GMTonyKosten wrote on 11/21/15 at 22:43:30:


The 'flat' look has been popular with designers for a while, and as a web/software developer, I'm so used to it by now that the Aero look is starting to appear old fashioned to me.  Personally, I preferred the days when we put gradients and drop shadows on everything and rounded all the corners, but nowadays everything is all about tiles and horizontal bands and big solid rectangular blocks of flat colour.  I'm at the mercy of trendy graphic designers, so I had to get used to it.

As for the lack of Chessbase on Mac, having built software for Windows and Mac/iOS in the past, I will say that I much prefer developing for Windows because of the far superior tools available, and that my company in the past has decided against developing Mac versions of our flagship software precisely because of the lack of third party components.  For Windows and web development, there are tons of third party libraries like DevExpress, Telerik, etc, but when we investigated the options for Mac development, we found we'd have to do all that work ourselves, which for a small company with limited resources, turned out not to be practical.  In the end, we opted to build an online version of our software, which was the only way we could realistically get our product to Mac users.  Having said all that, I don't know what Chessbase was built with, so none of that may apply to them.

I do have other problems with Mac development - in particular, I find XCode/Objective-C far less pleasant to use than Visual Studio/C# and Apple also have an annoying habit of repeatedly "updating" their UI design so that previous software breaks (for instance, one app needed major reworking 6 months after being released, because an iOS update rendered all the buttons invisible).   

GMTonyKosten wrote on 12/12/15 at 12:25:52:



Could you explain what GWX is and how to remove the telemetry stuff? 

I am staying with Win7 until it is dead then switching to Linux.

Also don't forget other issues with Win7 is the touchscreen and the fact it was made for the tablet + phone first with the Desktop being an after thought as that market is smaller and continues to shrink. I want an issue built with the EXACT opposite thought process. I also don't give a shit about integration as I don't want my phone and tablet to integrate with my desktop (plus I don't own a Microsoft phone nor tablet).

Windows 10 has deleted my files several times after an update.  It's the worse

More than 6 months on from my original post and I thought I would give an update, point-by-point:

GMTonyKosten wrote on 11/21/15 at 22:43:30:


The Start menu and Action centre have the Aero look (there's a 'transparent' setting for this, so you can turn it on and off), and now the windows have an optional 'accent colour' picked from the background (which you can automatically change from time-to-time) so this is a big improvement.

GMTonyKosten wrote on 11/21/15 at 22:43:30:


This is now better, if not perfect, I've managed to customise it more to my taste. I still prefer the Win 7 one!

GMTonyKosten wrote on 11/21/15 at 22:43:30:


No change.

GMTonyKosten wrote on 11/21/15 at 22:43:30:


Win 10 is getting better, but there are still problems, for instance a friend has recently lost use of her start menu, and I've spent hours trying all sorts of fixes I found on the Internet to get it back, but without any success.
I haven't been able to use many of the new Apps at all, for instance if I try to open a picture with Photos it immediately crashes.

GMTonyKosten wrote on 11/21/15 at 22:43:30:


MS has bowed to pressure and now you can get Info about the updates and also uninstall them (for a while!).

GMTonyKosten wrote on 11/21/15 at 22:43:30:


You now have a lot of control over what info you send, and can easily turn off '8.' (although you need to be computer-savvy enough to find all the settings! ) I also saw an article that claimed that a lot of the computer press were scare-mongering and that MS only took a lot of this info to make programs like Cortana work properly. Also that they were no worse than Facebook, or Google, say.

GMTonyKosten wrote on 11/21/15 at 22:43:30:


So far I've only see Ads for things from their Store on the Store tile, which I can turn off. I suspect they might be putting Adverts on the Lock Screen, but I've turned this off, too.

GMTonyKosten wrote on 11/21/15 at 22:43:30:


With a bit of searching I found a much better solution using the open-source VLC and the program codes to use my Internet box (which has hundreds of TV channels).

So, all-in-all Windows 10 is much better than last year, and all my programs work much as they did with Windows 7.

JEH wrote on 03/13/16 at 10:03:06:


LOL, you still have a month to return to your old Windows!

I just installed Win 10 for a friend who was using Win 8 (Ugh!) and was more impressed than back in August last when I installed Win 10 on my own computer (for a very short while). A lot of things looked and worked better, and there is now some info about the updates. There is also a regedit change that brings Aero back, so the only major problems for me are the loss of privacy and the end of Windows Media Center.
If I could find a program that stops Win 10 from sending info to MS then I would bite the bullet and change!

Another worrying article about Microsoft's strong-arm upgrade tactics:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/3024278/windows/you-will-upgrade-to-windows-10-in...

More worrying news about Microsoft spying with Windows X: http://www.forbes.com/sites/gordonkelly/2016/01/06/windows-10-spying-secrets-rev...