Microsoft Launches Windows 8 Consumer Preview

suraj.sun writes "Microsoft on Wednesday made the Consumer Preview of Windows 8 available for download to the general public. Built with touch computing and apps in mind, Windows 8 is crucial to Microsoft's efforts to make inroads against Apple and Google in the red-hot tablet market, where the company is significantly behind rivals. Windows 8 marks the biggest change to the OS since the aforementioned 95 flavor (which, shockingly, turns 17 this year). With Windows 8 comes the introduction of a Metro-style interface, inspired by the lovely and intuitive presentation found in Windows Phone. In it, apps and functions are pinned to tiles and, to interact with those apps, you simply tap those tiles. The former Start Menu has been replaced by a full-screen view of tiles that you can scroll through horizontally. You can pin applications, shortcuts, documents, webpages and any number of other things, customizing the interface in any way you like — so long as what you like is rectangular and only extends from left to right." MrSeb wrote on with info on generating a USB stick installer from the available images, and itwebennet with details about IE10.

Comments

Sponsered by MS Sales article?

[cayenne8]

I have to believe this is one of the new "sales" type posts on slashdot. The part saying "inspired by the lovely and intuitive presentation found in Windows Phone" sounds more like a sales brochure, than a post about a new OS product on a Slashdot front page...?

Re:Lovely and Intuitive?

[tibit]

If you don't know about that, you're really wasting a lot of time. Did you truly believe there are no new tricks to be learned as you upgrade your Windows? It's not like an undocumented poweruser thing. The damn key is on the keyboard, and has been for a while, what about pressing it every once in a while to see if they added any new functionality to it...

It's been quite long on both Windows and Mac since you actually had to browse lists to pick up items from them. You know, computers are quite good at looking things up. Command line with suggestions has come back, and it's known as Search or Spotlight.

Lists/menus/files in folders are good when you don't know what you're looking for. Once you remember the name (or a sample of contents) of the thing you need, let the machine find it for you.

</rant>