I have added a Mobile interface to the blog for our users with Android, Nokia, iOS, etc. devices. This update does not encompass the forums. On another note, Those of you who have been eagarly awaiting a more polished preview of the upcoming Windows 8, Tomorrow’s the day that Consumer Preview will be released. Be watching for more news on that tomorrow along with a review probably the day after.
Like for instance.. The Blog and Forums are no longer integrated and have been updated to their most current versions. This will bring further security updates and maybe we can find some better WordPress integration since the last one was such a big flop. On another note, Anyone else overly anxious about next month’s Windows Consumer Preview Beta from Microsoft? I know I am!
Many of you have noticed that you couldn’t access our site yesterday. This is because I have installed a SOPA Blackout plugin to protest SOPA like the other sites. This was our protest, if you have not done so yet please take the time to sign the petition at Google and tell the congressmen and content holders of Washington, D.C that the bill is against the will of the public and unconstitutional.
What is SOPA?
SOPA is a bill currently making round trips in congress and supported by the major content holders (The ones that censor all those awesome YouTube Videos). Under this bill, Content Holders such as WMG, Sony, etc will have the ability to take down any site with just a simple good faith letter. It allows them to force search engines, Ad Providers and even ISPs from allowing access to the site.
Why is this so bad?
It means that content holders and copyright holders can simply send a C&D styled letter to any site, or any search engine, and get that site removed via DNS Blocking. Any search engine or Ad provider that doesn’t heed this request will have the same done to it.
Example: If a site like Google refuses to take down a site that has been targeted by SOPA (Let’s say The Pirate Bay), then SOPA has the power to block Google as well as TPB.
This can mean the end of Social sites such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Anywhere that Copyright Material can be posted or links to torrents can be posted.
But stopping Piracy is good right?
Not in this way. Torrents ARE used for piracy, but Piracy is not the only thing torrents are used for. Torrents are used as a distribution medium for many Open Sourced products like OpenOffice, LibreOffice, Many Linux distributions, World of Warcraft (WoW uses BitTorrent technology to download it’s patches and content).
This bill gives way to many liberties to the Government and Content holders. Not only that, but you have to file for an appeal within a small amount of time otherwise your site will remained blocked permanently.
Now that I’ve been informed slightly, is there any place that I can get more information about SOPA?
The answer to this question is Yes! You can get more information about SOPA. Don’t attempt to find it on your daily news program on TV, you won’t find it. The media hasn’t been covering this issue at all which is rather distrubing, but here are a few sites that are currently giving information about SOPA and it’s Brother PIPA.
Google – End Piracy, Not Liberty
Google and American Censorship (I believe) both have links to petitions and information about your area’s representatives. Please, do this for the internet, stop SOPA and save the future of the internet.
While the Internet was originally made for Military communications, Since it was released to the public, it has become the world’s largest repository of free information that’s available for all. Please, contact your representative and strike down this demon bill!
Earlier this month, it was confirmed that Microsoft will release a new public beta this coming February. There are several new features that are both confirmed and rumored to be available.
Confirmed:
Rumored:
Just remember to keep checking back in February, I’ll definitely be posting about it once it’s installed complete with screenshots of the latest changes and features. I’ll even post about modifications to the Metro UI and anything else to do with Windows 8.
Another Juicy little tidbit is that one of the first Applications in the Windows Store is a Immersive Music Player called “Music (Beta)”.
Also for those of you who wanted to customize metro easier, I recently came across a new program that makes it easier to colorize the Developer Preview in addition to My WDP Customizer linked in my previous point.
Anyway, this program will help you continue customizing Metro with amazing ease.
Also before I forget, To those who dislike Metro, it will still be the default interface and will probably continue to be up past the Release. It’s a new user interface paradigm, the other operating systems are doing it, it’s about time Windows caught up since they haven’t had a radical change like this since Windows 95. Also please note, I will not post information about turning Metro off. Turning it off does not give it a fair chance, it actually will be very useful after more apps are released (Mail, IM, etc.) as their tiles contain notifications (If you want to know what I mean, head back to my original post and check the last screenshot, look at the weather tile.), You can also pin shortcuts to it as well, just start typing to find a application, right click it, then hit Pin.
Well, I know I’m a little late posting this, but I decided to do a review of the recently released Windows Developer Preview. Remember, this preview is nowhere near the final version and has some bugs which are being rectified with Windows Update.
Anyway, back to the review and shameless plug.
As most of you know from the news and blogs online, Windows Developer Preview has been released and is free to download from Microsoft’s website. (Link will be provided after the post.)
Windows Developer Preview is a beautiful new operating system, I had downloaded it the same day it was released and used the Windows 7 USB/DVD Tool available from the Microsoft Store website to copy the installer to my 4GB SD card to install.
My initial opinion upon seeing the new Immersive Start Screen was pretty much what most people’s reaction to it was: “OH DEAR GOD NO!”, However after playing with it for about a month or so I have decided that the new Immersive UI is exactly where Microsoft should’ve taken the system, It seems to give the Mobile feel without it being too cumbersome on the user, to give users a more simplistic start menu. At first it looks like ass, with the weird green UI color and all with no options yet to change the background of the Immersive Start Screen or it’s colors. When you first login to WDP, you are presented with the Immersive Start Screen, Here’s a look at the default Immersive Start Screen:
Does this mean that the Start Menu we’ve all known and loved since Windows 95 is gone? Yes, thank god yes, The old Start Menu was too boring, too bland, Microsoft has been using the same Basic UI since 1995 and up without too many changes (Unless you think adding a theme and search bar changes >_>;). Some of you who haven’t heard of Windows 8 yet might ask, Does this mean that the normal desktop is gone too? No, it’s still there. All you have to do to access the normal desktop is simply click the Desktop Tile or start one of your applications. You can even pin applications to the Immersive Start Screen by simply typing in the name of the application and then right clicking or hitting the Menu button on your keyboard (Not the Windows Flag, the other one.) and then clicking Pin App.
Even the Control Panel has it’s own slice in the new Immersive UI as shown below:
As you can see from the above picture, Windows 8′s Control Panel is highly more simplistic and does contain several options for customization (However none are for the Immersive UI itself yet.), for customizing the Lock Screen (Not shown here due to Windows not giving screenshots of the lock screen or login screen.). You can even select programs to show things such as, how many emails you have, how many IMs you recieved while you were gone, and even have things like a Media Controller on the screen itself to control Windows Media Player or what have you while your screen is locked (Not in WDP).
Also available in Windows Developer Preview is the ability to sync your system settings with your other computers using your Windows Live ID which you can link to your Windows account in the Users Control Panel. After you link your Live ID, the Sync PC Settings control panel shown here becomes active and your user account changes to mirror your Windows Live details, Full name, Avatar, and Live ID. Also as you see here, If the control panel you need isn’t found within the Immersive Control Panel, simply click “More Settings” and the desktop will open up with Control Panel.
Windows 8 is also supposed to have it’s own type of Push Notifications so that you can get notifications even if the application isn’t even running. These applications show up on the Live Tiles, as you can see in my Start Screen screenshot above. If the application has no notifications, you’ll see the default icon (As seen with the Tweet@rama icon). The Notifications Control Panel allows you to turn off which Applications you’d like to recieve notifications for. Now I’m going to introduce you to the new Internet Explorer 10 (Yes, I am indeed correct, it is IE10, do not try to correct me.)
As you can see from the above screenshot, This is the default startup screen for IE10 which shows your frequent and pinned pages, Pinned pages can show up on the Start Screen.
When your browsing a website, you can right click to get up the navigation elements. At top: Open pages/tabs, At bottom in order from left to right: Back, Favicon (New HTML5/JS features allow this to be a link to a Metro Application), Address Bar, Stop, Pin Tab, Page Options (Currently Find on Page and Open in Desktop), and Forward.
Ok you all have probably been waiting for the “What about the start menu while in the Desktop?” screenshot. Well here it is, To open this menu in WDP, simply push your mouse to the bottom left corner of the screen and this menu will appear, from there you have five choices, simply click Start to go back to the Immersive Start Screen, or any one of the 4 other choices (Which will be gone over here shortly, including how to shutdown your WDP system).
Ok, so ya, Windows 7 and Vista had this feature where you could search for applications and documents.. But did it have THIS? The ability to search WITHIN Applications? You are now able to search within applications in Windows 8, and searching within applications is great and all when trying to find a Facebook Friend or something else like that.
This is the new Settings Menu within WDP, I didn’t really get too good of a picture of this, I might post a better one later on the topic for this post but for now I’ll explain this. Here you can change the settings of your applications, change what network your currently connected to, turn on or off notifications, change volume, input language or brightness and even to turn off or suspend your computer.
Ok this one isn’t that good either considering that I should’ve looked through the apps to find which ones had a better representation of what the feature does. The share menu is rather self-explanatory though, It allows you to share things currently on your screen with other applications or people. Like say I wanted to post a screenshot of this to Facebook, I have Socialite installed which provides the Windows 8 Share function for Facebook. I simply click Share a Screenshot, it will ask me “With what application?”, and I hit Socialite, which will post that picture to my profile. There will probably be other uses for this, but as of right now, that’s pretty much the only one.
Fancy that, Windows Developer Preview comes with it’s own Twitter Application. Not really much to report here.
Finally! Windows with an Alarm function! I can finally enjoy having my computers wake me up in the morning.
Well as you can see, Windows 8 is full of revolutionary design changes. And also (having followed the MSFT Build Blog for a while now) the Immersive Start Screen is getting a change later on to allow naming groups of Tiles and Icons, so now you can catagorize your many pinned applications and tiles into catagories such as Gaming, Media, Social, etc.
Having seen all this would you like to get in on the action? Well Windows Developers Preview is open to anyone who wants to try it and comes in 4 flavors, x86/x64 with Developers Tools or without. However, if your a space saver (Like me!) the x86 version without Developers Tools is by far the smallest ISO to download at 2.8GBs.
Download Windows Developer Preview
Also I was saving the best information for last, Thanks to some awesome people at MyDigitalLife you can now customize everything about the Immersive UI down to the new Immersive Bootloader (Not shown here either because even though it’s a Windows application now, it still runs before the Login screen is shown and therefore no screenshots of it can be made without a Virtual Machine.).
My WDP Customizer allows you to customize the background and colors of your Immersive Start Screen so that it can look like so:
(LOL I just noticed when I took this screenshot just before I posted this, that my Avatar is missing from my Start Screen >_> Odd…)
I even changed all the green except for the Alt+Tab window but I don’t have a screenshot of that. Got WDP and have it customized? Drop by our forums and show us a screenshot of your WDP Immersive Start Screen and even share your “My WDP Customizer color pallete”.
Also I had forgotten this, but the Developers Preview does have an expiration date, It expires on March 11th of 2012, which means on that date if you installed WDP as your primary OS, you will have to re-install Windows 7 or by then Windows 8 will be retailed hopefully and you can switch everything over to the retail Windows 8.
BEN is getting lonely…
You read this,
You shouldn’t have done that.
You have met with a terrible fate, Haven’t you?
On a more official news side:
We have made some bug fixes that we are proud to say,
-Crossposting of Blog posts/Comments are now re-enabled. This was bugged due to a problem with the SEO mod that allows the nice permalinks you all enjoy now.
Remember, BEN is watching you….
Well we’ve decided that due to the incompatible mods that plague our current forums, we’ve decided to start fresh, your users and posts will all be there, but we also have integration with WordPress, in fact, if your in the forums seeing this right now.. You’ve been tricked, your already on the new forums!
Enjoy 
