It’s the last day of the Great Metro App Roundup, and we’ve got two of the biggest new apps to go! Reader This… this is not one of the biggest two apps today. This document and PDF viewer is, like many of the preview apps, totally functional. But I’m not sold. It’ll very obviously work better in touch mode, and it’s much peppier than Acrobat for loading and viewing PDFs, but the granular control over printing isn’t in place yet; it’s even missing things like being able to print single pages.…
Category: Uncategorized
Windows 8 Apps: Maps, People, Music and Video, Photos, and Weather
Apps, day the second! Check yesterday’s for Calendar, Mail, and Messaging. Carry on for dumb beauty, region code errors, drama, and cloudy skies! Maps Another gorgeous Metro app. I love Bing maps’ look; the aesthetic is clean and bright, easy on the eyes and extremely readable. It launches quickly and finds your location without much effort. And then you start to use it. Rendering the map isn’t fast on old hardware. It chugs, and refreshes at odd times. Also, its contextual awareness is atrocious, as is its parsing of Bing search results.…
Windows 8 Apps: Calendar, Mail, Messaging
The OS is only half the story of what makes Windows 8 interesting. There are plenty of new apps that come baked in, replacing things like the Windows Live suite, Outlook, widgets, and web apps. Some are fantastic, some show potential, and some just raise questions. Let’s take a look. Remember, these are all still preview builds, so I’m going to try to be fair. But I’m not going to pander. Microsoft is going to need to hustle to fix some of these apps before launch so they’re an everyday…
Windows 8: First Impressions (part 2)
I’ve been using Windows 8 now for a few days since the surprisingly easy install, and I’ve quickly gotten a feel for how it works. Let’s take a tour of some of the new stuff and see how it stacks up to what we all know and love (or hate, as the case may be). Lappy is not a new computer, so I was pretty concerned about performance when I installed Windows 8. Take a look: Yup, Lappy is a crappy old HP Pavilion dv2700t, without even the max available…
Windows 8 Consumer Preview: First Impressions
Last night, I braced myself for a painful goodbye. I have been watching a dear old friend become increasingly frail, seeing function lost almost daily. And together, we were going to do something insane. It might spell the end of our long relationship. But it could also be rejuvenating—one final adventure to go out on. My friend’s name—the name I gave him almost five years ago—is Lappy486. He saw me through my undergrad and teacher’s college. He’s been dying by inches. And last night, I installed the preview build of…