Six (out of ten) "best features of Windows 8" which we had long before it even came out

Thomas Pfeiffer colomar at autistici.org
Mon Oct 29 13:51:37 UTC 2012


There are many ways to see that you're going in the right direction.
One of them is reading an article titled "The 10 Best Features in Windows 8" and 
realizing that your product had six of them for more than a year now:
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/10/the-10-best-features-in-windows-8/

- Gestures: Check. (Surely there is always room for improvement, but we're 
pretty good especially with dragging and swiping)
- Live tiles (on the home and lock screen): Well, we call it Plasmoids, but it's 
pretty much the same thing, and for the lock screen the infrastructure is there 
as well, we just haven't flicked the switch yet)
- System-Wide Search: Check. For some reason it's pretty slow in PA3, but I'm 
sure we can improve that again for PA4
- "Pin Anything" (to your homescreen): I'm glad that F/OSS has the "Release 
early, release often" philosophy, because otherwise some people might not 
believe that a small team of people had the same idea (only much better, because 
we have Activities) _before_ the giant Microsoft. The similarity is staggering, 
and well, we came first :)
- "Share Everything": Check. Plus "Like". And "Connect". See above ;)
- Task Manager: Check. Since long before Plasma Active. But if _that_ is one of 
the top ten features of Windows 8, maybe we should install KSysguard by default 
(currently it's not even in the repos, which is a bit sad) ...

Maybe we should start writing defensive publications for our ideas, just in case 
some company from Redmond may try to claim them later...


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