Windows 8: Getting started, ARM and x86
The Windows 8 Consumer Preview (here's the Windows 8 download) updates the look of the Developer Preview and adds a lot of new features and revamps a few old ones.
The round Start button is gone, the Metro-style Start screen remains and yes, you can only pick from nine colours and five patterns for the Start screen background.
But there's far more to the Consumer Preview user interface than the Start screen, and far more to Windows 8 than the user interface.
There are new ways of switching between apps, as well as more updates to the desktop tools. There are changes under the hood to file copying, power management, security, networking, hardware support and more.
And then there are the first real Metro apps, so you can find out what it's like to use Metro for more than just trying out Metro, and the Windows Store for the first third-party apps from real developers.
This is the version of Windows 8 that's going to give you a real feel for what the final operating system will be like and the first version you could realistically use for day-to-day work. But will you want to?
Running the Windows 8 Consumer Preview
First of all, it's worth noting that the Consumer Preview is only for x86/64 PCs; there isn't an ARM version that you can download and try out, since there aren't any ARM devices that will run it.
That's because of the extremely custom way that ARM devices are built, where not even the way to control a physical button is standard. Microsoft isn't supporting tablets built to run Android or WebOS.
Much of what we're seeing in Consumer Preview will be the same on Windows on ARM (WOA) systems. Most stuff like the Metro user interface to the touch gestures, to the Windows desktop and built-in Windows tools like Explorer and Task Manager will be practically the same, but until we see it in action we don't know what WOA performance and battery life will be like.
Consumer Preview doesn't include the desktop Office apps that will be bundles with WOA either - and of course it runs all the x86 desktop apps that won't work on WOA.
When you download the Consumer Preview, installing is easier than usual with a beta operating system. You can start the installation directly from the Web page, instead of having to download an ISO file and burn that to an optical disc.
You can still burn an ISO if you want, and the installer can also create a bootable USB stick so you can download Consumer Preview once and install it on multiple machines.
The tools for creating a Windows To Go USB stick aren't available yet, so you can't run Windows 8 directly from USB, but you'll get a far better feel for how Windows 8 performs if you can try it out directly on a PC.
Windows 8: Metro interface
The Metro interface doesn't look that different, but having your email, photos, appointments and friends pinned to it livens it up considerably – as does the new Metro tile for the desktop, which sports a cute Metro-ified version of the Windows 7 beta fish.
You can also pin libraries here as well as Explorer, but you have to do that from Explorer set to view the desktop rather than from within a library itself.
The improved touch gestures also make it far easier to work with. Swipe from the right edge of the screen and you get the redesigned charm bar; Search, Share, Start, Devices and Settings.
You can do the same thing by leaving your mouse pointer in the top or bottom right corner; first the charms appear as white outlines and if you don't move your mouse they disappear as Windows assumes you didn't want to trigger them (you might be moving the mouse to scroll or closing a window at the side of the screen instead and you don't have to wait for the charms to vanish to do that. Move the mouse towards the charms and the black bar and charm titles draw in on screen.
Start, which is highlighted in the accent colour of the colour theme you choose, swaps between the Start screen and whatever you were doing last. Search is now context sensitive; if you're in IE when you choose it, you get results from Bing first.
Swipe up from the bottom on the Start screen to get a quick link to the All Apps view, which is now neatly organised into program groups, arranged alphabetically.
As you swipe across the Start menu, it stops with the group of tiles you've swiped to lined up under the word Start; this bouncing into place is the promised 'speed bump' to help you navigate around. Scrolling with a mouse works far better; you push the mouse past the edge of the screen and the tiles scroll as if you were swiping with your finger.
This works so well you'll find yourself missing it in apps that don't support it, like Photos, where you have to go back to grabbing the scrollbar – or use a touch pad or Microsoft Touch Mouse, which lets you swipe sideways.
The Semantic zoom feature now works too; pinch to shrink the tiles on the Start screen to tiny thumbnails so you can see everything at once or move an entire group. Select a group and drag it down to get the option of naming it.
This is also the view you get when you drag a tile you're moving to the bottom of the screen, which makes it easier to move an item a long way across the screen without disturbing the arrangement of all your tiles and groups.
As you drag a tile between two groups, when you position it between them a vertical grey bar appears to show that you're creating a new group to put it in.
Switching between apps is now far easier. You can still drag in the next app in the stack from the left edge of the screen to be full screen or to snap into a side window, but when the icon of that next app appears, you can also drag it back to the edge to get a vertical pane of thumbnails.
This only shows six thumbnails of recent apps (including the desktop if that's open) plus the thumbnail for the Start menu. Tap a thumbnail to open the app or drag it to choose where on screen it appears.
You can get the switching pane using a mouse by leaving the mouse pointer in the top or bottom left corner of the screen until a thumbnail appears (the next app at the top, the Start menu preview at the bottom); drag down with the mouse and the thumbnails appear. If you want to see all current desktop apps and recent Metro apps, use Alt tab instead (and Win Tab makes the switching pane appear).
You can close Metro apps without restoring to the task manager. Drag down from the top of the screen until the app you're looking at shrinks down to a thumbnail and keep dragging that off screen to close it (it's a longer swipe that when you use a quick finger swipe down from the top or up from the bottom of the screen to get the menu bar inside an app).
That works with a mouse as well. Or you can use Alt-F4, just like with a desktop app.
You can type quite well on screen. The large touch keyboard is a little better laid out now, and has predictive text and spelling corrections. The thumb keyboard layout still has the alphabet split between the two sides of the screen where it's all in reach of your thumbs, but there's now a numeric keyboard in the middle to make it faster to type passwords (or indeed, numbers) and you can resize the keyboard.
The new notifications in Metro work well; they pop up in the top right corner of the screen where they're not likely to be in the way and you can tap for options. So the first time you put a USB stick in, you can choose whether to open Explorer or do something else – and that will happen automatically next time you insert it.
Windows 8: Metro apps
Instead of the games and utilities bundled with the Developer Preview, the apps included with Consumer Preview are the basic apps you need – mail, calendar, contacts, messaging, photos and social networking, plus an app for exploring your files on SkyDrive (the desktop SkyDrive app is 'coming soon').
There's also a Bing Maps app and other tools like Weather and Finance, Music and Video catalogues powered by Zune (which also give you a music and video player that will be very familiar to Zune HD and Windows Media Center users) and an Xbox-branded gaming section.
These apps are all labelled as previews and while many of them were produced by the Windows Live team, they're not the final Windows Live apps that will be coming for Windows 8. Microsoft told us to think of them as representative of the kind of experience you'll have in the final apps but not of the features that will be in them.
The People app is similar to the Windows Phone tool, in that it combines the address books for all the services you link Windows to, through your Live account or by adding specific accounts for email and calendar.
You can see contact details and recent updates for individual friends or browse through updates from all your linked social networks in a view that wastes a lot of space unless there's a photo in the update; you can tap through to reply or see more details but this isn't powerful enough to be really useful.
The Mail app is better, although you can only use it with Hotmail, Gmail and Exchange accounts and while it's easy to jump between accounts and folders, there's no conversation view and you can't flag email or even mark it as spam.
The Calendar app is similar; it has a clean and appealing interface, with a monthly, weekly or two-day view and it shows all your calendars together. You get the choice of which calendar you create a new appointment in. But if you have multiple calendars in your Exchange account you can't choose which are visible
The Messaging makes good use of the size of a PC screen to show you multiple conversations on Facebook and Windows Live, with details about your contacts so you can see what else they're talking about on other services. You can also send group messages, but it's just text chat; no voice or video yet.
The Photos app lets you explore your images whether they're on your PC or in online services like SkyDrive, Facebook and Flickr.
You can swipe through images, zoom out to see thumbnails, play a slide show or pick an image for the Lock screen but there aren't any editing tools. It's very simple, but the look is elegant (apart from the lurid yellow banner marking it as a preview app).
Until the desktop SkyDrive app arrives, you can't automatically sync files from Windows 8, although you can pick files to upload to SkyDrive in the Metro app, which has a clean and simple interface with tiles for folders and thumbnails for images. It's a great way to work with your online files, although documents on your SkyDrive open in the Office Web apps in Metro IE rather than directly in the SkyDrive app.
Apps that let you select files, for example to upload to SkyDrive, use the Metro file picker, which will either make your life very simple or very complicated. When you look at the Pictures library, you see the contents of every folder aggregated together - much like Windows Live Photo Gallery - as well as a list of folders (or you can navigate to individual folders by starting at Computer and working down).
That's convenient if you can't remember which folder you put some recent photos in but could get overwhelming once you have a lot of images. The Music library only shows the list of folders (usually corresponding to albums) but not the individual tracks inside them.
The same is true in Explorer in Windows 8 desktop; the Pictures Library shows you thumbnails of all the pictures in all the library locations, but it's a little more manageable when you have a mouse and scrollbars.
The Bing Maps app is very like the version for the PlayBook; you can jump to your current location, see traffic or an aerial view, search for businesses and places and get driving directions. It's a little basic, with far fewer features than the Bing Maps Web site, but it's very easy to use with touch.
We've seen rumours of the Microsoft Reader PDF viewer before; it's included in Consumer Preview and it's an excellent and simple PDF tools. Large files open quickly and scrolling through documents is equally fast.
There are no confusing toolbars floating over the page; you can pinch to zoom in and out or double tap to zoom into a page, and the commands on the app bar let you search, switch views, rotate a page or see what you have permission to do with a password-protected PDF. This is far more pleasant to use than Acrobat Reader (and noticeably faster).
The Xbox Live Games app will look familiar to both Xbox and Windows Phone users; it has your avatar and those of your Xbox Live friends, your achievements on phone and Xbox games, the two games included in the Consumer Preview and adverts for the Windows and Xbox game marketplaces.
Those two games are disappointing though; Pinball FX2 looks good but the multiple splash screens and pages of instructions mean it takes far too long to load for a casual game) and the basic version of Solitaire doesn't even let you choose a different deck.
The Xbox Controller is far more interesting. Unlike the Windows Phone app, it doesn't turn your PC into a replica of the Xbox controller, which would be rather fiddly on a large screen. Instead you see what you can do on the Xbox screen and you can touch areas directly, so instead of looking on the Xbox screen to see that the B button means back, you get a back button to press.
This is going to work best with tablets, but on any PC the option to pick a movie or TV show from the Video app and play it directly on your Xbox is a great way of doing things; you get to search the catalogue using a keyboard so it's easy to find the show you want and then sit back and watch it on the big screen where it looks good.
Scrolling and zooming is smoother in the updated IE10 Platform Preview included with Consumer Preview; you can double-tap to zoom on the part of a page you're interested in – this works well, very like the same feature in the Windows Phone browser.
You can swipe near the left and right edge of the screen to move forward and back through the Web pages you've visited; if you use a mouse, when you hover near the edge of the screen you get an arrow you can click to do the same thing.
When you pin sites to the Start screen, they have a much nicer icon than in the Developer Preview, and if a site has a jump list you can see that in Metro IE on the bar of commands that appears when you swipe up (or right click). You can also choose whether the sites you pin to the Start menu or links you click in email and tweets open in Metro IE10 or desktop IE10.
The multiple tabs aren't quite a substitute for being able to see more than one Web site on screen at once and if you open several sites from other apps in quick succession, you may find the page you want is hidden away in a tab rather than being what you see in the browser.
Windows 8 desktop
Popular and polished as Windows 7 is, there are irritations like Explorer jumping the view back as you explore deep nested folders and the intrusive language toolbar. The Windows 8 desktop addresses all of our complaints, but it also takes away the familiar Start menu. Does that make it hard to use, with or without touch?
There's no denying that this is a different way of working; press the Start key on your keyboard and yes, you get the Metro Start screen.
But if you roll your mouse into the familiar left-hand corner you get a thumbnail of the Start screen and you can roll up to get the list of Metro apps running as thumbnails (or use Win-tab), so you can jump directly to another running app without the disruption of the full-screen tile layout, or you can use Alt-Tab to switch between all running apps, Metro or desktop.
If there's a Metro app pinned at the side – which you can easily do by dragging the thumbnail that appears when you mouse into the top left corner – Alt-Tab respects that and switches the app in the pane you were working in last. Windows plus the '.' key swaps apps between the different window positions on screen at top speed. There are far more ways of switching between apps than before so you can pick the ones you prefer and ignore the others.
If you want quick access to desktop tools without going back to the Start screen at all, right-click in the very farthest point of the left-hand corner to get a handy menu with just about everything you could want: Search, Run, open Explorer, Task Manager or Control Panel, run tools like Disk Management, Device Manager, Event Viewer or Power Options.
You can also jump to the control panel settings for Network Connections, System or Programs and Features and open the command prompt, as admin or a normal user. Windows-X opens this and you can navigate it with the keyboard, so if you want the Event Viewer in a hurry and you haven't already pinned it to the task bar, press Windows-X E.
And there's still Windows-R to run any app directly. Frankly, this addresses any complaints we had about losing the old Start menu; there are neat and efficient ways to get to everything you want in the desktop without ever taking your hands off the desktop or having to see Metro.
The charm bar works far better in the desktop in Consumer Preview as well. Throw your mouse over in the corner and the charms ghost in, in case you didn't really want them; like the hints of app thumbnails in the switching pane, this hints at what you can do without getting in the way of working with windows and controls on the edge of the screen.
Start is there for systems with no hardware Windows button, Search is there for consistency but Devices and Settings both give you the desktop tools rather than the Metro ones. The Settings pane has icons for network connections, volume, screen brightness, switching language, turning popup notifications on and off plus Sleep, Shutdown and Restart.
There are links to Help, System Information, personalising the desktop and the full control panel at the top; if you want the friendly Metro PC settings, that's a link at the bottom. Compared to the jumble of ways you could navigate to key tools, control panels and utilities in Windows 7, this is a streamlined and efficient interface – and again, you never leave the desktop unless you want to.
That irritating language bar? Replaced by an option to switch language from the Settings charm (or you can use Windows-spacebar to flip between installed languages).
There are a couple of points where Windows 8 sacrifices convenience for improved security. If you have two accounts on one PC, even if they're both signed in, you have to unlock the PC with the account that was in use last – unlike Windows 7, there's no way to choose which of the accounts to log in with from the lock screen.
We predict this will be unpopular in multi-user households. Also, when you log into a Wi-Fi access point, instead of the dialog where you type in the wireless password showing what you type by default, Windows 8 hides the password and only reveals what you've typed when you press and hold the cryptic icon next to the field (which might or might not be an eye for visibility).
With touch, the desktop is a bit of a hybrid. You can use gestures at the sides of the screen for task switching and working with charms, and you can swipe to switch to Metro apps; you can even swipe down from the top of the screen and drag the thumbnail off screen to close the desktop like any other Metro app. You can also touch anything you'd click with a mouse.
This works extremely well with ribbon controls (and makes it initially annoying that Microsoft has bowed to complaints from people who've never used a ribbon interface with touch and made it minimised by default).
Smaller controls work surprisingly well too, because Microsoft has used machine learning to predict where you're really trying to tap for the desktop and built-in apps; we found this made touching tiny drop-downs and menu items in Office and third party applications accurately very easy as well (on a Samsung Slate 7 that has a good touch screen to start with).
It can get fiddly; multi-selecting files in Explorer didn't always give us all the files we wanted, but Windows 8 does an excellent job of making an interface that was never designed for touch work with your fingers.
Windows 8 desktop apps
Look around the desktop and you'll find all the built-in apps you expect; Paint, WordPad, Notepad (which doesn't have a ribbon), Windows Media Player and Media Center, Control Panel, Sticky Notes and so on. Explorer and Task Manager get most of a makeover.
The ribbon works well for exposing buried features in Explorer like extracting compressed files, selecting every file that isn't currently selected, opening a command prompt and doing things Explorer has let you do before in awkward ways you had to be an expert to remember.
It's also context sensitive; navigate up to the Computer level and you get options like uninstalling programs without having to delve into the Control Panel. The Up button makes a welcome return; maybe you shouldn't need it with the breadcrumbs but it's so handy so often, ignore the purists and enjoy the efficiency.
Task Manager is very similar to the version in the Developer Preview, with a clean layout that's packed with useful information, from historical data about which apps use the most bandwidth, to how much items in your Startup list slow Windows down. You can see what all the strangely named Windows services are actually doing, find out which IE window is which and – new in Consumer Preview - double-tap or click on the name of a running app to switch to it.
Desktop IE10 has the same improved browsing engine as Metro IE, but it also has plugins, toolbars and all the traditional extras of a desktop browser, which can look rather cluttered after the 'just the Web page' view in Metro.
Desktop IE has the usual Favourites bookmarks; these aren't the same as the Pinned sites you see in Metro IE, which means you can separate the sites you want to view in Metro from the ones you visit on the desktop. Frequently visited are shared between the two browsers.
Consumer Preview includes Media Player and the small but vocal fanbase of Media Center will be glad to see this in the preview too, although both look almost exactly as they do in Windows 7 except for the version numbers.
So far the only differences we've spotted, apart from both feeling slightly faster and more responsive, are that the Media Center screen saver of photos is set to start after ten minutes rather than fifteen and that the burn CD/DVD option no longer shows up under tasks on PCs with no optical drive.
Windows 8: Accounts and more
If you use a Windows Live account (which can be a Hotmail address or any other email address you've set up as a Windows Live account) to log in, you automatically get your contacts, calendar and messages.
If you've already linked your Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or Flickr accounts to Windows Live, Windows 8 uses that to put your Facebook photos in the Photos app, your Facebook friends in the People app and Facebook chat in Messaging.
Much like it did in the Developer Preview, Windows 8 uses this account to take your settings, IE favourites and saved passwords to any other Windows 8 PCs you sign into with the same account, but this is now called a Microsoft account and it will let you download apps from the Windows Store.
If you use an account from a different provider, like Gmail, as your login you'll get the information from that account in Windows but you'll have to verify that before contact, calendar and message information start arriving.
When they do, you can choose which of them show notifications on the Lock screen; you can pick up to seven apps that will run in the background when your screen is off and tell you if you have new messages – one of them can show more detailed information although so far the calendar is the only choice.
This will be much more important on WOA and SoC devices that have connected standby, as these are the apps that will get updates while the rest of the system is asleep.
Windows Live account or not, the first account you make on a Consumer Preview system is automatically an admin account. When you add a second account, there's no option to set it as being an administrator straight away, as you realise the first time you try to install an app and have to put in the password of the original account; you can go into the control panel and change the account type, but it's irritating not to get the option in the first place.
Windows 8: Conclusion
The Consumer Preview is a huge improvement over the Developer Preview; it's more polished, more pleasant to use and has far fewer rough edges.
Performance is good, there are none of the frequent crashes we saw before and our initial testing suggests the battery life issues from Developer Preview have been fixed too.
The interface is far more usable, whether you have a touch screen or a mouse and you should quickly master the gestures for switching and closing apps.
Consumer Preview also proves that Windows 8 isn't all about touch. The improvements to the desktop are very welcome, although we'd call them evolution rather than revolution, and if you want to spend most of your time in the desktop you can pin apps to the taskbar and stay there until you want to explore the Start screen.
This is the version of Windows 8 that will let you decide what you think of Windows 8 and if you approach it with an open mind, you may be surprised how usable Metro can be.
On the other hand, Microsoft clearly has more work to do, both on Windows 8 itself and on the Windows Live apps that showcase Metro, and there are many key features like sharing and search contracts that will only be useful when there are far more apps to work with them.
Windows 8 has to both deliver worthwhile improvements in the way you use your PC today – which it mostly does – and take a major leap forward for tablets and other upcoming PC form factors.
Until we see WOA tablets, it's going to be an open question how well Windows 8 can compete with the iPad.
Consumer Preview is far and away the most touch-friendly version of Windows ever (and it no longer treats mouse and keyboard users like second class citizens). That won't be enough but it's a very promising start.
 |  |
0 comments:
Post a Comment