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”.

Download My WDP Customizer

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.