And they seem to have thus shipped what rightfully should have been exiled from the product

by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2012/08/29 07:01 -04:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2012/08/29/10344481.aspx

I'm a little annoyed right now.

Allow me to explain. :-)

First, the story:

• The evolving Story of Locale Support, part 6: Behind the Cherokee Phonetic layout in Windows 8
• The On-Screen Keyboard vs the Touch Keyboard: 2 very different Windows 8 things…
• Can't Touch This! (unless you have the hardware, I mean)
• Can't Touch This! (Though I can TYPE this because I have the hardware, and the keyboard…)

Okay.

So I created a Cherokee Phonetic keyboard that friends and colleagues from both Cherokee Nation and the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians were pleased with.

And when they had a chance to try it out in Windows 8 they were confused so I showed them what was going on (and based on their feedback I told the team that owns the optimized keyboard in Windows 8 that if their version of the Cherokee Phonetic keyboard were to be exiled from the product (so the actual keyboard popped up instead), that the customers would be much happier.

Then I explained vaguely how it would work based on vague descriptions from others since I lacked the hardware to see it.

And then finally I got the hardware and was able to show how it worked, how cool it was, and how we had to make some changes to make the default experience better!

I reported the problem and offered to put it in as a bug but was assured that they took care of it with other Release Preview feedback.

At this point, the evil music was starting to play, but I could not hear it -- since I'm not a tester. Testers know not to trust such assurances, and they will routinely put in a bug to track the problem.

Time passed.

We hit the RTM milestone.

We haven't yet shipped it out to the world, but I could play with the stuff everyone would have soon.

So I did a completely clean install of Windows 8 on both my non-touch self-host machine and my touch one.

So I could test things out.

This is where I got annoyed.

Because first of all, the non-touch-enabled machine never showed the standard layout; it only showed the optimized layout we all determined that we hate. I tested it right on the machine and it didn't work. And as before, the setting was unavailable.

And then second of all, the touch-enabled machine had the same behavior.

Crap.

Snakes? Why'd it have to be snakes. If I'd put in a bug, I'd at least have had some warning, some chance to resolve the problem!

I started grabbing art for this blog you are reading now to document the blatantly unfixed problem.

Unfixed with extreme prejudice!

But then I stopped for a second.

I mean, did they really break the thing that worked before?

After the Release Preview?

Technically, I was testing out the touch-enabled machine via remote desktop from a non-touch-enabled machine.

Perhaps Windows 8 is "smart" enough to not give touch-specific features to touch enabled machines when accessed remotely from non-multitouch machines.

So perhaps they fixed the one small part of the problem they were able to able to, and postponed the rest.

Though if true, they would seem to have thus shipped what rightfully should have been exiled from the product.

So like I said, I'm a little annoyed right now,

I'll try this out tomorrow on the machine and I'll report back on whether I am pissed off or not.

Stay tuned.... :-)

Jan Kučera on 29 Aug 2012 9:08 AM:

Alex Cohn on 31 Aug 2012 11:05 AM:

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