An exciting afternoon on Wednesday this week as Microsoft unveiled the Consumer Preview of Windows 8 in a live-stream-free (apparently due to the venue requiring a temporary floor covering a swimming pool!) presentation from the World Mobile conference. It was covered by The Verge in an as-good-as live blog that is well worth a read even if to just look at the pictures.
Having used and tried out building Metro apps in last year’s Developer Preview release the most exciting thing about this release for me was to get to try out some of the built in Metro apps around Mail, Calendar, People etc. to see how Microsoft have gone about tackling the UI challenges presented with building these Metro apps for Windows 8.
My initial highlights of the Consumer Preview are:
- “Super” easy hook up of Mail, Calender, People to Exchange, Gmail (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter were just there doe to them being set up against my Live account for my Windows Phone)
- Great experience combining touch and keyboard for Metro and desktop interaction on the Dell Duo.
- Lock screen notifications for mail and calendar (weather not showing up?)
- Weather auto set to my location, Sheffield, rather than Seattle. Although on a 2nd device I set up I got Seattle
![:-(]()
- Calendar Metro app seems very slick in both full screen and docked.
- (not directly to do with Consumer Preview) Single click install of Visual Studio Express 2011 (including SDK, Blend and project templates) taking only about 5 mouse clicks and 20 minutes to do full install, create and run a hello world Metro App. The opposite experience to my ventures into Android development! This post by Jamie Rodriguez gives all the links you need for getting started with the Windows 8 Consumer Preview.
- Seeing the photo of Windows 8 running on an 86″ multi-touch monitor (near bottom of page). I’m sure we need one of those in the office!
And my lowlights:
- Where’s the Start Button gone on the Desktop!!! Why? What ever happened to discoverability?
- Using just a mousepad on a non-touch screen laptop is pretty painful in the Metro and Start menu world.
- Skydrive doesn’t appear in my Windows Explorer and also not available in desktop “Save As” dialogs.
- Choosing “Send in e-mail” from Paint Ribbon doesn’t recognise the Metro Mail client.
- Metro Mail app feels very clunky and numerous, bad bugs.
- UI of full screen People – “What’s new”.
- “What’s new” doesn’t seem to automatically refresh.
- Maps couldn’t search on UK postcode (although getting directions would).
- “My location” doesn’t work in maps.
- Where’s the Office 15 preview? Thought it was going to be in there too.
Now I’m sure updates to fix the obvious bugs in the sample Metro apps will be quickly hitting the Store (in fact, there were a number of updates already available as the Consumer Preview was made available) so I’m not so worried about that. The “clunkiness” of the Mail client is a worry though and the People “What’s new” feed is downright embarrassing so hopefully these more major changes will be looked into.
Metro People - What's new - only 3 tweets visible in full screen mode (1366x768)!
I will go into more detail on the UI of some of these new Metro apps in full screen and docked states in separate posts:
- Calendar
- People