Windows 8 impresses me more in some areas, and sucks in others.
The email app can include multiple accounts, including all my gmail accounts, and that's handy; but the folders interface is awkward, and it doesn't thread messages like gmail does. Instead everything is piled together Outlook style, which is backwards and awful and shouldn't be allowed in the modern era.
The People app is a strange mix of "clever" and "what do I use this for?". There's probably a good and useful app in here somewhere and I look forward to that future day when they figure out what that is and get their act together.
The photobucket app would be handy if it worked.
There's a lot of useful apps but I keep finding myself switching back to windows-land, mostly so that I can use a browser to get to some application that they don't have an app for. Twitter is the biggest and most confusing absence, how do you not have a twitter app nowadays? The video app doesn't want to have anything to do with a DVD I want to watch, there is no Google Docs app but I'm sure that'll change. It'd be nice to have a Chrome app instead of just an IE app that, obviously, I'm not going to use except under pain of dismemberment.
Also, their messenger app doesn't seem to support gtalk, which puts it firmly in the "Useless" category.
It seems like the Metro app space has the ability to tile apps together on one screen, which is table stakes if I'm going to use that interface on a desktop as anything other than an adjunct to my usual-windows environment. Unfortunately when I've tried to use it, it doesn't seem to have the ability to undo the move, or get out of that app, leaving everything hung. I'm going to chalk that up to pre-Beta software.
Why doesn't Pictures work unless I put all my stuff in the Pictures folder? Bad Windows.
Reset and Recover are brilliant and also it's about time.
Configuration is still a wierd hybrid of tablet interface and traditional Windows point and click. It's a little jarring when you switch between the two modes, which unfortunately you have to do if you want to do anything more complicated than changing your start screen. The Metro config bits are clean and intuitive and well designed, and I'm used to the Windows style bits, but they'd be awful if you were using a tablet.
Finally, Windows 8 really doesn't handle multiple monitors well. It uses the corners to trigger windowing transitions and menu options of various kinds, but the one on the top right is hard to use when you have another monitor to the right of it and as such your mouse pointer doesn't have an edge to hit. That's a little awkward.
It also always puts Monitor 2 as Windows mode and you don't seem to have any ability to put Apps there. The start screen loves to scroll left and right but it only shows it on the #1 screen, never the #2, which seems like an odd choice. It's usable but it lacks in flexibility and it makes the whole multi-monitor thing seem kinda tacked on.
Anyway. It shows promise.
The email app can include multiple accounts, including all my gmail accounts, and that's handy; but the folders interface is awkward, and it doesn't thread messages like gmail does. Instead everything is piled together Outlook style, which is backwards and awful and shouldn't be allowed in the modern era.
The People app is a strange mix of "clever" and "what do I use this for?". There's probably a good and useful app in here somewhere and I look forward to that future day when they figure out what that is and get their act together.
The photobucket app would be handy if it worked.
There's a lot of useful apps but I keep finding myself switching back to windows-land, mostly so that I can use a browser to get to some application that they don't have an app for. Twitter is the biggest and most confusing absence, how do you not have a twitter app nowadays? The video app doesn't want to have anything to do with a DVD I want to watch, there is no Google Docs app but I'm sure that'll change. It'd be nice to have a Chrome app instead of just an IE app that, obviously, I'm not going to use except under pain of dismemberment.
Also, their messenger app doesn't seem to support gtalk, which puts it firmly in the "Useless" category.
It seems like the Metro app space has the ability to tile apps together on one screen, which is table stakes if I'm going to use that interface on a desktop as anything other than an adjunct to my usual-windows environment. Unfortunately when I've tried to use it, it doesn't seem to have the ability to undo the move, or get out of that app, leaving everything hung. I'm going to chalk that up to pre-Beta software.
Why doesn't Pictures work unless I put all my stuff in the Pictures folder? Bad Windows.
Reset and Recover are brilliant and also it's about time.
Configuration is still a wierd hybrid of tablet interface and traditional Windows point and click. It's a little jarring when you switch between the two modes, which unfortunately you have to do if you want to do anything more complicated than changing your start screen. The Metro config bits are clean and intuitive and well designed, and I'm used to the Windows style bits, but they'd be awful if you were using a tablet.
Finally, Windows 8 really doesn't handle multiple monitors well. It uses the corners to trigger windowing transitions and menu options of various kinds, but the one on the top right is hard to use when you have another monitor to the right of it and as such your mouse pointer doesn't have an edge to hit. That's a little awkward.
It also always puts Monitor 2 as Windows mode and you don't seem to have any ability to put Apps there. The start screen loves to scroll left and right but it only shows it on the #1 screen, never the #2, which seems like an odd choice. It's usable but it lacks in flexibility and it makes the whole multi-monitor thing seem kinda tacked on.
Anyway. It shows promise.
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