{"id":3866,"date":"2012-11-05T19:04:16","date_gmt":"2012-11-05T19:04:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/?p=3866"},"modified":"2012-11-05T19:06:30","modified_gmt":"2012-11-05T19:06:30","slug":"windows-8-some-first-impressions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/mt.php\/2012\/11\/05\/windows-8-some-first-impressions","title":{"rendered":"Windows 8: some first impressions"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"AYesterday I took the plunge and installed Windows 8 on my laptop. I had hesitated to do this, because of various reports such as that the Desktop (that is, the running of the normal apps like the web browser you are probably reading this on) had been downgraded to a kind of app itself, with Metro, the interface for mobile-derived apps, given priority. However, other reports said that the new OS was thoroughly stable and based on Windows 7 and would run everything Windows 7 ran. In addition, the upgrade only cost \u00a325 (confusingly, they offer you a “Windows DVD” for \u00a313 extra, but that is for a DVD in the post, not an ISO you can burn to DVD).<\/p>\n

Windows 8 took ages to install; as with the offer of a DVD, things weren’t always clear or well-explained; when I burned the DVD, the burning program gave me an error message even though the disc had burned correctly, and when I booted from the disc, and then selected the option to upgrade an existing version of Windows, it told me I had to close the setup program, reboot into Windows 7 and re-run it from that. When I finally got round to actually doing the install, it told me the system would reboot several times. I fail to see why Windows, unlike any other operating system, has to reboot five times, I think it was, during this process. If you have a boot manager that prioritises another OS, like Linux as in my case, then it will reboot into that unless you sit in front of the computer to make sure it doesn’t. The progress bars stayed still for several minutes at a time, though this is a fairly common problem and not just on Windows. However, when it was finished it had, as far as I can tell (and it boot successfully into Linux), left my Linux partitions and bootloader alone. This is significant because installing previous versions of Windows meant you would have to re-install the bootloader that let you run Linux.<\/p>\n

When it finally finishes loading, it asks you to link to a Microsoft account (a Hotmail or Windows Live account will do). It will actually link this account to your user account, and use the Microsoft account’s password rather than the one you may have been using. As has been widely reported, the “Start” menu has gone, and been replaced by the “Start screen” (and the word “Start” has come back — it had been absent from Windows Vista and 7, presumably because someone pointed out the oddity that the “Start” button was used to shut down the machine). The Start screen consists of tiles representing your various apps, which you can re-arrange to your liking, and those that represent new-style apps can carry notifications (such as how many new messages there are) as well. The old standard apps have mostly gone and been replaced by new-style ones for mail, calendar, instant messaging and so on. There is also a new-style settings screen, but the Control Panel is still there (you have to search for it, by typing its name from the Start screen) and it has the options that it had before. The new settings screen is more limited.<\/p>\n

Desktop apps still function as they did before, and reports that desktop and new-style apps are silo’ed so you can’t easily switch from one type to another have proven to be untrue. You can still press Alt+Tab and you will see all the currently running apps, whether desktop or new-style, and can switch as you like. You can also copy and paste from one type of app to the other. The stylings have changed — the Aero Glass look from Windows Vista and 7 is gone, and the new stylings look like a cross between the style used for Visual Studio circa 2003 and the old non-glass look used on entry-level versions of Vista. The old apps all work, whether they are generic Windows apps or built with cross-platform libraries like Qt. Cygwin (which lets you run some Unix programs on Windows) still works. The launchers along the bottom panel, as well as the system tray and clock, are still there. The desktop is the same one you had on the old release; the radical departure is Metro. This is not really Windows 8; it is really Windows 6.2 (Vista was 6.0, Windows 7 was 6.1).<\/p>\n

The big change is the introduction of the Start screen and the new-style apps. Windows calls them “Windows 8 Store apps”, although until a few months ago (when it got sued by a German computer shop chain) it called them Metro apps. Metro stylings go back a long way — previous versions of Encarta used an earlier version of them in the mid-90s — but for these apps they’ve been embraced wholesale. It’s an extremely clean, minimal style, with no 3D effects whatsoever. Sadly, the bundled apps are rather limited and lack very obvious things: Mail, for example, automatically “top-posts” when replying to an email, something you’ll be told off if you do on certain mailing lists, and there is no obvious ways of changing this. The “Messaging” app lets you add Microsoft and Facebook accounts for instant messaging, but no other type (and many people have Yahoo, AIM and various other types of account). I also can’t get it to properly display contacts (when you switch to the “People” screen, it fails to show your online Facebook contacts). There’s also a Maps app, which displays Bing’s maps (which took over Multimap), but there are obvious inaccuracies (primary routes in the UK showing up as normal A-roads, for example). All in all, the built-in Metro apps are a bit rubbish.<\/p>\n

There’s a store where you can download more Metro apps, and the first thing I looked for was Twitter apps, as I use Twitter an awful lot. The three I tried were Treetro, MetroTwit and Rowi. Rowi was clearly the worst, showing tweets in huge text so that anyone in the room could have read it over my shoulder from a distance (and there are some things I’d rather not be able to read over my shoulder) and showing new-style retweets as if they were old-style ones, and truncating them to 140 characters (including the “RT” bit) which often cuts off the ending. MetroTwit was disappointing compared to the fake-Metro Windows desktop version you can download on Windows 7; you can only have two columns unless your screen is super-wide (you can have more than that, and scroll left to right or shrink the columns, on the desktop version, and on other multi-column clients like TweetDeck). Tweetro also has its share of annoying features, and is difficult to navigate. Scrolling using a scroll-bar is a lot more cumbersome than swiping side to side on a touch-screen, which is why it’s generally avoided on desktop apps. There aren’t versions of any of the well-known Twitter apps found on the Mac, iOS or Android although an official Twitter and TweetDeck are said to be in the works. There aren’t a lot of social media or weblogging clients as you would normally find on a mobile device; it’s Windows, after all, where you would be expected to just use the websites.<\/p>\n

All in all, the upgrade does not add a great deal to the experience of working with Windows. Adding the ability to run Metro apps perhaps adds to Windows what the Mac has had since around 2005 — an ability to run lightweight apps, but these apps don’t serve the same functions. The more likely purpose is so that Windows Phone apps can be deployed on Windows so that people will eventually buy Windows Phone handsets, because they offer the same apps that desktop Windows users already “know and love”, but there’s not much to love about these apps as they stand; both the pre-loaded and downloadable apps are immature and lack critical features. That may change in the coming months, but right now, Windows 8 is not an essential upgrade if you find Windows 7 work well (and it did, for me). The low upgrade price might be an incentive, but if you burn it to a DVD, there’s no obligation to install it straight away.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yesterday I took the plunge and installed Windows 8 on my laptop. I had hesitated to do this, because of various reports such as that the Desktop (that is, the running of the normal...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[747],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3866","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-windows"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p17bgV-10m","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3866","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3866"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3866\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3869,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3866\/revisions\/3869"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3866"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3866"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3866"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}