Microsoft presented its first public demo of windows 8 on wednesday.The next version of Microsoft's operating system is a radical departure, designed around touch screens.
Windows 8 Features
Windows 8 Features
- Touch Factor : One of the first things Microsoft revealed about Windows 8 is the new Metro-style touch user interface, which will be the center of attention at BUILD.
- Customizable Start Screen: The Windows 8 Start Screen is much easier to customise than any tablet or desktop operating system. Interactive tiles can be made bigger or smaller by simply dragging down on their icon; tiles can be easily dragged and dropped into a new position in the stream – with no iOS style pause as you schlep from one screen to the next, because there is only one Start screen.
- Task Manager : The Task Manager is now displayed as a heatmap, making it easy to identify resource-gobbling applications or processes. There’s also an incredibly useful App History Tab, which exposes the apps that have been downloading the most data over your wireless network – which could potentially be a huge cash saver if you’re paying for data by the MB on a 3G connection.
- Windows appstore :Appstore to download metro apps as well as win32 apps.
- Metro App Interface :The new Windows 8 platform for metro style applications gives you access to the new Windows APIs, now called the Windows runtime or WinRT, using the language of your choice – HTML5/JavaScript, C#/VB/XAML or C/C++.By default, apps designed in the Metro style are full-screen with none of the "chrome," as Microsoft has taken to calling the gray bars that surround Windows traditional window boxes and Task Bars.
- Windows Explorer Ribbon : Athough this was first introduced in Office 2007.Then in Windows 7 , we found this ribbon in WordPad and Paint and then in Windows Live Photo Galley and Movie Maker.Now in Windows 8 which has several tweaks that can be categorised as
- Optimize Explorer for file management tasks. Return Explorer to its roots as an efficient file manager and expose some hidden gems; those file management commands already in Explorer that many customers might not even know exist.
- Create a streamlined command experience. Put the most-used commands in the most prominent parts of the UI so that they are easy to find, in places that make sense and are reliable. Organize the commands in predictable places and logical groupings according to context and present relevant information right where you need it.
- Respect Windows Explorer’s heritage. Maintain the power and richness of Explorer and bring back the most relevant and requested features from the Windows XP era when the current architecture and security model of Windows permits.
- Multitasking :Julie Larson-Green, corporate vice president of Windows, showed a new way of multitasking during Build called docking apps, which snaps the app to the side of the screen, allowing for good views of two apps at once. Apps that aren't active on the desktop will run "suspended," but can be killed in the Task Manager.
- New File Copy Confirmation dialog box :The new Copy File dialog box has several new features that are designed to make life easier. First, the copy dialog box will now show you individual progress bars when you have multiple copy operations occurring simultaneously. You can even pause a copy operation, as shown in Figure , if you want to give preference to another operation.
- Native Hyper-V support :If you will be running the 64-bit version of Windows 8 and your system will have at least 4GB of RAM, then you’ll be able to take advantage of the Hyper-V virtualization technology that will be available in Windows 8. This will allow you to run both 64-bit and 32-bit operating systems from the virtual machines.
Faster Boot Time :
In order to improve boot times, the engineers at Microsoft have developed a way of integrating the Hibernate system into the shutdown/startup operation.
In Windows 8, when you shut down a system, the operating system will shut down the user sessions as normal, but it will hibernate the kernel session instead of shutting it down. Hibernating just the kernel session is much faster than hibernating the whole system and results in a much smaller (hiberfil.sys) file. As such, when you turn on the system, the operating system will be able to boot up much faster since it has to resume only the kernel session rather than do a full system initialization.- Platform and Tools :
