I had a bit of a laboured rant about the UI choices Microsoft made with Windows 8 over numerous posts on another forum. I use a different username there, and a different 'forum personality' (many people will know what I mean by that). Apparently it seems the majority of people actually think Microsoft made Windows 8 perfect, I think they just like it because they will like anything that's presented to them! Unfortunately sales figures will be skewed due to the low cost of upgrade, and phone/tablet sales, but it doesn't mean people are actually happy with the product. I also hate the wall of light cream white and beige in Office 2013 (Excel is worse than Word though), I can't imagine sitting in front of that 8 hours a day 5 days a week, because that is what a lot of office workers will have to contend with. Unfortunately the reality is, it seems Microsoft are hoping people will use their tablets instead of proper computers, that people only use applications from their App store, and that gamers etc. will play the Xbox and not use PC. Business workers of course will still use Windows, but business don't need anything attractive,styled, or have a proper 'finish' to it.
User Experience is a very important part of application development and should by no means be neglected even if businesses aren't interested in pretty applications but functional ones. I've seen employees sit in front their computers to use a command-line office application where the background was bright blue and the text was white. Frustration with their tasks, their colleagues and their job as a whole ensued but management didn't care about replacing the app or investing to have it re-designed so that their employees' work might be less unpleasant and more productive. When the users hate the system they're using, they won't be very productive. It's a psychological issue and not one that can be rectified by threatening them if they don't work faster. User Experience is as important for internal business applications as it is for commercial, customer-side ones. Conducting proper studies is essential to designing and developing applications that will generate user "buy-in" and sense of ownership of the system. Windows' new desktop interface was done in secrecy until Microsoft's final goal for the UI was revealed in a blog post by Sinofsky mere months before RTM. Even the Release Preview had Aero glass. The glass in the Release Preview was different from the glass in Windows 7 and Vista which suggests that time was spent actually redesigning the glass effect (blur and transparency) for Windows 8 but for certain reasons (outdatedness, Sinofsky claimed) the glass effect was removed. I don't believe Sinofsky's explanation nor understand why they simply did not offer an option to enable/disable transparency. I don't believe it to be a matter of transparency not fitting into the Metro theme of Windows 8. I've seen dozens of talented DeviantArt artists come up with dazzling mock-ups for how Windows 8 desktop could have been and it fit very well into the whole new Metro craze that seems to have taken a hold of Microsoft.
i agree with the previous post and was very disappointed to find glass gone. I have trolled the "process" with procmon on my CP build versus RTM and compared the content of the DLLs for DWM and themes usings strings.exe from sysinternals. I am not a debugger, but was able to see that the strings and any registry reads to 'ColorizationGlassReflectionIntensity' and 'ColorizationOpaqueBlend' are not in the RTM files and procmon detected no calls to them. the RTM does have a call to 'EnableWindowsColorization' which I could not find in the CP. To me looks it looks like for this to work it is going to be a real hack to the system files, which is fine for one-offs but I have to support a corp environment and would have needed a built-in way to have this enabled. It just doesn't appear to be a 'hidden' feature unless there is some special reg value for ColoizationGlassAttribute or EnableWindowColorization that will somehow trick it back on. There may be API for third parties to plug into too though. I guess we'll see.
Dumb question most likely, but here goes. Can the system files from the Release Preview be renamed in a program like "Restorator" to the RTM Version and then be used in the RTM? to bring back Glass.
You don't acutally need to rename anything, you can pick the Aero-glass related files from the Preview and replace them in RTM but it doesnt work very well, its glitchy.
What performance gain, I have 6 cores running at 3.8 ghz 32 gigs of ram, and two video cards. Like my system can't handle the aero glass UI. MS are a bunch of idiots!!! Why should my desktop experience suffer because a Tablet has no power. I want glass back Microsoft.
you did not understand, i was being sarcastic, as ms claims it removed the aero feature to favor this, but it is clearly nonsense since any good system can handle it or disable at anytime on w7, so i'll be skipping w8 since w8 is the new vista! w8ting for w9! ftw!
No Aero in W9 either. Aero was removed mainly because of Styling but also because it adds a litte bit of extra permament power draw, as Aero Blur is using Shaders. It's not about performance.
The sad thing I guess is that I'm researching how to install OS X on my AMD Pc, I have a real Mac and all my games work on it, Including Skyrim MS lost a long time user with this Metro crap.
yeah but on desktops power is less relevant. it could have been disabled by default for mobile devices, and left as an option to turn on that flags a warning that it will hurt power consumption. it could have been that way for all systems, where turning it on flags a power warning message you need to accept. still a foolish decision. its not even like you can 'gradient' the title bar any longer.
It's also going to that 'extreme'. Switching back and forth between the new start screen and the normal screen, and having metro apps tile screens update in the background probably uses far more power than Aero. I'm sure with optimised code aero would make SFA difference to power draw, it's removal was only for the sake of change, and to make normal apps less attractive so people give the metro apps a go. If ever they put Aero (when people say Aero they mean proper Aero Glass) back in, just hope they put it back in properly and not stuff the code to make it less efficient so they can say 'told you so'.
It seems as though it is possible to get "Aero Glass" using TrueTransparency but it looks hideous in my opinion.
that was many years ago. would you use old cpu and old gpu from 10 years ago? windows 8 is backstep when it comes to graphics of ui
Actually thats where your wrong. With out aero, memory is not being allocated in the background to run it, regardless if you had a compatible video card or not so it is step foreword in saving memory.