Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
The only real change is that you launch apps from a screen that looks very like the iPad or Android home screen, rather than a heirarchical "Start Menu", and that makes a lot of sense to me, given that a lot of people are now familiar with such interfaces.
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I find this terrifying. (On a personal level; no statement about overall usability.) I find the iThing/Android screens frustrating and hard to use--I'm easily confused by all the icons collected in grids. I have a hard time learning new symbol sets and much prefer text, and when I do have to deal with symbols, I want to be able to arrange them.
No idea if ipads etc allow users to arrange the icons as they prefer (my experience is limited to very frustrating incidents with other people's devices), but I'd gotten the impression that even if they can put them in the order they want, they can't leave blank spaces--I wouldn't expect to be able to put "all the word processing/doc conversion software" at the top of the screen, and "all the internet/email/communications software" at the bottom, and "all the games" on a line at the right-hand side.
I use the Start menu for most of the programs I open most often, with most of the rest of my activities starting from an explorer window.
I'm considering that when my XP box finally needs to be replaced, it's time to learn Linux and run a Windows emulator so I can use Finereader and the handful of other programs I care about that don't have Linux versions. If I need to learn an OS from scratch, it might as well be something I know I can configure the way I'd like it to be.