Though my 3 year old can easily go what she wants. She bings Angelina Ballerina. Then hovers her hand over the icon and plays the movie. It is a very natural interface. Which might be hard for us old timers who love us some CLI.
Ah. Right. I'm seeing our difference here. I don't have a Kinect, yet.
The bing bar is pretty useless without it. I think I like to keep an open mind, and try the modern interfaces. Even back in the day, I was never that attached to the CLI, other than as a tool to make or fix things.
As it is, I ended up having a bit of time I could allocate to testing at work, and I threw the Windows 8 Consumer Preview on a smallish average laptop (i3, 4GB RAM, Intel GMA), to see if I could make more sense of things.
Short answer: I think I understand Metro more. But I don't think I've seen a good implementation of it, yet.
The W8 preview feels like a complete hack-job. It is almost two competing operational management systems that are stuck together because neither one quite accomplishes everything it sets out to do.
I can see that I could actually like the new Metro home. I'm starting to "get" this a bit. It does still feel disorganized, but I think I could sort it out in my brain, and come up with some useful layouts, here. It's in serious need of more live widgets, though. Why isn't my email an actual email window? Show me my most recent message headers, here. Same with the messaging and social networking stuff. And why isn't my Internet Explorer URL shortcut an actual Internet Explorer instance? Show me the webpage, not a big logo. If my Android device easily has enough horsepower to do this, I don't see why W8 can't. Why don't I have a persistent "Back" button to get out of applications in the Metro interface? All I can do is go back to home, and then close them from the finicky sidebar.
And, outside Metro, the old desktop is still there, like a strange relic. Except it feels like it's half missing, as there's no start menu launcher, anymore. It almost feels like an old Unix X session without a Window Manager, now. There's just an empty translucent bar with IE and Windows Explorer pinned to it, for some reason. It makes for a strange breaking point separated from any context. I suppose you could do like all my users do, and just create shortcuts for all your applications on the desktop (or pin them to the bar)... But, it just seems like a really clunky solution.
So, I guess my biggest gripe is rather ironic. Even though this is one of the largest interface overhauls Microsoft has ever done... And I know how much users are resistant to change... I don't think Microsoft overhauled nearly enough to pull this one off successfully.
Also, a different observation... What the heck is up with the Windows Accounts? I seem to have a local account on the machine. Ok, good... I also have a pre-existing Live account, which they asked me my email address for. This also makes sense. I can see where they'll probably allow additional accounts here in the future (gmail, facebook, etc), and hopefully have some way to link them. But, the only thing I can seem to actually use is my local account. Every time I go to any of the XBox Live features, it says I need to log in with my Live account, instead of my local account. Fair enough. The problem is, the place they tell me to go has no such option! Any option to use a Live account seems completely missing. Is this a known omission of the preview? Exactly how much is missing from this "preview"? It feels like a whole ton of meaty content should be there, but just isn't.
Ah... My mistake. I didn't verify that the time/date info on the PC was correct. Silly me, I assumed it would grab it from a common source, if it needed to. The Windows 8 Preview didn't properly activate because the date was so wrong. Also, this was preventing sync. Would have been nice had something mentioned this. Oh well. Hoping for meaningful error messages is just too much usability to ask for. There's a lot more here, now.
But the rest of my observations still stand.
