Today was finally a full day in Metro (and Snow Leopard, as I gave up on Notepad and wrote this and my notes with my usual TextWrangler setup).

• Metro is clearly intended to be used on a touchscreen: Everything is big enough to be fingered, there are no complex menu bars, status bars or tool bars, often just one big screen filled with content. There is a lot of swiping, dragging and horizontal scrolling, none of which is very comfortable to do with a mouse pointer.
• I was looking for a video tutorial on Metro basics for the end user, but did not find anything. Let me know if there is anything. Microsoft should probably include one in the final version.
• I am very grateful for PCWorld's list of keyboard shortcuts, which improved my day a lot. Old favourites that I still remember from XP like Alt-Tab, Ctrl-Tab, Alt-F4, Ctrl-F4 have also proven functional (and yes, three days in I finally reconfigured Virtual Box to relinquish control of the Windows key, which was used as the "Host Key" by default).
• For some reason, scrolling with the touchpad worked in most, but not all, apps.
• Alt-Tab still switches between apps, and it already toggles the whole screen (not just the application icon) while you are still holding the key, which is cool. Ctrl-Tab does the same for application windows (such as IE tabs).
• Speaking of "windows", there aren't any. Everything takes up the whole screen, and when it does not you have non-overlapping tiles that can only be arranged or resized according to a coarse grid. It might be good idea for Microsoft to rebrand their OS lineup. It is still justifiable since Windows 8 still has Desktop, but why is Windows Phone called "Windows"? It has certainly left its Windows CE origins far behind, something like Metro Phone or XPhone 360 seem to make more sense.
• Speaking of "tiles", that is a pretty and refreshingly different (from both the desktop and the iOS experiences) design. They come as a big clutter-free grid and in vivid colours. The old Start menu is gone, replaced by a Start screen (that actually extends over two screens for me, but that might be a resolution issue), which display application tiles, both for running apps as well as for "pinned" apps that stay there even when not active. Every tile can also become "live" and display some application-specific information, such as the current song title or weather report. They come in two sizes, and can also be placed on the lock screen (which is beautiful to look at, probably the work of the same folks that designed Bing). Unlike an Android widget however, live tiles are not interactive (they just launch the app).
• Application menu bars have been replaced by Charms, which appear in the form of a toolbar that slides in from the right side of the screen. It contains several settings and search functions, both application-specific and system-wide. You can also check the application's permissions (like Location or Internet Access, similar to what you have on mobile systems), and review it on the Store.
• Just like Apple with iCloud, Microsoft is nudging you towards getting a Microsoft account (which I think is the same as a Windows Live account), that you can then use for a number of applications (such as the various media stores) and services (such as syncing between devices), and even to replace local user accounts.
• The limited selection in the Windows Store might be because of me being in China. Maybe there is more to be had if not for that. The thought occurred to me while looking at the "Social" section, which had just three apps, Wordpress and the Chinese services QQ and RenRen. I did install the featured eight apps that won the Metro developer contest:
  • Air Soccer is a turn-based (but still real-time) air-hockey-like game. You want a touch screen here.
  • Cook Book is an online cook book that for some reason (China?) did not load any pictures (except for the gorgeous title photo, those seem to be a strong point for Microsoft).
  • Elements Weather Forecast immediately replaced the built-in Weather app. Looks better and has data for Shanghai (the stock one told me it was not available in my market and just showed Seattle).
  • Flip Saw is a puzzle app I did not get to try out.
  • Pew Pew is a nice retro/line-drawing style arcade-type shooter owing its name to a funny sound effect.
  • Physamajig looks interesting (probably along the lines of Crayon Physics), but I also had no time to look at it.
  • Puzzle Touch is a jigsaw puzzle game where you also have to rotate the pieces. Another case of beautiful photography and in need of a touch screen.
  • SigFig Portfolio lets you track a brokerage account, but you need to have one.
  All of them were free, but some of them still said "Buy" or "Try" instead of "Download", which confused me, but seems to indicate that there will be a try-before-you-buy feature that is missing from the Mac and iOS App Stores.

Today a play-by-play of what I did, without much commentary.

Install the VirtualBox guest additions

For a better integration between the virtual Windows 8 and the physical hardware and host operating system (OS X Lion), VirtualBox comes with so-called "guest additions". They mount as a virtual CD, which I could open with Explorer. The installer required command-line parameters, though, and I had no idea how to open a command line. I tried finding cmd.exe or something like that, but failed. I am now also confused why there are two folders with applications (Program Files and Program Files x86, whose contents appear to be identical). So I asked the Superusers, bending my rule of using only Windows 8 itself, because I could not install my password generator into IE 10 and thus could not log in to post the question (I say bending instead of breaking, because I could have posted anoymously). After finding out that I can go back to Metro to do a search (which would then take me back again to a command line in Desktop), I also found that all that messing around with the command line was unneccessary after all, because there was another installer with a GUI wizard. Rebooted, now sound works, and I have a "USB tablet device", which can successfully scroll left and right.

No luck in the Windows Store

The interesting thing about Windows 8 is the Metro interface, but so far I have spent all my time in Desktop mode. To leave that behind, I need a text editor and an SCP client that work in Metro. I first turned to the Windows Store. That is still under development, and only had a grand total of five productivity apps. One of them was Evernote, which I could install for free after creating a Windows Live ID (which involved another trip back to my Mac for the password tool, and to turn the VPN on to be able to log in to GMail to get the verification email). Unfortunately, the app asked me for yet another user name and password, presumably for the Evernote service, but without making that clear, or offering me a way to create one, and I was not in the mood for two new cloud service accounts in a single afternoon just to edit a local text file, so I gave up on that (and gave it a two star review using the nice integration of the Store into the application's settings sidebar, where you can also manage permissions and notifications). I did get updates for four of the pre-installed Microsoft apps from the Store, though (even before I signed up for a Windows account).

No luck on the Internet

I then tried to find Metro apps outside of the Store, and a quick search for "Windows 8 Metro text editor" (on Bing with IE10) turned up the very promising, apparently (as I had never heard of it before) highly acclaimed open-source text editor Bend. The download threw me back into Desktop, where a warning dialog asked me if I wanted to go ahead with installing software from an unknown publisher (I suppose this is what Apple is going for with Gatekeeper as well), and when I said okay and launched it I was back in Metro for a moment, where another (much slicker) dialog called Windows Smart Screen asked me pretty much the same question again. Unfortunately, that was it, as no application launched, and no error message appeared either. I assume that it just crashed. I went to the trouble of finding the Task Manager (which seems to have gained a lot of features) but could find no evidence of any process still alive. I continued to look for other Metro apps, but could not find any. Hopefully the Store will have more to offer later during the week.

As you can see, today's plan to switch over to Metro did not come together. But time for preparations is running out, so I will give up on that and make do with Notepad and WinSCP and spend tomorrow finding out what Metro can do for me.

Last week, Microsoft released a preview version of their upcoming Windows 8 operating system (interestingly enough at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, which is an event not for the PC industry, but for mobile phones), and since it is a free download (I assume it expires after a few months) I am thinking to spend a week playing with it, documenting my impressions in daily blog posts. And to make things interesting the blogging itself, and the research around it, is going to happen exclusively under Windows 8.

First order of business was to get the thing installed. The original plan was to partition the hard disk in my decommissioned Mac mini, and directly boot into it using Boot Camp. That failed however, because Disk Utility was unable to shrink the Leopard partition, even though there should have been plenty of free space. I hate HFS+, it is an embarrassment for Apple, and I was actually getting ready to spend a week playing with the new ZFS software Zevo, had not Windows 8 come along. Only one frivolous timesink at once. I then tried to check if my almost ten year old 80 GB external Firewire disks were still functional. I had dismissed them as defective, and (after finding out that I had to connect them with USB because the connectors have changed from Firewire 400 to Firewire 800, which unlike USB and USB 2 are not compatible) unfortunately that turned out to be the case: nothing except clicking noises and horrible read timeouts.

So instead of that, I installed it on my current Mac mini, but as Boot Camp and partitioning are too scary to do with a computer that needs to actually work every day, not directly on the machine, but as a VirtualBox. Installation into VirtualBox went smoothly, although I am still running with a bare minimum of integration, full screen mode has black borders, there is no sound, and the keyboard layout is off. Most of these things can probably be fixed if I dig deeper into VirtualBox, but that seems too much of a rat hole. What I would like, though, is to have proper drivers for the Magic Touchpad, as I can already see that Windows 8 would be so much more fun with gestures (or even a touchscreen tablet, but that is beyond my means).

I am reserving first impressions and further exploration of the new Metro interface for tomorrow, but what still needed to get done today was this post, and for that I need an SCP client, and a text editor. I will try to get Metro apps, probably from the Windows Store, tomorrow, but for now sticking with what little I remember from the XP days, I switched to the Desktop mode, downloaded WinSCP, and launched Notepad (by creating a New Text Document, not by opening the application, which frankly I don't even know how to do, because the Start menu is gone).

The 'book is back! They said it would take a week at least and maybe two, but after less than two days my iBook (complete with a new and free logic board) is sitting on its desk again. Which is funny, since the VersaPro was displaying some really weird display problems today, too, which made me reboot in panic. So to finish my report about this week, here is my opinion about the best feature of Mac OS X (the fonts look so much better, especially the Asian ones) and the list of programs I had installed so far:

• Thunderbird (email client)
• Firefox (web browser)
• SharpReader (a newsfeed aggregator, I cannot live without those anymore)
• JEdit (my favorite text editor, Notepad is just useless. Had to install Java first which does not come with Windows.)
• Cygwin (bash, vi, perl, ssh, tar, gzip). Cygwin is a really wonderful project. It is a compatibility library that brings large parts of the Linux API to Windows and a huge collection of Unix applications building on top of that. And installing it has become very easy.
• StuffIt Expander (uncompresses files, but did not work, maybe because I refused to reboot after installing it)
• WinSCP (secure file copy program, but I had problems with it, so I used Cygwin instead)
• PuTTY (ssh client, to connect to Unix servers, but I switched to Cygwin after I had installed that anyway)
• Gaim (a multi-protocol chatting client, quite impressive feature set and the most popular project on Sourceforge)

I was lucky that Itoh-san, our tech support guy, could fix me up with his spare NEC VersaPro (Pentium III/700, Windows XP), which is quite decent. So here are some good points about it:

• There are more applications available for Windows. While this situation has improved a lot in recent years and you can get good Mac applications for almost everything you need to do, there are still a few gaps. This week I can use Oracle Enterprise Manager and Symantec PC Anywhere.
• Some applications are better in their Windows versions. OpenOffice sucks on the Mac, but runs fine on Windows. Microsoft Remote Desktop Connection can open only one simultaneous connection on the Mac. Firefox can go fullscreen on Windows.
• I can make new folders and documents with a single mouse click.
• The login/logout fadein/fadeout effects are cool.

I admit that this list ended up a little short and unconvincing (maybe I should add mention to this helpful little doggie that pops up now and then to explain things) ...

I was not in office when they took my iBook away. It seems pretty certain that it is suffering from the well-known logic board issue (I hope that is the case, in fact, because if it is, Apple has to repair it for free). In any case, it will take about two weeks to get things fixed, so during this time I will be using a Windows XP notebook in office. And since the T-Files are a friendly and open-minded Mac blog (unlike certain others, who slam everything without the Apple logo and even make fun of people who are not happy with their failing iPod batteries or the fact that Apple applications always tend to require the latest OS version) I will start with some things I like about it --- tomorrow.