Chaps,
Andrew and Stephen, if you have become productive on Win8, then I am tempted to pay you for tutorials. Do have a specific example of familiar daily tasks that work in some superior way? What's this "pinning" you like, can I try it? I hadn't thought about the corporate training side issues. Lord knows how this will be rolled out in big companies The mind boggles at getting the carbon blobs from sector 7G to upgrade and get back to work. As a programmer mostly on web and desktop for the moment I'm really worried about conventions and standards. For decades I've had UI guidelines and conventions about usability and how apps should look and feel and not frighten users. Then WPF came along and everything went rubbery. Now Win8 has come along and everything is melting jelly. How the hell am I supposed to write an app that runs nicely in Win8? Are there any guidelines? Multi-OS targeting issues!? These and a zillion other on-the-ground questions about writing real-world apps now. I'm am utterly bewildered where Microsoft is going both artistically and practically. Perhaps I will be less irritable and confused if someone could explain in clear developer's geeky technical practical terms why Win8 looks like it does and how I am supposed to respond to it. Any links anyone? The list of points that Ian posted are quite sharp. I also wondered why apps are full screen (on my bloody great screen), where the app menus /options/etc and close buttons are. All of the familiar paradigms that are arguably necessary in software have vanished or moved. I mean, every app needs "options" of some sort, and needs to be closed (unless I've woken up in the 23rd century and everything has changed utterly). I eventually managed to join my Domain somehow, but why demand a Live login up front? Alt+anykey or other weird keystrokes will do something random (like 1980s word processors). Moving the mouse around is like exploring in a maze. Hitting Windows key flips between completely different modes, like I'm running two totally different operating systems at once. Overall, I'm bewildered and angry at being reduced to a bumbling incompetent despite 35 years experience on dozens of platforms, it's like the designers of Win8 had bets on who could invent to most counter-intuitive tricks and traps possible to obfuscate everything as a gargantuan practical joke (like the Office ribbon). I'm also angry as a developer because I have no clear direction now about what to learn or what to use for Win8 (if it matters!). The future of Windows software development has become really muddy. As Homer Simpson said, "it's my first day", so perhaps by next week I'll be struck by a techno-epiphany and apologise for what I've said. Greg P.S. My favourite example of Win8 bafflement is trying to figure out how to shut the damn thing down. I leave that as an exercise for the reader.
