Windows 8

I was watching some demos of Windows 8. It looks like Microsoft is drooling over the app store from Apple. The idea here is to get people to purchase all their software through a centralized app store that Microsoft makes a killing off of, just like Apple.

That said, I will now complain about the interface bits that I saw.

Everything is full screen. That makes sense on a tablet and phone, but not so much a computer. You can split screen apparently, but it isn't the same.

The alt-tab (cool switch) functionality is accomplished by placing your finger on the far left middle of the screen and dragging to the right. Drag and hold and a menu of running apps comes up. That is not so bad. It is not intuitive to me. It is just a move you have to remember.

You can share stuff from one application to another, but I didn't notice any highlight or cut and past functionality.

There does not appear to be anything resembling a right click menu, or a context menu.

The finger gestures are not intuitive. You just have to remember where to wiggle your finger to get something to happen. I have no idea how one person is going to tell another how to get anything done without showing them how to do it. "Wiggle your finger one the left hand side of the screen in a left to right faction then stop while still moving to the right and wait for a menu to pop up." That just doesn't compute if I'm honest.

I envision a large monitor for media and a small monitor below it for your hands to do most of the gesturing and control.

Thinking forward to Windows 9, I wonder how things will have changed. Windows 8 it to soften people up to the user interface. Windows 9 will be a sandbox OS that closes off things like free software and the ability for non Microsoft certified software to run on any device running this OS. Mark my words. If I were Microsoft, this is what I would do.

This is going to force open source to produce hardware in order to exist. This hardware will be ostracized by networks and outcast by the in crowd.

Field	Data
Title	Microsoft Windows 8 first peek
Description	I had trouble getting a demo running so I only used some YouTube videos to generate this first impression. Let me know what you think in the comments. No Microsoft products were used to make this video. At least, not on my end. I used Ubuntu Linux and Kdenlive to edit. * Twitter https://twitter.com/#!/zhsy00001 * Blog http://plastickelly.blogspot.com * YouTube RSS http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/users/zhsy00001/uploads
Tags	opinion Microsoft Apple Windows 8 "open source" software hardware computers phones tablets apps app applications corporations money "first impression" "Canon Elph 300" rant big business Houston Texas Kdenlive
Link	Link

Bullets

• App store for Microsoft
• Full screen - split screen
• Alt-tab
• Share data, but no copy and paste
• Right click
• Not intuitive gestures
• Large and small monitors
• Windows 9 - Microsoft only
• Open source will need to get in to the hardware business.