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Windows 8 Developer Preview Screenshots

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Like a lot of you, I got my hands on the Windows Developer Preview of Windows 8, that was made available to the Public following Steven Sinofskis keynote adress on the Build conference earlier this week. I will not provide a review of this build, since it is far from feature complete as well as being pre-beta software.

The Metro-style Interface takes some getting used to, especially since I am having in on a desktop computer without any touch-capabilities, and also having it on a screen with a resolution of 1280×1024.

The Metro-style start-screen

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The Start-screen that welcomes you in Windows 8

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By moving the mouse to the lower left corner the so-called charm-menu appears – as well as the time and date.

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By scrolling right with the mouse the tiles with the applications I have added appears. All these can be rearranged to your own hearts delight.

The classic windows desktop

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When hitting the desktop tile on the start-screen you end up here on the classic Windows desktop – sans the classic Start menu.

Internet Explorer 10

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There are two versions of Internet Explorer 10 in WDP; this one being the full-screen version Metro-style one.

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The Metro-style IE10 does not allow any plug-ins and has a very minimalistic interface.

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You can bring up other “tabs” by hitting the right-click button.

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Hitting the IE-icon in the taskbar brings up the more familiar version of IE10 – which allows plug-ins and add-ons.

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The version of IE10 included in the Windows Developer Preview is numbered 10.0.8102.0 – Pre-release version.

Windows Explorer

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A lot has been made of the fact that Windows Explorer now includes a ribbon;

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This is the home tab on the Windows Explorer ribbon for the Pictures library.

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Here is the Share tab in the Pictures library.

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The View-tab on the ribbon looks like this.

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And the Manage-tab looks like this.

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The Picture Tools Manage-tab looks like this in the Pictures library

The Control Panel

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When accessing the Control Panel from the new Metro-style start screen you end up in this view

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The more familiar look of the Control Panel is still available – here grouped by category

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And here organized by large icons.

Metro-style apps

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The weather-app included is just beautiful, with an animated background pictures illustrating present weather-conditions

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A native twitter-app is also included; Tweet@rama

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It is great-looking, but lacks too much functionality to be of any use.

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The RSS News Reader included also gives a good Metro-style view of your feeds latest posts.

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Microsoft once again confirmed that an app-store will be available in Windows 8, although not yet available in the Windows Developer Preview

Miscellaneous

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By opening the Charm-bar and choosing Settings, you bring up a context sensitive settings menu on the right side of the screen. Here related to the Desktop. Not too many options available yet, although it shows off info on Network, volume, Notifications, language selection and power-options.

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The Windows Task Manager has got a new look. This is the rather minimalistic look that greets you when opening it.

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By selecting the More details option in the previous image you get this view. Here we see that when you switch between apps in the Metro-style Start-screen the non-active apps are put in a suspend mode.

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The Performance tab in the Task Manager also has a revamped view.

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There is a new App History view in the Task Manager as well.

Old style Windows applications

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“Old style” Windows applications works just like before; here the beautiful Metrotwit application made by Long Zheng.

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And here is Word Pad.

I have installed Windows Developer Preview in a dual-boot on both my desktop and laptop in order to tinker with it and try out the new UI. I am not completely sold on the UI for a desktop situation quite yet, but will give it a try to see whether this is a good idea or not. The WDP is in no way ready to replace your daily work-environment but if you do have the space available, partition your hard disc and try it out for yourself in order to form your own opinion. You can download the WDP from here.

This will be the future of Windows going forward…

Your thoughts and comments?


Popularity: 3% [?]

Have you read more than 6 of these books?

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?Have you read more than 6 of these books? The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here.

Instructions: Copy this into your notes. Bold those books you’ve read in their entirety,italicise the ones you started but didn’t finish or read an excerpt. Tag other book nerds.

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR TolkienThe Lord of the Rings
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte

4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34 Emma – Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany – John Irving
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52 Dune – Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zifon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Inferno – Dante
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession – AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factoy – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

 

So what about you? Have you read more than 6 of these?


Popularity: 6% [?]

Internet Explorer 9 Beta is here!

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Today, September 15th 2010, Internet Explorer 9 Beta went public. And the only way to sum up my first impressions is – wow – IE is back in the game. I have been using Google Chrome for the last year. I like its simple user interface and speed, compared to IE 8, which became slower and slower to me. IE 9 on the other hand is slick, slim and fast.

I will test the browser more thoroughly in the weeks to come, and will for now only show you some screenshots with my comments after a few hours use. For more in debth information Ed Bott and Paul Thurrott have both written up their impressions after a few weeks use and both articles are really worth reading.

 

If you want to download the beta yourself head on over to the beautyoftheweb.com site to get the bits;

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Underneath are a few screenshots I have taken that shows IE 9 Beta in action;

 

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The IE 9 Beta site that welcomes you after installing it

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My homepage setup in IE 9 Beta with the LastPass add-in and the Favorites bar.

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My Hotmail inbox with the taskbar preview of all the tabs showing at the bottom.

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IE 9 Beta allows you to pin tabs to the taskbar, and for sites to make spesific jump lists for their sites. Paul Thurrotts’ winsupersite.com already has that functionality enabled as seen on this screenshot.

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The open new tab displays this page. Yes, there is definitely something similar to Chrome here, and I am pretty sure that a lot of people will compare IE 9 Beta to Chrome due to this and the general layout of the browser. It still feels different in all the right places.

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Like in Chrome you now search directly from the addressbar. But unlike Chrome the more secure option is default and you have to actively select to turn on search suggestions – which means that your keystrokes are transmitted over the net.

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Here I have locked the Favorties pane on the left, and here I am missing one of my simple but favorite UI solution from IE 7 and 8; the little blue arrow that pops up on the right side of your bookmarked links which enabled me to with just one click open the link in a new tab. Here I either have to right click and then choose “open link in new tab” or hold down CTRL while clicking the link – Microsoft – please bring back the blue right arrow.

To sum it up; Impressive and a total redesign of Internet Explorer. It is fast, it is good looking, it has great integration with Windows 7 and it really looks promising going forward. I have already made it my default browser and it will be interesting to see how I feel about it after more regular use of it. If you are using some other browser, it being an older version of IE or one of the competing browsers like Firefox or Chrome you ought to test this one out – you will be positively surprised

 

Two thumbs up!


Popularity: 6% [?]

Windows Live Essentials 2011 Beta 2 Available

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