I don't even like the touchscreen interface for phones all that much. The Blackberry trackball was so much better for a lot of things; ideally they'd start making things with both, but it's kind of awkward to determine where the ball should go thatswhatshesaid.
Yeah, fiancee just got a BB yesterday and the first thing she said was how much she liked the nub. I used it briefly and it was pretty smooth.
In my experience I like touchscreens, but I still don't have a smartphone. Should get one one of these days, at least to learn how to develop for Android.
I think the "desktop touchscreen" idiom is in anticipation of the tablet replacing the traditional PC, but that wil speculation isn't really panning out; tablets and PCs actually exist pretty comfortably side-by-side.
I think it's entirely too early to say it's not panning out. The trouble is that, judging by the reviews, there have only been two good tablets -- predictably, Apple's and HP/Palm's -- and the latter got smothered with a pillow before it had a chance to catch on.
Brad used to use an MBP as his primary computer; since then he's gotten a full Pro, and replaced the laptop with an iPad. Dude's a statistical outlier, but he's hardly unique; I think there'll be plenty of people in the coming years who have a desktop at home and a tablet in a backpack.
There's an appeal to replacing laptops with tablets, as tablets may be "good enough" for most of what laptops can do, and they're more portable. And keep in mind that laptops have been outselling desktops for the past few years now.
In particular, the tablet is wildly inappropriate for office use, and that's where Microsoft is losing the plot hard; non-technical corporate use is where it still makes most of its money and maintains a pretty comfortable lock, and if they start to take a direction that makes THAT segment lose interest (which they already have with the fucking Ribbon) then they might as well fucking quit the PC market and just become a game company.
Yeah, I can't imagine a single corporate office actually switching to Win8, never mind that most are just getting around to 7.
But I'm not really sure that's what MS is going for with this. Win7 Phone is, by all accounts, pretty great, but selling abysmally. MS is trying to enter into the tablet and phone market; the desktop seems to be an afterthought this generation.
Bears noting, of course, that corporations ARE actually a perfect place to try and make inroads in phone/tablet sales right now, as BB is on the decline and Apple is just beginning to gain a foothold.
The thing that bugs me the most about Windows 8 is the home screen. I mean, yes, the Start Screen sucks, but more the design mindset that leads to that being your home screen. Any computing device has kind of a "Default" place to be, a context from which other things originate. On Android, that's the home screen. On all prior versions of Windows, that's been the desktop. On Windows 8, it's the Start Screen. That's where everything originates, and where everything returns. "Desktop" is just an app within that.
An interesting point. GNOME 3 doesn't have a damn desktop at all -- actually, it does, but you can't put anything on it, which is really even worse than having the program launcher be the "home" screen.
I'm not sure that the paradigm shift is an inherently bad idea from a usability perspective (have you seen the shit lusers slather all over their desktops?), but as a power user I want my damn desktop, and I want my launcher to be a small, quickly-navigable rectangle in one corner of the screen. I sure as hell don't need those icons spread out across an entire 1920x1200x24" screen, covering up whatever the fuck I was doing before I opened the launcher and making me train my eyes (and pointer) from one corner of the screen to the other.
Again, great for a phone, but not so sensible for a desktop.
