Indeed. Options is something Microsoft is lacking on their OS division. Don’t really know where the company is taking us with Windows. But ever since Vista, I feel like driving on a road and having this nagging feeling I should have left it when I could.

Microsoft -still- should have given people an option to default to one of the filters there. As I mentioned in the article, I know a lot of people who regularly search their PCs for music and photos, and this manages to add another step to that process (having to filter by Files on the right side).

Of course, you mentioned Start menu replacements in the other article… perhaps that’s the real solution.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2011/10/18/designing-search-for-the-start-screen.aspx

Perhaps a better fix though would be for Microsoft to retain the category you last had selected. That’d be useful if someone -only- ever searches for documents. As it is right now, they’d have to click on the Files icon to the right after each search (unless I am totally missing something).

This isn’t practical. The filters on the right can even show you web search results if you select a browser, or a wikipedia page if you select the wiki app and so on & so forth. Therefore showing the contents from all the filters together will only produce noise.

The unfortunate thing for Microsoft is… if it had released Windows 8 and offered a choice between Modern UI and the old-fashioned Start menu, a LOT of the hate towards the OS could have been avoided. People would have then been able to look past the Start screen and appreciated all of the other things the OS offered. Instead, Microsoft chose to be stubborn, and I don’t think that decision will pay off.

I hate Windows 8, though. It’s that type of hate. I hate that it doesn’t give me full support for the UI that has been in one way or another following us since Windows 95 and that allowed the computer world to still thrive and no one got hurt. And, like a jealous kid, I hate that it’s a pretty UI at places.

It shouldn’t matter though. I should never have Windows 8 installed on my machine so it can feel my hate with the back of my hand. Do like some of the stuff you mentioned though, Rob. Ironically, nothing that couldn’t have been added to a Windows 8 without Metro.