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Writing process

Windows 8 makes writing harder

Microsoft, I’m a little disappointed that you seem to have forsaken your prime customers to chase the fickle home consumer dollar and the cloud. Do you think so little of your corporate and power users that you’re ready to dump them to chase the great consumer god Apple? Or do you take us so much for granted that you assume we will fall in line just because we have to?

I have an iPad.  I love my iPad.  I use it for reading books, playing word games and occasionally to surf the internet. I don’t use it for real work, because it makes hard work of work.

When I use the main computer I always have a number of programs open—SQL Server, Dreamweaver and a browser for work, and Word and OneNote for writing. Plus of course staples like Outlook for mail. I switch between them. When I am writing, for example, every time I introduce a new character in my work in progress I hop over to OneNote and add that character, which is a lot better than going through the story at the end and trying to work out who’s who.

Imagine if I had to do that on the iPad. I’m writing in the word processor, come up with a new name, click the button at the bottom of the iPad, open OneNote (or an equivalent), tap out the details, close the app, open the word processor app again, open the file and continue typing.

It makes hard work out of a one click task I can do in Windows.

Which is great, until Windows 8 comes along and assumes that you want that iPad/Android experience. John Scalzi says it a lot better than I could.

No Microsoft. We don’t want Windows without windows. If we wanted that we would use our iPad or our Android tablet.

I second the commenter in the post who said, “An incomprehensible design decision.”

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