Pokki | An Alternative to the Windows 8 Start Menu

[froggyboy604]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKMp7du16PA

Download Pokki at https://www.pokki.com/

I like the black, and sleek look of Pokki Startmenu alternative for Windows 8. This looks good for people who miss the startmenu in Windows 7 and latter versions of Windows. The search engine in Pokki also works pretty good.

I also like that Pokki also supports running Apps like Cut The Rope, Angry Birds,and more on the Windows desktop.

 

[VirusZero]

For a desktop, Pokki looks nicer than that metro crap windows 8 starts with. I'm not sold on it's mostly black look since it kind of doesn't fit with the default theme that well. (Perhaps if they had tweaked the theme to be darker Pokki would have looked nicer and fit in better.) Functionality wise, I don't want to deal with metro apps at all. I would just rather have programs on my desktop to do things that I want. I don't want links back to metro at all, I want everything handled in the desktop mode if I'm using windows 8 on my desktop. This metro crap is just ancillary bullshit that consumes extra hard drive space, looks ugly and makes things more confusing or annoying for users. I can totally understand having it for tablet or phone users where they're all touchscreen based. But on a desktop none of that is necessary.

In one of the related videos, they have another app that actually brings back the Windows Classic, Windows XP or Windows vista/7 start button. (It's called Classicshell from sourceforge. http://classicshell.sourceforge.net/index.html And it's free/open source to boot. So much love to that.)

 

[froggyboy604]

It's not hard to change the default desktop background to a dark wallpaper, the color of the Taskbar and Windows borders to gray or black, to match the color of Pokki. All you need to do is right click on the desktop, and pick personalize from the right click menu, or go to http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=234469 with Internet Explorer , and download one of many themes which match Pokki's color.

I bet in future versions of Pokki, it would also be possible to change the color of Pokki, or change the theme like in other programs like Firefox, Google Chrome, etc.

I been using Windows 8's Modern Startscreen with a keyboard and mouse on my desktop to launch my desktop programs, and full screen modern startscreen programs, and it been working pretty well for me.

I like that the icon are big, and different colors, so they are easy to recognize by icon and colors. Plus, I can use my mouse to re-arrange, re-size, add, and delete tiles to help me find tiles easier. I like that I can use the keyboard arrow buttons to move to the tile shortcut I want to launch, and press enter, so my hands don't even have to leave the keyboard to reach for the mouse which can come in handy for laptops with small touchpads.

I like some of the Apps in the Startscreen like PDF Reader, Picture, Cut The Rope, JetPack Joyride, Weather App, and Bing News app in the Modern Startscreen user interface. They're just full screen programs which are like desktop programs and websites, but without the need to click the maximize button, and scroll horizontally.

Classic Shell is a pretty good program. I used it in Windows Vista. Start 8 is another good program, but it cost 5 dollars.