Windows 10!

On Wednesday, July 29 of 2015, Windows 10 was released and I went to a tech talk on it one day later (July 30) at the Microsoft Center in Austin's Domain mall which was partially coordinated by Ryan Joy pictured here. Over five million Windows Insiders have been testing Windows 10 up until now so it is hardly super mysterious or new. Why no Windows 9? Ryan explained that there is a lot of old Java code that tried to match on the first piece of a string for "Windows 9" to try to distinguish Windows 95 and Windows 98 from Windows NT. It is pretty easy to roll back an upgrade from Windows 8.1 to Windows 10. There is now a start menu again, but it isn't much like the Windows 7 start menu. Basically, when one opens the menu one sees something like that home screen full of Metro tiles that one sees at Windows 8 only now this new screen is three quarters of the whole screen and sort of sits on top of the desktop at the lower left. At the leftmost edge of this thing is a list of programs in a shape sort of like the Windows 7 start menu, only the hierarchy only drills one tier deep past the initial hierarchy. There is no deep nesting. There is a feedback option baked directly into the start menu to allow users to easily/quickly give feedback to Microsoft on Windows 10. A user profile sits at the upper right of the start menu three-quarters screen thingy. You may access it there. Microsoft Edge is now the default browser at Windows 10. It interfaces seamlessly with Microsoft Office. One may take a web page, "draw over it" with One Note to make whiteboardesque notes on top of it, and then send it on via email, I guess as a flattened screen grab plus. Three dots in a horizontal row at the upper right of Edge are its equivalent to the hotdog menu of Google Chrome. You use that button to break into the settings. Microsoft has a goal of continuum in which users get a consistent look a feel at a desktop/laptop, tablet, or phone, but that said there is a specific control to toggle between desktop/laptop and tablet modes and the tablet mode has more of Windows 8 feel. I myself am not overly excited for Windows 10. I can't imagine we will use it at work anytime soon. It seems like everyone just really liked Windows 7 and wished it would stay. :(

Before the event there was a meet and greet where we, the guests, were fed and we socialized some. Someone I spoke to suggested that he had seen installs which made him think that the program was trying in vain to put stuff in the start menu in a hierarchy more than two tiers deep and the stuff beyond the first tier was just getting flattened into the second. This individual, Jeff, said that one of his frustrations with Windows 8 was that at a list of programs he often saw a swath of multiple items with long names which each started out the same, but which each got truncated in the name of screen real estate before they could be told apart. He said that while this problem still exists in Windows 10's menu system too, one may now mouse over such a listing to see a tooltip revealing the full name. Jeff said that the AOSP (Android Open Services Project?) was the open source core logic that Google itself did not control (open source, remember?) that was the centerpiece of every Android device. Some Chinese vendors sell dumbed-down Android phones that have just the AOSP baseline and nothing more. Anyways, Windows 10 for Windows Phone is very likely to soon work with AOSP allowing Android app store apps to run on the Windows Phone which could save the Windows phone from obscurity/irrelevancy. Think of the apps you use on your iPhone or Galaxy. Does it have a counterpart in the Windows Phone space? No, it does not, not that app for your bank. No one builds apps for that platform and that keeps the platform from being competitive. Jeff said that Objective C is to be interpreted by Visual Studio 2015 and that "sitting is the new smoking" and encouraged me to get a standing test, but I'm not delving into that silliness. No thank you. This was my first time in a Microsoft Store and I was intrigued. The Microsoft Stores have existed for six years and the Austin locale for three. The staff does first-line-of-support Geek Squadesque work for its clientele. The Microsoft Store sure reminded me a lot of the Apple Stores I've been in. There is a difference however, even when Microsoft pretends to be fluffy feel good like Apple, it is making the real tools for work and not the toys. I went there. Challenge me?

Addendum 8/2/2015: AOSP really stands for Android Open Source Project.