Now Windows 10 has been released, I feel it’s worth putting together a highly subjective review of Windows 8.
What does it feel like?
For me, from the first preview buil, Windows 8 felt like the movie From Disk till Dawn.
For those who haven’t seen the movie, it is a collaboration between Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez. Quentin Tarantino is best known for gangster movies, Robert Rodriguez (at that time) was best known for horror movies.
The movie starts like a normal Quentin Tarantino movie, guns, hold ups, tough talk. Two fugitives are on their way to Mexico. They fight their way over the border to a bar.
Suddenly half the people in the bar turn to Vampires and the movie switches to a horror movie. The survivors band together to fight the vampires.
It’s not really one movie. It’s two movies with two directors with an abrupt transition from one to the other.
We’ve got Tarantino:
Then Rodriguez:
It’s a great movie. You should see if if you haven’t already.
Windows 8 isn’t one operating system
Windows 8 isn’t one operating system, it’s two. On one hand you’ve got the traditional windows desktop, largely the same sort of experience since Windows 98. You know, windows, desktop, explorer.
So what does it feel like?
Tablet/Convertible – hey this is pretty neat
Laptop – doesn’t really make sense, but ok
Dual Screen Desktop – I want to stab someone
This didn’t really come home to me until I started using windows 8 on a dual screen desktop extensively. The metro modern interface, optimised for touch, doesn’t translate well to large screen displays. Or more than one screen.
The start screen taking over the whole screen is hugely jarring.
My pattern of usage is to start apps using Windows Key + start typing app name. Prior to Window 8, this was a relatively unobtrusive start menu. With Windows 8 it takes over the whole screen. And on a 24″ monitor I hate it.
With the release of Windows 10, it looks like Microsoft has acknowledged this.
uberconcept - David Cameron's Blog 
I like the Dusk til Dawn Analogy
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