Today I had the opportunity to try out the official release version of W8 - on a touchscreen. Test subject was a Sony VAIO all-in-one. As W8 is hardly designed for mouse and keyboard, I felt I should give the touch interface a chance.
DISCLAIMERWhat follows is the highly subjective opinion of a first-time, mildly prejudiced W8-touchscreen user. I'm focusing mainly on the 'Modern' interface (for that's what it's called now, from what I've heard), because apparently that's the future Microsoft has prepared for us; if they get away with it in W8, I expect much more of it in W9.
The goodYeah, okay, the Start screen makes sense for a touch interface - probably more so than the old menu. And some bits of Modern are looking quite the part - for some reason I liked the computer settings app, once I'd figured out how it works. Furthermore it's generally responsive, like any halfway decent OS should on a system like that.
The badAside from the start screen, I was rather disappointed by W8's touch controls. You know how with a mouse, the start button pops up if you move to the bottom-left corner? No such thing on touch. I tried tapping, dragging, swiping, to no avail. So much for an easy way back to the Start screen. The next most convenient option to go back would be via the ridiculously-named 'Charms bar', which you're supposed to swipe in from the right. There's a knack to that, too: you really have to swipe in from outside the screen border to bring it up, just dragging near the right edge isn't good enough. But alright, once I got that figured it went pretty smoothly.
Next up, multitasking. It's practically impossible. You've probably heard that all 'apps' (as in, stuff you get from the Windows Store) run in fullscreen, but that they can also be used side-by-side. Well, that's only true on a widescreen; if you want to multi-app on a 1280x1024, you're out of luck. And then still! Using apps side-by-side only works with one big and one small app. The width distribution is fixed around 80/20 (or 20/80). Even on a big screen like the VAIO's, this means the smaller app is barely wide enough for following a chat. There is no way to choose the width of the apps yourself, you can't even just make them equally wide (like you can on the desktop).
And app switching? If you drag in from the left, you'll get the previous app you were in. But what if you have more than two apps open? I found this out purely by chance: drag in from the left, as if to get the previous app, then
drag it back off the screen and you'll get an overview of the apps you have open. How that's supposed to be intuitive I have no idea.
Last but not least, closing apps. You may or may not know that to close an app, you have to grab its top and drag it down to the bottom of the screen. And you have to do it slowly, or your movement won't be recognized. On a big screen like the VAIO's, that takes two seconds.
Two full seconds, for something that used to take naught but a click on a red button! I'm enough of a power user that that seriously bothers me. And it's not just that: the fanciness is overdone everywhere. In W7 it was already bothersome, but bearable: now it just gets in my way. Goddamn Minesweeper took thirty seconds to start up, taking me past loading screens, login screens, level selects, and a whole bunch of fancy animations in between.
Thirty seconds!? I could have
finished the game in that time!
Twice! (On 'beginner', obviously). If they do this to (what used to be) a simple time-killing accessory like Minesweeper, I shudder at the thought of what else they still have in store.
The uglyThe design of the start screen I found utterly impersonal and downright annoying. Half the backgrounds are downright dull, the other half plain ugly, an all of them are terribly generic. Nope, you can't set a custom picture as background. There's about 20 predefined colour schemes to choose from; nope, can't define your own. And then the tiles. Every time you go to the start screen, BAM! COLOURFUL CHAOS! I should probably mention that I'm used to Rainmeter, which makes your desktop look like
this; it's highly customizable and generally subdued. Next to that, the Start screen looks like a kindergarten: colourful, messy, and all the kids are begging for your attention. Oh yes, they are: the much-hailed live-updating tiles get downright annoying after a while. And often, in their efforts to grab your attention, the third-party apps get quite unrecognizable: while the tile displays a slideshow of sometimes barely relevant pictures, the actual logo of the app - your only hook to find the correct app in the mess of tiles - gets reduced to a tiny box in a corner. While that's technically not Microsoft's fault, it still adds to the issues that make the start screen - IMO - very annoying.
tl;drTouchscreen interface doesn't work quite as good as people would have you believe; except in the start screen, the mouse remains the most convenient input device. Multitasking is nigh impossible, fanciness gets in the way of productivity, the start screen is impersonal and chaotic. 2/5, recommend against.
