Windows Archive

"Windows Server 2012 probably won't have the adoption lag in the enterprise that Windows 8 is bound to face. That's because, aside from the Metro GUI, Server 2012's biggest changes are in substance rather than style, building upon what the company delivered with Windows Server 2008 Release 2 three years ago. In particular, Server 2012 takes two management features Server 2008 R2 admins will be familiar with - Server Manager and PowerShell - and expands on them considerably."

The Verge published a video demonstrating how desktop mode and Office 2013 - a desktop application - work on Windows RT, the ARM version of Windows 8. The video showed a desktop mode that clearly didn't work well for touch, and even Office 2013, which has a rudimentary touch mode built-in, didn't work properly either. It looked and felt clunky, often didn't respond properly, and even showed touch lag.

With Windows 8 right around the corner, the usual game of reading the end-user license agreements and spotting the different versions is in full swing. Usually, this is a game of ridicule as Microsoft comes up with ever more convoluted version schemes and EULA terms. This time around, though, the company seems to be taking steps to make things easier, as Ed Bott reports.

Microsoft has made Windows 8's final release available to MSDN and TechNet subscribers, so if you are one of those - have fun. The 90-day trial has also been released, so us mere mortals can have a go at it as well. The evaluation version is Windows 8 Enterprise, so it contains a number of features regular users normally won't see. As far as I can tell - it's a bit unclear - the trial version cannot be upgraded to a final version a few months down the line. Happy testing!

"Here's the official guidance, my sources say: Anything currently/formerly known as a 'Metro-Style application' (with or without a hyphen) will now be known officially as a 'Windows 8 application'. References to the 'Metro user interface' will now be replaced by "Windows 8 user interface." And instead of saying 'Metro design', the Softies and those adhering to their official guidelines will be using the words 'Windows 8 design'." Microsoft not being allowed to use the Metro name here is just as ridiculous as Apple trolling Samsung. All ridiculous exponents of the western world's IP fetish.

Now that Windows 8 has gone gold, Microsoft can move on to other things. With Windows 8, the most important of these is probably to make sure people know how to actually use it. Metro is filled to the brim with hard-to-discover features, but Microsoft has a plan. Will it be enough?

"Though Windows 7 doesn't quite have the same experience when it comes to resolution and scaling control as OS X does - it can be a bit of a chore to get it just the way you like it - it's still quite useable on the Retina MacBook Pro's 15" 2880 x 1800 pixel screen. I recommend running Windows at full resolution with the 150 percent scaling setting - that seemed to give the best overall usability. 'Retina' class desktop displays are still a relative rarity today, so it will be some time before software developers adapt applications to best take advantage of such a resolution. In the meantime, you should have no trouble running Windows on the Retina MacBook Pro if the need arises." A look at how Windows 8 handles the display would've been nice, too.

A very detailed post at the Building Windows 8 blog about the graphics subsystem in Windows 8 - very interesting. One part stood out to me, though: "The Metro style design language is typographically rich and a number of Metro style experiences are focused on providing an excellent reading experience. DirectWrite enables great typographic quality, super-fast processing of font data for rendering, and provides industry-leading global text support. We've continued to improve text performance in Windows 8 by optimizing our default text rendering in Metro style apps to deliver better performance and efficiency, while maintaining typographic quality and global text support." All this still doesn't explain why text rendering on Metro (so not the classic desktop) had to be made as horrible as it is. Please, for the love of god, give us the option of turning ClearType's subpixel RGB optimisation back on for Metro applications. Fonts look horrible without it, which is kind of ironic given how font-heavy Metro is.

"When we began planning how touch and new types of PCs might work on Windows 8, we recognized the need to provide an effective method for text entry on tablets and other touch screen PCs. Since Windows XP SP1, which had Tablet PC features built in, Windows has included a touchable on-screen keyboard. But those features were designed as extensions to the desktop experience. For Windows 8, we set out to improve on that model and introduce text input support that meets people's needs, matches our design principles, and works well with the form factors we see today and expect to see in the future." If it's even 50% as good as the windows Phone 7 keyboard, they've got a winner. Still haven't found a touch keyboard that even comes close to WP7's keyboard.

Ars Technica is running an interesting article about the Mail application on Windows 8. It's one of the first party Metro applications, and Ars' conclusion is that it's really, really not up to snuff - it can't even compare favourably to the mail application on Windows Phone. The sad thing is, however - this applies to virtually all Metro applications.

"Windows 8 is on track to Release to Manufacturing the first week of August. For enterprise customers with Software Assurance benefits, they will have full access to Windows 8 bits as early as August. Additionally, she noted that RTM is when we’ll be turning on the commerce platform so that developers can start earning money for their apps. Tami went on to say that Windows 8 will reach general availability by the end of October! This means that new Windows 8 and Windows RT PCs will be available to buy and upgrades will be available starting in October. She also mentioned that that Windows 8 will be available in 109 languages across 231 markets worldwide."

Microsoft is continuing its efforts to simplify its product lines, and has cut the number of versions for the next release of Windows Server down from twelve to just four: Datacenter, Standard, Essentials, and Foundation. Pretty straightforward. Windows Home Server gets axed, but then again, I don't think anybody bought Windows Home Servers anyway.

HP has told Bloomberg reporter Dina Bass that the company has no plans to sell ARM-based Windows 8 tablets initially (thanks, The Verge) - it will only do x86 tablets. This may actually explain why Microsoft is getting into the business of selling its own tablets: other than Asus, not a single company has announced a Windows ARM tablet. Pretty abysmal start for Windows RT.

Since its introduction at Microsoft's BUILD conference last September, Windows 8 has garnered a large measure of attention, especially with regards to the new Metro interface. The feature that intrigued me the most, however, was the inclusion of Hyper-V.