gamefbi: Preview

If you played around with the consumer preview (read: beta) of Windows 8 earlier this year, you may not have been impressed. Certainly, impressions at that point were bitterly divided between those who love and those who hate where Microsoft is going. But hey, that's what betas are for, right? Figure out what people don't like and make improvements.

Today, Microsoft has made available the release preview—roughly analogous to the first release candidate of previous versions—and it shows a lot of improvement. If you can't stand Metro, you'll be disappointed to know it's just as prominent as before. It's more useful now, with better gestures, multi-monitor support, and greatly improved apps, but you still can't avoid it. There's a lot of polish in other areas, but still some work to be done before Windows 8 finally hits the market on tablets and PCs later this year.

Check out PCWorld's hands-on impressions of the release preview for a lot more detail about Microsoft has added and changed. If you'd like to give it a whirl yourself, download the bits from Microsoft's site. Just be sure not to upgrade your current Windows installation; install to a new partition or drive.

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Apple today pushed out another update to its OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion developer preview program, moving to build 12A206j. The update comes on top of build 12A193i, which was released on May 1.

Apple notes that "MacBookPro3,1", which corresponds to mid and late 2007 machines, is not compatible with the new build, but that issue will be rectified in a later build.

No other details on improvements in the latest build are available yet, but it certainly appears that Apple is making some of its final tweaks for developers leading up to its Worldwide Developers Conference less than four weeks away. Apple is expected to provide extensive previews of OS X Mountain Lion at the conference, with a public launch scheduled for "late summer".

The new Mountain Lion build is still a bit short of the 12A211 build spotted in a Geekbench entry for an apparently unreleased MacBook Pro earlier this week. While that entry could have been faked, the data does match closely with what is known about upcoming Ivy Bridge MacBook Pro models, and Primate Labs believes the entry to be legitimate.