All the cudgels in Christendom, Kent or New England will never make me quiet - Randolph
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Microsoft brings heat maps to Windows 8 task manager
SOFTWARE DEVELOPER Microsoft will include a heat map in the Windows 8 task manager in a bid to highlight potential problem applications.
Microsoft claims its upcoming Windows 8 task manager has something for both power users and those who want basic information about unresponsive programs. User interface tweaks aside, the task manager in Windows 8 will have a heat map to help diagnose what the firm calls "performance issues".
Surprisingly Microsoft's internal usage figures show that task manager is a very popular application, but unsurprisingly, the most common use for it is to kill processes. The default interface for Windows 8 task manager has been cleaned up to present just application names and the ability to end tasks, not particular processes.
Microsoft's biggest visual change to task manager is a heat map that will help users find the processes that use the biggest percentages of particular system resources such as processing cycles or memory. Although it might sound like something of a gimmick, for those who don't understand terms like VM size it is a relatively easy way of identifying processes that are hogging resources.
Microsoft also deserves some credit for working Bing into the task manager by giving users the ability to search for definitions of obscure processes.
Ultimately however, having users fiddle around with a task manager is exactly what competing firms like Apple and other operating systems such as *cough* Linux try to avoid in order to deliver a consistently excellent user experience. µ
Tags: Microsoft
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It has nice stuff but I'm really surprised how long it took.
The move from expecting computers to be used by people into tech towards people that are only using gadgets but don't know much about tech per se is very slow at MS, and frankly I think they should support both users and not be persuaded by the tech-dumb to only have a dumb interface without options, it's tricky since many tech 'journalists' and writers are those kind of people and so that kind of user is heard a lot but it's nasty for people that want options and are frustrated as hell when even hidden-from-tech-naive functionality is removed.
One apple is enough already.
We know which are the crap apps, devs & MS are the idiots in dunce caps who dont have a clue and cant be arsed to fix them anyway. They need the info because if you try to get through to them via customer feedback you are fighting a losing battle.
Also dumbing down TaskManager sounds like a bad idea. There are occasional but real apps which will leave bastard processes running which block restarting the app but dont show up as tasks (Firefox for one) requiring a restart if you cannot find and kill the process.
The term heat MAP conjured up a lot more than appears in that video. Am I missing something, or has the might of MS's R&D come up with little more than:
t=document.getElementsByTagName('table');
for(i=0; i < t.rows.length; i++) {
cell=t[0].rows[i].cells[1];
cpu=parseInt(cell.nodeValue);
td=cell.style
if(cpu < 10) td.background='#fff';
else if(cpu < 30) td.background='#ff8';
else if(cpu < 60) td.background='#ff0';
else if(cpu < 90) td.background='f80';
else if(cpu < 99) td.background='f00';
else solution = new Hardware('intel', '8 cores', '4Ghz', '350W', '210°C');
}
When you say microsoft you mean the guy from sysinternals (now owned by MS) I assume? Since their utiliries has the lookup since many years
For non w8 users that need an enhanced taskmanager http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896653
Incidentally when MS hired the guy from sysinternals and took over the site and utilities the first thing they did was 'update' them with as only change being that the lookup function was changed from using google to using MS's search.. .
Enable it so I don't have to hit more details every time. Other than that, no complaints.
Windows 8 is incredibly annoying. There are lots of lovely interface changes in areas, like copy and paste, and task manager, all wrapped up in a ribboney, metroey layer of hell.