Windows 8

Is it just me, or is Windows 8 a massive disappointment?

I'm a recent Mac/iAnything convert and love the way Apple lag behind the trend, appear to consider the best way to implement something, then just make it all look so easy. The Mac OSX multi-desktop is a good example - there have been desktop managers around on Windows for years - i've tried many and none have lasted. I've bought bigger monitors or reduced my font size rather than struggle with an odd virtual desktop thing which never seems to behave rationally and consistently. But on the mac, just do a three-finger swipe to the left or right and your other desktop slides into view - as natural as opening a drawer and looking at what is inside, or turning over a book to read the back cover.

So I rather expected something exciting and new from Microsoft with Windows 8 - something of a game-changer, something which would make OSX look old fashioned and perhaps show us that there is life in the 'old dog' Microsoft yet. But no - what we have is yet another 'skin' on the familiar Windows 95 UI with a fancy codename - Metro.
All this means is that sometimes it looks just like your Win7/XP/95 machine with a bar at the bottom and the familiar borders around windows which need clicking before they will interact, and sometimes you are faced with a child-like mosaic of application tiles supposedly there to make life easier.

Infact it just made it rather more difficult for me to navigate around the thing - I got 'trapped' in the photo application until I realised that moving the mouse to the edge of the screen gave me a popup menu which would take me back to the awful mosaic thing. And after wondering whether it had crashed and left me back to the 'base OS' with a solitary Explorer window, I found myself searching for the start button which is nowhere to be found. Finally, I thought i'll shut it down - no luck. Seems that the shutdown option is hidden somewhere in 'settings', quite apart from the drop-down under your username where you might expect it.

Get a grip, Microsoft - why are your wasting your time 'revolutionising' when you should be evolving? All we want is devices to work together in harmony and to behave simply and predictably. Then we can concentrate on the apps which run on top.

The more you keep closing the pub for refurbishment, the less likely we are to drop by on the way home for a drink.