People
The People app brings all your contacts into one place. It's hardly a new idea, but it's the first time Windows has had a native app to pull in contact information from various websites. Most popular social networking sites are listed, and it's simply a case of logging in with your username and password and providing permission for the app to access the information.
Windows 8's Metro UI is designed for touchscreens
Tap on a contact and you're given options for getting in touch, such as phone numbers and addresses. To the right, a number of panes will appear depending on the information available. For example, a What's new pane might show recent status updates from sites such as Twitter and a Photos pane could show recent images uploaded to sharing sites.
Media
Although Media Center and Media Player are still present, there are Metro-style apps as well. Music combines your local library with the music marketplace so you can quickly add to your collection. Video is a separate app which looks identical to music and displays the files in the Videos folder. There's no 'video marketplace' yet, but there will almost certainly be one in the final version of Windows 8.
In both apps, it's easy to control playback with your fingers, but it's not so easy to find what you're looking for. Admittedly, most of the Metro-style apps are unfinished, which would explain why it isn't possible to quickly jump to artists beginning with a certain letter, for example. Currently, you can browse only by 'most played'.
Photos is perhaps the most polished of the media apps. It puts your pictures front and centre and is perfect for a touchscreen. As well as photos stored in your Pictures folder, you can link your Facebook, Flickr and SkyDrive (see below) photos, and view them all using the same great interface.
Tap Facebook for example, and you'll see a list of albums just as you would if you tapped on Pictures library. A clever trick is the ability to pinch to zoom out from this view and see smaller album thumbnails to save you scrolling horizontally through all the big thumbnails. You can use the same trick when viewing photos themselves to see more of the contents of an album onscreen. If you don't have a touchscreen, hold Ctrl on your keyboard and use your mouse's scroll wheel to zoom in and out. If you don't hold Ctrl, the mouse wheel scrolls through photos in a slideshow, or through lots of thumbnails if there are too many to fit on screen at once.
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Comments
Nabin said: Sorry to saying that Windows 8 is a flop show Windows 7 is the best version of microsoft
jake james said: used windows 8 i found it amazing it was quick for my tablet and my pc i will be one of the first out side the microsoft to store to get this lol
Anon said: Windows 8 is terrible and clunky Im sticking with Windows 7 and my keyboard and mouse