Windows 8's app collection: what you get with the Consumer Preview
Summary: The Windows 8 Consumer Preview includes 18 built-in Metro style apps. They're polished and useful, but still deserve the App Preview label. Here's what you get.
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The Xbox Companion app, like its Windows Phone counterpart, requires that you log in on your console and your PC using matching Microsoft/Xbox Live accounts. A Windows 8 slate makes an excellent Xbox controller for media apps.
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Talkback
Looks good
It looks cheesy
Is the start panel still missing ?
windows crap
win 8
Windows is the Republican of OS's
By the way, it's not "OS's".
By the way, it's not "OS's". .
When you said that, you showed off not only your ignorance in participating here, your picky, senseless attitude and just how uninteresting your posts are. Thankfully there's a name with posts so they can be easily ignored.
VirtualBox will give you a taste...
Loving it
Sweet
@Shaun What you see in the picture is the start panel, or maybe you where just too busy complaining about it to notice. What are you missing from your start panel that you "MUST" have? Programs, settings, documents? They are all there, and you can customize these icons and add new ones to your preferences and liking. If you like using a Windows XP look, you can click the desktop button, might even be a way to disable the Start menu GUI for the basic XP view, but then you might as well just stick with XP 32bit. I personally had no reason to change the Taskbar preferences. Changes create better performance and control. But by all means, I am not stopping you from doing the same task that has been corrected for me to do in 3 mins what it will take you to do in 10 mins.
Highly Promising for Tablets, but Fails Miserably on the Desktop.
For power desktop users that rely on Keyboard and Mouse for fast multitasking, with tens of applications opening and closing from a central location (i.e. Orb, or Windows menu, whatever you like to call it), this iteration offers little to no value. Once you start installing your applications (Adobe, Autodesk, etc.) which some of them add sometimes up to... 20 TILES each! to the start 'menu', then you start to realize the magnitude of the problem. Swapping between the Start Screen and the Legacy Desktop Screen, and having to scroll-right, or rearrange them to get them closer to the start -or both for that matter-, fails miserably when it comes to productivity, and feels just plain awkward and ambiguous.
I've been testing first the Dev Prev and now the Cons Prev and I was really hoping they would've gotten this issue pinpointed and solved, but apparently that's exactly the way M$ wants it to be. Well, I hope support for Win7 lasts as long as, if not longer than what it was for XP, because I'm pretty sure a lot of power users won't be switching any time soon.
The Apps are bad...
Email - looks and works pretty much just like mail on iOS tablets and the Gmail app for android tablets. I once thought that might be a good idea for a desktop email interface and loaded up the Chrome offline mail client. Took about 5 minutes of comparisons to what I could do in outlook to get rid of it. Same is true for this one too limited for what you can do on a desktop/laptop. And why must I put in a hotmail account first? What if I don't have or want one?
Weather - Total fail. Entered my hometown, made it default removed Seattle, WA and boom, gray screen. App never worked again.
Music - Why can't I turn off all the other crap from the store and just have my music? If I had to look at that every time I pulled up the app it would drive me crazy. A full 24 inch screen full of my album art artistically displayed with a little ribbon of controls near the bottom is a major waste of real estate.
Pictures - How can I add more from metro (no cheating and using the nasty old legacy Win32 Windows Explorer) that come from my file system or local area network, or even a thumb drive? What if I don't use Skydrive, Facebook (the horror), or Flickr? Do I always have to look at those tiles?
Lets just face it, whatever merits Metro has as a tablet or phone interface and possibly even as a TV interface, its stinks as a laptop/desktop interface. MSFT, please give us the opportunity to just turn it off on our desktops and laptops.
Let me answer that
Weather - there will be a TON of weather apps at launch and they will all be pretty good with live tiles and interesting features, if Windows Phone is any indication. So, it will be up to personal preference at that point.
Music - snap it to the smaller snap pane and it gives you just a player where you can see playlist, artists bios, and recommended artists whose music is similar. This too will get more robust, like Zune (arguably the best music software UI there is) with updates.
Pictures - will be able to be pushed/pulled and added/deleted from any service or device you have as well as the cloud once this is complete.
As a desktop interface, I'm flying around this thing on my 42" tv with very few if any hitches. This after 2 days.
tl;dr
Email = Beta
Weather = Beta
Music = Beta
Pictures = Beta
ALL other apps and the OS = beta
Why
Pinning to the side is not nearly as efficient in terms of screen space as minimizing to the task bar. Besides, in the task bar + notification tray, I can monitor not only my music player (which is not bugging me with recommendations), but my IM application, email and a bunch of other stuff. Not to mention that, at the same time, I could have gadgets running on the desktop with a stock ticker, CPU usage and network meter in the same space pinning to the side takes all while working on a spread sheet in most of the window.
There are two different form factors that require two different approaches to maximize their effectiveness.
Pictures
TV
All of my comments are directed at the inadequacy of WinRT as a desktop/laptop interface. Its apps are about the same (perhaps a little worse at this stage) as iOS and Android on tablets and phones. But without the capability to have multiple overlapping windows open it is not a very capable desktop/laptop system. Sure you can get some stuff done, but its capabilities pale in comparison to what a windowing system let you do.
WHAT!?!?!?!?
I'm in no hurry to get this piece of *CARAP* !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
windows 8 is doa
Can I say wow....
Running on an ASUS UL30VT, i3, 128gb SSD, 4 gb RAM
It is different. While there are a number of things that bear further investigation, there is an aweful lot of "forced" functionality - you have to use this and do it only this way.
I will keep an open mind but, wow......
Just sayin'
Almost but no....
I still have an XP system that works fine. I will keep my Win 7 laptop until the wheels fall off and I am learning Linux as a backup. At least Linux is free not some ill thought out half finished cr**p that will probably have service packs larger than the original system.
So you went from making COMPUTER operating systems that worked, kinda, to a tablet system that is ugly, hard to use, and not cutting edge. I guess the adults have left the kids in charge at Microsoft.
Linux is looking better and better!