Stay Tuned for a Live Blog of Microsoft Build Day 1 Keynote

[Marcus Yam]

Follow along for all our coverage and commentary from Microsoft's event of the year!

Stay Tuned for a Live Blog of Microsoft Build Day 1 Keynote : Read more

 

[Osmin]

Let’s hope they fix the worst part of Windows 8, the inability of Metro Apps to run in a window on the Desktop. Having tablet apps take the full screen, or a 1/4 screen on the side of a large desk top monitor is plain ugly and counterproductive. I should be able to populate my large display with as many small metro apps wherever I want them to be and remove them from the desktop as easily as closing a normal Windows program thus keeping the desktop as the primary work place. I enjoyed using the weather and calendar widget in windows 7 and pinning Metro apps in order to emulate widgets would have been a nice feature too.

 

[Osmin]

Let’s hope they fix the worst part of Windows 8, the inability of Metro Apps to run in a window on the Desktop. Having tablet apps take the full screen, or a 1/4 screen on the side of a large desk top monitor is plain ugly and counterproductive. I should be able to populate my large display with as many small metro apps wherever I want them to be and remove them from the desktop as easily as closing a normal Windows program thus keeping the desktop as the primary work place. I enjoyed using the weather and calendar widget in windows 7 and pinning Metro apps in order to emulate widgets would have been a nice feature too.

 

[Osmin]

Let’s hope they fix the worst part of Windows 8, the inability of Metro Apps to run in a window on the Desktop. Having tablet apps take the full screen, or a 1/4 screen on the side of a large desk top monitor is plain ugly and counterproductive. I should be able to populate my large display with as many small metro apps wherever I want them to be and remove them from the desktop as easily as closing a normal Windows program thus keeping the desktop as the primary work place. I enjoyed using the weather and calendar widget in windows 7 and pinning Metro apps in order to emulate widgets would have been a nice feature too.

 

[CaedenV]

@Osmin
I completely agree that would be awesome to have windowed metro apps for us desktop users, but at the same time I doubt it is going to happen. There was not a single desktop on display during the show. The closest thing was the 27" all-in-one, or maybe the xbox. MS is sure that the desktop form factor is going to be dead soon for consumer use, and so they are moving the bulk of their focus away from innovating new features for the desktop without killing it off.

There were a lot of things I did like though; Native 3D printing support is neat (will be getting my first 3D printer either Christmas or next summer), more resize options for metro apps is neat, giving developers better tools to make useful metro apps is neat. Lots of little neat additions and tweaks... but no major 'wow' features.

I was hoping for more cross platform capabilities between WP, win8.1, and XBO. It looks like they are headed that direction with the addition of speech for win8, and better unifying the layout across devices... but it is still not what I was hoping for yet.


And what where they thinking with the typing on the 8" tablets!?!?!? WP8 has a perfectly functional system where the word predictor sits right above the keyboard. It is easy to access, is extremely good at predicting words, and works like a charm. All that they had to do was use the same thing on the small tablets. BUT NOOOOOOO, they had to break something that works well and add some silly space-bar gesture thing. I do like the new way of entering punctuation, and I hope that finds it's way to WP with an update, but that space gesture thing is needlessly complicating a very simple task.

 

[back_by_demand]

Osmin, if you want a windowed 'app' on the desktop, maybe you should be running a desktop 'program' instead. It sounds too much like splitting hairs and arguing about minutiae, as any decent 'app' already has a desktop version anyway, either through installed program or website. Take Facebook, do you want a windowed app or would you just open desktop IE and avail yourself with all the functionality. The whole idea is to use the tablet Metro mode as simple content consumption device like the iPad does, but yes you can do work. But what the iOaf can't do is switch to OSX and run like a Macbook. Somehow, all this extra functionality has been derided, even though with 60 seconds of effort you can add your own Start Menu for free and have a better desktop version than Windows 7. What the hell is wrong with you people?