They are releasing a new phone operating system.
No, they're releasing a new version of Windows Phone, which has been out since 2010, and has always had the "Modern UI" tiles thing. My understanding is, that's where it's from actually.
Do you think people do?
I don't think anybody does, no. When you use your computer, people sit down with a mouse and keyboard and click icons. When you use your phone, you hold it in one hand and either swipe around with your thumb, or poke at it with your other finger. When you use your tablet, it's more about multiple-finger gestures and occasional keyboard input - either on-screen or physical.
When you use your phone, files and resources are app-specific; you only see your music in the music player, you only see your pictures in the camera app and photo viewer, etc. There's no notion of a "finder" or "explorer" where you traverse a file system where all your resources are abstracted as files for you to move around. A desktop, you do. A tablet, kind of depends; for the most part, tablets are consumption devices as opposed to creation devices, so traversing a file system isn't what you really want to do. If you work with files, it's probably on cloud storage instead of local to the device.
Moreover, the kind of user who
would be confused by multiple UI's - your grandpa, let's say - doesn't have more than one of the above. Maybe he's got a tablet from his adult kids, who figure that a simple finger-pointing UI and LTE wireless is a great way to get him connected with the rest of the world. They can Skype or Facetime with the grandkids without having to fix the computer every Thanksgiving. If he has a phone, it's one of those Jitterbug phones with the big buttons. Maybe he's got a desktop but it's precisely because he can't figure out how to use it and keep it running that his kids got him the tablet.
So, crisis averted. Now, though, Microsoft has created three separate operating systems that
look like they're the same, and they're called the same thing - "Windows 8" - but they're not the same, they won't run the same software, except that you can run Metro apps in the Win 8 Metro screen, but they don't store data the same way. Or, as Paul Thurrott has so helpfully put it:
quote:
Microsoft makes such a solution, in its SkyDrive desktop application for Windows. This application is completely different from the SkyDrive (mobile, Metro-style) app that ships as part of Windows 8.
(Sadly, Microsoft is confusing matters by retroactively calling everything an app. So in its terminology, the Windows desktop application is named the SkyDrive app for Windows. Honestly, it’s more of a plug-in for File Explorer than an app or application. But I will continue to refer to desktop applications as applications, in order to differentiate them from Metro-style mobile apps.)
When you install the SkyDrive application for Windows, it creates a SkyDrive folder in your PC’s file system and then syncs the entire contents of your SkyDrive cloud storage to that location. (We’re all hoping a future update to this application will allow us to decide which parts of the cloud storage get synced, but for now it’s all or nothing.) Everything is automatically kept in sync between your PCs and the SkyDrive.com cloud storage, so you can access your files, which are always up to date, from virtually anywhere.
You canand shouldhave both the SkyDrive app and the SkyDrive desktop application on all Windows 8 PCs.
I'm sure your grandpa should have no problem with that. Just remind him to call Windows desktop applications that look like mobile apps "applications", and Windows Metro mobile applications that you run on the Windows desktop "apps", but that Microsoft refers to both kinds of software as "apps", even though Windows desktop applications won't run on most Windows mobile platforms. I'm sure he'll remember, aren't you?
Edited by crashfrog, : No reason given.
™ Version 4.2
(1)