First, what's boring? The folder icon? The tile color? or the text?
To me, the whole thing is just drab. But as I said, it's subjective. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. And I don't care one bit if somebody wants their system that way, it's fine. I just like having the choice to have mine different. Tailored to the way that I work. For me, the start screen and tiles is not it. And I find it sad that I have to resort to a third party to have it any other way. But since that is the way it is, that is the way I do it.
My desktop launcher is fascinating because icons can explode, be on fire, shrink, throb, shake, rotate etc...
Great, I'm glad that works for you. I just want the app to open as fast as possible, I can skip all of that flash and sizzle.
but quicklaunch toolbars cannot handle hundreds of shortcuts.
Fair enough. I just don't have hundreds of shortcuts that I need direct access to on a regular basis.
... no one thing should take up the whole thing ... I like it that way, no amount of banter is going to change that.
ok. No one thing? Full screen videos? Full screen spreadsheets? Full screen CAD?
For me, yes there is almost never 1 thing that I run full screen on my 27" 2560x1440 monitor. I do IT work for a living, I always have multiple things opened that I am watching.
I prefer a start menu and icons on the taskbar to launch things versus the start screen, because covering up my whole screen to look at a list of what's installed on my machine isn't beneficial to me. And nowhere did i say that nobody should want the tiles, I just don't want the tiles. I just prefer to work by using a start menu and icons on the shortcut bar...but MS removed that option for me....which is a change from every previous OS upgrade where you could run the new or default to the classic. So what's the issue with giving people the option to turn on the old start menu if that is what they want?
My menu is pretty simple, here it is;
--Outlook for my email
--IE for those 2 pesky sites that I use that don't work with chrome
--explorer: For navigating to files
--Lync: For IM, video chats and phone calls at work
--Google Chrome: For all browsing
--File Zilla: FTP file transfers
--Paint.NET: I write lots of documentation and use this to draw boxes, arrows, etc
--VisionApp: Remote Desktop and SSH links to the hundreds of servers managed
--Media Monkey: For listening to my music
--command prompt: I'm a linux guy, so I use the command line a lot
--remote desktop: For those one off boxes I have to connect to which aren't in our shared VisionApp environment
--calculator: occasionally have to do math
--powershell: For scripting and repetitive tasks
--vSphere client: For everything I do with VMWare vSphere
--VMWare Workstation: Because I do everything in virtual machines
--snipping tool: to get the screenshot of the bar that I just posted.
That accounts for 95% of my day. It's all right there, I don't have to close anything, I don't have to scroll, and I only have to click one time. This works for me, your mileage will vary.
Somewhere along the line I think somebody assumed that I was saying everything had to be my way. That was not the case at all. Never have I said, bring back the start menu and drop the start screen for everybody because it is dumb. But I don't really like the start screen and I don't use it. It doesn't work at all for me and the way I do things. Having another choice is extremely valuable to me. A choice built right into Windows 8 right on day 1 would have been beneficial and saved MS a lot of grief.
