Microsoft Launches Windows 8 Consumer Preview 500
suraj.sun writes "Microsoft on Wednesday made the Consumer Preview of Windows 8 available for download to the general public. Built with touch computing and apps in mind, Windows 8 is crucial to Microsoft's efforts to make inroads against Apple and Google in the red-hot tablet market, where the company is significantly behind rivals. Windows 8 marks the biggest change to the OS since the aforementioned 95 flavor (which, shockingly, turns 17 this year). With Windows 8 comes the introduction of a Metro-style interface, inspired by the lovely and intuitive presentation found in Windows Phone. In it, apps and functions are pinned to tiles and, to interact with those apps, you simply tap those tiles. The former Start Menu has been replaced by a full-screen view of tiles that you can scroll through horizontally. You can pin applications, shortcuts, documents, webpages and any number of other things, customizing the interface in any way you like — so long as what you like is rectangular and only extends from left to right."
MrSeb wrote on with info on generating a USB stick installer from the available images, and itwebennet with details about IE10.
Lovely and Intuitive? (Score:5, Insightful)
I had the Win8 Developer Preview, and I *HATED* the Metro Interface. IMHO it was ugly and a PITA to use. It does not scale well to a standard WIMP interface.
Maybe for a tablet, it's OK.
full screen start menu nice on small screen not (Score:1, Insightful)
full screen start menu nice on small screen not so much on a big one / more then 1.
My desktop is not a tablet. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Lovely and Intuitive? (Score:5, Insightful)
I can see it being "OK" for a tablet, like it is "OK" for a phone (not great, and I'd struggle to call it "good"). However, for a non-touch screen, or a screen that is large enough to hold a decent amount of text, this interface is a horrible, inefficient waste of space.
"Consumer" Preview (Score:5, Insightful)
Possibly too little, too late ... (Score:5, Insightful)
My organization is in the middle of deploying Windows 7 to replace XP desktops.
Given the costs and time of doing this, it will likely be several years before this gets replaced.
I wonder if other organizations are only just getting to Win 7, if Win 8 might become one of those releases that everyone bypasses since they just finished upgrading. That would likely hurt MIcrosoft.
Anybody got any screenshots for the new interface? I'm curious to know how trying to make something optimized for phones and tablets is going to work as an actual desktop interface. It sounds like they might be trying a bit of a "one size fits all" approach, which doesn't always work so well.
Re:Lovely and Intuitive? (Score:5, Insightful)
Agreed entirely. There is absolutley no fucking way my owners will want this at all in our office environment.
Complete and utter shit. Vista 2.0
Re:A new kind of copying (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:A new kind of copying (Score:5, Insightful)
From a geek's perspective, ever since iOS came out, OSes have been competing to out-crapify each other.
Re:Ooo, look! (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, it looks just like my Xbox -- when they updated it and added ads to it. I don't want ads in my fucking Xbox screen, why did they feel compelled to "monetize" my game console? They already got paid for it.
Greedy bastards.
Re:Lovely and Intuitive? (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, as a computer technician, i loved the few years of Vista. I had so many customers buying new laptops, and asking me to downgrade them... Those were the good time, cash pouring in all the time.
Then came 7, it was good, no one wanting a downgrade, but certainly lots of people needing help to upgrade. Maintenance-wise, 7 didn’t prove to be a challenge, and fixing its problems is usually simpler, especially with the addition of repairing tools to the boot partition.
I guess now with windows 8, we'll go back to the downgrade frenzy phase... I look very forward to it.. and even more hopefully, Microsoft will again, as with Vista, learn the errs of their ways, and produce a good windows 9.
whatever the result... I’m happy with my Linux and KDE here... windows is nothing but a huge job opportunity to me :)
Re:Copying (Score:5, Insightful)
The cloud thing is a whole different issue.
Inspired by Windows Phone, with no market share (Score:4, Insightful)
"inspired by the lovely and intuitive presentation found in Windows Phone"
Is that just mean, or plain ignorant? The Windows smartphones have no market share any longer. Look at the stats for smartphones - http://www.engadget.com/2011/12/14/shocker-android-grew-us-market-share-after-q2-ios-was-static/ [engadget.com]
That expensive effort from Microsoft was killed by Android and Apple.
Why copy a product with a sinking market share? Do they believe the new Nokia hardware will sell their operating system for PCs?
Re:Lovely and Intuitive? (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm gonna be hated LOL (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Lovely and Intuitive? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Lovely and Intuitive? (Score:2, Insightful)
Very slim margins (Score:4, Insightful)
I paid for the device
But you didn't pay enough for the device. Console makers traditionally make very slim margins (or occasionally even a loss) on the device in order to make it up with high margins on the products that contribute to attach rate.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Inspired by Windows Phone, with no market share (Score:5, Insightful)
Because Microsoft believes, and correctly so, that no matter what they do to their OS PC manufacturers will still preload it on all of their hardware. This will lead to more developers targeting metro apps which, in time, will lead to a more robust ecosystem for their phone platform.
Re:Very slim margins (Score:4, Insightful)
I understand what you're saying ... buy why is it my problem? I'm not here to prop up their business model.
As I said, they can also find out about the detach rate too.
It reminds of Yahoo and Portals (Score:5, Insightful)
Remember them? When your ISP still thought that you would visit their home page for anything else but to find the way to cancel the service?
Yahoo was just one of many to do this and often it meant that what you came for was completely impossible to find. MS has never lost this, its web presence is a design nightmare. There really even isn't one. Every little thing gets its own site, often barely working and then gets forgotten. It also happens to bigger things, MS pushed its own solution for selling music for music players, then it dropped it completely when it launched the Zune and then it dropped the Zune. Games for Windows has had many forms, launched and forgotten again.
But now... this approach has made it to the desktop and it ain't new at all. Active Desktop, widgets,gadgets, someone at MS seriously believes that people spend all their time looking at their desktop. Are you? Right now, how much space on the screen in front of you is taken up by the browser?
Right... where are all those Metro blocks supposed to go?
The engadget article doesn't suprise me. Did you see the monitor in the video? I didn't even know they still made them that small. The original Mac had a bigger screen for fucks sake. Now try the same interface and the scroll down for start menu on a triple 30 inch monitor setup. And I am thinking of going to 6. Apples unified menu system, Unity, Gnome 3. They ALL suck with big screens. Of course not everyone has a big screen... even more reason to use the available space for what you are working on. Where are the metro apps? Hidden... now you want something else... so you are supposed to minimize all applications, then click on the desktop and get that app running fullscreen because you need full details... that is handy?
No... this is a classic designer mistake, it looks pretty but it isn't usable. If you demo it, you have only one app running and as you make the metro desktop appear you pause and show the wealth of information available to you and how easy it is to get a detailed view open... very nice, very smooth and totally NOT how you do it when you are working.
Jagged Alliance 2 was a turnbased game that on every move, had the bottom 3rd of the screen drop out and appear again to change the display. Very pretty... once... the millionth time, you want to exterminate the designer and everyone he ever met.
I just don't see people use their PC's the way the metro app seems to think. Most people I know work with either full screen applications or have them covering the desktop and switch them the taskbar or by alt-tabbing. The desktop just never is in view. That is why Active Desktop never got anywhere, people never saw it. With the new linux desktop Enlightenment it is possible to make animated wallpapers... cute... and there is a reason nobody else has bothered with it, because you never see the damn thing. The desktop and start menu are there to get you started... from then on, you switch between applications and never ever close them. Only the most infrequent users and under powered constantly shut down their PC and start it up again. I know one person like that and she has firefox on autostart and arranges it to cover the desktop with her IM.
The Metro style is the domain of movie UI's. I remember one Sci-Fi movie with I think Robert Sellect (magnum PI) in which he goes through a morning routine with a robot. It is a common enough scene in future movies and it just doesn't happen. A: No human being can possibly care to be informed in detail about the weather outside, the news, appointments, social chat with relatives, banter with the AI before they got a cup of coffee. B: Any AI system at the moment that would display so much information would display the wrong thing at the wrong time and C: INFORMATION OVERLOAD.
I check my mail... then I read the comics... then I check the weather. Display them all at once... and WHERE ARE YOU GOING TO PUT THE ADS FOR THOSE FREE SERVICES?
I think this will be another MS Bob. Vista? To small a disast
Mixing metraphors (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm a longtime Apple guy who also owns, uses, and mostly enjoys Windows Phone 7. Metro is a fresh take on what software should look like, and since Apple hasn't done any graphic innovation since 2007 I really appreciate it.
But on the desktop? Mixed in with traditional Windows applications? On your boss's computer? OMG train wreck!
Mixing two UX metaphors is an unbelievably bad idea. It's a big reason why Linux on the Desktop is a hard sell. It's why people intuitively avoid Java applications. It's why Adobe has struggled on OS X. And in all three of those cases we're talking about power users having trouble switching UX contexts.
If you do this in plain vanilla Windows you're going to have confusion on a whole new level. Grandma is not going to understand why some apps work this way and some apps work that way. Or why there are two versions of Internet Explorer. Or what happened to the Start button that I've been clicking to do *everything* for the past 15 years?
I have a lot of respect for Metro and what the team behind it is trying to do. They should just stick with a phone/tablet OS that is Metro-only all the time and not try to do this unholy mix on the desktop.
Re:Lovely and Intuitive? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Might work as a tablet OS... (Score:4, Insightful)
Because the use case for the tablet isn't primarily for creating content.
Everyone I know with a tablet is using it to surf the web, play games, play videos, and do a small amount of email. Doesn't matter who makes it. It's not their work machine.
As long as people know that they're buying a secondary machine for doing other things, the tablet concept will hold up.
Not everyone is doing advanced photo editing or writing spreadsheets -- in fact, I'd be hard pressed to tell you the last time I made a spreadsheet. But when I travel on business, the tablet lets me watch movies on the plane, check news and gmail from the airport and hotel, and gives me some games to play in the evenings, find nearby restaurants. After work I can put it on the hotel bar, have a drink, read a few things, and then decide what I'm doing that evening.
My last bunch of business trips, I've brought my laptop, but never used it. My tablet, however, gets loads of use.
The advantage is that I can use it in my recliner, in the backyard, in bed, in a car, and more comfortably in an airplane than I could a netbook. I can't do any content creation on my music player either, and I'm OK with that. Because that's not what I bought it for.
Is it so hard to accept that probably the vast majority of what most people are doing is simply consuming media? To me it's mostly an entertainment device with some light internet connectivity, and works well as that.
My brother managed to get himself a 7" Android tablet for about $150 after Christmas, and he's not much of a techie. But, he uses it for eBooks, watching movies, and quickly checking stuff on the internet. He occasionally does some CAD work as a hobby ... but he uses his desktop for that.
Do you have a smart phone? If you do, are you concerned you can't do any serious work on it? Or are you using it differently than you would your desktop? (In fact, I know people with smart phones who see the tablet as something they don't need ... I don't have a smart phone, so the tablet is better for me. To some people, they fill the same niche.)
Anybody who expects it to replace their work machine is going to be disappointed. If you have a little spare cash to buy it as an entertainment device, it's worth the money.
Re:Lovely and Intuitive? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Lovely and Intuitive? (Score:1, Insightful)
I started on Win 95a, I actually liked ME, however 2K was much more superb. Nothing against learning something new, I use Gnome or KDE now. It is more of a usability standpoint, not sure why companies think less control of what we use is better. Ribbon is just sloppy the original menu bar works just fine and allows you to accomplish many things in a timely fashion.
I don't want to have to hunt through tabs and list boxes just to bold something, just like I don't want to hunt through tiles to find my desktop to hit the start button to navigate through the horrible Windows 7 start bar just to launch a program that doesn't have a tile.
This wont affect my home life, or my personal computer, it will affect end users which I support, and will influence my future headaches.
Re:Lovely and Intuitive? (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't want to have to hunt through tabs and list boxes just to bold something
I'm sorry, but that was a piss poor example. The Bold button is right there at the top, where it always was.
Re:Lovely and Intuitive? (Score:5, Insightful)
So your anecdotes are worth more than empirical data gathered through studies?
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Lovely and Intuitive? (Score:5, Insightful)
not sure why companies think less control of what we use is better.
A sure sign that this is a man who has never had a user:
1) delete Word and complain the next day that they can't open Word files
2) Zoom in to 200% and complain that the text is too big
I'm sure everyone here has stories to tell... Making users jump through some hoops before they can break things is fine, but removing control altogether isn't fine.
I suspect less user control directly reduces the money companies have to spend on tech support...
Re:Lovely and Intuitive? (Score:5, Insightful)
that the desktop interface still exists, and that metro is not intended to be used in a desktop environment.
Except it's replaced the start button entirely, and you can't even kill it with the reg hack any more. So as a desktop user, you have 4 choices:
1) pin your most common apps to the taskbar - while I do do that, I use far too many to pin them all; such as the administration tools for servers.
2) have them as shortcuts on the desktop; great until you have an app window covering the icon you want
3) take hand off the mouse to hit start, flip to metro, type the app name you want (yes, I touch type), and flip back to desktop, put hand back on mouse
4) put up with the flipping into metro and back every time you want to launch a frigging app
There's a noticeable delay with the pretty flip window for switching from desktop to metro to desktop; and since certain apps are metrified, you go there anywhere when it launches. It's not as quick, nor as simple as a dock + plus application folder.
Sure, for those people who only use their computer at home for light use - facebook, mail, photos, google search for 'the internet' metro is fine; but they're the people buying ipads in such large numbers anyway, or they buy an ipad to do their light use on the sofa with, and leave the desktop/laptop for the serious business.
At offices, where windows is utterly dominant, metro seems utterly terrible. Not one person, and I mean not one I know has seen the metro interface from where I've been running it on a test rig at the office (I'm the head IT guy) and expressed anything positive - my wife has threatened to divorce me if I put it on her laptop! It's just not a decent tablet interface (too many small fiddly buttons still, such as on ribbons or the non-metro desktop) OR a decent desktop interface; they've taken a really solid OS and frankly ruined it.
The 'push up against the sides/corners for charms, metro shortcut and running apps' gimmick is also a frickin nightmare on virtual machines or RDP - if you run them windowed, as I often do when I'm testing new software rollouts on multiple images, you can't hit the fricking hot corners or edges reliably because of course your cursor goes past the edge of the VM window. If you run fullscreen, you just hit up against the host bringing up ITS UI on screen edges - start bar on a windows host, or the top mac bar on parallels/osx. It is literally rage inducing.
I've been running windows desktop/linux servers as my primary OSes for a good 15 years now. After a couple of weeks with the developer preview, I got so sick of it I built a hackintosh; given my boss is a bit of a machead, it wasn't hard to get him to eventually buy me a mac at the office, and I've now switched to OSX as my primary OS (at home and work) for the first time in my life; save for gaming and a win7 vm for vmware tools/AD work. I've never been a fan of OSX, but it's growing on me; between multiple spaces and a magic touchpad, gitbox, totalfinder, iterm, alfred and sublime text I've grown to find it quite useful, if a bit expensive. And mac mail can go die in a fricking fire for its non-standard attachment handling.
I've been testing the consumer preview of win 8 out today, and it's still just as broken on a VM with the new UX. I'm going to have to force myself to use it so I can support it later, but it's going be a cold day in hell before most of the staff accept it as a replacement for windows 7 on their machines. You thought getting through the switch from office 2003 to 2007 was bad? (We've still a few staff refusing an upgrade to 2010 it was so traumatic, they don't want to go through any more). The switch from win 7 to metro is so jarring, I seriously think we're going to see a lot of users jump ship from windows entirely, myself included.
Re:Lovely and Intuitive? (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, XP wasn't actually good (clearly you've forgotten all the bitching over the cartoony UI and issues it had with compatibility and especially security)... XP SP2, however, was very good.
And as mentioned, Windows 98 and Windows 98SE are both missing from your list (both good).
Also, Vista SP1 eliminated most of the real problems with Vista.
So yeah, this meme is everywhere, but it really doesn't hold any water, as you really have to cherry-pick in order to make it work. Better to just stop repeating it.
Re:Lovely and Intuitive? (Score:4, Insightful)
No, the start menu isn't gone.
The "Start Screen" *is* the new Start Menu. You can arrange it as you wish, group things as you wish, remove anything you don't want to be there. Yes, it looks a lot different... but the old "start menu" had major changes in every major release of Windows since Windows 95.
Re:Lovely and Intuitive? (Score:5, Insightful)
The Developer Peview UI wasn't complete. It wasn't for consumers or the UI really. There were place-holders and some things just completely missing.
The Consumer Preview changes things and is a lot more consistent and usable. There is much better support for mice and keyboards.
You should try the Consumer Preview, give it a few hours so you can get used to it, check out the right-click menus and keyboard short-cuts, and realize it's not that bad at all.
But yeah, there are some things that are lacking in the "Discoverability" aspect. But hopefully constructive feedback will help polish the remaining rough areas.
Re:Lovely and Intuitive? (Score:4, Insightful)
I foresee I'll get modded down like the guy above me... but Vista SP1 isn't that bad. It's not much different than Win7, actually.
Well mod me down too because I spend a boat load of time with OSX and Linux and as much as I love each, I have to say Win7 is damn good. W7's taskbar is the undefeated productivity king, I'm happy to settle it with fist fight with anyone who wants to disagree. Microsoft nailed integrated search in the OS, and popping of advanced searches from the start menu is pretty damn useful. The metro interface, love it or hate it, was far from a let down at it's release - If you've used it on a touch interface it was actually ahead of it's competitors at the time. It is at least highly innovative and a level up from the iPad's 2007 interface paradigm rut that Apple won't be able to get out of.
Actually.... Microsoft hasn't fucked anything up since Vista. Kinect, even, was actually more of a success than expected. Windows 8 doesn't seem to have any sign of problems.... erm... yet...