Updates and Notifications and Tablet Mode, Oh My!

It's been a while since I've played with the Windows 10 preview. I've been happy with what I've seen in the past and looking forward to being able to upgrade my home computer hardware when Windows 10 is public. I have had a few minutes between server data migrations to spend some time on it again this week.

The first thing that I experienced were a lot of updates. I think I've seen the "Welcome" / "Setting up" screen three times this week. I don't know if that's a VM glitch or if I've gone through three major updates. A couple of the updates just rebooted my system (the last time while I had left it idle with a desktop market charting program running) and once I saw I could update and reboot so I did that. It hasn't rebooted in the last hour so I think it's done.

One of the first changes I noticed was a Notifications icon down in the system tray. I'm not sure what the API exposed there will be. I hope that it will allow programs developed for windows to send their own notifications to queue up in it. I didn't play with much until today when I think it had changed even more. I've got a grayed out Microsoft OneDrive notification titled "Welcome to the new OneDrive", but clicking and double clicking it doesn't do anything. Maybe it's expired or maybe it's a VM glitch. A new notification from Windows Feedback has arrived titled "How satisfied were you with your experience". I've got to play around a bit more before I open that up and respond.

Finally, there are some buttons down at the bottom of the Notifications window: Tablet mode, Display, Connect, and All Settings. If I click Expand ^ a second row appears: Airplane mode, Location, VPN, and Wifi. These appear to be quick setting access, which is handy but I don't know if the Notifications are is the most intuitive location. On Win8 I would expect to get to these things by parking my mouse in the bottom right corner and choosing Settings (also hidden and non-intuitive, but easy once trained.) I don't seem to be able to activate the Charm bar with my mouse and I'm not sure if that's due to it being destkop-centric or, again, a side-affect of running the preview as a Virtual Machine. Maybe it's desktop mode.

Playing around I thought the first thing to try out was Tablet mode. You use to have to stand on your head and click three times to get to this feature, now it's right in my face, when my face is looking at notifications. Turning it on makes the desktop grey out and the Windows button pulls up a mostly familiar Windows 8 looking start screen. Mostly, but we'll get to that. I am unable to interact with any of the icons on my desktop. Running desktop applications continue to run, but they are forced to be full screen. The restore down button on the title bar is visible but does nothing in Tablet mode. Fair enough, my programs work and I should launch them from the Start screen when in Tablet mode.

The Start screen has changed as well. I'm trying to be open minded and keep my "change bad" tendency to a minimum, but this new layout is less visually appealing than the first Windows 8 one. Like Windows 8.1 there is a little "All" label at the bottom with a down arrow to get to the rest of your apps. Unlike Windows 8 there is this column of tiny icons of Places and Most used and the "All apps" just switches that to an alphabetized list of all your apps as tiny icons and names. The live tiles have all moved to the right half or maybe two thirds and instead of scrolling left and right, they also scroll up and down. Oh, and the windows bar continues to remain visible complete with the windows button (switches back to the disabled desktop), search bar, system tray including the date and time. Having the date and time is a bonus to me. No more silly not-quite-working live tile to show me the date and time for me.

Going back to the desktop, turning off Tablet mode and clicking the Windows button gives a "I see what you did there" impression. The start menu is exactly, and I mean exactly, like the start screen complete with click-your-user to log out and power button to shutdown or reboot. Just smaller. If you want it bigger there's a grow button in the top right and now in non-tablet mode you can quickly see a full start screen (with reduce-down button to switch your preference back). This should give almost everyone what they want. Almost. I totally expect those Windows 95 die hards (including the little one in me) to say "Where is my All Programs button". Sure, it's All apps. They are all there. But if you are use to All Programs > Some Company > Company App, forget about it, get over it, move along, this way works too.

One more change. Search. In Windows 8 & 8.1 when you looked at that start screen full of everything you may have wondered where you Windows XP through Windows 7 search at the bottom of the start menu went. You may have, on a fluke or after reading on the web, actually typed on the start screen and saw that it started filtering all the options and gotten use to this since functionally the Windows Key > type program name sequence still worked. That doesn't appear to work anymore. Instead there is a more intuitive search bar that is always visible with the text Ask me anything. (No, not the redit category.)

You may have heard that Cortana, (yes, voiced as that Cortana from Halo) is coming to Windows 10 among other places. She doesn't quite read your mind, yet, and needs you to set up a few details before she starts helping you find things. Like Google Desktop Search, Windows Desktop Search, Ubuntu Unity search, Siri and many others Cortana searches everywhere to find your answer. You can tell her to just search your stuff and that pulls up a search result that reminds me a lot of the Ubuntu Unity search with categories like Documents, Apps, Settings, etc. You can direct her to search the web. Or you can just wait for the results to come in and then choose one. Since Windows key + S puts your cursor in for a search and since the default seems to be to select whatever you chose last time, this will work for my Windows Key + search I'm use to from previous versions of windows. Just don't click search my stuff unless you wanted a Document instead of an App, because that's where that screen defaults. For my use case that is a weakness shared between it and the Ubuntu Unity search. I am almost always using it as a shortcut to launch programs by name and wish I could or knew how to set that as the default.

Now that I've tested and talked through everything, time to give Microsoft some feedback. It looks like they wanted to know what I thought of Tablet mode. Overall I'm happy with it.

Still lovin it

After installing, with no problems, one of our main Windows desktop applications and running it occasionally for over a month, I've been pleased as punch with the Windows 10 preview. I don't have any serious qualms about 8 or 8.1, but I do appreciate the more desktop-centric experience in 10.

Today I tried one of our Java based desktop applications. The process of going to java.com to install the runtime and installing and running our application was as smooth as it is on Windows 7. All good.

My home desktop computer is getting long in the tooth and faulty in the hardware and I've been considering where to go next. If Windows 10 preview wasn't slated to expire potentially a half a year before it's available I would build a new system and put it on today and then purchase the full version when it came out. That six month gap and the potential of needing to drop back to 8 and re-upgrade to 8.1 before upgrading to or purchasing 10 later sidetracks that though.

Impression so far? I'm still lovin' it.

Add Live Tiles to Start Menu? Pin it!

As a Windows 8 user, one of the first things I wanted to do with the Start Menu+ on Windows 10 was to add some Windows Store Apps with Live Tiles I cared about.

In Windows 8 everything went to the Start Screen, so it was a simple matter of dragging the ones I wanted to see to the left. Windows 8.1 changed up this game a little by putting the world down below the fold, but still I saw them all on a screen, and I had trained myself on Windows 8 so I never really used that in 8.1.

So, with that background I ignored their pin-it tool tip and tried over and over to find a window that would list all the apps that I could drag into the Start Menu. I thought it would be by right-clicking the Windows icon for the Start Menu and choosing properties. Then I figured it would be from Properties on the Task Bar. No dice.

I had to be told again. Reading on the How-To pages for the Windows Technical Preview I saw the Love it? Pin it section. So I go to All Apps in the start menu and right-click the ones I want in the live tile area. Simple. It doesn't give me the preview I was looking so hard for and use to from Windows 8, but if I don't like how it looks I can simply unpin it by right clicking it in the live tile. Easy enough.

Switching the Start menu to the Start screen

One of the things that has been touted in Windows 10 is the concept of having a desktop mode where a keyboard and mouse are available and a tablet mode where they are not. They call this switching idea continuum. It looks pretty slick to me. It looks like a great feature on something like a Surface tablet.

I wanted to do the same thing on my Virtual Machine (VM) instance of Windows 10 Technical Preview, but I failed to find how to virtually disconnect the keyboard and mouse from the VM instance. Instead I found a post by Paul Thurrott on his Supersite for Windows about how to swap between the Start Menu and Start Screen. I should have been able to figure this one out on my own. I was already looking around for how to personalize what tiles are on the Start Menu. I was within a click or two of this setting a couple of times.

This isn't all that continuum does, but it's a step in the right direction and it gives me a way to have the Start Screen back on Windows 10 if I decide I don't really want a Start Menu. Nice!

Now to figure out how to go the rest of the way or otherwise manually invoke continuum in the VM.

Installing into VirtualBox

Since the Technical Preview is bleeding edge, they recommend you install to a spare computer. I don't have a spare computer handy at my desk but I do have Oracle VirtualBox. My first shot at installing failed with an error. I had chosen type: Microsoft Windows Version: Other Windows (64-bit) since Windows 10 is not on the list.

Searching around I found an article on betanews by Wayne Williams titled "How to install Windows 10 Technical Preview on Oracle VirtualBox" that gave some great tips on settings to try to get it going. For me it was as simple as switching the VM version to Windows 8.1 (64 bit). Worked fine with or without dynamic sizing.

I gave it 4GB of ram and 25GB of dynamic disk, but the performance isn't great. My other windows versions run smoother. I'm OK with it. It's a preview, just for testing, and they did suggest using physical hardware. I'm just happy to have it up and going to start trying out and testing against.

Windows 10, because 7 8 9

It's been almost two years since I started wandering Windows 8 and I've had no regrets sticking with it. Oh, there were things that were speed bumps, things to get use to or to tweak and configure and things that just didn't stand out as obvious at first like how to search on the start screen in 8.0.

When people would decry Windows 8 and later 8.1, I would meet their resistance with as much skepticism and perhaps a little derision as I did those who talked about Vista being so terrible and such a failure. I used Vista for a few years on the same hardware I had run XP Pro 64 and for my experience it was an improvement. (I love the Windows Mojave Experiment.) I would talk about how tablets have really exploded and explore the reasons why. While the new and cool factor helped, I think the convenience of the form factor and simplicity and focus of finding, installing, and using a large selection of programs is what really helped it take off. There's an App for that and you can figure out how to use it without reading anything.

Lets be clear that I am no Microsoft fanboy or apologist and I was quick to acknowledge the rough spots I experienced and the areas I felt should change. Several I chronicled on my Wandering Windows 8 blog, and many more I formalized in conversations among friends over time. From the blog a few stand out to me:

• Non-intuitive Search - Starting a search on the 8.0 start screen was not intuitive and I have no idea how a tablet user ever got that job done.
• Hidden Power Button - The power button was overly hidden in what seemed like an overly tablet/laptop-centric view of things. Sure Sleep worked the best it ever had on my desktop, but sometimes I wanted to shut down.
• Jarring Windows Store / Desktop Experience - Mixing windows store apps and desktop mode software was just jarring, even when splitting the screen with desktop mode and sometimes the windows store app versions didn't work as well as I was use to.
• An example of this is the jarring experience of jumping from Desktop mode to Windows Store App mode when double-clicking an image.

As I talked with others about these experiences I started forming some opinions on what should be done differently.

• Desktop vs Tablet mode - Have a way to specify that you preferred Desktop mode or Tablet Windows Store App (ex-Metro) mode and have it auto-switch your program defaults similar to the XP era program default settings for your preferred email and browser.
• Start Screen / Menu Icon - Give people a thing to click to get back to the start screen since, unlike myself, most people want something visual instead of quickly learning to rely on the Windows key. I didn't feel I missed or needed the start menu, I was fine with the start screen, but it was a common complaint. I thought Windows 8.1 took care of this, but for most people who started in the 95 era it wasn't enough, they wanted their menu back. A bit of "change bad" like people uglifying Windows XP with a Windows 2000 start menu.
• Less Jarring Desktop Experience - In general, anything else that can keep from jarring a Desktop user into Tablet/Phone mode, but don't take away the Windows Store Apps, I think they are a promising direction.

So, when I watched the Windows 10 announcement video I saw some changes to look forward to.

• Start Menu - I found it interesting that the first feature highlighted was the return of the start menu. It had a Vista & 7 style search at the bottom, so I was fine with whatever was there. 
• Intuitive Search - Additionally, new users have a nice magnifying glass search icon to click so they don't have to click around and see that it is also in the start menu.
• Less Jarring Desktop Experience - Windows Store Apps will open in windowed mode instead of full screen, acting more like windows programs from the last twenty years on your desktop.
• Intuitive Task Switching - If, after the last 20 years, you haven't learned Alt+Tab have no fear, there is now a button for that on the task bar, next to the Start and Search buttons. I'm into the keyboard thing, but this will make it easier for me to help others.
• Multiple Desktops - The few people I've talked to about this didn't seem to get it without showing them, but for me it was like a throw-back from my first days using a desktop manager in X-Windows. It's nice to have it join the party as a standard MS Windows feature.

Now I'm a registered Insider for the Windows (10) Technical Preview and have it running on my Windows 8 system under Virtual Box.

One question I was hoping would be answered on the video or the Microsoft Preview web site is "Why Windows 10" (or where did Windows 9 go). Some things I read said basically "We think when you try it you will see why we went to 10" or "This is not an incremental change". I disagree with both statements. It seems incremental to me, and I don't see why they skipped 9 and went to 10. 

I joked with co-workers about Windows 10 having an App Store, a Dock, and a Search that maybe should be called Quicksilver and later updates would keep the 10 like 10.1 and have code names like Polar bear or Snow Cat. They weren't Mac people and didn't get that I meant the roman numeral X or the rest of the joke.

The best reason I've found for why Windows 10 involves a bit of grade school playground humor. Why are all of the other numbers afraid of 7? Because 7 8 (ate) 9.

Why Windows 10? Because 7 8 9.