I’m a fairly neutral guy when it comes to operating systems. I just use what I need to get the job done. I’ve recently had more of a bias towards Mac OS, simply because I find it clean and easy to work with. In fact, my advice to friends is usually to go buy a Mac (which is mostly not followed, since a lot of people can’t get past the cost of the things).
My day job however is on Windows, and there are lots of things to like on that platform – especially for a more advanced computer user who doesn’t mind a bit of configuration here and there, and getting their hands dirty. I also love the software technology on Windows – .NET, WPF, Silverlight, XAML, Visual Studio 2010, etc. As a software developer Microsoft really do spoil you for any other platform. XCode 4 is new and shiny, no doubt, but I for one don’t ‘get it’ yet. It would be easy to get religious about all this stuff, but in the end I mostly just want to get things done.
What does get me excited are new and shiny toys to play with. Windows 8 is certainly that. Once I saw the public developer preview release was up, I started figuring out how I could get it installed and have a play without trashing the rest of my box. Last night, I cleaned out a drive, formatted it, and installed Windows 8 on it. Reading the MSDN forums, some developers had trouble getting back to Windows 7 after an install on the same partition, and I figured the safest way was on a clean drive. The install went without a hitch and I now have a dual boot machine which lets me play with all the new goodies; VC 2011, Metro UI, Expression Blend, and all the new features in Windows 8.
After a few hours playing, and a late night to bed, I can say that Windows 8 is a lot of fun. The forums are full of people complaining about the start menu changing into a toggle for the Metro UI, and wondering where the program list is, along with various complaints about other changes. I’m used to switching paradigms, however, and I find the new system already makes a lot of sense. The provided sample apps all work more or less as advertised, and while they are obviously in need of some finishing touches here and there, they are pretty impressive for work by a bunch of college interns (who Microsoft drafted in to write them over 10 weeks). I don’t have a tablet to compare the experience on, but I’m already at the conclusion that Microsoft are going to nail this one. It’s no mean feat to make an OS that is confortable to use on a desktop machine and a tablet (not to mention the phone). If you haven’t seen the videos, it’s worth a trip over to http://www.buildwindows.com
I installed a bunch of different apps on the box to see if I could break it, and the only thing I couldn’t get working was 3DStudio Max, because I couldn’t get the installer to work. I imagine that will be easily fixed. It is a shame though, because with Max I could potentially have used the OS for real work and got used to it as I went along. I did like the windows dialog that popped up telling me that the installer was trying to add .NET 3.5, and was that OK?
One thing I don’t like so much is the domain setup. Although I installed VPN software just fine, it took me a while to get the machine onto our domain, and then to figure out you can ‘link’ your Live ID to that account. Mostly the problem was I needed to make my domain account an administrator for the box. I found the popup dialog with multiple login options a bit confusing – and annoying since it appears quite a lot, especially when you are trying to remember/figure out how to change the user privileges on the system. Yet again I found myself moving towards turning off the User Account Control so I could make the dialog go away. But after a while of figuring all that out, I had a Windows 8 box connected to VPN and getting email via Outlook 2010.
One thing that I really like is the generally snappy feel. Windows 8 certainly feels even faster than Windows 7 (which I think is pretty fast these days). I love the new file copy dialog with graphs of copy speed and progress. Copying a file of my NAS drive seems to go faster than I’ve ever seen it; I’m not sure why, but I do like it!
I’m really excited to try the new developer tools, especially the HTML5 + JavaScript support. Perhaps I’ll get some time to play with that over the weekend.
