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Contra-Gruber I'm betting ARM Windows 8 devices will have some mode that looks and feels just like Windows desktop. It may not be the default and it may be a dumbed down version of it but I can't imagine them shipping without it.
Metro to me, and I hate to say it, reminds me of MS Bob, and frankly of the original Windows 3.1 except where in that case it was a layer on DOS, this seems like a gloss on Windows 7. I hope for the sake of innovation I'm wrong, but it is frankly more bizarre than Launchpad (and that's saying something). Let me show: https://skitch.com/ethank/f3drj/windows-8-x64-preview then https://skitch.com/ethank/f3drc/windows-8-…
[1] http://www.winsupersite.com/article/windows8/windows-8-devel...
Virtualization could enable you to run a legacy app, stop its processing instantly, bring up a new app, and save the 'background app' state to storage when it's convenient.
This seems to be where they are heading. I don't know how it would translate to ARM tablets, but intel wants in on tablets anyway.
http://thenextweb.com/microsoft/2011/08/03/windows-8-to-have...
Thinking about it, isn’t window an odd word choice for what we call movable, stackable, resizeable content regions in a user interface? Other than being rectangular they’re not like real-world windows at all. I can remember my high school computer studies teacher explaining they're called windows because they're split into panes. Microsoft Windows versions 1 and 2 didn't actually have stackable overlapping windows (y…
>You can ask Mac apps to behave like iOS apps, which is what Lion’s Automatic Termination feature does, but it has to be opt-in. Virtualization could enable you to run a legacy app, stop its processing instantly, bring up a new app, and save the 'background app' state to storage when it's convenient. This seems to be where they are heading. I don't know how it would translate to ARM tablets, but intel wants in on tab…
Contra-Gruber I'm betting ARM Windows 8 devices will have some mode that looks and feels just like Windows desktop. It may not be the default and it may be a dumbed down version of it but I can't imagine them shipping without it.
I believe it's already confirmed that Win8 ARM devices will indeed be Metro-only - no legacy Desktop whatsoever.
edit reading through the comments shows a commensurate level of better discussion than the usual Gruber response as well.
>I think Metro will only run alongside the traditional Windows desktop on Intel PCs. On ARM devices, there will only be Metro. It seems there will be a desktop mode for ARM tablets if you look 1:40 into the video here: http://thisismynext.com/2011/09/14/nvidia-kal-el-windows-8-t... The desktop mode doesn't seem to immediately respond to touch like Metro. It will be interesting to see the final product and how well Wi…
But it won't work, because those apps won't be available on ARM, and even if they were, they wouldn't be designed for touch. So Microsoft is starting from scratch, and this time they have strong competition from both iOS and Android.
In this market, their Windows dominance doesn't matter as much, so they are on equal footing with the others. And I find that very exciting. If you notice, Microsoft is innovating only when it's the underdog in some way, not really when it dominates.
So I hope 5 years from now we'll get to see iOS, Android and Windows with about equal market share each for "personal computing devices", whatever that means 5 years from now.