Windows 8 Consumer Preview Thread

for me the start menu is the place i go to to run an app that isn't in daily use.

how do you get to a rarely used app ic1male?

I always used to organise the folders by type in the all programs section so moving over to Windows 8 was pretty simple for me.

As a design concept dumping all your programs into something that's never managed is quite bad, I'm not sorry to see it hobbled (despite it still being there if you do a search or you don't bother to organise your start screen). I can't believe it's a real concern or problem for the desktop experience.
 
Does anyone know of any decent themes you can use for Windows 8?

I really hate the basic windows 8 theme with no transparency.

I currently use the Shine 2.0 theme link for my main Windows 7 rig along with the Universal Theme Patcher tool to enable the themes.

Is this possible for Windows 8 yet?
 
oh its only a minor thing, an extra click every other blue moon isn't going to cause me too much hassle lol

True, but still Metro does need to go through a refining process. For example, if you do a Start screen search and there are no hits for apps it should automatically drop you into settings if there are results in that category. Making you click or arrow down is kind of annoying and a bit dumb. Needs more smarts!
 
Better still would be to give you a choice of which apps you want including in the search, for example: Applications, Settings, Files, Mail etc might be your default choice. But you would still have the opportunity to extend this to other searchable apps in the current way.

There's enough room in the results panel to show the results in separate columns for each search category. Again, no reason why this couldn't be an option as well so all results are grouped together.

I'm sure we'll see improvements in the medium to longer term, just needs a bit of polish and is a good example of where this is clearly a 1.0 implementation.
 
Does anyone know of any decent themes you can use for Windows 8?

I really hate the basic windows 8 theme with no transparency.

I currently use the Shine 2.0 theme link for my main Windows 7 rig along with the Universal Theme Patcher tool to enable the themes.

Is this possible for Windows 8 yet?

For the RTM version of Windows 8, Microsoft removed Aero to give 'a cleaner, more modern feel' to the OS. Since Aero has gone, I think you have lost the chance to have transparency in the main though the task bar is stil, oddly, translucent.
 
It's even more odd if you consider they cite power saving reasons as well - although maybe the transparency isn't the same as the Aero glass rendering. I think the default theme looks really smart personally it makes Win7 look a bit cheesy IMO.
 
They updated the bundled apps as well but to be honest there is still a long way to go with those. Mail, for example, is still not as nice to use as Outlook.com
 
People are assuming that everyone pin's stuff to their taskbar or has them on the top level of their start menu, or maybe just all on your desktop but I'm sure I'm not alone when it comes to having a lot of programs, and those program's are actually organised in folders that are easily and quickly traversed in their start menu (very easy for me as I have the old style classic win2k cascading start menu).

As people say sometimes you will be looking for an application you know you have installed but it's one that you rarely use. People say just type in the search for it, which is nice and all but if you can't remember exactly what it's called, you're gonna have issues.

However if you have your programs organised in folders (games, utilities, internet, multimedia>editing/encoding etc...), you can quickly click on your start menu and go to the folder/category and look to see which was the exact program you are looking for.

Ok I know this has turned into what seems a bit of a rant, but the metro start menu is far from intuitive for users who have a large catalogue of programs and use their computer for a huge variety of users.

And I'll just add that you can do all of this while still having a view of what's going on with your applications in the background.

Metro and it's menu locations are a good idea for touch based computing devices but a pain and unintuitive most of the time when on a normal computer using a keyboard and mouse. Which is a pity as the underlying OS seems to be good and an improvement in areas over previous versions.
 
People are assuming that everyone pin's stuff to their taskbar or has them on the top level of their start menu, or maybe just all on your desktop but I'm sure I'm not alone when it comes to having a lot of programs, and those program's are actually organised in folders that are easily and quickly traversed in their start menu (very easy for me as I have the old style classic win2k cascading start menu).

As people say sometimes you will be looking for an application you know you have installed but it's one that you rarely use. People say just type in the search for it, which is nice and all but if you can't remember exactly what it's called, you're gonna have issues.

However if you have your programs organised in folders (games, utilities, internet, multimedia>editing/encoding etc...), you can quickly click on your start menu and go to the folder/category and look to see which was the exact program you are looking for.

Ok I know this has turned into what seems a bit of a rant, but the metro start menu is far from intuitive for users who have a large catalogue of programs and use their computer for a huge variety of users.

And I'll just add that you can do all of this while still having a view of what's going on with your applications in the background.

Metro and it's menu locations are a good idea for touch based computing devices but a pain and unintuitive most of the time when on a normal computer using a keyboard and mouse. Which is a pity as the underlying OS seems to be good and an improvement in areas over previous versions.

Let's turn this around then, as the whole start menu thing has been debated to death. What new features are you really looking forward to in Windows 8 that would make you even consider such a godforesaken UI?
 
People are assuming that everyone pin's stuff to their taskbar or has them on the top level of their start menu, or maybe just all on your desktop but I'm sure I'm not alone when it comes to having a lot of programs, and those program's are actually organised in folders that are easily and quickly traversed in their start menu (very easy for me as I have the old style classic win2k cascading start menu).

As people say sometimes you will be looking for an application you know you have installed but it's one that you rarely use. People say just type in the search for it, which is nice and all but if you can't remember exactly what it's called, you're gonna have issues.

Type a letter on the start screen and press back space and you have all your programs listed by their folders as per the old system. Exactly the same feature just 2 key presses away as opposed to clicking all programs (although you don't need to expand folders under Windows 8).

However if you have your programs organised in folders (games, utilities, internet, multimedia>editing/encoding etc...), you can quickly click on your start menu and go to the folder/category and look to see which was the exact program you are looking for.

I can comfortably fit 50 programs on my start screen, I'm going to assume half that on a quite low resolution screen. How often do you really need to see 20+ application short cuts on one screen?

Ok I know this has turned into what seems a bit of a rant, but the metro start menu is far from intuitive for users who have a large catalogue of programs and use their computer for a huge variety of users.

And I'll just add that you can do all of this while still having a view of what's going on with your applications in the background.

Doesn't really make sense, when you open the start menu to look for a program you're looking at the start menu not applications running in the background.

Metro and it's menu locations are a good idea for touch based computing devices but a pain and unintuitive most of the time when on a normal computer using a keyboard and mouse. Which is a pity as the underlying OS seems to be good and an improvement in areas over previous versions.

Most of the time it's fine, it's been designed for that purpose. If you have a huge number of applications then you may find it worse, don't upgrade if this is a huge issue for you but I can't say a wall of program short cuts or folders is an intuitive method of working either.
 
Type a letter on the start screen and press back space and you have all your programs listed by their folders as per the old system. Exactly the same feature just 2 key presses away as opposed to clicking all programs (although you don't need to expand folders under Windows 8).

Didn't know that, will have to give that a try when I next boot into win8.


Doesn't really make sense, when you open the start menu to look for a program you're looking at the start menu not applications running in the background.

Both for home and work use I will quite often quickly be looking for something in my start menu but will still be keeping a watch on the status of server's, backup jobs etc. stuff that I have running in the back ground.
So what I'm trying to say is that metro being full screen can be intrusive when just having a quick look to see if you have a program/utility etc compared to a small start menu taking up only about 1/4 to 1/3 of your screen.

I would actually quite like the idea of an option to have a non full screen version of the start menu that takes up, say the left 1/3 of the screen. That would be much more at home on a desktop. Wouldn't be something I could imagine you using on a tablet though.

Hope that makes some sense.
 
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MS have finally started to advertis w8 at least online, with 4 "tutorial" videos.
Should give people subconsciously a good idea how to work it


 
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The ads aren't bad. Music is a bit annoying but catchy. I'm actually looking forward to seeing some hardware and more apps now so launch day can't come quick enough. Not long now.
 
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