![]() ![]() Over the last 30 years, the resolution and color palette have improved, but that’s it. Icons stem from the same 8-bit era as Mario, where artists had to communicate the purpose or brand of a program with just a handful of pixels and colors. With Windows 8 (and Windows Phone 7 and 8), live tiles replace icons - and boy are they awesome. Even iOS and OS X, the most critically acclaimed operating systems of the last 10 years, are glorified WIMP interfaces. For three decades, the Windows, Icons, Menus, Pointer interface has adorned every successful consumer computer ever made. Then there are the Metro-style Start Screen “live tiles” that singlehandedly represent the biggest paradigm shift in computer interfaces since Xerox PARC/Apple brought WIMP to market. The Messaging app is a full-blown IM client that lets you message friends on Facebook, MSN Windows Live, and many other networks. In the Mail app, you can add multiple email accounts: Gmail, Exchange, Hotmail, ISP - anything goes. In the People app, which is much like app of the same name on WP7 and Android ICS, you can message any of your social network or email contacts, or see their latest status updates. At its most basic, your free 25GB SkyDrive account follows you everywhere - you can access it from the “file open” and “save” dialog in every Windows 8 app - but there’s also deep Facebook, LinkdedIn, Twitter, Gmail, Hotmail, and Flickr connectivity too. There is unprecedented integration between Windows 8 and internet-based services. In the Consumer Preview, semantic zoom now works on the Start Screen (and is a joy to use with the mouse scroll wheel) you can pan the Start Screen by moving the mouse to the left or right edge of the screen and the All Apps view (which replaces the old Start menu) has been refined to the point that it’s now rather fun to use. In the Developer Preview, the horizontal-scrolling Start Screen was truly atrocious. Most importantly, though, the Start Screen has received a few tweaks that make it much more usable for mouse-and-keyboard users. Unfortunately there’s still no easy way to power down or restart, but we’ll discuss that later. You can also right click this thumbnail to access standard Desktop-oriented features, such as Run, Explorer, and Control Panel. While the Start button hasn’t made a miraculous reappearance, the button that replaces it - a thumbnail of the Start Screen or currently-running Metro app (much like superbar thumbnails in Windows Vista/7) - is really quite good. Likewise, you can now kill Metro apps with Alt-F4. Instead of having to flip through Metro apps to find the one you want, there’s now a multitasking tray that looks a lot like the one in Android Ice Cream Sandwich. If you remember my original list of five deal-breaking flaws in Windows 8, they have all been expertly dealt with in the Consumer Preview. ![]()
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