MS Windows 8 Consumer Beta

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Anyone playing around with the MS Windows 8 consumer beta?  I've loaded it on an X86 tablet and it definitely has potential.  The screen keyboard is in the right place more than half the time, the gestures work and make as much sense as the gestures on any other tablet device.  There aren't many tablet specific programs, it's a pain to use MS Word on it.

My first reaction was where was the ()$%$#((# Windows ball??   But it isn't needed on a tablet and would just be an annoyance.  I have yet to try it on a desktop but every gesture seems to have a mouse equivalent (I tried a mouse before I learned the gestures) and it's fairly easy to get to your programs.  You just need to unlearn some of the conventions that were added with Windows 95.  I'd give it a 3.5 on a scale of 1 to 5, higher when the bugs are worked out.

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I suspect Microsoft will be forced to put some kind of implementation of the ball (which was called a start button in old (pre-2004) Windows versions) into Windows 8.  The two headed interface is confusing, especially when one of the heads seems to be just an incomplete remnant of what used to be the standard interface. Metro is supposed to be that old start ball spread horizontally in tiles, but I can't see this making a lot of sense on a notebook unless you change some of the functionality of a notebook track pad.  

I'm going to load this up in a Virtualbox on a Mac and see how my Magic Track pad works with it.  So far I've only used it on a tablet and it is far far better on a tablet than Windows 7.  But then Windows 7 on a tablet was akin to Chinese water torture....

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Metro apps require 1024x768, they won't run on a lower resolution.  My tablet has 1024x600 so I do a neat little registry hack to fool the OS.

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Microsoft's Metro folks are trying to engineer a paradigm change that hasn't happened in Windows since 95.  It's the same one that's driving OS X and Linux Unity.

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@LoadWB  Yeah, when are they going to put the switches back on the front of computers so we can enter programs like real programmers.  Keyboards and mice are for wimps.

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The problem in IT has always been forecasting the future.  It's an industry younger than a lot of the people in it.  Personal computers started out in people's garages and a plaything of geeks and have become a household appliance.

What percentage of people prefer a touch or touch like interface?  The tablet marketplace is exploding while laptop and desktop sales stagnate.  If I were a manufacturer I could easily read that as the market demanding more touch devices.  The click the windows ball and have all your programs listed is an outdated paradigm, most people just pin their favourite apps to the non-dock dock bar at the bottom and never touch the "start" ball.  The question is what makes the most sense to replace it with.  Would metro make more sense if your computer had a kinect connected to it?

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Have you ever heard one Mac user say "Gee, what we need is a round ball that you click that lists the contents of your applications folder?"?  But of course we do need to be sure that what we replace it with is better from a UI perspective.  I agree with you that we aren't to the touch pad, kinect, touch screen phase in the PC world yet and it's not clear that will end up the direction.  The Metro developers clearly believe that it is the direction, but for the operating system to lead rather than follow is dangerous.

Apple is moving iOS and OS X back together, but they are doing it in steps, making sure that the hardware & software work together in a logical way.  Microsoft seems bound and determined to skip all those steps in between and plunk a fully developed unified desktop/tablet OS down this year.

[persia]