Window to confusion

Microsoft has revamped its popular operating system to combine touch and type functions. But users are confused, says David Pogue

Microsoft made interesting changes to its product portfolio recently. The company released its first computer (the Surface tablet), a new phone operating system (Windows Phone 8) and, believe it or not, two PC operating systems.

I’m not talking about Windows 8 and Windows RT, which are, in fact, two new and distinct operating systems from Microsoft. I mean the two different worlds within Windows 8 alone, one designed primarily for touch screens, the other for mouse and keyboard. Individually, they are excellent – but you can’t use them individually. Microsoft has combined them into a superimposed, muddled mishmash called Windows 8, which went on sale at prices ranging from $15 (Rs 805) to $40 (Rs 2,147), depending on the offer and version. Let’s tackle each version one at a time.

Desktop Windows

This is my name for the traditional Windows: the land of overlapping windows, menus and the taskbar across the bottom. Here, you can run any of the 4 million traditional Windows apps, which Microsoft calls desktop apps: Photoshop, Quicken, tax software, games.

Windows 8’s desktop is basically the well-regarded Windows 7 with a few choice enhancements, like faster start-up, a Lock screen that displays a clock and notifications, and more control over multiple-monitor arrangements.

You can now log into any Windows 8 PC with a Microsoft ID. Boom: Your wallpaper, online mail accounts, contacts, photos and SkyDrive contents are instantly available.
The Task Manager now offers a table of open programs, showing which are the memory and processor hogs. File Explorer (formerly Windows Explorer) now has a collapsible toolbar.

A new Refresh option lets you restore Windows to its virginal, factory-fresh condition without disturbing your programs and files.

There’s a superb new feature called Family Safety, which provides you, the all-knowing parent, with a weekly summary of how much time your offspring have spent on the PC and which websites, searches, programs and downloads they’ve used. Finally, there’s no more Start menu. The taskbar is still there, but the Start-menu icon isn’t on it. More on this in a moment.

TileWorld

The enormous, controversial change in Windows 8 is the overlaying of the second “operating system,” intended for touch screens. (It’s not really called TileWorld. Microsoft simply refers to it as Windows 8, which is so infuriatingly confusing you feel like firing somebody. I’m going to go with TileWorld.)

TileWorld is modelled on Microsoft’s lovely Windows Phone software. It presents a home screen filled with colourful square and rectangular tiles. Each represents an app – and, often, that app’s latest data. For example, the Calendar tile displays your next appointment.

TileWorld is absolutely fantastic for tablets. The tiles glide gracefully with a swipe of your finger. You can “pin” frequently used tiles to the Start screen. The tiles are fun to rearrange, resize, cluster into groups and so on.

Desktop and TileWorld

TileWorld is fantastic for touch screens. Yes, there are mouse and keyboard equivalents for the touch gestures, but those are clearly afterthoughts.

Conversely, Desktop Windows is obviously designed for the mouse. Most of the menus, window controls and buttons are too small for finger operation. Unfortunately, in Windows 8, you can’t live exclusively in one world or the other.

Even if all your programs live in TileWorld, you’ll still have to use Desktop Windows to work with files or disks, connect to networked folders or open the Control Panel. And even if all of your programs live in Desktop Windows, your PC still starts up in TileWorld, and you still have to use TileWorld to perform tasks like searching and address-book lookups.

The free program Pokki helps a lot. It restores the Start menu to the desktop and can even take you straight there at start-up. Even so, two worlds means insane, productivity-killing schizophrenia. The Windows 8 learning curve resembles Mount Everest.

For example, you have what feels like two different Web browsers, each with different designs and conventions. In TileWorld, the address bar is at the bottom; in Desktop Windows, it’s at the top. In the desktop version, your bookmarks appear as a Favourites list; in TileWorld, they’re horizontally scrolling icons. TileWorld has no History list at all (only autocomplete for recently visited sites).

The Help system is a scattered mess. On the Desktop, you have the regular Windows Help browser. In TileWorld, Microsoft has hidden the Help command in Settings for some reason, and at the Start Screen, it offers only three canned topics (like “Rearranging tiles on Start”) and no Search command.

In some apps, like People and Mail, Help offers two links to Windows 8 discussion forums, and that’s it. In others (like Maps, Weather and Camera), the Help command doesn’t appear at all.

Look, maybe it’s really not that confusing. All you have to understand is this: There are two new versions of Windows, called Windows 8, for regular PCs and some tablets, and Windows RT, for cheaper tablets and laptops (not to mention Windows 8 Pro, which adds corporate features). Each edition has two environments, which Microsoft calls the desktop and Windows 8.

In the Windows 8 environment, you can run only Windows 8 apps from the Windows Store. The Windows 8 version of Windows runs both desktop apps and Windows 8 apps; Windows RT runs only Windows 8 apps. Older apps’ icons can show up in both the desktop and the Windows 8 environment, but Windows 8 apps appear only in the Windows 8 environment. The Windows store sells both kinds of apps but is the only source of Windows 8 apps. Got it? Me neither.