In 2013 one of my favorite tech magazines, wether in print or on the web, has always been PC Magazine. It is no secret that I am a Mac user, and I support PCs for a living. So it made sense to me to keep my feet on the ground and keep watch on whats happening in the PC industry. Nowadays that includes cell phones, tablets, laptops and desktop computers. I always felt that PC Magazine attempted to support as much of a cross section and diverse subjects across all platforms. So around the 1st of the year, it was no surprise that they decided to redo their website to better support tiny phones and emulate the Windows 8 interface in some way. Many sites now use tiles or data, and for some reason they think this keeps them looking trendy and edgy and in tune with what is happening in the computer world. To my surprise, the tiles interface overall in Windows 8 works, but this new layout for PC Magazine is terrible. I have never seen such an ugly and hard to navigate website from a truly professional organization like this before. Lost now is the easy to understand groups of content, and special articles from their writers. Now you have to zig zag down the tiles to try to understand and find articles of interest. I realized that many websites are following this thought that site information should be scrambled across the page and force the reader to look at things that you don't really want to. Take a look at the
PC Magazine site, and see for yourself if this is better or worse that a structured column view. I myself, have seen better, and don't like it.
John Dvorak is spot on as to the problems with Windows 8, and what Windows 9 (the next version of Windows) should strive to be for the betterment of the Industry! I hate Windows 8 (I am a Mac and Windows user), and many PC experts also hate it. Not because of the tiles, but because of the lost features, the central start button missing that brings all features and access to one location, the lost productivity due to a users inability to get done what they want to do! See his top 5 list of what Microsoft MUST do to correct the path of the ship, or face going straight into the iceberg within the next few years.
