After all, we've had the basic system of windows for 17 years, more or less.

More, probably. Windows had its genesis about 1981, and really came to the fore about the time the Macintosh appeared, which was 1984. So, the desktop metaphor, with mouse, windows, folders, icons and sundry other stuff has been with us about thirty years.

Amazing, really, that in all that time no-one came up with anything better.

it has kept the same, (more or less) look and feel since Windows 95 was released in, rather unsurprisingly, 1995.

That was what I meant - Windows 7 in terms of GUI isn't really that much different to '95. Most of the same concepts in use etc. Cosmetically it's different but that's not really here nor there.

Jon

Could type for ages here, but essentially I'm saying that the Metro interface on a PC just seems pointless to me, and that the styling of it... Well, I've genuinely seen classier stuff on my nephew's InnoTab

Probably about as pointless as Apple's keenness to put iOS features onto their desktop OS.

Probably about as pointless as Apple's keenness to put iOS features onto their desktop OS.

Alphabetical classification is useless if you can't remember the name of the thing you're looking for. In fact in Rusty's example (IMO only to be fair) you're probably likely to vaguely remember the name and also vaguely remember what the icon looks like. In that case, categorisation is a hindrance rather than a help, because while if you know what you're looking for it's doing a good job (hiding the things you know you're not interested in) if you don't it's doing the reverse - it's hiding things you essentially are interested in, because you don't know what interesting until you see it.

I have no objection to MS trying to find a new GUI paradigm. After all, we've had the basic system of windows for 17 years, more or less. However I'm not sure their new paradigm works as well for desktop computing as it does for touchscreen computing and in any case, attempting to make the same paradigm work for all different forms of physical interfaces seems to me to be a fool's errand. It hasn't really worked for Apple (the most iOS-y bits of Lion are the things people seem least enthusiastic about) and I don't think it will for MS in the long run either.

If you try to make a GUI work for all interfaces, it'll end up being optimised for none of them.

Jon

You can move the tiles around to have your apps in any order you prefer.

We were talking about the "all apps" list, not the start screen.