Windows 8 Release Preview Discussion

[Vice]

Looks nothing like that for me at 1920x1080, so who knows.?? Regardless of the scaling issue, he'd hate it anyways :p

Please post some screenshots so we can see how it is supposed to look.

[Steven P. Administrators]

firefox ui glitches, are they fixed in relese preview?

I'll let you know once I'm upgraded if no-one else responds.

[Detection]

Looks nothing like that for me at 1920x1080, so who knows. Regardless of the scaling issue, he'd hate it anyways :p

1920x1080 looked fine for me with the CP, haven't seen higher than 1366x768 with the RP yet but I imagine it would be the same

Personally though, I can put up with a full screen of colour slapping the LCD everytime I open an app on my laptop, but on my desktop it looks a little ridiculous and this is only a 1080p 22", anything 40"+ would be painful

[Detection]

Started upgrading from Windows 7 1hour 20mins ago and it's now at 80% :p

Upgrade.... the cardinal sin :D

I upgraded 7 with the CP and was surprised how quick it was, and had something like 800GB of crap on a 1TB drive it was upgrading too, sure it was done well before 1h:20m

The clean install of this RP took longer than the CP too though

[Harshwardhan]

I'll let you know once I'm upgraded if no-one else responds.

Waiting :)

it is one of the main reasons I switched back to 7 from consumer preview.

[Trudd]

Anyone else experienced this? When I try to add another account to the Calendar app (Google account if it matters) and start typing in the email address, when I type the @ sign the app closes and throws me back to the main metro screen. I have a Swedish keyboard which means I press ALT GR+2 to type the @ character (I tried other combinations such as ALT GR+4 ($ character) but theses all works as expected).

[Kelxin]

This is cool! Now you can change the DPI settings on a specific part of the GUI:

You can do that in Windows 7, Vista, XP, 2000, ME, 98, 95, 3.1, and 3.0.

[George P Global Moderator]

Also I disagree with you that it uses your 1080p monitor well. Open a news article in stocks and post a screenshot to prove me wrong.

Ok?

[Bioran]

Really hope there can be a method (either official or hack) which allows us to customize the tiles for desktop apps and pinned sites, e.g. with icons which fill up the entire tile space.

[Vice]

Ok?

Doesn't look like the stocks app to me. Also you picked the longest article there was and it still didn't fill the screen :/

Well you proved my point at least.

[George P Global Moderator]

And here, because you wanted it from the Stocks app, and I posted from News, whatever.

Is that enough or do you want me to post from every metro app I can find? I think it looks fine to me on my 1080p 22" monitor, or maybe I'm seeing things.

[TheLegendOfMart]

It doesn't look fine at all, look at all the wasted space and thats on 1080p.......

[Vice]

It looks wasteful.

[.Neo]

I think it looks fine to me on my 1080p 22" monitor, or maybe I'm seeing things.

It just shows that having every app full-screen doesn't serve any purpose whatsoever on larger screens.

[George P Global Moderator]

It just shows that every app full-screen doesn't serve any purpose whatsoever on larger screens.

If the app is a basic one then I agree, but nothing is to say that will always be the case. Besides, I have my simple yet crowded IRC client in full screen 24/7 (one of the few, non-heavy, apps I run in full screen).

[Vice]

If the app is a basic one then I agree, but nothing is to say that will always be the case. Besides, I have my simple yet crowded IRC client in full screen 24/7 (one of the few, non-heavy, apps I run in full screen).

You know what would make it more useful, if you could run 4-8 Metro apps at the same time scaled down on the screen at once. Because even in your thumbnail of your 1080p display I can still read 90% of the text easily, I think that kind of shows that when fullscreen everything is way oversized.

But again just my thoughts.

[.Neo]

If the app is a basic one then I agree, but nothing is to say that will always be the case.

I can see it being the case most of the time. I honestly don't care about Microsoft says anymore, being limited to only one full app and one taking up 1/6 of the screen just proofs the company had one thing in mind when designing the interface: tablets and small ultrabooks. Anything else is just an afterthought.

[MattGarner]

Looking at the blog post about multi-displays I thought you was able to have Metro up on one screen all the time and then able to use the other for desktop as normal. But instead it closes metro? I guess I read the blog post wrong, silly me.

[cacoe]

Is scrolling with a mouse any more coherent yet?

Previously, even with some Microsoft apps, scrolling might not work. Sometimes it popped up a metro styled scrollbar, sometimes that was overlayed by a desktop style scrollbar.

Sometimes, you would be able to scroll horizontal and vertical content, sometimes only vertical.

Other times, an app might not even scroll at all with the scroll wheel! On occasion it was dependant as to where the cursor is, at other times, the scroll wheel would only scroll one part of the content on the screen no matter where your cursor was and even when there was extra content that could be scrolled. Sometimes you have to click the alternative content to focus it and scroll, sometimes that didn't work and you'd have to click on a screen scroll bar.

Even with my Logitech keyboard and trackpad combo with multi-touch scroll, scrolling vertically sometimes scrolls content horizontally, sometimes vertically. Same goes for horizontal scrolling, sometimes using it caused vertical scrolling.

This is my biggest gripe with windows 8 on the desktop!

(Disclaimer: I do realise that many of these problems are caused by developers but I don't believe Microsoft gave them clear enough rules to follow when it comes to standard user controls on desktops. Even if it turns out that they did, Microsoft aren't following them very well!)

Oh, try this. Open the weather app. Scroll left and right and leave your cursor in the middle of the screen. Try to scroll the middle section (think it was a 10 day forecast or something). This is one of the inconsistent instances which I'm talking about.

[George P Global Moderator]

You know what would make it more useful, if you could run 4-8 Metro apps at the same time scaled down on the screen at once. Because even in your thumbnail of your 1080p display I can still read 90% of the text easily, I think that kind of shows that when fullscreen everything is way oversized.

But again just my thoughts.

I don't disagree with that option at all, right now it's limited to just 2 as we've seen, probably because that works best with tablets and so on. But I see no reason why this will always be the case, I expect the desktop will be updated (probably in win9 though) to run winrt/metro apps windowed and that we'll get more snap options as well.

[George P Global Moderator]

I can see it being the case most of the time.

Only time will tell and how much developers want to dive into WinRT, if it's mostly basic apps for Win8 I think that will start to change around Win9s time frame. The new APIs have to mature still.

[neo1911]

I ended up uninstalling all the new Metro Apps and pinning desktop apps in their place. The only Metro app I kept was the Weather app. I also uninstalled that POS good for nothing IE10 Metro.

[.Neo]

Only time will tell and how much developers want to dive into WinRT, if it's mostly basic apps for Win8 I think that will start to change around Win9s time frame. The new APIs have to mature still.

With Microsoft not setting much of an example it will probably take a while. In the meantime you can enjoy constantly switching back and forth between Metro and the desktop.

[George P Global Moderator]

With Microsoft not setting much of an example it will probably take a while. In the meantime you can enjoy constantly switching back and forth between Metro and the desktop.

Depending on how often you use both types of apps then it's not much of an issue. If you're using desktop apps 99% of the time then it's just on the times you have to start an app you haven't pinned to your taskbar, and it's a few seconds at the most. Once I have the apps I use open I'm not diving in and out of the start menu in Win7 for example.

[psreloaded]

There you go.

So basically I'm only allowed to have two apps open at the same size, one of which taking up only 1/6 of the screen. That's just amazing? I definitely understand why Microsoft would implement this on smaller screens, but on larger ones it's just a waste.

Yeah, and this is why people have been unhappy about the implementation for Desktop/Laptop user since DP. Welcome to the party... :p