Windows 8....urgh

[Domino]

Windows 8 and Its Incredibly Cool New Touch Interface

Am I the only one who thinks this'll be horrible in a work/school environment.....

[mullet_man]

It looks like it has the standard Start Button etc underneath so I guess there will be a way to keep the 'standard' Windows desktop feel.

IMO I think it looks great.

[mac_shinobi]

OS X Lion - yes please, am hoping they have good AHCI support on OS X Lion and will hopefully prompt a 3rd party to create / make NON RAID Sata 3 PCI Express X4 , X8, X16

[CyberNerd]

Unity is suddenly looking rather good.

[danbuntu]

I'm loving the fact that it's clearly based on Windows Phone Mobile 7 - and we all know what a great success that was

[andy_nic]

I really hope you can keep a standard look as a default, looking at one screen shot I’ve seen there is a desktop square or whatever they are called. I don’t mind the new look UI, think it will be great for tablets. But from first looks I prefer the current standard look for PC’s And laptops. But will reserve my final judgement till hands on.

[tech_guy]

Windows 8.........hmmmmmmm......

I get it (finally) - each of Microsoft's incarnations of Windows is the equivalent in child years so by the time Windows 21 is released we might have a half decent operating system that is starting to take things seriously.......?

[walks off muttering under his breath]

[Domino]

I really hope you can keep a standard look as a default, looking at one screen shot I’ve seen there is a desktop square or whatever they are called. I don’t mind the new look UI, think it will be great for tablets. But from first looks I prefer the current standard look for PC’s And laptops. But will reserve my final judgement till hands on.

From the above article

You can't turn either of the experiences off—it's always there. The regular Windows is always underneath the new Live Tile start screen. The Live start screen always is on top of Windows.

Of course it's still early days - but doesn't appear so :-(

[TechMonkey]

Dunno, first screen shots I saw I thought "Dear God!!" but I imagine that is the tablet UI & can probably be turned off. But it also got me thinking. What if it was customisable & set by group? So you create a kind of School Intranet homepage there, branded with your school colour scheme and logo.
- A box for internal messages.
- A box for linking to your VLE with what's changed, homework dates or an RSS feed of new resources.
- A box with the school calendar on showing what is coming this week and next.
- A box showing how many unread emails they have.
- A box showing the latest trip photos that have been uploaded

Could be interesting. As I said though, I think this will mainly be the tablet UI, but available as a launch item on PCs.

[CAM]

I like it, it's desktop widgets taken to the next step. Would feel odd with mouse/keyboard but I wonder how long they will last anyway.

[gshaw]

Looks great for tablets but that will be so irritating for non-touchscreen devices, the sensible way would be to have an option to set the UI based on device and user preferences...

Just had another thought... could have those active tiles on a standard desktop... ah actually we've been there before... Windows 98 Active Desktop anyone

[AngryTechnician]

My first thought is that the entire of my Intranet home page could be replaced with tiles on the Start screen. Web apps and standard apps in the same intuitive menu system? Yes please!

As for using it without a touchscreen, my guess is that it will work a bit like Media Center: cursor keys replace swiping left and right. I think I spotted a horizontal scroll bar in there too. It will take a bit of getting used to, just like the Office 2003 -> 2007 switch did, but that went fine in every school I did it with.

[SYNACK]

All the stuff that I read previously indicated that there would be a touch type UI for tablets and a desktop type one for desktops. The biggest complaints about 7 for touch was that the interface was not right and so I think that they have spun it off. So long as they are keeping the idea of the UI being adaptable for the usage schenario it should be fine.

[penfold]

I think it looks good for a touch screen device, but dont really see the point in having all that included if your going to be putting it on a desktop. It looks more like it's aimed at the home user market who are used to touchscreen devices already and use them to browse the web/view images etc. With the ability to view a couple of things at the same time is always nice, but I'm not sure that having those features on a "work computer" will be anything more than a gimmic. In reality I tend to have a couple of windows open, but when I'm doing work I only work on 1 thing at a time with email alerts in the background. Without being able to turn the touchscreen feeling off, I think it would become an annoyance for keyboard and mouse users.

But then maybe I'm old fashioned.

[deceptivex]

I'm loving the fact that it's clearly based on Windows Phone Mobile 7 - and we all know what a great success that was

Look at the reviews mate, they are very nearly universally positive, not to mention the fact that carriers publically admitted that out of all the phones they sell, the Windows Phone's have the lowest return rate. Marketing is killing the phone nothing else, I've yet to meet anyone who has said "I don't like it". It's usually "I'd get it if it had this app" and with Nokia around the corner it's on it's way up. Holds the record for the fastest 0-10,000 apps.

Also, it isn't Windows Phone interface, it's the Metro UI interface that Microsoft have been designing for a while now.