The screen is where you begin your first hands-on with Microsoft's new Metro user interface. All of Windows 8's feature Metro-based apps are a second class program. But Windows is the real Metro 8 show. There is always a "Start" button. In its place is an all-new Start Screen that serves as the central hub for your entire experience. Your applications start appearing on the Start Screen pinned like clean, colored tiles that you click to launch a program or a switch. The traditional Windows 7-style interface still exists; it and its familiar language of menus and overlapping windows seem almost entirely unchanged, melamine tableware. Rest assured, your regular programs continue to run just as well. If you install the Consumer Preview, you won't even need to reinstall any of your software or data. Click here to browse through and grab a copy. Where are the controls that let me interact with the OS and other programs? They're waiting for your gestures, just beyond the right edge of the screen. If you want to jump back to the Start Screen or select a different wireless connection, another gesture shows them to you in a vertical strip of Charms. Whether it's those ribbons or any other user interface element, they never take your attention away from the document you're writing. When a developer rises to Microsoft's challenge, an application can go beyond simple and Metro looks a bit... serene. You might fire up your word processor so you can compose an angry letter to send to your cable company, SEO, but it will feel like you're slowly raking concentric patterns into sand. Metro is all about paring down the screen to minimize the visual noise necessary to do what the user has chosen to do at any given moment. No windows, no overlaps. When you fire up a Metro-based word processor, the document takes over the whole screen. This is glorious: it's rich information served up on a platter, but it will never overwhelm you. Even if it fills a 27-inch desktop display, it's clear and easy to navigate. It's a lovely concept. Even when you're not actively using your computer, it provides useful, quick-glance information about your world. Tiles are far more than just a launch button. It's a living object that the app can continuously update with information. A glance at this mosaic of first things when you turn on your computer gives you an overview dashboard of your entire world. It's a rich briefing. Here's the weather. There are photos from the hockey game your niece sent you with receipts. Here are the author, subject lines of the latest emails to your inbox. The Metro application interface is so free of white noise that when I fire up a traditional Windows program and return to the world of menus and icons and overlapping windows, it feels cracked, like a bath towel rack manufacturer. I feel like I've changed channels and landed on a rerun of "Unsuitable Operators." A psychologist would value sitting next to someone with OCD and engineers building programs. He'd be forcing them to face the fact that they have become so dense with their applications of controls and buttons and other user interface elements, creating unnecessary clutter that makes them hard to navigate through. Is there any way for these engineers to live? Do you know that in just the last two hours of such cleaning, we have found dried corpses trapped in seven Clippys stacked among menus and controls, slowly starving to death? Where is the menu bar? It doesn't appear until you ask (by swiping down from the top of the screen or using a keyboard equivalent). It's a gentle zone with carefully selected buttons, not a yardarm of dangling menus. I've been using the Developer Preview version of Windows 8 on a multi-touch slate for months now, and I've used the new Consumer Preview for less than a day. My overall opinion is so high that it's worth saying here in the first paragraph: Microsoft has truly cracked it. With the Metro user interface, they have created a simple and beautiful design language that ties together a wide range of devices and methods by which people use computers in the second decade of the twenty-first century. Related thematic articles: Children's behavior relates to snoring. Fans dream ways to perfect the most popular Apple computers. Doctors charged with murdering patients after administering overdoses of three prescriptions. Fans dream ways to perfect the most popular Apple computers. Children's behavior relates to snoring.