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[CodenStuff]

Windows Consumer Preview (CP)

Yes Windows 8 consumer Preview was released to the world on Wednesday 29th Feruary and since then well over a million people have downloaded it to see just what this next generation OS has to offer and what all the fuss over metro has been about.
You can read my previous post I made back in September when I got my hands on Developer Preview and not much has changed in regards to tast manager, paint, explorer etc..all your standard windows gear is present as you would expect and hasnt really changed since the preview and the biggest change has been with Metro itself.

The first thing you will notice when installing CP is a big blue and red fish..theres something you wasnt expecting lol a fish atop of a small blue box blowing bubbles in the shape of the number 8. Im not sure why Microsoft decided a fish would make a good symbol for windows 8 but there you go....ok then.

CP just like the developer preview installs in around half the time windows 7 does so its really really quick and after the traditional restarts and once its finished installing you get a chance to customise the start screen colors and setup your internet connection if you have one and asked to enter a username. Normally at this stage you would make up some name/password for your user account (you can still do this if you choose too) but this is where you first start to notice a change in this new version of windows because instead of creating your own account you get asked to enter your Live ID (hotmail,msn) and the reason for this is so you can sync everything to your machine. If you choose to enter your live id or setup an account on the spot then when you get greeted with metro (start screen) you will notice new Skydrive, Email and Messenger tiles and aslong as you logged in with your live id then all of these apps magically sync to everything so you have instant access to your skydrive, email and messenger rite from the get go and that is a great feature if you ask me.

OK so we are installed and ready to go and this is the first thing you see (screenshots were taken after I added visual studio and some other apps they dont come preinstalled)



In the developer preview the all new windows store wasnt available but it is now open in CP so thats the first place I went and this is a shot of how it looks:



Apps are categorised in a simple easy to navigate form with the ones visible on the main store page being to highest rated and more popular but you can jump into any categorie so see a full list of apps available from games to cookbooks, social networking, image and video manipulation and more.



At the moment I think only about 70 apps in total are available for download and thats because microsoft have decided (very annoyingly) to limit the number of people who can submit apps which means new apps will be slow coming for the time being but hopefully that will change soon and we will see loads more added regularly to add a bit of variety to your metro experience.

Metro has had a big code change and it runs a lot smoother than developer preview and looks a lot nicer this time around. Some of the changes ive noticed are the charms/setting bar on the right has had a makeover and you can see the new windows logo in it aswell..the bar holds buttons for Search, Settings, Sharing, Devices and accessing the start screen.



You can get to the start screen by simply pressing the windows key but you can also go this by moving your mouse to the bottom-left of the screen and it no longer shows shortcuts just a thumbnail. If you want to see which apps are currently open and choose one to play with you can place your mouse in the top-left and swoop down to reveal a shortcut bar similar to using Alt+Tab.



I think a lot of people are very disappointed that CP still doesnt include a start menu and I think its still needed on the desktop because navigating via the start screen (metro) is incredibly annoying. You could put shortcuts to your favorite software on the desktop but that would just clutter it up so rite now your only option is the start screen and cluttering that up with shortcut tiles instead lol.

There is atleast 1 helpfull thing you can do and thats if you right-click in the bottom-left corner of the desktop it brings up a little menu to easily access control panel, search, run, device manager etc but its still not as good as a start menu!. Then again we are a creative bunch so im sure someone will make a useful replacement to the start menu to make using windows 8 a lot easier.



Im not sure what else I can say about it really its better that you download and test it for yourself so you can get the full experience and decide if you like it or not.
If you are thinking about maybe developing apps for metro then you can only do that on windows 8 so you should download it and get VS2011 beta aswell.

Windows 8 is definitely the future of computing on pc, tablet and phones and thats where things are heading wether we like it or not lol so you may aswell start learning to code for metro. Incase you didnt know metro apps can be made with pretty much anything now including VB, C#, C++, DirectX, Java, HTML5 ...so if you can code in any of those languages you CAN create metro apps.

Downloads can be found here: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-GB/wind ... er-preview

If you have a spare computer or partition then I recommend giving it a try just to see what you think.

This is a short list of some of my favorite apps so far. The first one has to be cut the rope because om nom is so cute and its a very addictive game that works great.



Biological Piano: This is a strange one you get to select different animals and humans/objects then play their sounds on the piano to make a weird musical track and the demo track is hilariously funny lol.



Train Titans: A puzzle game where you have to build a track from start to finish using touch and drag movements and basically just get the train from A to B.



AutoDesk Sketchbook Express: I think this is the first painting app designed for metro touch and it has a really nice simple interface and basically just draw lol. Its good.



Wordament: This is a find the word type game from a grid of random letters. You slide your mouse from one letter to another trying to find as many words as possible to get a great score and you play ove the internet with everyone else whos playing its quite addictive.



Flow: Another little puzzler that I havent really seen before and the object of this is to connect coloured dots together without the connecting lines overlapping...I must have spend an hour playing this without realising it because its another addictive one to play.





Thanks for reading this boring thread lol cooll;

[Shim]

I LOVE WINDOWS 8

[Usman55]

Boring? Nope, it was rather interesting. I appreciate the you took your time to type this. I have tried the Developer Preview but it wasn't that appealing. I'll try this version as well. Will it work on VirtualBox? The DP was slow. How much RAM should I give it (I have 4GB)?

[CodenStuff]

Glad you liked it lol I thought I would give it a mention and just let you know what I thought. Its not easy to point out its good/bad points because its such a big change to the windows we are all use to its something you have to try for yourself and you be the judge.

It should run in virtual box but its best installed on a test machine or a seperate drive/partition if you want to get the most out of it.

[zachman61]

I tried to USB install it but that wouldn't work

[Frost]

I'll try on virtualbox when I get home

[Usman55]

I tried to USB install it but that wouldn't work

I hope you're not putting the 5MB installer on it, that won't work. You'll have to use the .iso file.

[MrAksel]

I was kinda disappointed when i saw the desktop :( Its the same interface with aero as Windows 7 (which is good), but with bad graphics and flickering some places. This is only a preview though, but I really really hope it will be better!

[Usman55]

I can swear the Developer Preview was a lot better than this (at least for me). The consumer preview has almost no applications. I was at first thinking of trying out all of the apps but when I saw it, I was greatly disappointed.