Windows 8 designers are blind.

[anidais]

The most obvious answer is that it was a last minute decision to change the Aero theme. They were doing minor tweaks to the theme the previews and had touted a feature to have auto-color for Aero Glass originally. That changed all of a sudden right before the RP came out and suddenly we hear about a new theme to flatten the OS.

The auto-color feature is still there. I also think they did not plan to replace Aero with the new theme until the RP came out. I think it was a wise choice. As nice as the RP theme looked, it really didn't fit the new start screen at all. While the desktop still doesn't match 100% with the start screen, at least it fits much better than Aero.

[L.H.O.O.Q.]

I actually like Metro style very much.

No more skeuomorphism BS, just nice, stylish, crisp, and modern chrome, topped with content.

But instead of just flattening everything (I wouldn't mind), they decided to leave a mess here and there.

Oh I'm still moving to Windows 8 for sure.

But the mixing of Metro and Aero and icons from different time,

along with the bloody UI inconsistency and weird logic, is definitely gonna annoy the crap out of me.

[hotdog666al]

Notepad, though, is an app so ancient, it's just excess baggage at this point. It should be stripped out in favor of Wordpad, which HAS been updated with the Ribbon UI. It wouldn't take much work to match it up with the rest.

I find myself pasting code snippets into notepad more or less every day at work, also using it to quickly strip formatting when pasting stuff into wysiwyg editors etc. Total nightmare for me using rich text editors like Wordpad, please don't say Notepad is useless, because it's used more often than you think.

Just because something is old, doesn't mean it's useless. :/

[Shane Nokes]

I find myself pasting code snippets into notepad more or less every day at work, also using it to quickly strip formatting when pasting stuff into wysiwyg editors etc. Total nightmare for me using rich text editors like Wordpad, please don't say Notepad is useless, because it's used more often than you think.

Just because something is old, doesn't mean it's useless. :/

Indeed. I use Notepad way more than Wordpad.

[contextfree]

re WordPad, I didn't like the redesign in Windows 7 as having the ribbon just feels wrong to me in a lightweight text editor. Though I do like it in Win8 Explorer, go figure.

[contextfree]

Connect the tile to a data source that's polling the OS. I'm guessing that Windows handles the data fetching frequency, so it won't be a real-time CPU monitor.

Making it completely useless.

[KevinN206]

Frankly, I would have never noticed any of the OP highlighted points. This isn't to minimize it, but it apparently made no difference because my eyes couldn't tell if it's a pixel off.

[grayscale]

Frankly, I would have never noticed any of the OP highlighted points. This isn't to minimize it, but it apparently made no difference because my eyes couldn't tell if it's a pixel off.

This. Those are things that you stare at all the time. Especially if it's a just a pixel off.