back to article Windows 8: Sugar coating on Microsoft's hard-to-swallow tablet

How do you bring legacy-encrusted Windows into the mobile era? Microsoft's solution is to take all that baggage and place it into a compartment labeled desktop, while reinventing the Windows user interface in a second compartment called Metro. Metro is primary, and conceptually the old desktop is now an app in the Metro Start …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Metro UI

    Having played with Win8 CP over the weekend, it would appear that the Metro UI is gearing up for Kinect control to some degree; Fluid, single digit or two digit control (pinch to zoom), unlike iOS with its 4-finger swipes, lending itself quite nicely to being used by waving your arms about a la Minority Report. IIRC there were reports of laptops being developed with Kinect sensors in them too.

    That's not to say that people will be preparing their business reports on the train by waving around, but possibly useful for presentations where there is no mouse, slides are navigated by moving your hand, or for video walls. Or home televisions being used as a media centre.

    So MS seem to have prepared an OS that has the possibility of being navigated by mouse and keyboard, by touch and possibly by Kinect.

    Just my $0.02

    1. the-it-slayer
      Meh

      Re: Metro UI

      I can see the logic here, but imagine yourself with your Windows 8 kinect-enabled laptop sitting in Costa. Wouldn't you look like a tit swiping to navigate and whatever else you have to?

      Actually, you can imagine the girl sitting next to you watching and then you swipe your hand so far to the right, it knocks her skinny latte all over her. Charming.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Metro! Metro! Metro! Windows! Windows! Windows!

    Uncle Ballmer forgot to take his medicine.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4CM1W_qFLZM

    Windows 8 will be such a flop, that I'll almost feel sorry for Microsoft.

    Almost.

    This will be such a colossal FUBAR that Windows Me, Windows Vista, Kin, Zune, BOB all pale in comparison. 2012 is the year when Microsoft officially jumps the shark.

    With one single product, Microsoft has:

    1) Alienated corporate enterprise customers.

    2) Alienated consumer desktop users.

    3) Destroyed the familiar Windows desktop UI by lusting after some iPad (and maybe Kindle) market share.

    If unifying the desktop and portable touch device UI were such a great thing, Apple would have done it long ago, merging iOS and OSX. There is a good reason why they were kept separate.

    http://www.roughlydrafted.com/2011/09/15/why-microsoft-8-doesnt-matter/

    1. Robinson
      Angel

      Re: Metro! Metro! Metro! Windows! Windows! Windows!

      "If unifying the desktop and portable touch device UI were such a great thing, Apple would have done it long ago, merging iOS and OSX. There is a good reason why they were kept separate."

      This is an excellent point.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Get rid of that Metro shit!

    Now, if Microsoft retained some of the familiarity of the Windows desktop UI: Start button etc. and implemented the Metro UI as a SKIN or THEME (like Aero in Win Vista or Win 7), then maybe the final Windows 8 product can be somewhat salvaged.

    But I doubt it'll happen. Microsoft/Ballmer/Belfiore thinks that Metro is the best thing to happen to Windows, and you could see those annoying Metro-ish tiles in the background screen during Microsoft's CES keynote.

  4. zen1

    I dunno

    Maybe I'm just old school, but the touch tablet concept is still a novelty, until the cloud service providers can prove that nobody is able to crawl my data. I mean there is absolutely no way in hell I would PAY to store files with all of my personal details "in the cloud". If I were a large corporate entity, who might indirectly compete with MS, Google or Apple, there's no way I'd let my employees bring any of that crap into the office and use it for real work.

    What about government departments? Mark my words, you'll get some minister/secretary or some elected idiot, who gets that "oooo shiney" look in his/her face, loads gigs of citizen data into the cloud, only to have it become available to the masses because of some xss spoof.

    Perfect the SSD so it doesn't self destruct and allow me the choice to control the destiny of my data, and then I'll be impressed. Until then, that crap won't be anything more than a novelty.

  5. Will 20

    So, I finally got my email working on the Windows 8 CP, and it looks like Fisher Price "My First Email"

    I don't get the whole thing. I'm doing this and that and the other with the trackpad, not really knowing what I'm doing, and sometime the laptop does what I want. I like to think that I'm not so much "using the laptop" as "taming it"

    Will I be installing it on a production PC? No. This is a tablet only OS.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Will 20

      actually i agree, trackpads are really tricky with this, ive kinda got the hang of mouse an keyboard now and its no slower or faster than Win 7 but the trackpad is still dodgy, i dont think it was designed for such fluid user input,

      With regard to email, i think the intention isnt to replace your email client of choice, its designed in a similar way to your phone, to give you a snap shot of whats there, yeah you can read things but thats about it.

      Im still not saying its great, but i think i have the idea squared away, use desktop for everything, then flick back to metro for a snap shot of all your important stuff in one go then back to desktop to continue work. using it like this i find really efficient, or at least i would if i had a start button back!

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Down

    Cheers MS...

    It was a pleasure knowing you. Xubuntu is free and does what I want...

  7. parityerror
    Trollface

    Can't wait.

    Window 9 is going to be awesome!

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