It's been a while since I've played with the Windows 10 preview. I've been happy with what I've seen in the past and looking forward to being able to upgrade my home computer hardware when Windows 10 is public. I have had a few minutes between server data migrations to spend some time on it again this week.
The first thing that I experienced were a lot of updates. I think I've seen the "Welcome" / "Setting up" screen three times this week. I don't know if that's a VM glitch or if I've gone through three major updates. A couple of the updates just rebooted my system (the last time while I had left it idle with a desktop market charting program running) and once I saw I could update and reboot so I did that. It hasn't rebooted in the last hour so I think it's done.
One of the first changes I noticed was a Notifications icon down in the system tray. I'm not sure what the API exposed there will be. I hope that it will allow programs developed for windows to send their own notifications to queue up in it. I didn't play with much until today when I think it had changed even more. I've got a grayed out Microsoft OneDrive notification titled "Welcome to the new OneDrive", but clicking and double clicking it doesn't do anything. Maybe it's expired or maybe it's a VM glitch. A new notification from Windows Feedback has arrived titled "How satisfied were you with your experience". I've got to play around a bit more before I open that up and respond.
Finally, there are some buttons down at the bottom of the Notifications window: Tablet mode, Display, Connect, and All Settings. If I click Expand ^ a second row appears: Airplane mode, Location, VPN, and Wifi. These appear to be quick setting access, which is handy but I don't know if the Notifications are is the most intuitive location. On Win8 I would expect to get to these things by parking my mouse in the bottom right corner and choosing Settings (also hidden and non-intuitive, but easy once trained.) I don't seem to be able to activate the Charm bar with my mouse and I'm not sure if that's due to it being destkop-centric or, again, a side-affect of running the preview as a Virtual Machine. Maybe it's desktop mode.
Playing around I thought the first thing to try out was Tablet mode. You use to have to stand on your head and click three times to get to this feature, now it's right in my face, when my face is looking at notifications. Turning it on makes the desktop grey out and the Windows button pulls up a mostly familiar Windows 8 looking start screen. Mostly, but we'll get to that. I am unable to interact with any of the icons on my desktop. Running desktop applications continue to run, but they are forced to be full screen. The restore down button on the title bar is visible but does nothing in Tablet mode. Fair enough, my programs work and I should launch them from the Start screen when in Tablet mode.
The Start screen has changed as well. I'm trying to be open minded and keep my "change bad" tendency to a minimum, but this new layout is less visually appealing than the first Windows 8 one. Like Windows 8.1 there is a little "All" label at the bottom with a down arrow to get to the rest of your apps. Unlike Windows 8 there is this column of tiny icons of Places and Most used and the "All apps" just switches that to an alphabetized list of all your apps as tiny icons and names. The live tiles have all moved to the right half or maybe two thirds and instead of scrolling left and right, they also scroll up and down. Oh, and the windows bar continues to remain visible complete with the windows button (switches back to the disabled desktop), search bar, system tray including the date and time. Having the date and time is a bonus to me. No more silly not-quite-working live tile to show me the date and time for me.
Going back to the desktop, turning off Tablet mode and clicking the Windows button gives a "I see what you did there" impression. The start menu is exactly, and I mean exactly, like the start screen complete with click-your-user to log out and power button to shutdown or reboot. Just smaller. If you want it bigger there's a grow button in the top right and now in non-tablet mode you can quickly see a full start screen (with reduce-down button to switch your preference back). This should give almost everyone what they want. Almost. I totally expect those Windows 95 die hards (including the little one in me) to say "Where is my All Programs button". Sure, it's All apps. They are all there. But if you are use to All Programs > Some Company > Company App, forget about it, get over it, move along, this way works too.
One more change. Search. In Windows 8 & 8.1 when you looked at that start screen full of everything you may have wondered where you Windows XP through Windows 7 search at the bottom of the start menu went. You may have, on a fluke or after reading on the web, actually typed on the start screen and saw that it started filtering all the options and gotten use to this since functionally the Windows Key > type program name sequence still worked. That doesn't appear to work anymore. Instead there is a more intuitive search bar that is always visible with the text Ask me anything. (No, not the redit category.)
You may have heard that Cortana, (yes, voiced as that Cortana from Halo) is coming to Windows 10 among other places. She doesn't quite read your mind, yet, and needs you to set up a few details before she starts helping you find things. Like Google Desktop Search, Windows Desktop Search, Ubuntu Unity search, Siri and many others Cortana searches everywhere to find your answer. You can tell her to just search your stuff and that pulls up a search result that reminds me a lot of the Ubuntu Unity search with categories like Documents, Apps, Settings, etc. You can direct her to search the web. Or you can just wait for the results to come in and then choose one. Since Windows key + S puts your cursor in for a search and since the default seems to be to select whatever you chose last time, this will work for my Windows Key + search I'm use to from previous versions of windows. Just don't click search my stuff unless you wanted a Document instead of an App, because that's where that screen defaults. For my use case that is a weakness shared between it and the Ubuntu Unity search. I am almost always using it as a shortcut to launch programs by name and wish I could or knew how to set that as the default.
Now that I've tested and talked through everything, time to give Microsoft some feedback. It looks like they wanted to know what I thought of Tablet mode. Overall I'm happy with it.
