8 categorizes your search results, occasionally in an unintuitive way.

But, as a simple example, in Windows 7, a user calls cause their system is crashing (a problem from a legacy app), I say for them to hit the start button, type dpi and hit enter. Change to smaller and hit apply.
In windows 8, I have to guide them through the GUI instead guessing what they see and what windows has decided to select. To make it more confusing, the Metro "make things bigger" shows up along with the desktop DPI setting making the user have to guess which.

A simple issue, but it represents a step backwards. Maybe with some more experimentation I will find another way.


Also, the hot spots is still totally unintuitive, I had a Windows 8 machine running in the office yesterday and today, not a single person could figure out the hot spots without me taking the mouse and showing them. Even describing it to them they could not figure it out. More than half couldn't find the start screen even after they found the hot spot, they were expecting a "start" or a windows logo, the 4 squares thing didn't seem obvious to them.

And some personal gripes, the mouse wheel is effectively broken now. Up and down means left and right, unless while scrolling left and right your mouse rests over something that scrolls up and down, now it scrolls up and down. Argh.
Scroll bars don't show unless you hover over the scrolling area, this caught me by surprise as I was looking through the options and wondering why there were so few until I saw one with the text running off the bottom of the screen. I moved my mouse to try the highlight text trick (like in a browser) and the scroll bar appeared. How was I supposed to know those other screens had more information hidden, it gave no visual indication. Worse yet, on a tablet, how am I supposed to know that section is scrollable.

Why is it when a legacy app is on the start screen, it can't even use the legacy apps icon as the tile, instead it shows a blank white window? But if you go all apps, then it shows it? That's ugly and again, counter intuitive because now users have to go back to reading text instead of looking for their recognizable icons. Is there an API so we can modify legacy applications to add proper tiles to the start screen? Is this fixable?

Overall, I am not impressed one bit, I see nothing that would make me want to move from Windows 7.
And as for development, I wouldn't bother developing a metro app, Microsoft changes its mind on dev platforms nearly every 2 years, your better off using HTML5 and if you must make a metro app, make a shell for IE or CHROME or something and use it to display your HTML5 app.