Immediate impressions of Windows 8.
It’s…different. That’s about as much as I’d like to say, as when evaluating Operating Systems first impressions are deceptive. The devil is in the details, and strong features can present themselves after familiarity.
Is it easy to learn? Not especially. It’s aggressively orientated towards a touch interface; not necessarily a bad thing, but it is not - at present - particularly intuitive. Secondly, on a desktop machine a keyboard and mouse are very, very effective input devices. A competing method needs to be well designed to offer a credible alternative.
The biggest immediate change to an experienced Windows user is the obfuscation of the desktop. The desktop of old (well, WIndows 7. Technology, huh?) has been tucked away in much the same manner that the command line has been in previous versions. Far more significant is removal of the start menu, and therefore all submenus. Microsoft clearly do not want the user at the desktop. They want the user in Metro.
Metro in concept is inherited from the Windows Phone - the tiled interface that has been marketed so heavily recently. It is essentially one giant start menu. The combined search/run box from the legacy Vista/7 start menu (a superb feature) lives here, and is triggered simply by typing characters. A bit like Gnome 3 and Unity, but with no need to locate the search field first. It’s colourful and pretty clear. There is a horizontal scrollbar (it was not captured in the screen grab) at the bottom in a concession to the non-touch user. It’s a bit awkward, and I didn’t notice it at first.
Navigation is managed by hotspots. initially, this did result in me staring at the screen wondering how to get around. Following the fashion that started with iOS and is now creeping into everything, you do not go back as such, rather you always return home. A workspace of sorts (showing active applications) is reached via the top-left corner, and a link back to the Metro home screen is bottom-left. An options ribbon lives by hovering bottom right. There is an example here - observed also in Gnome 3 and Unity - of the problem inherent in placing hotspots near controls. A user will on occasion activate unwanted controls in error, through a slightly inaccurate click:
In terms of applications, they present a different user interface dependent on whether they are opened within Metro or the desktop. This bothers me. Non Metro-native applications will only open in the desktop. This gives the desktop an air of an emulation environment; an ugly and unwanted compromise.
It also creates a clumsy user experience. Take a common scenario: Installing an application. You can download it from the desktop - I could not get the download to work from within Metro’s UI (most likely a beta glitch). It is possible to run the installer using the usual Windows download dialogue controls.
In order to run the application after installation, one then has to return to Metro - you cannot run the Application from the GUI in the desktop, unless the installer created a desktop icon. No start menu, remember?
The application then opens in the desktop shell:
I’m struggling to see how this could be an efficient way of doing things. It just does not seem very well thought out.
There’s a lot more I want to write, but I want to spend more time with it.
