Windows 8 Customer Preview is finally here. Customer Preview being a fancy name for beta.

I’m running mine in a virtual machine with 4gb memory and a 60Gb hard drive. I won’t bore you with the installation which is almost identical to Windows 7. The only notable difference is the option to customise the installation or use Express settings. But at the end of the day the day, Windows 8 was installed.

I logged in using my Hotmail account, no fuss there. And there was what met my eyes. (I had seen this before, Windows 8 Developer Preview to be exact, so I wasn’t surprised)

 

 

Experience

I have used a mouse and keyboard all my computing life and I really had initial problems with applications in this interface. Opening apps was dead simple, click on it and it opens. No funny tricks there. Closing, well that was another issue. Except those applications like windows Explorer which I opened in Desktop mode, I could not close these apps. No close buttons, no exit menus. Maybe its me, or maybe these apps are not supposed to be closed I don’t know.

Apps

Most Windows apps, have been made into Metro apps, including a calendar, Mail app, messaging app and it’s a refreshing new look. Of course in using them I kept looking for the exit buttons, which naturally do not exist in these Metro happy apps.

It took me some few minutes to realise that the options bar at the bottom, is activated by right clicking anywhere in the app.

The other app was Calendar, looks clean and new and allows me to actually create events and reminders without Outlook. Hooraayy. Event invitations also worked like a charm. They are most likely using Hotmails calendar function to achieve this. After realising that my invitations were having the wrong time, I had to change the time zone. Don’t remember being asked about my time zone anywhere in the setup process

 

Windows explorer, in windows 8 as we saw in the  Developer Preview has been ribbonised. This means that it resembles and works like the ribbon in Office 2012. This means, some menu options are activated or displayed based on selected items. Besides that its still our old and lovely explorer and works as expected.

 

Start Button

There is no start menu in Windows 8. I’m not sure whether to be hapy or sad. But its not there. But its functionality still exists. If you start typing, your results start coming out whether you press the Windows key or not. Which is pretty actually, remove one click from opening my apps. The moment I started typing des (for desktop) these results came up:

Solitaire

Solitaire was one of the first games I played on windows. I smiled when I saw that it now has a metro version. But for some reason I struggled to play it. Every time I tried moving cards (with my mouse) nothiing was moving. Maybe its just me.

 

Internet Explorer

Internet explorer has two versions in Windows 8. One is the metro IE10 and the other is the full desktop version. The metro version is limited in that it does not run plugins (like flash), whilst the desktop version has all the bells and whistles expected from a browser.

App Store

The app store seems to be straight forward. You open the store, find the app you want, you install. That’s it. That’s exactly what I did when I installed cut the rope.

 

 

Desktop Experience

File copying as highlighted in the Windows 8 Blogs, has a new dialog box.

 

 

Check the Second Part of the Blog for more insight into the Windows 8 Customer Preview.

I have lots of stuff to rant about Google Docs and its ability to work with Word document files that contain nothing but simple text and upload file sizes. And yet they are calling themselves an Ms Word alternative.

First of all, they only allow uploading of that are only less than 2MB. Maybe this guys have the wrong calendar or something, but mine says 2011. And that means i should be allowed to upload a file of any size (for sanity’s sake, lets say any file size as long as its below 2Gb). and be allowed to edit it.

To show i’m not just rambling about nothing, i was working in my faithful Ms Word, doing a user manual for a recently developed system (yes i’m a developer). After having finished my part, i was supposed to hand it over to a colleague to add more flesh into, and a brilliant idea came to mind. Why not use Google Docs excellent collaboration tools so we don’t have to email the 9Mb file back and forth.

So i proceeded to open my Google and started the document upload. After waiting for a few seconds, the verdict came back, my document was deemed too large by the Google jury and would not be allowed into Doc’s 2Mb club.

So there ended my collaboration dream, because Google thought my 9MB file was too big for their Docs Server. Just to make sure this wasn’t an industry standard, i opened Skydrive and uploaded the same document and opened it for editing and managed to share it within a minute.

Ok, i have a soft spot for Google, so i might forgive them, maybe with all the millions of gmails being sent around the world, they are running out of space.

Then came the second incident a few minutes after this one.

For the same development project named above, i created a two paged report in word and decided once again to share it with my colleague. Simple document, no fancy markup, a few paragraphs with a few bold headings and thats it. Thought this would be a breeze in Google Docs, its below 2Mb and its text only.

But alas, how wrong i was. Uploaded the document and it opened it in editing mode. And the document had been butchered by Google Docs. The nice paragraphs which spaced the text nicely into blocks (of paragraphs), gone!. My original text was all calibri and it had been converted into Times New Roman. the painful this about this is that calibri is available as a font in the edit box font selection  box.

Maybe it just me and my tired laptop, or Google really needs to up its game. In case you might have better luck than me, here is the original document, (replaced the actual report text with replacement text). Upload it into your Google Docs and see if it works out for you.

For now i’m back to emailing documents to my work colleagues, and yes you guessed it, with Gmail, which thankfully still works properly.

 

 

This is the first post of many, that should include tit bits of information from technology related issues like women, soccer, children etc. Hmm, no i meant issue like Windows 8, Apple’s IOS, IPhone, IPad, and anything digital.

This will be done in my free 20% of my time (which in actual fact is never free). Feel free to register an account for comments and discussions.

My first posts will be related to the Windows 8 Developer preview which has had me pulling out my hair in frustration, but i’m still alive. So stay tuned as i meticulously wrote my pains down in the next post.

Till then…