Items tagged with Start Screen
New rumors on an upcoming release of Windows could be sweet tidings for users who either aren't satisfied with the OS's current state or who have refused to upgrade to the present version. Microsoft is reportedly planning a new release of the operating system, codenamed Threshold -- and it contains two huge changes. According to long-time Windows guru Paul Thurrott, Windows Threshold will offer the following: Metro applications running in windowed mode on the desktop. A genuine Start Menu If true, these are features I'd upgrade for. Hurrah! It's 1987! Let's start with windowed more for Metro applications. One of the improvements to Windows 8.1 was that tiles could be two sizes (up from just one)...
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With the Windows 8 launch only days away, Microsoft made official something that has been widely known unofficially for months: Skype is built into Windows 8. The move is part of Microsoft’s push to put communication center stage in the newest, heavily revamped version of the Windows operating system. The first thing you’ll notice about the Skype integration is that Skype gets its own Live Tile on the new Windows 8 Start Screen. Any Skype IM messages will appear in the upper-right corner of the Start Screen, and you can snap your Skype video conversation to the left or right side of the of the screen, similar to the way you can already snap windows to the side of the screen in...
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Earlier this week, Microsoft principal program manager Chaitanya Sareen dished out information on why Microsoft ultimately decided to kill the Start Menu and replace it with the polarizing Start Screen. According to her, killing the Start Menu wasn't seen as a big deal, given that consumers and businesses had largely stopped using it. We’d seen the trend in Windows 7. When we evolved the taskbar we saw awesome adoption of pinning [applications] on the taskbar. We are seeing people pin like crazy. And so we saw the Start menu usage dramatically dropping, and that gave us an option... So I’m a desktop user, I pin the browser, Explorer, whatever my apps are. I don’t go the Start...
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The Windows 8 Start Menu Screen is shaping up to be a bone of contention between Microsoft's engineers and those following the company's Building Windows 8 blog. In a series of recent articles, Microsoft's Steven Sinofsky delved into the history of the Start Menu (the basic concept is 16 years old) and discusses its various shortcomings. Part of the impetus for a re-think comes from Microsoft's own research, which shows that Start Menu usage declined dramatically from Windows Vista to windows 7, thanks in considerable part to the debut of taskbar pinning. Windows 8's Start Screen does away with classic Start Menu functionality and replaces it with an entirely different model. Microsoft believes...
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