Day 1 of Surface 2 as Primary PC Recap - Good(ish)
I was pleased that I was able to get so much done using Surface today. I think I’m good to go for tomorrow. Sure there are things that require me to remote in (business apps) and sure there is just not a use case for staying all RT mode (formerly known as Metro formally known as Modern). As a business user, I have lots of desktop apps open and in front of me daily. I need to be able to see things on a variety of windows at once, something that just isn’t possible in RT mode. Sure, there’s the new app resizing, but those get in the way pretty quick. I found myself doing a combination of touch and mousing which surprised me – I fully expected to be mouse only. The productivity apps in RT mode are getting there but still a ways off:
- OneNote – I’m just used to using desktop mode and I haven’t figured out how to open corporate notebooks with the RT version of the app – I’m sure I can but I have the desktop flavor next to me and always accessible on the taskbar. Tomorrow, however, I’m going to do all my OneNoting (happy birthday OneNote by the way!) from RT mode to get a better feel for it.
- Team Viewer Touch – let me in to my home PC very easily – great job there. Join.Me was view only 🙁
- RDP – I might try doing my RDPing into work servers using the RT app, but again, I’m just used to WIN+R, mstsc, server name, connect.
- Mail – Outlook is what’s running the corporate mail, primarily because it’s Outlook but also because the Mail app uses EAS, which means my company gets to put restrictions on my computer like it’s a mobile device…not happenin. I would, however, like to use the Calendar and People portion but they are all tied together so no luck there. I do get a lot of personal email throughout the day, and I will say this for sure – the Mail app, bound to Outlook.com is hands down, the best experience I’ve ever seen for personal email. It’s FABULOUS
- Facebook – always open in the background, alerting me throughout the day…now, if I could just have a ()#(@*$*&%0#*(&(#@*%$# notification center!
- IM+, worked good for personal communication throughout the day, including Skype – I can’t use the dedicated app for Skype because I’m only allowed 5 or 6 apps running in the background at once, so I am forced to use IM+’s Skype connection instead which is less than optimal.
- Yammer – I’d use the app but it isn’t really functional for my purposes – I bounce between lots of external networks and even different accounts and it’s easier to just have lots of IE windows going…speaking of which
- IE – I can’t … I just can’t get RT version of IE going without me wanting to hit something. I’m going to try again tomorrow, like REALLY try. It’s just so full screeny…agh
- Twitter – went all day without Tweetdeck, partly cause it’s only available on Chrome lol but the Twitter app with my three feeds going kept pace.
- News – followed news throughout the day and was surprised – I continue to get NBC News alerts even though that app isn’t on my ‘permit to run in the background’ list – which is totally fine – love getting the alerts but I thought that was a requirement. Maybe they just wrote their app better than others. Other news apps, including the built in News app is acceptable.
I’ll be getting into the other productivity apps soon but it was a good first day. More tomorrow!