The Ten Six team has been running tests on the latest evaluation copy of Windows 8 specifically to see how well it supports our primary tools of specialization; namely Deltek Cobra and Primavera P6. Our first impressions of this new operating system from Microsoft were a mixture of curiosity and shock. Brace yourselves folks, Windows 8 is probably going to be liked by tablet users, but is already upsetting the PC desktop community. Here’s our first look and first impressions.
Compatibility
From a compatibility standpoint we’ve been running Deltek Cobra 5 and the Oracle Primavera P6 R8.2 Professional client on Windows 8 and neither the installations nor the programs themselves have generated any issues or warnings concerning this new environment. They seem to be working well. Ironically, the only program that did grumble about known compatibility issues was the Microsoft SQL Server Express 2008 R2 (64-bit) installation that we needed to get in place for testing the aforementioned tools. Once SQL Server was finally installed however, it seemed to be working OK.
The Windows 8 Concept
Windows 8 is designed to support a range of portable, touch screen devices such as tablets and phones as well as your standard desktop and laptop machines; a good concept considering the explosive popularity of these mobile devices. Done right, this model will lend itself to good integration of the two types of system and is clearly an attempt to provide the same benefits currently enjoyed by the Apple community in this regard.
This concept has caused Microsoft to reengineer the interface with a so called Windows ‘new-style UI’, known in earlier releases as the ‘Metro UI’. Fundamentally it means that common applications such as your Internet Browser, Mail, Photos and Music are available to you via large colored block icons on the Metro Start screen.
Clicking on one of these new-style block icons opens the underlying program in full screen mode. On your touch screen device, you can open several applications and then flick amongst them with a simple swipe across the screen. The apps themselves are bold with large objects that are easy to interact with on smaller touch screens. Take the weather app as an example. It’s easy to navigate the wide page, which can be scrolled left and right to reveal weather maps and historical weather charts.
For PC and Laptop users however, this can be problematic because you have no way to swipe among the application windows. Getting out of these new-style apps on a PC or Laptop with a mouse is a frustrating experience. There’s no obvious way to close the window, leaving you scoping around with the mouse looking for hot spots, right-clicks or buttons that will hopefully get you out of there.
The trick to getting out of these new-style apps is to move the mouse over to the lower-right extreme corner of the screen and wait for the navigation tools to appear. Because there’s a delay in these appearing, it can be hard to know if you’re in the right place to invoke them. Once they do appear you have to click the Start button and go back to the Start screen.
There’s also a hotspot in the lower-left corner of the screen (roughly where the old Start button used to be), which pops up an icon for getting you back to the Start page.
Going back to the new-style UI Start screen, you can also see old-style application icons as you scroll to the right.
This is where you’ll find your PC favorites such as Microsoft Office and other installed applications specific to you system. When you click on these icons, you are taken into the Desktop view of Windows 8, where things may look a little more familiar.
The Windows 8 Desktop
On the face of things, the desktop is mostly familiar ground. This area allows you to run multiple applications in their own windows and presents them in an aesthetically pleasing motif. You can right click to personalize the appearance of the desktop, so if you don’t like the transparent dialog boxes for example, you can switch to Windows Basic mode and see a more solid frame around your programs.
The Desktop view is really the only practical view for PC and Laptop users. You should avoid clicking on the new-style apps for the reasons discussed earlier.
Unfortunately it’s in the Desktop view that you run into the first and most obvious flaw in this new operating system. There’s no Start button. It would appear that I’m just one of a seemingly endless chorus of critics who are completely stumped by this design decision. In every article and blog I’ve read the authors are absolutely crucifying Microsoft for this decision. Its causing such a stink that there are dozens of articles and blogs explaining different ideas to get some kind of start menu structure in place in the Windows 8 desktop. A company called Lee-Soft has even developed a program called ViStart that installs a replica of the Windows Start button and menu structure onto the Windows 8 Taskbar. We tested it and it works very well.
Another article we found at How-to Geek describes how to create a Programs menu on the taskbar. We tried this option too and it did the trick.
It all sounds rather trivial, but without any way to quickly navigate to your installed applications, you’re forced to keep returning to the Start page and running each of your programs from there. You have to do this one application at a time; thus adding multiple clicks to what was once a quick and simple process. The alternative is to start cluttering up your taskbar and desktop with program shortcuts, which is also messy and takes time to do.
I think we can all agree that the concept of an operating system for the portable devices of the future is important and should be tackled sooner rather than later; and that Windows 8 does seem to be a good start in that direction. However Microsoft does seem to be ignoring the present paradigm where the overwhelming majority of users are using PCs and laptops, and will have little choice but to use the desktop view on these platforms.
The bottom line is that we are in the transitional phase from PCs to Mobiles. My personal prediction is that we will each be using both types of device for a long time to come. Why then does Microsoft see fit to alienate the PC users by removing functionality that is clearly in high demand? We can learn to love their new-style Start page as we migrate from one paradigm to the next. It will cost Microsoft nothing to keep the Desktop’s Start button, but it could be costly if we have to avoid this version the way we did with Vista. We at Ten Six are hoping that the final release of Windows 8 will keep the all the options open for PC and Mobile users alike.
To read more Microsoft articles click here