 test VM. My start menu looks like Windows XP now. Link: https://github.com/Open-Shell/Open-Shell-Menu https://github.com/Open-Shell/Open-Shell-Menu Screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/ujspeiD.png https://i.imgur.com/ujspeiD.png Ignore the shit font rendering, I have every option toggled for max performance over RDP.
Havoc 7y ago
Maybe dump the crazy mix of metro control panels and classic control panels too while we're fixing insanities
- nitemice 7y ago
  The majority of the control panel is metro now.
  - Havoc 7y ago
    Yeah sorta. It's most noticeable in the network settings > status...there are like 8 buttons leading to 5 different styles of windows. The whole thing is just bizarre. Even the back button doesn't do what it says on the tin. Status > Change network prop. Now click back. Do you got back to status (i.e. last page you were on like a browser)? Nope...goes to wifi. Now click Dial-up then ethernet. If you guessed the back button takes you back to dial-up...nope goes to status page. The whole thing is just jarring.
noja 7y ago
Can they remove all the spyware while they're at it too?
- enitihas 7y ago
  The spyware might be making them money, so I doubt it's going to get removed.
sys_64738 7y ago
You know they're running out of ideas when they introduce this stuff to begin with. The tank is empty if they're considering removing it.
- ptcampbell 7y ago
  The tank was empty introducing it. I don’t think removing it reflects poorly.
nzgrover 7y ago
Seems like a good place to ask if anyone has a "go to" script to remove/disable Windows 10 unnecessary extras? For example, telemetry, Shop/onedrive integration, unneeded services for home use, etc.
- toxican 7y ago
  https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10 https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10 has been my go-to for a while now. Even lets you export your settings so you can import them on additional computers.
  - LeoPanthera 7y ago
    Yeah Shutup10 works very well. Make sure you keep it up to date to keep up with new Windows "features".
indymike 7y ago
Somewhere in the past 10 years, Window has devolved to the point the UI is at parity with your favorite Linux desktop environment... mixed with another Linux desktop environment.
RedComet 7y ago
That's a good start. Now do mandatory reboots and mandatory spyware.
Fej 7y ago
I use custom tiles to display art of Steam games, which makes my Start menu look quite nice, but I acknowledge that's a niche use. The tiles open their respective games. The weather and calendar widgets are useful. Not a whole lot else though, in my experience.
markmm 7y ago
Live tiles on a piece of UI you want to be in for seconds at most. Live info should be shown in a bar where you can glance or drill down if need be. Never used live tiles and will be glad when they finally get buried.
pcdoodle 7y ago
Kill the whole OS and go back to win32 with security patches. We only want one control panel.
insulanian 7y ago
I often remember my excitement about Win7, and how well done it was. I've switched to Mac after they started destroying and bloating things with Win8 an later versions, but am still sad to see what this OS has become.

126 points by benryon 7y ago

Now we only need option to install windows WITHOUT ANY APP PINNED IN THE START MENU - and while we are at it, option to not actually install anything but kernel + most basic stuff that can't be removed - explorer, shell & friends - no candy crash, maps, movie maker and other useless garbage that one could install via Store anytime anyway The first thing I do is to remove them all with powershell script.

Krssst 7y ago
Windows Server is pretty close to that, just three times as expensive.
1ark 7y ago
Mind sharing that script?
- Agenttin 7y ago
  One of the first I ever saw was Tron Script, here's the subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/TronScript/ https://www.reddit.com/r/TronScript/

zarmin 7y ago

Good freakin' riddance.

typescriptfan1 7y ago

Bring back the classic start menu and UI and call it a day. The Windows UI is so inconsistent, tedious and un-metaphorical today.

insickness 7y ago
Classic Shell app for the win! http://www.classicshell.net/ http://www.classicshell.net/
- ptx 7y ago
  Or the actively developed fork linked to from that site, Open-Shell: https://github.com/Open-Shell/Open-Shell-Menu https://github.com/Open-Shell/Open-Shell-Menu
typescriptfan1 7y ago
I'll go on... the 95/XP UI was meticulously crafted. It solved some real usability problems by drawing on metaphors to aid discovery. It was close to a language. I think what happened was eventually the designer types got their hands in there and started making changes here and there to make specific things look good. Now we're here.
- vezycash 7y ago
  Busy work - that's what they are doing.
- salawat 7y ago
  That's exactly what happened, and it all started with the damn ribbon BS in Office. To me, the "advancement" of the human-computer interface came to a screeching halt at that time. People grok menus. Memorizing sequences of Mnemonic accelerators is natural when overlaid on a haptic path created by mouse movement/menu navigation. Then you take everything and throw out the baby with the bath water by trying to put every past bit of functionality on screen at the same time when what one needs is to be able to set up a work bench quickly, and just do your work, and if necessary save said work bench state to return to later. I've seen more and "better" advancements in UI design in exactly 1 place, in all the different software suites I use, and that is in IDEs. Ironically, the one place that programmers have to make due day in, day out. It makes me wonder whether anyone who presides over these programs is actually proficient in the non-computing version of said task. A Typesetter/document composer for instance. Nothing about the modern interface leads me to believe that any actually invested individual is involved, and that the design was pushed by the need for someone at Microsoft to be seen as needed in order to change something. Then again... Can"t judge 'em for that. We all want to be wanted.

k0dede 7y ago

first thing i did every times when I setup windows 10 is to unpin every tiles in start menu

mxschumacher 7y ago
it makes me mad when non technical friends or family members of mine give me their Windows machines to "fix" something and I see all the garbage they are exposed to in the start menu. Invasion of privacy and leeching of attention. Not as bad as the boot times and the overall performance I suppose, but still ...
- salawat 7y ago
  I'm glad I'm not the only one. You have reminded me I need to go see my aunt to see if a fresh install of Linux mint will solve her usual computing needs though. Or at least to figure out how to kill some of that trash. God, I remember the near instantaneous boot of 7... I was giddy when I had that way back when. Now? I'm just angry at all the garbage.
- ansible 7y ago
  > Invasion of privacy and leeching of attention. Oh gosh the visual noise! I couldn't stand it the moment I saw it. What is all this stuff, changing every second? It completely disabled my ability to focus or find anything.

mxschumacher 7y ago

the world will be better for it

thrower123 7y ago

Now the struggle will be to not forget how much these sucked, so that they don't come back in slightly different guise in five years, when the wheel has turned and a new generation of designers starts to think it is bright idea. I wouldn't mind seeing the Desktop Gadgets from Vista and Windows 7, which were killed off in favor of Live Tiles, make a comeback.

i80and 7y ago
There was a period of UI design in the late-2000's (late 90's, if you include BeOS) where desktop gadgets caught on, and I thought that was a pretty good implementation of the general idea. Then it all vanished for some reason.
- velosol 7y ago
  The iPhone. That's a little generous, but the rise of smartphones (and their data connections) brought widgets and gadgets to the handheld, with-you-everywhere device and a little advertising on top didn't hurt. The motivated persons who developed the gadgets for free or donation moved to apps because it worked better for them _and_ they were able to get some extra money on top. Then you have MS playing catch up and trying to merge mobile and desktop in all the wrong ways with 8 and the userbase shrunk. What was left was OS X and I'm not sure what happened there.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- zozbot234 7y ago
  Windows 98 had its own flavor of network-powered "desktop gadgets", with its Active Desktop. It was supposed to download updated Web content in the background, with a homegrown RSS-like technology. It was quite modern for its time.

ambitito 7y ago

Reading the comments I suppose I am the only one who saw some use for them, particularly the Weather app. Farewell then I suppose.

ocdtrekkie 7y ago
The Weather app and maybe News were the exceptions where these actually were nice to have. Though sometimes they updated on a significantly delay, and clicking a news item didn't even bring you to that news story. Vista's Gadgets were nicer because you didn't have to open the Start Menu to see the weather. However, the tiles largely were duplicative of... just having a desktop shortcut (if you don't want a desktop shortcut, just being in the start menu is good enough). Add the fact that Microsoft never really fully backed off pinning things like Candy Crush to this even for domain account users, and I won't really miss it much.
- WorldMaker 7y ago
  Even when it was "just desktop shortcuts" you could never get a desktop as clean or orderly as the tiles (without 3rd party tools like Fences). Live Tiles at their best made the Notification Center redundant. Have all your notifications in the "same place" every time and at-a-glance easy to read. > Vista's Gadgets were nicer because you didn't have to open the Start Menu to see the weather. Windows 8 had the right idea in making the Start Screen the default and making the Win32 Desktop "inside it" rather than the other way around. There just wasn't enough courage to let Windows continue to innovate after they lost the initial PR war. (Charms were a really good idea, the execution just needed cleanup. A tiling window manager by default was a really good idea, but they needed to sell the execution by better bringing Win32 applications into that world/window manager without the bulk of the rest of the desktop having to hobble along.)
- lostmsu 7y ago
  Weather, News, Mail, Finance, Skype, etc, etc
Ididntdothis 7y ago
I think the start menu is the wrong place. Desktop widgets or the notification area make more sense to me.

tasogare 7y ago

Finally. Live Tiles were awesome on Windows Phone, yet totally useless and distracting on Windows.

cpascal 7y ago

Thank god. The first thing I do on a new Windows 10 install is disable all that crap.

m0zg 7y ago

How about they get rid of the remnants of Win 95 UI which pops up every time you dig into anything administrative or system settings related? Would that be possible?

wvenable 7y ago
They're working on it. I'm surprised so many developers complain about Microsoft's approach here. They're slowly moving over settings from the control panel to the settings app a little more with each Win10 release. It will be impossible (or at least wildly impractical) to attempt to do this all at once. Iterative releases is entirely the correct approach to a problem of this scale. Personally, I still prefer the old control panel but I also know it's a little intimidating for the average user. Having a mobile-phone like settings experience is going to b be less surprising for the majority of users.
- zachwood 7y ago
  Windows 8 came out almost 8 years ago. A decade to restyle some GUI panels seems a bit extreme to me.
  - WorldMaker 7y ago
    It's not just a restyle though: it's in most cases a complete rewrite. At the very least in almost all cases it is a very new UI framework compared to anything the control panel was previously written in (WinRT/XAML versus organically grown madness across mixtures of MFC/ATL/Win32-by-hand/other forms of macro soup). But if Old New Thing and other Windows blogs make anything clear, it's also a ton of new testing, because Microsoft has no idea ever what sort of changes might domino into some user's beloved fifteen year old application that no one realized instead of using the right API for its job was instead scraping the pixels of the control panel for the right shade of purple.
ocdtrekkie 7y ago
The Settings app does get a little more serviceable with each Windows 10 release. I am not sure all of those legacy UIs will ever completely fully disappear, but they're certainly becoming less necessary over time.

Fnoord 7y ago

Here is a source which won't forward immediately to cc.html because it has detected an adblocker (while lying they "don't mind" about) [1] [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20200225190518/https://www.laptopmag.com/news/rip-windows-10-live-tiles-reportedly-getting-killed-by-microsoft https://web.archive.org/web/20200225190518/https://www.lapto...

notjustanymike 7y ago

Good. When I open the start menu, I'm trying to do something. I'm seeking, not browsing, and the live tiles are inappropriate for my current task.

dbbk 7y ago
Windows is designed for all types of users though, not just yourself.
- qzx_pierri 7y ago
  Windows seems to be designed for people who aren’t savvy enough to use Linux, and don’t want to buy a Mac. They get away with egregious design practices, because the OS is ubiquitous and the common user has no other choice. Mac OS on the other hand, has kept a fairly consistent design, mostly due to the obvious barrier to entry for most people ($$$), so any mistakes that would impact usability could easily give someone a reason to not spend $1k on a laptop or even more on a desktop. Microsoft needs more competition. What’s stopping them from re-skinning Windows 10 to resemble Windows 7, and add actual functional improvements? They’ve done that recently, but they didn’t need to redesign their start menu to add workspaces (just one example).
  - BrandoElFollito 7y ago
    > Windows seems to be designed for people who aren’t savvy enough to use Linux, and don’t want to buy a Mac 25 years of IT, developed for the Linux kernel in 1994. I tried to use Linux on the desktop for years and years and it is dreadful, marginally unusable. Windows just works great with my hardware and monitors. I would not use a Windows machine as a server (mostly because I do not know it enough, but also because it does not seem right) and a Linux for desktop.

xeeeeeeeeeeenu 7y ago

The weather app was literally the only UWP application I was using of my own free will and it was because of its live tile. I liked being able to check the weather by opening my start menu. I hate the other UWP apps. They're slow, they lack features, they have horrible UIs and they don't integrate well with the rest of the OS. The only reason why I'm using the new "Settings" app or the new calculator is because Microsoft forced me to it. It's such a shame that Microsoft refuses to acknowledge that UWP was a mistake and keeps porting apps to it.

fultonfaknem42 7y ago
They have obstacles to overcome, and then there is just the glaring fact that they had so much momentum with Win32. My biggest gripe is that startup times are just too long. So many times I've gone to launch something like calculator only to have a beefy machine hang for almost a second, if not a full second. It's likely an engineering obstacle that can be overcome but it just makes UWP look like a bad move perf wise.
- WorldMaker 7y ago
  There was a brief period in Windows 8 where (proto) UWP apps launched smooth and fast and the Win32 desktop took several additional minutes to launch. With so many stacks living side-by-side on Windows it seems an interesting trade-off between past apps, present apps, and future wishes.
  - badsectoracula 7y ago
    I hope future wishes don't involve adding yet another stack though. They need to fix the stuff they have (without breaking them), not introduce new stuff.
    - WorldMaker 7y ago
      That's part of my sadness in seeing so many posts here talk bad about the UWP. The UWP barely had half a chance to live, and with Microsoft having to spend so much time in the Chromium codebase and working on Android code, with Electron and React Native seemingly becoming the most common development platforms for them, the future for Microsoft already doesn't seem to be UWP.

type0 7y ago

Oh, but how else will I remember that there's Candy Crush available on my PC?

dpcan 7y ago

I switched it back to the normal menu-only view the minute I switched to Win 10 and haven't looked back. I don't really understand how having a handful of huge icons helps anyone, especially when you can pin icons of apps you actually use to your taskbar.

at_a_remove 7y ago

Now if we can just get rid of the big letters at the head of each section of the alphabet, we would be making some more progress.

kingpiss 7y ago
The headings in the list of programs? I guess they're a bit redundant but do they really bother you?
- at_a_remove 7y ago
  Yes. Yes they do. Quite a lot. They take up space reminding me how the alphabet works. This "C" is to indicate that the following programs begin with the letter C. This "D" shows that the next items have names where D is the common starting character. And so on, and so forth.
  - pbhjpbhj 7y ago
    Actually, I just looked at this .. and they have a function (who knew??). If you click then it shows the alphabet as a block in a dialog and you can jump to a different letter! I'd still get rid of them (or push/float the app links to the right) and save the vertical space.
    - bchanudet 7y ago
      The behaviour you found out is an inheritage from the good old Windows Phone 7. I use it quite frequently, because when I'm going through the list it's usually because I couldn't reach to the program I wanted by just typing the name. So if what I need it's under "W", then it's a way to be quicker.
- flukus 7y ago
  Yes. It seems to breaks up the list and my brain doesn't seem to process it as being alphabetical for some reason. Only a minor issue though compared to the search being so utterly broken after so many years.

StreamBright 7y ago

Imagine a world where Microsoft cares and does not force people to use something like this at the first place. It would be trivial to A/B test if tiles were a good idea, if they are unsure.

pbhjpbhj 7y ago
Or give people an option, even. Not everything needs to be all or nothing.

twalla 7y ago

The sad thing is that with things like WSL, VSCode, chocolatey/scoop and .NET Core, MSFT has done a good job of fostering a decent platform on which to do modern software development but then completely squandered a lot of that goodwill by turning Windows 10 into an ad delivery platform.

non-entity 7y ago
64bit Visual Studio would be nice, but I think I may have read that that's basically never going to happen.
- fdfffff 7y ago
  https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/ricom/visual-studio-why-is-there-no-64-bit-version-yet https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/ricom/visual-...

badsectoracula 7y ago

Nice. Now kill UWP[0] and bring some actual improvements to the base Win32 C API that any application written in any programming language and available from any source (direct downloads form author pages, repositories like GitHub, eshops such as Steam, etc) can use. [0] of course for backwards compatibility reasons this cannot be totally removed, though considering that 99.999% of the applications made for it were obtainable through the online Microsoft Store there is an assumption of internet availability so it can be installed on-demand like older versions of .NET framework.

jfkebwjsbx 7y ago
Yes, please! Win32 ("WinAPI" nowadays) is the API everyone will keep using (plus .NET for higher level). Make a sandbox/container for Win32 apps and that's it.
- badsectoracula 7y ago
  I'm not sure if this is what you have in mind (because sandbox/container can mean several things, including things i wouldn't like to see like limiting what applications can do to each other) but one thing that i'd like to see is something like a "desktop chroot": being able to right click an EXE (or zip/installer/msi/whatever) and select "Run this in fresh Windows 10 VM" where the application runs in a VM (either inside its own window or seamlessly, could be an option) as if it was the only application installed in a fresh Windows 10 installation, optionally with a way to make this VM permanent as a desktop shortcut, until you decide to delete it and remove the entire thing as if it never existed. This would make it easy to experiment with applications you do not fully trust or simply trying out applications in an environment that wont affect your real working one. It is kinda/sorta possible to do that now using something like VirtualBox, but you need to create a full Windows 10 installation (which takes several GBs), it takes time to install (you can save some time by exporting a fresh installation to an appliance - at expense of more space - though you'd also need to disable networking otherwise after a while the moment it notices internet will start upgrading) and it can't use the computer resources properly (it runs much slower, you have no access to the GPU, etc). A properly integrated Windows 10 solution would be to map existing files to VM so that it reuses 99% of the stuff that would be the same and, if needed, do a copy-on-write in cases where these files are altered inside the VM (it could also help to see what exactly the programs inside the VM touch, sort of a system-wide diff... though that can also have false positives if the changes are by the OS itself).

theiz 7y ago

And now it would make sense again with that folding thing, they stop it. That is Microsoft for you.

partiallypro 7y ago

I like the idea of live tiles, but the lack of buy in from developers really killed it.

_bxg1 7y ago

I get it, but it's also a little sad to see the end of one of the last visually-distinctive aspects in any modern OS. Nothing has personality anymore.

B1FF_PSUVM 7y ago
Live tiles were great on mobile - to this day I look at iOS/Android and feel I'm back in the past century ...
- ptx 7y ago
  Don't Android's widgets provide the same functionality? And they aren't forced to fit into the space of a tile but can be resized.
  - freeone3000 7y ago
    Not quite; it's more like a cross between a widget and a shortcut. The idea being that instead of having a Weather Widget and also having a shortcut to the weather app from the app drawer, the icon for the weather app would just be the widget. It feels different.
    - ptx 7y ago
      The details are a matter of taste of course, but Android widgets do kind of provide this as well: the home screen has a mix of shortcuts and widgets (corresponding to pinned apps in your app drawer, I guess?) and clicking the right spot in the widget usally brings up the app, so usually I use the calendar, weather and notes widgets as (or in preference to) shortcuts to open the apps.

cheschire 7y ago

It takes 5 minutes to whip up a VisualElementsManifest.xml and a custom PNG to make your own static tiles for applications, and we can't even get companies to adopt that. Steam should have had a full win10 static tile ages ago. So if they can't even adopt static tiles, no wonder the live tiles have received nearly zero traction.

bobthepanda 7y ago

Is there a Chrome/Firefox equivalent of tiles for the homepage? I didn't appreciate tiles when they screwed up the Windows 8 Start Menu but I think a nice use case would be a browser homepage. (And something with more flexibility than just "here's your most recently opened windows").

whalesalad 7y ago

I discovered 'Open-Shell' and have really been enjoying it on my Windows 10 test VM. My start menu looks like Windows XP now. Link: https://github.com/Open-Shell/Open-Shell-Menu https://github.com/Open-Shell/Open-Shell-Menu Screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/ujspeiD.png https://i.imgur.com/ujspeiD.png Ignore the shit font rendering, I have every option toggled for max performance over RDP.

Havoc 7y ago

Maybe dump the crazy mix of metro control panels and classic control panels too while we're fixing insanities

nitemice 7y ago
The majority of the control panel is metro now.
- Havoc 7y ago
  Yeah sorta. It's most noticeable in the network settings > status...there are like 8 buttons leading to 5 different styles of windows. The whole thing is just bizarre. Even the back button doesn't do what it says on the tin. Status > Change network prop. Now click back. Do you got back to status (i.e. last page you were on like a browser)? Nope...goes to wifi. Now click Dial-up then ethernet. If you guessed the back button takes you back to dial-up...nope goes to status page. The whole thing is just jarring.

noja 7y ago

Can they remove all the spyware while they're at it too?

enitihas 7y ago
The spyware might be making them money, so I doubt it's going to get removed.

sys_64738 7y ago

You know they're running out of ideas when they introduce this stuff to begin with. The tank is empty if they're considering removing it.

ptcampbell 7y ago
The tank was empty introducing it. I don’t think removing it reflects poorly.

nzgrover 7y ago

Seems like a good place to ask if anyone has a "go to" script to remove/disable Windows 10 unnecessary extras? For example, telemetry, Shop/onedrive integration, unneeded services for home use, etc.

toxican 7y ago
https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10 https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10 has been my go-to for a while now. Even lets you export your settings so you can import them on additional computers.
- LeoPanthera 7y ago
  Yeah Shutup10 works very well. Make sure you keep it up to date to keep up with new Windows "features".

indymike 7y ago

Somewhere in the past 10 years, Window has devolved to the point the UI is at parity with your favorite Linux desktop environment... mixed with another Linux desktop environment.

RedComet 7y ago

That's a good start. Now do mandatory reboots and mandatory spyware.

Fej 7y ago

I use custom tiles to display art of Steam games, which makes my Start menu look quite nice, but I acknowledge that's a niche use. The tiles open their respective games. The weather and calendar widgets are useful. Not a whole lot else though, in my experience.

markmm 7y ago

Live tiles on a piece of UI you want to be in for seconds at most. Live info should be shown in a bar where you can glance or drill down if need be. Never used live tiles and will be glad when they finally get buried.

pcdoodle 7y ago

Kill the whole OS and go back to win32 with security patches. We only want one control panel.

insulanian 7y ago

I often remember my excitement about Win7, and how well done it was. I've switched to Mac after they started destroying and bloating things with Win8 an later versions, but am still sad to see what this OS has become.