Windows 8 employs global navigation, usable when you're in Metro, the Desktop, a Metro app or a Desktop app -- in other words, no matter where you are.
To switch between your current app and the last app you used, either press the Windows key on your keyboard or move your mouse to the lower left corner of the screen and click. If you want to see a thumbnail of the last app you used, hover your mouse over that lower left corner. If you hover the cursor over the upper left corner of the screen, you'll also see a thumbnail of your last app -- but if you then move your cursor down, you'll display the thumbnails of your other open apps.
There are keyboard shortcuts as well. You can press the Windows key and Tab key simultaneously to open thumbnails of your open apps, and then move to any you want to run. And the old Alt-Tab standby still works.
If you then move your cursor down from the top left corner, you'll display the thumbnails of your other open apps.At first, there doesn't seem to be a way to actually close a Metro app. I finally discovered that it's possible by moving the cursor to the top of the screen and dragging it down towards the bottom of the screen. The app first shrinks from full-screen size to a window, and when you drag it off the bottom of the screen, the app closes.
By the way, for those who are fans of the keyboard, you'll find that Windows 8 has some very useful keyboard shortcuts. In combination with the Windows key, you can press the "I" key to open the Settings pane, the "F" key to search through your files and the "W" key to get to a settings pane.
Charmed, I'm sure
One new interface feature that takes some getting used to is what Microsoft calls "charms" -- icons that let you perform an action, such as searching or changing options. When you move your cursor to the upper-right corner or lower-right corner of the screen, five of these charms appear: Search, Share, Start, Devices and Settings. Some are quite useful, while others appear to serve no purpose.
Search, as its name indicates, lets you search through local apps, local files files or via the Web -- its quite customizable.
Share is designed to let you share with others from within your current app, but I was unable to find a way to use it. When I clicked it in the Mail app, for example, I got the message "Mail can't share." I received the same message when I attempted to use it in every app I tried, even in the People social networking app, whose primary purpose is sharing. Perhaps it will work better in future versions of Windows 8.
The Devices charm is also somewhat baffling. By its name, one would expect that it would help with configuring and managing devices. However, the only device setting that was visible was for using two monitors with Windows 8 -- I found none for tasks such as setting up a printer. And when I attached an external USB hard drive to my test system, that wasn't listed.
"Charms" are icons that let you perform an action, such as searching or changing options.One would expect that clicking the Start charm would always bring you back to the Metro Start screen, but that's not what it does. Instead, it switches you to whatever you were just doing -- the same thing that happens when you press the Windows key or click in the lower left portion of the screen.
Settings, as the name indicates, allows you to change systems and/or settings, depending on the context. In Metro and Metro apps, the Settings charms is context-sensitive and will change the settings related to the app you're currently in. Inside Desktop apps, however, you can only change the overall Desktop settings, not those for the program you're running.
Built-in Metro apps
The Developer Preview shipped with a small number of Metro apps, which were a bit rough around the edges. But the Consumer Preview comes with a full suite of them, including email, calendaring, maps, SkyDrive, messaging, Xbox and social networking, among others. As expected, they appear to have been designed more for tablets than traditional computers, with simple, colorful bold interfaces. The results are often striking, such as the visually compelling Weather app.
Windows 8 Consumer Preview comes with a full suite of apps, such as the visually compelling Weather app.However, in the pursuit of simplicity and tablet-friendliness, Metro apps often sacrifice power and functionality. The best example of this is the Mail app. On the plus side, it's simple, colorful and makes it very easy to add and read mail from multiple mail accounts. On the downside, it offers very few tools that you expect in a modern email program, such as creating rules to automatically route mail to specific folders. In smartphone and tablet-based email software, these limitations aren't unusual, because those devices typically aren't someone's primary computing device. But you expect more in a desktop or laptop app. The Mail app simply won't be up to the task for most users of desktops and laptops.
The Metro-based Mail app is simple, colorful and makes it very easy to add and read mail from multiple mail accounts. Where the Metro apps generally shine is in their ability to grab information from elsewhere and display or use it in some way. For example, the Calendar app automatically grabs the birthdays of your Facebook friends and displays them on the proper day. And if you've created a Google account, it will also automatically populate and sync the Calendar with your Google Calendar information. But once again, powerful tools are missing. I found the display of people's birthdays distracting and looked in vain for a setting that would tell the calendar not to display them. And I also didn't find a way to display multiple Google calendars; it only displayed the default one for my account.
Other apps are more useful, and some play to Microsoft's strengths, such as one that lets you link to Xbox 360. You'll be able to not just review your account and make changes to it, but play Xbox 360 games as well. And I found the Remote Desktop Metro app to be a paragon of simplicity. Within a minute or two I was able to take remote control of another computer on my network.
Metro apps do take some getting used to. They don't have menus, and so it's not clear at first how to access certain features. But right click anywhere on the screen, and a series of icons appear for that app, such as adding locations in the Weather app, or viewing all of your accounts in the Mail app. There is one a very simple and useful navigational tool missing, though: There's no minimize button. That's because you don't minimize Metro apps -- you just you switch away from them.
A disappointing cloud
Microsoft is betting part of its future on the cloud, so it's no surprise that one of the built-in Metro apps is for Microsoft's cloud-based storage service, SkyDrive. The SkyDrive app, as with other Metro apps, is simple to use, colorful and easy to navigate.
But rather than being integrated throughout Windows 8, SkyDrive is a standalone cloud-based storage service, so you can't automatically back up data to the cloud and make it available to multiple devices, or have data on SkyDrive automatically sync to Windows 8. Cloud-based syncing is relegated at this point to syncing your settings across devices, such as language preferences, background themes, your account picture and browser settings including bookmarks.
One of the built-in Metro apps is for Microsoft's cloud-based storage service, SkyDrive. The lack of cloud integration is a big disappointment, but Microsoft claims that this will change in the future. The company says that eventually SkyDrive will be available from any Metro and Desktop app, so that you'll be able to save a file to SkyDrive and open files from SkyDrive directly in Windows 8. SkyDrive will be combined with Microsoft's syncing software Mesh so that data will be automatically synced to and from the cloud. And you'll even be able to stream audio and video from a remote PC.
I found no evidence of any of that in the current iteration of Windows 8, so we'll have to wait for updates to see if Microsoft delivers on those promises.
The Windows store
I'm not a fan of closed stores on the general principal that freedom in computing is always a good idea. But as with the Apple Store for iOS, the only way you'll be able to get apps onto Metro is via the Windows Store. This contrasts with the approach Google takes with Android, in which you can download and install apps in many different ways, not just through Google's Android Market. (Over on the Desktop, though, you can install applications in the same way you did in previous versions of Windows.)
The Windows Store at launch is a lonely place; there are very few apps there. When I went there for this review, the Productivity section, for example, had a grand total of five apps, and that included two that were already pre-installed on Windows 8. Travel, meanwhile, had four apps, including one already pre-installed. Other categories were similarly bereft of choices. I would assume that over time the store will be more populated with apps, but it has a very long way to go before it's a winner.
When reviewed, the Productivity section of the Windows Store had a grand total of five apps, and that included two that were already pre-installed.Problems with the store go beyond the dearth of apps to download. The Search charm doesn't work inside the store, and I couldn't find any place inside the store itself to do a search, either.
The result of all this? At this point in development, you won't spend much time in the Windows Store. And although over time you'll likely see more apps there, if Microsoft doesn't add search capabilities to the Windows Store, it will be far less useful than it needs to be.
Conclusion
If you haven't downloaded Windows 8 Consumer Preview yet, and want to try it, the setup can be downloaded from Microsoft's website, while the .iso images can be found here.
The new version of Windows breaks with its past, and for tablet owners that will be a good thing. The new Metro interface is ideally suited for tablets and touch. But desktop and laptop owners will likely see it as a mixed success. Metro apps are more visually compelling than Desktop-based ones, and do an excellent job of integrating information piped in from the Internet. But the Desktop is underpowered compared to previous Windows versions, and overall the operating system feels more natural to touch-based interaction than it does to mouse- and keyboard-based use.
I certainly look forward to using Windows 8 on a tablet, because it offers useful and innovative features, such as displaying changing information directly on tiles. I can't say that I'm as enthusiastic about using it on a traditional computer, though. Switching between Metro and the Desktop feels awkward, and I never shook the sense that I was using two different operating systems. While I appreciate Metro's new features, I think Microsoft should have worked on adding new features to the Desktop as well, and done a better job of integrating the separate interfaces.
Given that the software that many people use on a daily basis -- Microsoft Office -- works only on the Desktop, and that the next version of Office will be a Desktop app as well, many people will spend a good deal of their time on Windows 8 desktops and laptops using the Desktop. I certainly will. So while I'm looking forward to taking advantage of Metro's new features, I'm not at all pleased to know that for most of the time, I'll be in an interface that Microsoft seems bent on making worse, not better, with this version of Windows.
