Windows 10 preview: A glimpse of our desktop future
The Windows 10 technical preview program started off cautiously.
The Windows 10 technical preview program started off cautiously. The first few builds could almost have been mistaken for Windows 8.2 — which is to say that they featured some solid changes that helped address the obvious shortcomings of Windows 8 and 8.1, but not much else. That’s changed with the latest preview (Build 9926), released by Microsoft only days after Terry Myerson and Joe Belfiore showcased many of the expected highlights of Windows 10.
We are finally getting to experience the outline of the next generation of the Windows OS. The new hybrid Start menu is in place, Cortana has taken its first bows, and we have been introduced to Continuum — Microsoft’s answer to the tablet versus desktop confusion of Windows 8. With all these new technologies come a lot of rough edges — which has made evaluating the new preview releasemore challenging than previous versions. But spending a few days working with it on a variety of devices has provided a good view into what will be the future desktop — and perhaps mobile — OS for many of us.
The Start menu rises from the dead: Will you welcome it back?
In a valiant attempt to be all things to all people, Microsofthas re-created its Start menu as a massive hybrid of application list, live tiles, suggested help topics, and “Everyday apps.” Once you get your head around it, the design is fairly flexible. The tile portion can be re-arranged just like the Start screen in the Modern UI of Windows 8.
The Start display (its not quite correct to call it either a menu or a screen, and it isn’t exactly a window) can also be shown either fullscreen or as a smaller version more similar to the old-fashioned Start menu. Purists will quickly notice that the actual menu portion only displays a few items (Places and Most used items) by default.
To get to a complete list of applications, you need to press the small “All apps” link at the bottom of the list. Unfortunately, in my case at least, that link was often obscured by the Taskbar, but I assume that will be fixed in future versions. A larger issue with the all apps display is that it is just one long list. If you have a touch screen you can move up and down the list fairly quickly, but there does not seem to be any equivalent to the popular cascading-menu design featured in Windows 7.
Cortana may have had a few too many drinks before her debut
As promised, Cortana has been integrated into the Taskbar, but it isn’t very useful or easy to use yet. In theory, when you hit the Windows key and start typing, your keystrokes will go to Cortana. It (she?) will then handle the (hopefully) very quick search for matching applications (e.g. if you type Word or OneNote or Control Panel) and also more sophisticated questions (ala Siri or Google Now or Amazon’s Alexa). From having used Windows Phone 8, I know Cortana is capable of quite a lot. But the implementation in Windows 10 is currently really broken. Sometimes typing does nothing, other times Cortana is confused. And it doesn’t have nearly the sophistication of the Windows Phone version. Its ability to answer questions also seems to vary from hour to hour.
Presumably all of that will get sorted out before the product ships, but I hope early users not familiar with what Microsoft can really do with Cortana don’t get turned off by the current implementation. Microsoft has covered its user-experience bases here as well — you can type, click the microphone icon, or turn on recognition of “Hey, Cortana” to get the AI’s attention.
A bigger complication of integrating Cortanainto the Taskbar will be the inherent ambiguity of replacing a quick system lookup function with a complex AI-powered search tool. Windows 8’s integration of Microsoft Search into the simple command lookup function got a lot of pushback, and the integration of Cortana risks making that worse. There are lots of possibilities for confusion. Typing “Time” for example, wound up getting me the New York Times crossword puzzle at one point. At another, typing, “What is the time?” brought up the Windows Clock application. Cortana also has the sort of attitude that people might not want from a computer that doesn’t understand what they just said. For example, one of the canned answers when Cortana doesn’t understand how to deal with your question is “A circle is infinite, but my answers are not.” It made me wish for the return of Clippit.
Despite the teething pains in this early version, if Microsoft can combine the convenience of a voice-activated interface like Amazon’s Alexa with context-sensitive desktop search, then users will definitely benefit. Think how nice it would be to be able to simply ask your PC to play a different song or add a reminder to your calendar while you are still typing a Word document or playing a game.
Next page: Continuum and some good news…
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