Smarter Geek

The web site TheVerge has published a video that shows some of the navigation and UI changes in Windows 8 since the developer preview. The video shows the follow changes since the developer preview:

1. Pull down gesture from the top of the screen down will close a metro app
2. You can customise the colour of the background and UI
3. The mouse wheel will scroll the start menu horizontally
4. Holding the CTRL-and Mouse wheel will zoom out the start screen

This certainly shows that Microsoft are starting to address some of the navigation issues that the Developer preview had using a non-touch device.

Source: http://www.theverge.com/2012/1/10/2698435/windows-8-build-8175-pictures-video

Here is an new video from Microsoft showing its aspirations of how technology can help people in the future…

While the video is showing you some very cutting edge ideas you might notice that there are some things in it that you have seen before.

Notice a video playing on the wall in the woman hotel room is actually the Microsoft Health Vision (at 12 seconds) video released a few years ago…

Microsoft Health Vision Video

Microsoft Vision Video with Microsoft Health Vision video playing…

The jet setting woman staying in the hotel is also the same character Ayla Kol (and possibly actor) in the previous Microsoft Sustainability: Productivity, future vision video.

And her college Qin is also the same actor but with a little more grey hair. The character is even wearing the same shirt and tie… Maybe they have self cleaning clothes in the future.

It looks like they have also gone from Green Roof to Green Wall designs…

It looks like they even used the same actor to play Shannon Kol who is the daughter of Ayla.

Old Video

New Video… She had definitely grown up since the last time we saw here but the hair style’s have not changed…

Will we see this same family in another few year? Who knows…. but at least Microsoft are showing us what they are aspiring to enable all of us to do in the future.

Here is a video from the recent BUILD conference that shows a Qualcomm based Windows 8 ARM table running Adobe Flash within Internet Explorer (Desktop). This confirms that even the ARM based version of Windows 8 tables will be able to run non-metro third party browser plug-ins (and presumably applications).

Jump to 2m 24s for the exact moment.

Source http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/Windows-8-Running-on-ARM

Neowin just published and then pulled a blog post images they claim to be of Windows 8 and the device that will be given away at Build.

Before they pulled the article BING was able to cache a copy of the page that can be see here http://cc.bingj.com/cache.aspx?q=http%3a%2f%2fwww.neowin.net%2fnews%2fscreenshots-of-windows-8-developer-preview-slate-device-surface&d=69954183475&mkt=en-AU&setlang=en-AU&w=642461cd,c7dfed4e

And here is a screenshot of the web page below:

As you can see this image also looks similar to the Quad Core Slate I saw form TechEd NZ.

Here is a video from the TechEd Australia 2011 Kick Off Session that shows how to setup a Windows Server 8 Hyper-V Replica that had been previously demoed at WPC.