Be Excellent To Each Other

Anyone tried this yet? It seems that a few development builds have leaked, and one appears to be installing itself on my crappy old laptop as we speak, er type/read.

Apart from the setup screens having a shade of blue reminiscent of Windows ME/2000 , there's not a lot to report yet.

It didn't leak, MS released the developer preview.

I wrote a bit about it for RPS yesterday, not tried it yet though.

Oh yeah, that'll teach me to read the whole wikipedia article/page I downloaded it from.
Also the fact that the boot screen says Windows Developer Preview in massive letters should have given me some kind of hint.

It's all weird and makes me want to touch the screen.

Can you people not be satisfied with what you have?

God bless the internet.

That should be the formal review for W8!

FTFY

Whereas if it were Windows 7 with knobs on people would complain they were playing too safe.

I didn't say it was a bad thing, although the new UI does just appear to be a glorified start menu. Click on the desktop and you're in familiar territory again.

South Manchester?

Assuming that's where you were when you clicked on the desktop, then yes.

1995?

Assuming that's when you were when you clicked on the desktop, then yes.

In your Mum?

No. Not there.

Because they're ripping off Apple again?

As I understand it, if you boot into metro, it doesn't even load the full desktop. Metro's not a skin, it's a full OS. That's how they're able to get the mental <5 seconds cold boot time.

I haven't had a proper play yet as I've been too busy playing mafiascum working, but it looks like Metro sits on top of the desktop, in fact, from what the wikipedia article says, if you're screen's too small, you don't get Metro at all. Also, it says the boot time is so short because it effectively goes into hibernation, rather than shutting down. If I could actually work out how to shut down, I'd try it out.

Yes, bitter experience has taught me this is the best thing to do.

Everything I've seen says that's not the case.

Fair enough, as I said I've not really had a chance to play much. In fact yes, it does look like it boots Metro, then the Desktop is an app that you can run if you want, but it's not already running in the background. It doesn't seem overly intuitive, but that might just be me.
It certainly does boot quickly, not <5 seconds, but I'll put that down to my ancient laptop.

Yeah, the <5 seconds thing was off an SSD - but it's still bloody impressive.

So we can still make it look like Windows 7? I'm not overly adverse to change, but I really don't want an OS that looks like the Xbox Dashboard. I assume that's what this Metro thing is?

From what I've seen so far, it boots into Metro, which appears to be a glorified Start Menu. One of the apps on there is Desktop, which will take you to a Windows 7 style desktop (except the Start button takes you back to Metro). From what I've seen, once you're in the desktop, everything functions as you'd expect.

Balls to windows 8. BALLS TO IT.

we're still struggling to move the fucking luddites away from xp

Xp is quite adequate thank you very much. Give me back windows 2 anyday...

You will need to change off it soon as Microsoft cease support in a few years.

I'm one of those luddites and I work in IT.

I think when I eventually switch to 7, the first task will be changing the desktop to behave more like XP.

Pft... if a nice big corporation asks them to extend support again, they will.

The most exciting part of Windows 8 is that it runs on the ARM chip (nice subtitle, Joans). This means Microsoft can do away with WP7 and run a full Windows desktop edition on tablet and smart phone devices. I'm interested in seeing how these run much more than upgrading from Win7 on my laptop.

But... why?

It's easier to develop for and support a single platform. It will also mean phone apps on the desktop, like Apple are doing with the MacAppStore.

But... why?

This

Ask Apple - they started it.

My views on my dislike of apples direction are hardly secret.

Excuse my ignorance but are you in favour of or against your dislike of apples direction?

Supposedly windows 8 will have native support for WP7 apps.

Has to be potw.

I'm not sure if that's an autocorrect error or not. Probably, but I'm not sure what I mean to type if it is...

Clearly a fake.

I put the Dev build on a newish HP tablet.

The touch screen OS part of Windows 8 looks Ok but they are going to have to get some decent hardware if they ever want to have a hope of denting IPAD sales. You are dependent on pressing the windows all the time button to get out of apps etc and you really need to have a key on the outside of any tablet that does this.

In terms of touch interface they hasn’t been much progress, there are still the issues that there are with Windows 7 on a tablet, the main one being that the display settings flick between landscape and portrait randomly and the only way to change them back is via the desktop. The really have to sort this out if they want to compete with Apple. This could be a HP Tablet issue though.

The touch interface IE app is shite, it keeps crashing and only a reboot will fix this.

As for the more traditional desktop interface, first thoughts are “what’s new?” in my company we won’t want tablet interfaces as we use laptops and PC with a some IPADS. So not really sure what would prompt us to upgrade. The big change on this interface is that the windows button takes you back to the tablet interface which is really annoying.

Only Apple isn't doing that with the Mac App Store. That store is a mechanism to make it simpler to find and install software, but the products are standard Mac apps, not iOS ones. Sure, there are some ports, which in the case of games and a few apps retain rather too much of their iOS origins, but you also get the iLife apps, Photoshop Elements, iWork, BBEdit, Aperture, Scrivener, etc. It remains to be seen how Microsoft approaches its store.

I'm wondering if we'll see ports of Xbox controller only games for PCs/tablets. Or Controller/touch only games.

Metro won't support XNA. Which is odd.

Oof - I'm a bit gay for this.
I don't like the "dots" for loading things, and the lack of right-click menu will take some getting used to, but it's bloody quick.

I don't know how to switch it off!

Sounds very similar to WP7.

They look like this (but moving, obv):