8 things about windows 8: living in metro

I’ve been running Windows 8 for well over 6 months as my production operating system, but the funny thing is you wouldn’t normally notice unless you asked “where’s the Windows logo in the lower left hand corner?” and that is because I spend a lot of time in desktop applications today.  My primary personal and work machines have touch screens, so it isn’t that I don’t have the touch experience, it’s more about choices.  So today I spent some time purposely living in more of the Metro apps that Microsoft has in the Windows 8 operating system and internal applications they have started to roll out for our use.

I showed how I can use mail, messaging and calendar in a previous post, but there are apps for videos, music, web browsing, word of the day, reading, just about every category you can imagine.

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our intranet viewed from the Metro Internet Explorer (even tells you there are add-ons that require Internet Explorer on the desktop and allow you to either continue without them or switch to the desktop brower).

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once you become used to the tabs at the top and the address bar at the bottom (and the frequent sites on a new tab), it becomes a much easier transition to the Metro IE

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the music app allows you to get your favorite tunes playing and it even runs in the background!

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if you adjust your sound in a Metro app, the music playing is also displayed.

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the video (and music) app have access not only to my local content, but my Xbox Music and Video content, too!

Ironically, I spent most of my time working in these and other internal Metro applications today, but then to post my experiences, I opened Windows Live Writer which runs on the desktop!  Maybe it’s ironic or for me it just further emphasized how Windows 8 will be these new experiences along with the old favorites.

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It will be interesting to see how quickly I adapt to these new experiences now that I have mainly touch screens (but most have a keyboard, too).  Stay tuned…