Happy Halloween folks and what a great day to talk about Monsters – specifically the new Windows 8 operating system that is now haunting any new hardware you’ll be purchasing, and of course how Deltek Cobra is standing up to this new beasty.
So let’s start with the good news, Deltek Cobra does work very well on the new OS. We tested it on a late beta version of Windows 8 back in August and it looked good then. I just checked with Deltek and official support will be announced after they’ve completed their testing which is planned for next year.
This week I’ve been setting up some new training laptops that just came in. SURPRISE! Windows 8 is the installed operating system. Having had much success with installing and using Cobra on the beta Windows 8, I wasn’t so concerned about this from a technical viewpoint. However my thoughts did go out to the students who will be using these machines and may not yet have ‘experienced’ Windows 8.
The installs of a standalone version of Cobra 5 on the Windows 8 training machines went forward without a hitch and the software has been holding up great under some routine testing. In reality Windows 8 does appear to be very much like Windows 7 with some changes to the navigation and general motif. As such I’m not expecting any major issues with the operability of the software; just issues for the unfortunate users who will have to relearn how to use their PCs and Laptops.
For those of you not yet familiar with this new OS, here are some of the main differences you will encounter.
There’s no Start menu on the desktop (very controversial). Instead there is a Start page that contains big buttons for running all the applications on the machine (see below).
After I installed Cobra, it was necessary to click on one of the corner hotspots to access the Start page on which the Cobra icon resides. In the above image you can also see the sub-menu tools such as EPM Security Administrator, the Data Tool and Data Conversion utility. As many applications have sub-menus, I can see this page getting cluttered very quickly, requiring further intervention by the user to keep house on all of this.
When you click on the Cobra icon you are taken to the desktop view and the program runs up in there. From here on, everything should be fairly familiar save the absence of the Start button. This means that you have to keep switching back to the Start page and then scrolling around to boot up additional programs. Once you have a program running you can right click on the program icon at the bottom of the screen and pin it to the taskbar. You’ll have to do this for any program you want to launch from the Desktop view.
Here are a couple of screen shots of Cobra on the new OS. It’s actually not a bad motif and I much prefer it to the Windows 7 default transparent dialogs and round edges; which I always turn off for training material development because round-edged dialogs don’t screen shot well – but that’s just me.
Summary
Bottom line on the OS is that Deltek Cobra does work although it is not officially supported yet. As the new Start page suggests, Windows 8 has been developed mainly for tablet computing and as such has forsaken its business user base who is still primarily working on laptops and desktops.
You’ll keep seeing prompts to ‘tap here’ to do something; a big clue to its design bias. And why they saw fit to eliminate the Start menu will be a permanent mystery to most people. So is Windows 8 really a Monster? While it may be a tad scary, I think little Jimmy down the street’s Darth Vader costume will be more frightening. Windows 8 is just an annoying Sprite that we’ll all just have to get used to. Nevertheless, it might get unlucky if it shows up at my door tonight looking for candy.
To read more Deltek articles click here