It wants you to touch it, and frankly touch is the easiest way to get around. Unfortunately, at this point the Windows 8 beta doesn't come with a quick tutorial, and although the workflow is easy, it's not necessarily obvious. Windows 8 is all about the edges of the screen. You swipe in from the right edge to reveal the Windows 8 charms. The Start button returns you to the Start screen, which is what you see after you log in and where Microsoft expects most of your activity to take place.
Once you've launched at least one app, you can swipe in from the left edge to return to the last-open app. You can also perform a U-turn from the left edge. Swipe in a little bit, then swipe back to the edge, and instead of pulling forward the last app you used, you'll get a sidebar of thumbnails of your last six apps. At the bottom left corner of the thumbnail bar is a thumbnail of the Start screen, providing another way to return "home.
It takes about the same effort to get to the Start screen from either edge. One of Windows 7's better interface features was a split-screen view that you could initiate just by dragging one program's Title Bar to the left or right side of the screen. This has been updated for Windows 8. When you drag an app from the left edge, if you drag it slowly and hold it near either the left or right edge, a vertical separation bar will appear. Once the bar shows up, release the app and it will "snap" to the edge.
The screen will be split, with one-third for the app you just dragged over, and two-thirds for the previous app. Tiles, Microsoft's term for its app icons, are arranged in groups. A long press on a tile will select it, and you can change its position or group from there.
You can also pinch to zoom out and get a global view of your groups, or create custom groups by dragging a tile to the right edge and releasing it. Where the left and right edges are global, the top and bottom edges are for the apps themselves.
In Internet Explorer, for example, this means that your location bar is at the bottom, and your tabs are up top. On the Start screen, you can get a list view of all your apps. In Mail, you can set up accounts--including non-Microsoft ones like Gmail, create folders, sync and more.
This worked well in almost all cases. The only one that caused me problems was the Calendar, where about half the time swiping from the left moved me back a day instead of pulling me into my previous app. Again, this could easily be a factor the demo device Microsoft lent me, a Samsung tablet currently available in stores with Windows 7. The Desktop tile will jump you directly into a Windows 7-style desktop, complete with Recycle Bin, traditional Internet Explorer, Windows Explorer, and taskbar.
A keyboard icon next to the system tray forces the Windows 8 soft keyboard to appear, with options for splitting it for vertical orientation, or using a stylus for handwriting recognition.
The side edges still work here, though, and it's much more responsive to touch than Windows 7. I was actually quite impressed how even on the older demo hardware that Microsoft lent me, the desktop mode of Windows 8 was incredibly accurate. Of course, Windows 8's desktop mode is really for easing the transition to the Metro interface.
More on that below in the Features section. Navigating Windows 8: Keyboard and mouse Because Windows 8 is intended as unified system for both PC and tablet, it works as well with a keyboard and mouse as it does with touch. As with seemingly everything in Windows 8, this too serves two masters.
Sure, it gives you the precision required for Photoshop editing or navigating a spreadsheet's cells, but it's also Microsoft waving a big flag that proclaims Windows 8's usefulness. You get touch, mouse-like precision, and keyboard hot keys in Windows 8, Microsoft is saying. If they could give you a way to interface with the OS via Morse code, that would be in here, too. Not only do hot keys work, but from what I can tell, all the major hot keys in Windows 7 perform the same functions in Windows 8, as well as some new ones.
One of the best keyboard functions is that you can pull up an app from the Start screen just by beginning to type. It's ridiculously simple and effective: type "ma" when on the Start screen, and a list of apps with "ma" in their name appear in the center of the screen, but on the right you can flip from Apps to Settings to Files that have the same "ma" string. Not much will happen when you first connect a mouse to Windows 8. As soon as you move the mouse, though, a scroll bar will appear along the bottom edge of the Start screen.
You can then use the scroll bar to navigate through your groups, or you can use the scroll wheel for that--so the vertical motion is interpreted by Windows 8 as a horizontal scroll.
Move the mouse to the lower left corner to reveal your Start screen, or the upper left corner for your most recently visited app. If you then move the mouse alongside the left edge, it will reveal your other most recently used apps.
The mouse has been enabled for apps, too. So in Internet Explorer, for example, a back navigation arrow appears on the left, and a forward nav arrow appears on the right edge. Mouse to the lower-right corner to see reveal the navigation charms, and then mouse up along the edge to use them. Right-clicking reveals the "app edges," the app-specific options from the top and bottom screen edges, while a button denoted by a magnifying glass on the far right of the scroll bar zooms you in and out of your groups.
If you're on the lock screen, you click and drag it up to reveal the password dialog. It may sound like a lot that's different from the touch workflow, but it's actually quite simple. Today the show kicks off in earnest with a keynote that begins at the same time as this article went live, followed by some mega-sessions for developers covering the biggest aspects of Windows 8. Yesterday was a pre-show day for press, with Microsoft spending most of the day running the press through a similar series of presentations, focused more on the end-user than developers.
At the conclusion of the press sessions we managed to get some hands on time with a tablet PC development platform running the same build of Windows 8. Certainly based on the pre-beta build on display, you will be using Windows 8 significantly differently from Windows 7. Metro is the Windows Shell, Metro is an application design paradigm, Metro is a user paradigm, and Metro is the future of Windows application programming.
Metro is everywhere — and for ARM it is everything - and it will make or break Windows 8. The Task Manager now opens up in a simple view which only displays a list of open programs and not processes. Expanding the view reveals a modernized and improved version of the classic Task Manager, featuring tabs and a bigger focus on memory usage.
Windows Store allows the consumer to distribute and download Metro apps or advertise desktop software. The Windows Store would later be redesigned in Windows 8. The Store was called "MSHelp" in builds before Customers with existing Windows 8 Pro licenses can purchase Media Center with the Windows 8 Pro Pack, which was free previously under a promotional offer until 31 January Microsoft offered display languages in Windows 8, [1] 14 more than Windows 7, including:.
Similar to other Windows releases, Windows 8 beta builds include a timebomb which triggers after about days although this does fluctuate between builds from the build's official compile date see the build's information page for the compile and timebomb activation dates.
However, some beta builds contain a broken timebomb. This means that they can be installed on the current date, without triggering the timebomb. These builds are , , , , However, installing these builds on the current date renders Windows unactivated, disabling the ability to both access the personalization options in Settings and the ability to change the desktop wallpaper in the Control Panel unless done so with third-party tools such as DeskImg or ProductPolicyEditor.
Build list legend Available build. Confirmed build. Unconfirmed build. Fake build. Using the language you want , Building Windows 8. Archived from the original on 26 December
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