“We are pleased to be releasing a set of improvements to Windows 8 in broad areas of performance, power management and battery efficiency, media playback, and compatibility. These improvements are available starting today via Windows Update. We wanted to briefly talk about our improvements to the engineering system and in particular the speed at which we were able to deliver these updates to you.” Good stuff. They’re also updating the core Metro applications to make them less useless.
Can’t see any details in there.
The viewer requiring drags to scroll down on a pdf is insanity. From what i have used, metro apps seem to only have more support to emulate a finger instead of being thought of as an actual mouse.
On the app panel there’s an icon for continuous scroll.
The default Metro UI controls do indeed allow for mouse scroll in lists and canvases — exactly where you’d expect it. For example, see the Mail and People apps. (The People app scrolls horizontally.)
If the PDF viewer does not scroll, then that’s either because they wrote their own custom control, or because they turned it off for whatever reason. Nothing to do with Metro itself.
It is true, though, that some of the apps lack mouse-friendliness. In Mail, for example, you cannot drag items into folders with the mouse or stylus. It is an enormous waste of time to bring up the menu to move items into folders — especially since you cannot mousedrag-to-scroll inside the list (you have to use the scrollbar or scrollwheel).
Up until now the default email client lacked imap support and they are adding this obscure feature between rtm and ga? Speaks volumes about how “finished” those applications are.
EDIT: Almost like they looked at KDE 4.0 release and are aiming for the same kind of reception it got from the end users
Edited 2012-10-09 19:24 UTC
Yeah, would’ve been nice had they actually finished it before releasing to manufacturers.
It appears there are multiple unfinished projects coming out the door from Redmond.
http://www.extremetech.com/computing/137621-two-weeks-away-still-no…
It definitely supported IMAP before.
They probably improved support for more obscure IMAP features (there are some obscure parts in the standard and its various extensions) and fixed bugs.
You’re supposed to use ActiveSync — like on phones.
I have a feeling no one on the Windows Team know what to do with Metro app.
The mail app is pretty horrible. Where’s the Universal inbox.
The map app still can’t find my location (if my iPod Touch can find me then MS’ app can also).
They need to separate the fvcking stores from the video and music apps. I don’t give a sh*t about Zune Pass.
Most Windows 8 apps haven’t reach parity with their Mango/360 equivalents.
MS is shooting themselves in the foot. If MS wants to introduce a major shift then they need to make it as smooth as possible.
Groan – and Microsoft, through the power of software, can make a GPS chip suddenly appear in your computer to provide said functionality.
I don’t believe the current iPod touch devices have GPS functionality, do they?
Don’t they use the IP address to get something resembling a location (at least the area of a country you’re in)?
Edited 2012-10-10 12:31 UTC
They seem to use wifi router BSSID or ESSID since these can be scanned by streetview etc cars rather easily. Naturally Google has a different database for that than Microsoft.
After moving, Google continued to mis-locate me for a couple of years at my old place – with geoIP they’d at least figured out that this must be wrong (public-facing IPs by German ISPs are rather easily to resolve to city level thanks to data in DNS, and I moved a couple 100 kilometers, ending up in an entirely different net block), but that didn’t seem to bother them.
My day just started out with a good laugh on that line
Less useless, hehh, go figure 
No matter how many times I tried to use them, I always felt they need some more progress to be even approach the useless-but-promising category, and they remained there ever since.
Windows 8 ran very slow in Virtual Box on my computer, but I downloaded it again while updating Virtual Box yesterday and now it runs fine.
I still can’t like it though. These “Live Tiles” seem like a good idea, in theory, but not in practice. The whole screen is filled with these tiles, but really it’s just a small portion of what normally would be found within the Start Menu, while a few provide information that you can easily do without, let alone be staring at all day.
A number of things I tried just switched to the classic desktop, minus the Start button. If you want to do a different GUI do a different GUI, but don’t keep using the old one too. It gives a very messy feeling.
I don’t know if it’s possible, but if I had the choice I would turn Metro off and only use the classic mode.
Windows 7 was a great step in the right direction, I can’t imagine why they’d mess it up with Metro just so their tablets would have kind of the same GUI.
Just for some version info. Virtualbox 4.2 added real support for Windows 8 and Server 2012, before that it was a dog and almost unusable.
Yes, that would explain it. I was pre-4.2 the first time.
It was so slow that I couldn’t figure out how to get back to the Metro stuff from classic, although I always did manage it after a while I never knew how I did it. Now it turns out any corner is “hot”, but it was so slow that this wasn’t clear to me.