Mixed-use mayhem

Windows 8 provides a solid desktop experience. Its tablet experience is, in spite of the rough edges, workable, with many enjoyable parts. And as long as you stick to one way of working or the other, you can be pretty happy.

Where it falls down, hard, is when you try to mix and match. Microsoft has done precious little to bring the Metro environment and the desktop environment together. They're two separate worlds. The charms, in particular, are off-limits to desktop apps. The Search charm won't search the foreground desktop app. Desktop apps can't share or be share targets. Desktop apps don't know about devices, and don't store their settings behind the Settings charm.

This makes a mix-and-match approach deeply flawed. I can't even send an e-mail via Outlook from the Metro world. Outlook. Probably one of the most important business applications of all time, and Metro doesn't even know it exists.

We get the same problem in reverse, too. If you use the Metro Mail app as your e-mail client, you might expect that you could right-click a file in Explorer, and then go to Send to, Mail Recipient, and for this to create a mail in the Mail app. You might expect that, but it won't work. Send to Mail Recipient can only use desktop Mail apps. How about sending someone a URL to a webpage from within the desktop Internet Explorer using the Share charm? Nope, not an option; desktop Internet Explorer can't send to the Share charm. Nothing on the desktop can.

Making matters worse is that, by default, Windows 8 is configured to use this mix-and-match approach. I already mentioned things like defaulting to using the Metro Photos app instead of the desktop Photo Viewer app, so let's explore that in detail. I often get sent ZIP files of images (product photos, that kind of thing). So I unzip them all into a directory somewhere. I then want to look at them, so I double-click one of them. In Windows 7, this would open up Photo Viewer, and I can just use the arrow keys to cycle through all the images in the same directory. Quick and easy.

In Windows 8, however, the first image opens up in the Metro Photo app. And here's the problem: the Metro Photo app can't view the rest of the images in the directory. Why? It doesn't have permission. It's another one of those security things: Metro apps can't read arbitrary directories on disk. They can only read files explicitly selected by the user, and files in one of the libraries (which, incidentally, can only be managed from the desktop).

So instead, you open the first file, then either quit the Photo app or alt-tab back to Explorer, open the next file, then switch back to Explorer, open the next, and so on.

OK, you might say, so put the folder in the Pictures library. Do that, and the Metro Photo app does the right thing; you can open the first file and then navigate to its siblings just fine, without having to flip back to Explorer the whole time. But I may not want to put the pictures in the Pictures library. I probably want to put them in the Documents library, alongside the PDFs, Word documents, and Markdown files that comprise a piece of work. But if I do that, the same problem occurs. The Metro Photos app can't read from the Documents library. It's only allowed into the Pictures one.

The separation also makes the Start screen's Live Tiles much less useful. Again, to use Outlook as an example: Outlook can't display Live Tiles. It can't give me a mail notification on the Start screen, nor on the lock screen. It can't show me my next appointment on the Start or lock screens either. Why? Because only Metro applications are allowed Live Tiles.

This is vexing in Windows 8; it's arguably even more annoying in Windows Server 2012. The Start screen could make an ideal at-a-glance console, with Live Tiles to indicate the health of various system components and services. Except it can't do this, because doing that would require Live Tiles that were generated by desktop applications, system services, and PowerShell scripts.

There is a hard and dividing line between the two worlds. Far from allowing seamless switching between the two environments, they barely even acknowledge the other's existence. It's extremely limited, and it means that as a person who has to use the desktop for some things, I find myself avoiding Metro apps for all things. Bridging the gap is just too painful and annoying.

The only silver lining to this cloud is that there's no real technical reason for these restrictions. It would be relatively easy to, for example, allow desktop applications to participate in the share contract and other mechanisms. I've heard claims that other scenarios are being considered too, such as allowing drag and drop from the desktop into Metro apps. So the situation could improve in some future version.

Right now, though, it's a big pain point. Until this gap is closed, it leaves Windows 8 feeling like two separate operating systems poorly grafted together. You can never avoid the join entirely, but your happiness with Windows 8 will depend heavily on just how often you have to cross over. The more you try to treat the two worlds as equal, integrated peers, the worse Windows 8 gets. The more you stick to one paradigm or the other, the better it is.