Wow. I am still very impressed by Windows 8, even after sleeping on the announcement, demo and video. It looks great. I can see huge benefits in the design of it to allow people to switch between casual use and productivity use, this is certainly needed with devices like the Dell Duo.

Check out the official video of Windows 8, the D9 video and a video from Computex last night.

So, Microsoft seem to have got the paradigm right but they have also got the UI right in a big way. Pressing the Windows button now takes the user to this new start screen that borrows a lot of its design from Windows Phone 7 (which in turn took it from Zune that took it from Windows Media Center, it’s a nice full circle). There is a new application type, “immersive”, which uses web markup to develop the apps and looks like the Metro apps on Windows Phone but on a larger screen. That larger screen and the fact that Windows has always been known for its multitasking has allowed Microsoft to design a good way to get immersive apps to run side by side.

But, in the new Metro design for Windows 8 there is something noticeably missing; buttons. There appeared to be no hardware buttons on the slates shown and in fact all buttons are software one. However they don’t show themselves until the users wants to access them. To access the button the user swipes from off screen to on screen and depending on which side of the screen the user swiped there will be different options available. From the right side is a new button bar containing the Windows button, search button, settings button and two new things; the share button and a connect button. Swiping from the top or bottom will bring up the UI for the immersive app and swiping from the left allows a user to go through the apps that are running.

It appears that Microsoft use a clever trick to detect the swipe by using the outside line of pixels to indicate where the user has swiped.

It’s extremely easy to move from this new UX to the more traditional UX of Windows, it’s simply be done by launching an app that doesn’t have an immersive UI or tapping the desktop live tile. During the demo the Office apps were shown to not have an immersive UI and the user has to use them in the traditional Windows UX, it looks just like Windows 7.

There were a few other things shown off and talked about but ‘d like to point out that however good this new UI is its only a fraction of Windows 8. In fact there wasn’t a huge amount of talk as to what kind of work Microsoft would do to make touch and tablet PCs better but I imagine this has blown those ideas out of the water. There has perhaps been more speculation about the features of Windows 8 including things like cloud integration which was not mentioned or shown at all.

In fact there was very little mention really about the internet other than Live Tiles and notifications that will use the internet. I imagine that the fact nothing was really said about the internet is because Microsoft is working on some interesting integrations such as backing up data to SkyDrive.

This integration might be hinted at by the share button in the buttons bar. I am also interested in the connect button as Microsoft already have a product called connect and it allows devs to use Windows Live data in the same way Facebook Connect allows devs for Facebook data. I wonder if connect will be used to allow a user to sign in to a cloud service.

Another thing that has long been rumoured is a Windows Marketplace and would appear that one is certainly coming. Microsoft are using the “store” name here, I wonder if they are trying to antagonise Apple.

However, there were several things missing. Where was the Kinect integration? For a company so focused on NUI there was an apparent lack of hands free or voice control announcements. Silverlight was definitely missing and instead of using it for new immersive apps HTML5, CSS, etc. will be used. I imagine there are some annoyed Silverlight devs. I also thought we might hear something about Bing integration, maybe that’s there by tapping the search button but just not shown.

I am looking forward to the next load of information to come out about Windows 8 at the new Build/Windows conference announced yesterday.

Anyone else looking forward to Windows 8? (I think I know the answer to the question).