Why touch is killing Windows 8 apps

At his keynote speech at the BUILD conference today, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer hyped how important touch is to Windows and the future of computing. But because of Microsoft's reliance on touch, Microsoft and others have dumbed down Windows 8 apps so that many are barely useful.
There's no doubt that Windows 8 apps -- now often called Modern apps -- are pretty to look at. And it certainly is fun and satisfying to swipe to your heart's content. But whether by design or accident, touch has hamstrung many apps. Those apps could be much more powerful if Microsoft designed dual interfaces into the same app, a simple one for touch, and a richer one for keyboard and mouse. You might accomplish 80% of what you want with the touch interface, and the remaining 20% with the keyboard.
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Why touch is killing Windows 8 apps | Computerworld Blogs
 
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I agree. Working for a software company that is redoing its apps for touch, I can see the feature set dwindling in exchange for touch components.
 

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Do we have a "no rubbish Sherlock" tag here....:thumbsup:
 

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I stopped reading when the guy can't even figure out how to make a bookmark/favorite in Metro IE... at least be informed before you look like an idiot...
 

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dirtyvu said:
I stopped reading when the guy can't even figure out how to make a bookmark/favorite in Metro IE... at least be informed before you look like an idiot...
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In defense of the idiot, I'm not an IE user, and I haven't spent hardly any time with the Metro version of IE.

For fun today, I fired it up and tried to figure out how to make a bookmark/favorite. Guess what, I actually had to Google it after spending close to 10 minutes and not figuring it out.

When you hover over the pin, it only says, "Pin site". Well, I knew that I didn't want to pin it to my start screen, so I went in search of trying to figure out how to do it another way.

I think the point the author was trying to make is that Windows 8 is simply not very intuitive for most desktop users. Basic functionality shouldn't require lots of web searching to figure out how to do something you've known how to do for 20 years. Granted, he should have said, "I couldn't figure out how to add to Favorites, not necessarily that you couldn't add to favorites".
 

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    ABS M1 Mechanical
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    Logitech G9 Laser Mouse
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    15/2 cable modem
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    Windows and Linux enthusiast. Logitech G35 Headset.
If the guy knows how to pin to start, I can't believe he missed the "add to favorites" option. That's the incredulous part. I would've understood if he didn't know how to do either but how do you see one and not the other? The only other reasonable explanation is he didn't know the difference between a favorite and a bookmark. Lesson to guy: bookmarks are called favorites in Internet Explorer.

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I'm not an IE user either (Firefox is still my favorite and Chrome is #2) and I knew how to do it.
 

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