New touch-friendly user interface, taking the Windows Phone 7 Metro UI style. Apparently the typical Windows experience is hiding behind it when needed.
It'll ship with Internet Explorer 10, since that'll be released sometime in the next year.
They're saying Win8'll be shipped sometime in 2012.
I was under the impression that that was the desktop OS. It has the full Windows UI running in the background, so I'd assume you could just turn off the touch-friendly stuff permanently.
50/50. Windows 8 on all platforms comes with both UIs. That nice tablet UI is the new start screen. There is a usual Windows 7 interface to go along with this.
Personally, I feel like Windows is abandoning desktops. Steve Ballmer has said he was reluctant to even keep the traditional interface in there. Expect this to be a transition to Windows 9, a full tablet oriented OS that just happens to be able to run on desktops.
Me, well, I'll be switching to Linux. Fuck this tablet trend.
Seeing as they're basically taking the Windows 7 UI and adding on top of it the Windows Phone 7 Metro UI, I see very little wrong with it currently. Windows 7 is easily their best OS, bringing the awesomeness that was XP to the nice visual style of Vista (which was a disaster).
I don't have a cell that runs Windows Phone 7, but I have downloaded the Metro UI Theme for Android, and other than the fact that it is still being developed, it was great. I would use it continuously, but my phone sucks, so I can't.
If looks like they specifically built it for use with touch screen devices, which are becoming more popular. My problem is that if you have to use the interface with a mouse it would get slightly annoying. I'm hoping that you don't have to have it up and can run the older Windows 7 setup.
If the touch stuff and apps bit are going to be stressed as much in the final system as they are in this video, I may upgrade from XP to 7 around when this comes out. My computer is not my phone, don't try to make it look like it is.
All those apps that are always ready to share info with you is just added startup time and command lag to me. I've never had high-end systems (I just upgraded from a 90GB HDD to 160 two days ago), and the less that my computer wants me to always have open, the better.
All I really need is a laptop that does all the web-browsing I need it to, runs MSOffice, and can do non-gaming media. If I need to know the forecast, I'll go to a weather site in Firefox. If I need to know how many friends I have online in some service, I'm already on either facebook or xbox or whatever the app would be for.
Why do I need a specialized app for everything under the sun, when I have all of the internet at my disposal through a web browser? It's nice on a phone, where you can't type at the speed of sound, but the redundancy on a full-fledged computer seems like overkill to me.
If that is the case I'm not sure I'm a fan of it, but I've always preferred a less cluttered look to my desktop. The functionality is nice looking, and I'm sure it'll work nice with tablets, etc. I just don't use them.
Valid points. If you don't need it, you don't. They are definitely pushing for tablet support for this, and PC's like the Asus EEE Slate would find it useful.
Pesonally, i use other computers cause i dont have my own. I dont like the constant upgrading and learning new ways to use the computer, but it seems like i have done it so many times, another upgrade wont hurt...
There are all-in-one machines that have touch capabilities. Those are still classified as desktops as they aren't always easily portable. I wouldn't think of it as abandoning desktops, but rather pushing for a more modern interface method. I'd like to see more touch capable monitors and laptop/tablet hybrids so that traditionally non-tablet users could fully utilize the new OS. I'd have to agree with you that I'm not eager for touch-only interfaces yet and I also happen to dislike the 'app' features if it becomes a big focus of the OS.
I just wrote up a quick blog post summarizing my thoughts on this Windows 8 preview
Basically, I see this as a unifying OS. Microsoft seems to want to do what Apple did with iOS (Unify phones and tablets), but expand that idea even further.
Because they're building it for ARM and everything else, Win8 will be able to go many more places than previous versions. There will be Win8 PCs and tablets for sure, but I see it going even further. Win8 (At least the Start UI they showed) could very easily be WP8 as well.
And why not go all out and use the same style interface on the next Xbox? They've already started that with the Kinect Hub...
Question for any and every CompSci whiz: if you build something that's generalized to function on just about anything and do just about everything, doesn't it generally work sluggishly and inefficiently?
If this is the case, it seems foolish to make one OS that will work on computers, tablets, phones, and an xbox, regardless of how super-similar they are becoming.
Question for any and every CompSci whiz: if you build something that's generalized to function on just about anything and do just about everything, doesn't it generally work sluggishly and inefficiently?
Getting things perfect costs money, Microsoft will not commit all the contents of their coffers in the pursuit of perfection. So what;ll be left is something very cool looking that lacks features that as it turns out would make this whole thing better.
I will beta test this thing, but I will not be able to try this touch stuff out as I don't have a touch screen monitor.
The way I see it is that "in the future" Kinect technology could be built into computers ala today's webcams. Honestly, size-wise, we aren't too far from that being possible. Kinect at its core is just three sensors and three pieces of silicon.
Well the motor is to move the whole setup so it can track you as you move around the room. If it was built into a laptop like a webcam, theres no need for the motor because you'll be sitting in front of it the whole time.
There's a few quirky things I've never really figured out that happen with multiple monitors attached to the computer when you're trying to have one screen be the Metro interface and the others be the traditional desktop. (Sometimes the desktop stays visible when you focus the Metro screen, sometimes not, and vice versa.)
Hopefully the Music/Video Metro apps get fleshed out a bit more to completely replace/supplement the Zune software. (Right now I still have to have Zune installed to sync to/from my Windows Phone, which means I HAVE to jump back to the desktop interface for that stuff.)
Honestly, the biggest thing it needs to do at this point in my opinion is to flesh out the Windows Store's catalog of Metro apps. I've been running the Consumer Preview pretty much nonstop since it came out a few months ago (except for Office because I don't want to burn a product key on an OS I'm not going to have for more than a few months), and I haven't really had too many complaints. I stick mostly to the traditional desktop right now because I don't have a touchscreen and the app catalog just isn't there yet, but it really didn't take much time for me to get used to the changes from Win7 to this. It starts up and shuts down faster than 7, everything I used in 7's still accessible. Hell, clear everything off the start screen except for the "Desktop" button, pin most of your frequently used programs to the taskbar in Desktop mode, and you're good to go.
I stick mostly to the traditional desktop right now because I don't have a touchscreen
- this is one of the things that I noticed straightaway. I don't know about calling it "Windows 8" maybe "Windows 7 Touch" would have been more appropriate. What do you think?
I am usually wary of OSs that I have never tried before before I put it on any of my main systems. I therefore put Windows 8 CP on a virtual machine. The new-style start menu and lack of icons on the desktop mode is odd for me and therefore there is a bit of a learning curve. I don't see myself replacing any of my Windows 7 installations with windows 8 if it still feels and looks like CP. That and I probabl4y won't be able to afford it anyway. :-)
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Link to a website I've never seen before from a user who signed up just to make that post. Seems legit. Maybe it'd be a good idea to google the target URL there.
Oh, looks like that place is well known for forum spamming. I never would have guessed!
Question for any and every CompSci whiz: if you build something that's generalized to function on just about anything and do just about everything, doesn't it generally work sluggishly and inefficiently?
If this is the case, it seems foolish to make one OS that will work on computers, tablets, phones, and an xbox, regardless of how super-similar they are becoming.
It really depends on how they did it. Typically in such a scenario one would use a layer of abstraction over top of the platform specific stuff, so that application code only interacts with that abstraction. That brings on a massive overhead of having to write any new feature that can't be accomplished via the abstractions has to be written and tested for each of the platforms.
I hate to say it but Microsoft isn't so good at this. Having worked with the .Net Framework on PC, Xbox360, WP7, and Zune; I can't for the life of me figure out why they feel their ready to do that with an entire OS. The differences in performance and behavior of commonly used parts of the framework between the devices wound up requiring special code tailored for each device. I will be amazed if Windows 8 performs remotely as good on phones and tablets as it does on the PC, allowing for differences in processing power of course.
