Hands-on with Windows 8: it's good stuff on the PC, too

Windows 8 is going to be a "true" tablet platform that provides first-class support for touch-based tablet systems. But not everyone wants a tablet. Lots of us use PCs and are happy with our mice and keyboards. We don't have touch screens, and even if we did, we wouldn't want dirty fingerprints all over our monitors. Are we going to be left behind by this brave new world of the post-PC?

Windows 8 will be a tablet operating system. But it's also an out-and-out PC operating system. The PC still matters. The PC is still a core platform and PC users are still a core demographic. PC applications are never going to disappear, and Windows must continue to support them.

Windows 8 will run existing Windows applications on a regular Windows-looking desktop. It will, of course, support mouse and keyboard input—and pen, for those rare people who want to use styli—and for regular Windows applications, nothing much will change.

The Start screen, however, shakes things up a bit. Hit the Windows key on the keyboard, or the Windows button on the taskbar, and you don't get a regular Start menu. You get the same start screen as the touch users do. Instead of touching tiles with your finger, you click them with your mouse. Or you can navigate with your keyboard, if you want: arrow keys move between tiles, page up and and down scrolls the start screen a group at a time. The mouse wheel also scrolls the Start screen, though this doesn't work perfectly in the developer build, as Microsoft has not yet implemented acceleration (it's on the list of things to do; it's just not in this build).

The Start screen isn't as dense as the Start menu. At 1366×768, you can get about 18-21 small tiles, or half as many large tiles, on screen at once. In that sense, the Start screen is certainly a compromise.

However, just as is the case with Windows Vista and Windows 7, where clicking icons on the Start menu wasn't the best way to use the platform, clicking tiles on the Start screen isn't the best approach either. Keyboard users never have to click the search charm in the Edge UI. They can just start typing, and Windows 8 will search automatically. Though the presentation is very different from Windows 7's, the functionality is the same: hit the Start button, start typing. Windows 8 does it better, in fact, due to the search contracts and in-app search features. If you use search and tiles pinned to the "main" (left-most) Start screen, applications are typically more accessible than they would be in the Start menu—few people pin 20 apps.

If you've already switched to the new Windows 7 way of using things, then Windows 8's Start screen is essentially just a new look to the things you're already doing. If you haven't, you're in for a big shock, and you may well hate Windows 8.

Even if you do hunt through the Start menu's menu, the Windows 8 interface is not as different as it first appears. The Start menu is a bunch of icons arranged into groups. The Start screen is a bunch of tiles—which are live, active icons that can show you information without even running the application—organized into groups. You'll still be able to scroll through the menu with your mouse wheel.

The result is that while Windows 8 may always lose out to the Start menu in terms of the sheer number of applications visible per screenful of data, it may still have a comparable amount of information—thanks to tiles—and a similar structure. The semantic zoom feature, which allows you to zoom out of the Start screen, and iconify the tiles, will allow access to even more applications. Windows 8 provides a very different look and feel, but it doesn't force you to work in a fundamentally different way.

The mouse and keyboard UI doesn't attempt to slavishly emulate the gestural interface. Instead, it uses actions and movements that are natural for the mouse and the keyboard.

So, for example, instead of nudging tiles on the Start screen to select them and adjust their properties, mouse users do what's natural for mice; they right click. The result is the same, but the action is different.

Other gestures are likewise adapted. Instead of using the swipe-from-left gesture, mouse and keyboardists will switch tasks with good old alt-tab and win-tab. Alt-tab works just as it does in Windows 7; a panel of thumbnails in the middle of the screen. Win-tab has changed; it's currently the (useless, though showy) Flip-3D effect. In Windows 8, it's directly equivalent to the swipe gesture.

Swipe-from-right, to bring up charms, is done with a hot corner; put the mouse pointer in the bottom left corner of the screen, and a small charm menu appears. For keyboardists, hit Win+C and the same occurs. Pen users can just swipe; pens can do that.

The app bar is revealed on a right click, replacing swipe from the top or bottom.

The result is an interface that works well for all input devices, both new and traditional. The operating system doesn't work identically, but it does work, without incurring any penalty for preferring one mechanism over another.

This doesn't mean that everything translates perfectly. The pen is still the best input device for doodling, sketching, or handwriting. Fingers can, uniquely, do multitouch. It's likely that some applications will favor one mechanism over others, but it's not Windows 8 that's making that happen; it'll be down to the choices developers themselves make.

Traditional applications will tend to run on the traditional desktop, and the traditional desktop has received some love too. Functionally, it's the same as it always was; you can still stick icons on the desktop, you can still dock toolbars to the taskbar, there's still a nofication area full of icons. Apart from the loss of the Start menu, it works the same as it always did.

Only in fact, it works a bit better, at least for users of multimonitor systems. The inability to span the taskbar across multiple monitors has long been a source of frustration for multimonitor users. In Windows 8, 16 years after the taskbar first hit our computers, we'll finally be able to span the taskbar across multiple screens, without needing third party applications or special drivers.

Windows 8 is a usable touch-screen tablet operating system, and it certainly has some compelling features when used on that kind of machine. The look of the software is different from what traditional Windows users are used to, but the operating system remains true to its PC roots: you can use it on a tablet, but you won't need to.