SUMMARY
There are lots of little issues Win 8 but the bulk of the problems I encounter are because of the duality of the UI with Tiles and Desktop not playing well with each other. MS could easily solve much of this but it's obvious they want to go head first into the mobile interface at the expense of the legacy desktop and as a result, much of this ill conceived bi-polar UI is maddening to use. Being forced to use it is the type of thing that made postal workers 'go postal' in the first place.
APP PORTABILITY AND DATA PROTECTION
The fact that Win 8.1 highly recommends backing up everything before installing it means that the nitwits at MS still haven't addressed the problem we've had since Win 1.x which is reinstalling and upgrading often means clean slate for the whole machine with is ridiculous.
There are things MS installs and things users install and this problem is all rooted primarily in 2 issues:
* The Registry
* Shared DLLs
While they've made great strides in user profiles and user portability and can separate everything by who's using the machine, they've done NOTHING to address software portability.
This is not rocket science and putting the OS on drive C: as "Windows_Partition" and all the user stuff on drive D: as "User_Data_Partition" should be child's play, it should be done by default, yet it isn't. While we're here, since disk space is abundant and cheap as hell, I'd prefer the option for each user to actually get their own physical encrypted and protected partition instead of a folder under (L)"Users" which leaves your data vulnerable to access by others or wiped out entirely doing a windows update while the partition could be completely locked down and off limits as accessing it for a Windows update would not be required.
Think about it, wipe drive C:'s Windows partition at will and all your data would be safe without backup and restore, no worries, no fuss, just install it. FWIW, that's how I used to install my servers when I ran a hosting ship as Linux on HDD 1, customer data on HDD 2 and any time it had a serious crash or got hacked, hardware fault or whatever, the HDD 1 Linux drive was swapped with a new one OR the HDD 2 customer drive was moved to a new machine and back up in 15 minutes either way. That's how it should be done, but I digress.
I've written 'portable' self-contained Windows programs and so have many others so it's quite doable yet it isn't standardized and users are left backing up and restoring every time something happens to the OS like a bunch of trained monkeys.
There are ways to handle shared DLLs without overwriting and overlapping by keeping a local copy of what the individual program needs instead of polluting the common core, often a cause of malfunctioning apps, and a smart DLL loader can sort it out at run-time. Simple solution and now you get a portable app too, win-win.
If I were selling Windows software I'd promote that my software was 'portable' and could survive upgrades as a selling point.
WINDOWS STORE
As a new victim, er user, of Win 8 all I can say is the Store is some major league suckage compared to Google Play and from what I can see without actual hands on 8.1 does not appear to address all this suckage. From the get-go you can't search for just anything from the initial window unless I'm missing something and if I am, it's not designed well. Worse yet, there's no simple list of store categories easily accessible without scroll scroll scrolling. Blows. I'm a big mobile and desktop user and I'm telling you it blows from both directions vs. Google Play.
If the things I'm looking for are in pull-outs without any visual clues, then it's setill sucky because I want to use the OS, not play where's Waldo with the damn thing.
TILES ON DESKTOP
Tiles are kind of like Gadgets from Win 7/Vista and the fact that I can't put tiles on the desktop is silly. I'd love to have a sidebar with tiles but it's not allowed for idiotic reasons as it's a WINDOW you morons at MS should be spanked.
MOUSE GESTURES AND KEYBOARD SHORTCUTS
There are some places in the use of tiles and other aspects of Win 8 where it's obviously designed for a touch screen and it really lacking in good mouse gestures and keyboard shortcuts unless they exist and I missed the memo as scrollbars and arrow keys aren't cutting through this Tiled mess.
WINDOWS START MENU
I've tried it the new way and I must say when I'm in the desktop the start screen tile thingy doesn't really bother me much as it goes away never to be seen again after boot. However, I still forget and hit the Windows button and get the tiled abomination instead. Ugh.
Would it kill them to just make it an option for desktop users to use it Win 7 mode or Win 8 mode? Or even make it CTRL+WINDOW to get the old Stat menu?
With 2 screens I find it next to impossible to bring up that idiotically named Charms menu on screen 1, not even sure if it's supposed to work that way on dual screens but it does every now and then. Anyway, off to the far side of screen 2, Charms menu shows up and when I click the search and the menu of programs shows up my dockef magnifier vanishes, everything reformats on screen 1, the magnifier LENS now appears over the search stuff, and likewise when I close it everything goes back, DOCKed magnifier on top, screen 1 reformats again, total visual chaos and confusion.
Accessibility? For who, people that want to go insane engulfed in idiotic screen popping chaos because of the stupid rules that make the new UI behave different from the desktop?
Integrate it before someone with bad eyes loses it and hurts someone because this magnified insanity didn't happen in Win 7 and someone should be tossed in jail for this because it really is criminal what it's going to site impaired people trying to use a damn computer.
Got ahead of the topic...
ACCESSIBILITY ISSUES
Last but not least, the guy with cataracts needs the Magnifier and it's totally screwy in Win 8. If you're on the desktop you can DOCK it, I like a big magnifier docked on the top of my portrait mode monitor, but the minute an actual Win 8 app shows up on either screen docking is no longer allowed and it switches to LENS or FULL SCREEN mode and the whole thing makes me dizzy. It gets uglier but that's the basics. The programmers writing and testing Win 8, probably no testers based on stuff I'm running into, don't check simple real world situations like monitors in portrait mode don't get the LENS magnifier to alter it's orientation for the user and it's still in landscape mode. Sure you can customize the LENS but when you flip the monitor back to landscape it's messed up again, back and forth. Why this baffles me is tablets flip orientation all the time so this feature must not be used much on tablets or it behaves differently on desktops, dunno but it's damned annoying.
FWIW, I also tried Narrator but thanks to the lazy nincompoops at Firefox they haven't finished implementing UIA or whatever it's called so while it can read the title and tabs, the content might as well be carved into the side of an Egyptian pyramid in undecipherable hieroglyphics because Narrator can't read the page. The whole thing is idiotic if the FF page accepts messages to get selected text then Narrator could read anything selected but they're all a bunch of API snobs so the visually impaired suffer with a second rate browser because their primary choice isn't compliant with some MS nonsense when MS could read it anyway. Jerks. But I digress.
I could go on and on but there isn't enough hours in the day and MS won't do anything about it anyway.
Deaf ears.
Windows 8.1 Preview Arrives
