Mouseover the bottom-left most corner of the screen.

Also, it runs fine on my system. Hell, I think it runs better than 7 does, which is weird. Probably cause it's a fresh install, but TF2 runs a fair bit smoother, aside from backspace, insert, delete (and etc) not responding.

I was hoping they were going to expand on the glass concept they started with the Aero theme. Could have been sexy as hell.

Both of CM's choices are defaults for me. Try upgrading your VirtualBox both of those may have been added in the last few releases IIRC...



IIRC VirtualBox driver installer uses NSIS so it's probably possible to crack open the installer and force it to install Windows 7 drivers and DirectX support. I may try it when I get home from work today.



It's supposed to run better AFAIK.

I will have to try this out on real hardware maybe... you can boot from VHDs with the Windows 7 bootloader supposedly, so this should not be too tough to set up.

Already tried it. The installer says it has to be installed from safe mode, which is amusing as I couldn't find a traditional safe mode to boot into.

Besides that, I forced it to install the driver, rebooted, and the driver never worked. It also messed up the Windows theme which made most tiles invisible. Luckily that was reversible.

I tried it in VirtualBox last night. It's okay, still very rough (a lot like the first developer preview of Longhorn.) Unless you want to get an early start on developing Metro apps it's a waste of time. Just wait another year.

Jon'C as Admiral of Awesome, what did you think of the Metro experience. I know you just said its still fairly rough, but does it seem like Microsoft had the right ideas in mind when designing it?

lol, no.

Look, I'm not a user interface designer, and I'm not even going to pretend to be one. What I understand is software engineering. The thing about iterative software development is that it's not necessarily a good way to get the "best" piece of software: it's like evolution, where all you can do is improve upon what you already have, even though you might do better in the long run if you start over with something worse and evolve from there. Metro is starting over with something worse. Microsoft might eventually be able to turn Metro into something really good and well-polished, but in the meantime it's a cold reboot of the user interface that is not informed by any of the 24 years of polish that went into the Windows 7 UI.

So, to answer your question:

Is Metro the right idea for next fall? No. **** no. It's chunky, ragged, ugly as ****, the desktop touchscreen market is nonexistent, and a year of polish just isn't going to get them to the level of quality they have with the Windows 7 user interface. It'll be perfectly fine and everybody is going to manage, just don't delude yourself into thinking that the new UI won't have rough patches.

Is it the right decision for the future of Windows? Probably.

So it works great on my laptop, boots in ten seconds.
buuuut the intel display drivers it comes with are ****, which you would think is okay because it's a dual graphics setup.
buuuut the aspect ratio scaling settings (if a full screen program is not native res, center/stretch/maintain aspect) is in the intel display manager
Which is gone
And the video card drivers from Asus brick the system while Intels refuse to install.
All I want is that goddamn menu.
Jedi Knight and several other older games work better on it then 7 on my desktop, I'm annoyed that this dumb crap is preventing the same from happening on my laptop.

I'm okay with that in a way. I like the idea of forcing more HTML5 video. Too many sites avoid it like the plague on the desktop when their have mobile sites that work just fine with it.

However, browsers need to get their **** together with codecs, and badly. You have Firefox and Chrome pulling for WebM, and you have IE and Safari pulling for h264. It sucks, especially since WebM has no hardware decoding capability right now, which ironically means playing WebM is slower than using Flash.

So far my only significant gripe with the OS is that there is no way to quit most metro apps without actually killing the process. Suspend is great and all, but enough programs suspended can still slow this laptop down pretty hard, or else it was due to me running a defrag on a 100gb drive with 3gb free and opening pretty much everything. Also, for some reason after running said defrag, explorer.exe crapped out on the next immediate boot, but I'm actually trying to break this install so progress achieved!


I think this is the first time I've ever seen anyone purposely request your opinion.

Good lord this was terrible, I formatted the drive and abandoned it.
Flopping constantly between metro and "classic" is the dumbest thing in the universe.

Everyone respects your opinion, Tibs.

Do you mean Metro & desktop, or Metro and "I hate change make it look like win 95" "classic"

I don't like the Metro flip either because, as it stands in the Developer Preview, it has no useful functionality. There's only a couple system operations available in it, meaning that opening Metro is more of an annoyance than a convenience. Basically, the only time Metro is used is:

1. Doing a search
2. Login
3. Actually purposefully running one of the ****tastic included Metro apps.

It's a developer preview so I'm only complaining just as a future warning, but if they don't actually make Metro more useful for desktop users, it's going to end up a pain in the ass. I appreciate the work they did to make it usable, but it's not useful. I think it needs a lot more functionality and Windows applications. Hopefully that is in the works.

There are Mail, People, Calendar, and Messaging apps in the works that they've already demoed, they just aren't included in this build. Basically they're blown up, tablety versions of their corresponding WP7 apps.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYOA1k-nfJI&feature=player_embedded

And then there's of course the Metro SDK for third-party apps. I'm sure they'll probably also at some point do some hardcore search stuff like they've done in WP7 as well. All of the built-in search stuff they added into Mango is pretty awesome, and it'd be silly for them to not have it in Windows 8 as well.

That messenging app is pretty cool.

If they could somehow come up with some sort of deal with Google to add support for Google Talk into it, that would be awesome. Highly, highly unlikely though. It's a bummer that the WP7 messaging app is limited to just SMS, Facebook, and WLM.

Well aren't those apps just HTML5/.Net? If it doesn't come default I'm sure someone else can make it.

Yeah, but out-of-the-box support is always preferred if it's good. That's one of the main appeals of WP7 to me, it has a lot of out-of-the-box features that make it less necessary to go out and download apps for every simple task.

I agree completely.

Yea, any built-in IM client isn't going to do it for me. The best case scenario would be Trillian having a Metro app. I just find the mere idea of an IM client that only supports 1-2 services to be downright silly.

Except trillian still doesnt get the idea of sending a message to a person instead of an account.

You mean like a metacontact, and having it send to all services?

It's because you were running defrag. With speculative caching there's no meaningful difference between having an application closed and having an application blocking on a message queue in the background.

That's okay. I think this is the first time I've consciously noticed one of your posts and it wasn't unfunny fyad-lite thread****ting.

I requested a Jon'c opinion because he puts thought into posts. UX designer or not, its interesting to hear opinions on things.

This is the nicest thing you've ever said to me

Finally got around to installing the dev preview. The new lock screens pretty cool. Are there any apps that take advantage of the lock notifications?

Its much easier than I expected to go from the desktop to the metro UI. I'm interested in seeing what else will be added to the Metro part. Right now I've only really loaded my twitter & weather into it.

I wish you could click and drag to get between the metro sections. (I use a tablet a lot :ninja:)

l

I've done it lots of times.

At the very least the mail and messaging apps will when they come out. I'd hope there are hooks in the SDK for utilizing it for third party apps as well, but I don't honestly know for sure.

Oh there is, guaranteed. That's why the thing exists in the control panel in the first place.

I downloaded the version with the dev kit too. I'll take a look around and see what i can find!