Well Windows 8 is out soon and wow is it going to change things. I just finally got a chance this weekend to check out the Windows 8 Preview from within a VM on my computer and here are my initial thoughts.
Log on with your Live account – I logged in with my throwaway Hotmail account when it asked me too. This should be interesting as hopefully we can link our email to our Windows account just like a domain will bring policies and save settings. I need to find out more about this as it could be an interesting way to move between computers as we have never done before at home. The questions I have though is; 1. can I use a gmail or other account or only Microsoft. and 2. What happens if you are off the grid, logging in without internet or WiFi?
Booting up to Metro – When you first boot up you are given the Metro interface. You have probably seen this before, it is the blue background with some tiles which are your apps. The difficuly thing when you first boot up to this is that you can click on email or news, or apps and then you are stuck. How do you get out of the app? I figured out (should have checked YouTube first) that if you bring your mouse to the bottom left corner of the screen you will get the Metro Start page again or you can go to the bottom right corner to get program options and more. Tough to figure out first time but easy afterwards and nice that it makes sense.
App Store – Just looked around a bit and the app store should be interesting. We have all gotten used to the Apple or Android app stores so this seems like a nice friction free way to get you apps. I tried out installing a Goal setting free app and it seemed pretty smooth in the background. We will see how well Microsoft builds this out. Embrace and Extend is always interesting from the Redmond crew.
Visual non-intensity – Some of the beauty and color of Windows XP seems to be gone and the interface is just kind of boring looking which may be good as this is supposed to be interface not art. What I really did not like was the lack of a start button as I am sure with all the apps I use that the Metro interface is going to get very cluttered after you install 50 apps or so one there, but maybe there will be organization built into the final product.
Cool Windows 8 Admin Tools – The task manager is just getting better for seeing what is going on. when opening Task manager it shows you what is open and running but when you hit the more info you get a default breakdown of Disk I/O, Processor used, Memory Used and each of these can be broken down to show even more info.
I am sure that there is a lot more but just in the 30 minutes or so of my diving into this thing I was pretty impressed although not overwhelmed. My attitude should be gauged with a bit of skepticism though as I was a bit of a slow adopter of both Windows XP and Windows 7 but eventually embraced those as very great operating systems.
