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I just have time to read over Thurrott's and MJF's blogs, I have the feeling that Thurrott didn't have the actual build, what he showed was a enumerated shot, just like the same one shown by win8china earlier.

However, win8china said they have seen it on a MS internal build, and they are trusted, so I guess the start button thing is legit nonetheless.

I don't much care about the button, I think the other changes are way better. Boot to desktop is nice, having the same wallpaper for both UIs is finally something people have been asking for since the start. Add in the other things we've seen, unified search etc and this looks like a solid upgrade.

I'm going to want to remove that extra unneeded start button pronto.

having the Desktop and Start menu background the same might look cool, not sure. We will see.

I doubt I will bother booting to the Desktop either, it's simply not a big deal.

Regardless, I'm certainly looking forward to the 8.1 preview and I will quickly install it onto my PC and tablet.

Neowin had an OP whereby a female MS rep stated in an interview video that, the preview and final release would be obtained from the store in Windows 8. it was a couple weeks ago roughly

This build seems to be older than the build showed by Microsoft in their blog since there is no start button.

The build they showed could just be from an internal branch that they're not sharing out to partners so it doesn't have all the bits. It sounds like MS showed the build off to some select media bloggers a while ago, maybe a week before their own blog post.

This build seems to be older than the build showed by Microsoft in their blog since there is no start button.

Yeah, May 15 is 2 weeks old, according to win8china the start button only appeared on a "internal build"; and I have seen in PCPortal mentioning that is on a "ecosystem fundamental(fun-eco)" build. I guess(it's a guess) Thurrott's shot was a mock-up like the win8china shot,

Windows 8 team seriously needs to re-consider some of the UI elements and how they are positioned on the screen. Look at the All apps screenshot in #34 and see how that down arrow for the list is spaced away from "by name"? Looks completely weird IMO, shouldn't be too difficult to use an "elastic" control. :/

FFS Windows team, stop and look at your Windows Phones and now look back at what you are doing.

(I know work in progress blah blah but history is not with the Windows 8 team).

I thought start button will "always" be visible when in desktop mode? Will it only be an overlay?

Quoting MJF's description, maybe it also applies to the desktop :
When users are on the Start Screen or inside of a Metro-Style/Windows Store app, according to my source, the new Start Button won't be visible. It only will become visible if/when a user moves the mouse to the bottom left corner. Instead of seeing the thumbnail of apps that Windows 8 users see when the mouse over the left corner, they'll supposedly see the new Start Button instead.
When users are on the Start Screen or inside of a Metro-Style/Windows Store app, according to my source, the new Start Button won't be visible. It only will become visible if/when a user moves the mouse to the bottom left corner. Instead of seeing the thumbnail of apps that Windows 8 users see when the mouse over the left corner, they'll supposedly see the new Start Button instead.

No. Put the tile preview back.

  • Like 2

It'd be nice if there is a setting to pick which one you actually want. I'd like to see a screenshot of the new metro IE11s tabs, Ed Bott said that they've moved the tabs down to the bottom now, above the address bar, and that it's a scrolling list like how the recent and bookmarks would show up. That's a good thing since it gets rid of the annoying 10 tab limit metro IE has at the moment. Also like to see the new favorites in metro IE11 as well.

  • Like 1

If after all that bull$hit Microsoft spew about return of start button, only to replace the preview tile by hover on Fake start button, it is clear that Metro is going to be shoved down our throats. This time very hard.

I have not yet downloaded a single app in my Windows 8 pc for last few months and still feel that I am not missing anything.

However at this stage we can still expect drastic changes in final build.

Build 9418 compiled May 30 :)

http://bbs.pcbeta.com/viewthread-1347053-1-1.html

screen1436.jpg

screen1437.jpg

btw, in the 9415 pics, the PCBeta guy had to take shots (of the installation screens) with his phone, and someone pointed out that from the mon reflections he is in a MS China office(who doubted the pics were not real? LOL), unfortunately it also showed the shirt he was wearing and could be traced with CCTV.....good luck to the good guy. :/

http://bbs.pcbeta.com/forum.php?mod=redirect&goto=findpost&ptid=1346868&pid=36229872

both 9415 & 9418 guys are MS people.

The same guy who posted 9418 posted this shot of win8.1 feature, which is a boosted sync feature of win8, in Weibo(Chinese Micro-blog). He didn't mention which build, but since he installed 9418, guess it's from this build(There is a "0100~0800 curfew" in PCBeta, and probably other Chinese forums to avoid sex spams).

screen1440.jpg

Translation: Win8.1 now allows to transfer devices from old to new PC, what's more from the win8 sync is now it supports transfering software/apps and hardware datas, so it's not needed to do the set-up bit by bit.

screen1439.jpg

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