Pure, Clean, and Functional. Three word I never would have thought of using when describing Windows before today. When I first used Metro Consumer Preview I was shocked. After some initial trouble with low screen resolution which I solved by switching to an external monitor, it has worked beautifully. Some of the apps in the Metro interface I already plan to include in my everyday life. The
mail app is clean, and effective. The weather looks beautiful, is a breeze to navigate (no pun intended), and has a ton of features as I’ll get into below. The app store has a small selection, but quality apps. Metro isn’t great on smart phones, but it may be the future of computing (for Windows).
First of all, let me just say that they stole a few things from Apple. Metro is based off of Lion’s Launchpad, and their app store is based off of the success of the Mac app store. There is no denying it. Microsoft also took a few things from ios including the built in simple mail, weather, stocks, and photos app. They even launched an itunes competitor in beta.
The navigation in Windows 8 is pretty simple. Just use the corners to navigate between pages, or click on the app you want. I like going dual screen with one screen traditional, and the larger screen Metro. It suits my personal and profesional needs.
The weather app may be my favorite of the built in selection (although that may change when I play Pinball). It is nice looking, with sharp backgrounds, and it is location based, with different screen which can be swiped to for day to day, hour to hour, a bajillion radars, and more. It is truly beautiful and sure beats weather.com.
The next best app might be Stocks. Stocks isn’t amazing for customization, but it is fully featured and it will keep you informed on financial news. You can even preview the markets from Metro itself.
The final app i’m covering today (more coming this week, and for a long time more) is mail. This works great on the large screen, with a nice left side inbox and right side viewer. It’s cleaner than some mail clients, and it is full screen which makes it even cleaner. The message sending area is full screen, and things appear when you need them. Everything is clean here, with minimal text. You can do standard formatting of text, and attaching, and even emoticons. I feel like some plugins could give this some nice functionality, but for now it suits my needs. Setting up my Gmail was a breeze and so on.
So that is Windows 8 in a nutshell. I’ll certainly cover it more in the next few weeks and beyond. Sign up for our emails to stay posted. See yah.
photos provided by Microsoft