Microsoft’s carefully timed unveiling of Windows 8 has been frustratingly incomplete. Today’s launch of the Release Preview fills in many of the missing pieces, with the biggest surprise being a rich and polished collection of Metro style apps.
Microsoft publicly unveiled the Windows 8 Release Preview today. If you’ve been skeptical of Windows 8 so far, prepare to be surprised.
Microsoft’s painstakingly staged reveal started with a Developer Preview last September, followed by a Consumer Preview at the end of February. Each milestone has unveiled new features, but the overall picture has been frustratingly incomplete.
This milestone release fills in many of the missing pieces and offers a much more nuanced picture of what the final release will look like.
Take a gallery tour: Windows 8 from every angle: A closer look at the Release Preview
I don’t expect it to silence the skeptics who think that the Metro-izing of Windows is a strategic blunder, a franchise killer that deserves a place alongside epic failures like New Coke and Star Wars: Episode 1. But if you’ve managed to retain an open mind about Windows 8, the Release Preview goes a long way toward making sense of Windows 8’s controversial design decisions.
If Windows 8 were being developed like its predecessors, the pace of change would be decelerating rapidly at this point, and reviewers would be focusing on the minutiae of system-level tasks. Instead, Microsoft has quickened the development tempo dramatically. To understand why, you have to look at what makes Windows 8 so fundamentally different from its predecessors.
Over the past two decades, Microsoft has released roughly a dozen major desktop versions of Windows. Each one has included a predictable mix: the core of the operating system, a collection of essential system utilities (think Windows Explorer and Control Panel), and a motley assortment of underpowered apps (Calculator and Paint being the canonical examples).
Windows 8 turns that mix on its head. The underlying operating system is solid, reliable, full-featured, and impressively fast. But it’s no longer the star. The apps included with Windows 8 are the true stars of the new OS. Out of the box, a Windows 8 device will include a full suite of robust apps to handle communications (mail and messaging), digital media, and information.
The built-in apps in the Windows 8 Release Preview are light-years ahead of the rudimentary “app previews” that were included with the Consumer Preview release. Collectively, they leverage Microsoft’s enormous multi-year investments in productivity software, digital media, and online services.
The biggest surprise is a trio of new Metro style apps that aggregate news, sports, and travel in a way that really shows what a well-designed Metro app is capable of doing. These apps, along with the previously released Finance and Weather apps, depend on an extraordinarily tight level of integration with Microsoft’s Bing search platform.
Continue Here : Windows 8 Release Preview: Microsoft gets its apps together | ZDNet
Download Link :
Download Windows 8 Release Preview
Microsoft publicly unveiled the Windows 8 Release Preview today. If you’ve been skeptical of Windows 8 so far, prepare to be surprised.
Microsoft’s painstakingly staged reveal started with a Developer Preview last September, followed by a Consumer Preview at the end of February. Each milestone has unveiled new features, but the overall picture has been frustratingly incomplete.
This milestone release fills in many of the missing pieces and offers a much more nuanced picture of what the final release will look like.
Take a gallery tour: Windows 8 from every angle: A closer look at the Release Preview
I don’t expect it to silence the skeptics who think that the Metro-izing of Windows is a strategic blunder, a franchise killer that deserves a place alongside epic failures like New Coke and Star Wars: Episode 1. But if you’ve managed to retain an open mind about Windows 8, the Release Preview goes a long way toward making sense of Windows 8’s controversial design decisions.
If Windows 8 were being developed like its predecessors, the pace of change would be decelerating rapidly at this point, and reviewers would be focusing on the minutiae of system-level tasks. Instead, Microsoft has quickened the development tempo dramatically. To understand why, you have to look at what makes Windows 8 so fundamentally different from its predecessors.
Over the past two decades, Microsoft has released roughly a dozen major desktop versions of Windows. Each one has included a predictable mix: the core of the operating system, a collection of essential system utilities (think Windows Explorer and Control Panel), and a motley assortment of underpowered apps (Calculator and Paint being the canonical examples).
Windows 8 turns that mix on its head. The underlying operating system is solid, reliable, full-featured, and impressively fast. But it’s no longer the star. The apps included with Windows 8 are the true stars of the new OS. Out of the box, a Windows 8 device will include a full suite of robust apps to handle communications (mail and messaging), digital media, and information.
The built-in apps in the Windows 8 Release Preview are light-years ahead of the rudimentary “app previews” that were included with the Consumer Preview release. Collectively, they leverage Microsoft’s enormous multi-year investments in productivity software, digital media, and online services.
The biggest surprise is a trio of new Metro style apps that aggregate news, sports, and travel in a way that really shows what a well-designed Metro app is capable of doing. These apps, along with the previously released Finance and Weather apps, depend on an extraordinarily tight level of integration with Microsoft’s Bing search platform.
Continue Here : Windows 8 Release Preview: Microsoft gets its apps together | ZDNet
Download Link :
Download Windows 8 Release Preview