There's a wide gap between Metro and the regular desktop.
With a Windows 8 PC, you can either be in the Windows Phone 7-style Metro interface or on a desktop that closely resembles the traditional Windows 7 desktop. But these interfaces don't just offer two different ways to look at the same thing. They act more like two separate operating systems working side-by-side, with separate apps, different settings, and very different rules of operation.
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It's hard to stay in Metro.
It may not be obvious from my complaining, but I like the Metro interface, which is why I'm frustrated that getting knocked out of it--especially on a dual-monitor system--is so easy.
Typically, if you have two monitors, your primary monitor will use the Metro interface and the other will use the traditional desktop (unless you mirror the primary desktop on the secondary, but what's the point of that?). Click in a window on the non-Metro display, and your other screen automatically switches from Metro to traditional desktop. If you're on the Metro start page and you choose the wrong option, such as a shortcut to a non-Metro-ized application, you get bumped out of Metro.
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Metro shortcuts are tricky and annoying.
To open the Metro start page, for instance, you drag your pointer to the lower left corner of your screen. A thumbnail image of the start page pops out. My instinct, honed by thousands of Flash interfaces on the Web, is to move my pointer into the popup and click. But in Windows 8, If you do that, you actually click whatever icon beneath the popup window your pointer happens to be resting on. In Windows 8, you have to keep your pointer off screen while you click. This change is easy to learn intellectually, but harder to make instinctual, given the years of conditioning we've had to do the opposite.
As I mentioned earlier, IE in the Metro interface often shows no address bar or other buttons, including tabs for other Web pages that the user already has open. I tried everything I could think of to get them to appear--moving my pointer off the top and bottom of the screen, trying to "grab" the bars with my mouse while it was off-screen--but nothing worked. Finally, my colleague (and Metro enthusiast) Nate Ralph told me that I had to right-click an empty area on the Web page to gain access to the controls. Without his timely intervention, I might have thrown something through my monitor.
All Metro apps display at full-screen size and can't be moved from one screen to another.
The look is striking and gives the applications lots of breathing space. But sometimes you need to see two programs at the same time, to compare information or to move data from one application to another. You can grab the top of an application and move it so that it sits in a vertical panel on the side of your screen, but that orientation isn't useful for most programs.
Windows 8 menus are contextual.
If you click the Settings icon while you're in the Metro start page, you get settings specifically for the start page. You can click a link below for 'PC Settings', but those settings don't include everything you're used to having access to in the Windows Control Panel. To obtain a link to the Control Panel, you must click the Settings icon while you're in the traditional desktop.
Perhaps this is something users will become accustomed to; after all, it is how many mobile apps work? But I think users expect more consistency from their desktop OS.