For almost two weeks, my main computer – a ThinkPad W510 (circa 2010) has been running Windows 8. Courtesy of the Logitech Touchpad T650 I’ve mentioned here and many times on Twitter, the experience has been – to me – much smoother than when I was trying to use Windows 8 (in a VM, admittedly) with a mouse during the previews.

Three things I want to say up front:

1. I’m trying to be positive and fair, and give Windows 8 on a touchless system a shot.
2. I’m writing this from the perspective of a person with a laptop (docked or other), or a desktop, without touch. Because that’s what I have and what I use most of the time – and for the next several years or more, that’s not a freakishly uncommon scenario.
3. I’m almost not going to talk about apps at all. For a change. I have several installed, I’ll talk in a few weeks about the ones I really find myself using.

No, instead, I’ve got a wish list. It’s not quite Christmas, but I don’t think Microsoft can get me these this year. So perhaps over the next year?

In no particular order:

1. Add back key system state to the Start screen (clock/battery/wireless). These three intrinsics are there on the desktop taskbar. They’re even there when you power on your Windows 8/RT device before the logon screen. They’re even visible on iOS (sorry – first of three times I’ll do this) with most applications, unless the application elects to hide the status bar. So why are they missing on the Start screen and while running applications? Hiding chrome is good. But you can go too far, and I think the loss of these three items exemplifies this. There are three important things to know on a computer – even a fruit-flavored one that fits in your pocket – 1) What time is it, 2) Am I connected to a network, and 3) When will this thing run out of juice. Don’t be shy about sharing that info with the users. I’m currently using Ze Clock to show a tile that displays date and time, but this is duct tape and should be in the OS – especially when I’m in an app.
2. Add back a visual cue of some type for mouse users to indicate where to navigate to for the Start screen. If you’re using a tablet, you’ve got the Windows key front and center (literally). With my Logitech, I’ve got an easy gesture (three fingers up) to navigate to it. Yes, I know there is a button on the keyboard to open it. But users have been trained for 17 years to click a button with a mouse to launch apps – and the entire visual cue just disappeared, unless you hover over it. Proper behavior in my opinon? Show the start orb (even a sexy new one for Windows 8+) that pops the Start screen open. it’s okay that it opens the Start screen. But you’ve fundamentally disconnected the trigger that users on a desktop expect, and that novice users search for. When you find that the system supports touch, hide the orb. That, to me, is the best of all worlds.
3. Add the Search charm functionality to the desktop through an Explorer band. Heck, you might even be able to skip item 1 if you do this. Equivalent to the old URL band in Explorer. I just wish without touch there was a single-step way to invoke the Search charm because it works really, really well.
4. When you open the Charm bar – type ahead should automatically start searching. When you are on the Start screen, just typing begins invoking the Search charm and showing results. When you flick open the Charm bar, the same thing should happen. The Charm bar moves to the top of the Z-order, but it isn’t doing anything until you choose a charm. If the user just begins typing after they open it, I think it’s safe to assume they want to search. Can you tell I like the Search charm?
5. Add intrinsic social sharing. On iOS (sorry – but hey, it’s only the second time I’ve invoked it, right?), it’s remarkably easy to share from iOS to Twitter, and now to Facebook – through the OS. When you want to share a URL from IE, in particular, this is remarkably hard. Even if Microsoft doesn’t want to build apps for Twitter or Facebook, I think building in first-class sharing to share links to Twitter, Facebook (and LinkedIn if you’d like, though I could care less) directly from the browser would be wonderful. Huge favor – do what Buffer does, and grab the title AND the URL automatically. I was originally going to suggest that IE needs some sort of new extensibility model that would work on Windows RT as well, but to me, this is really what I need that IE (especially immersive IE) is missing.
6. Fix Favorites. Even when I worked at Microsoft years ago and advocated roaming favorites (1999, baby!) it seemed like Favorites were the cobbler’s child of IE. I get that in many ways the “Frequent” screen shown when you open a new tab has replaced them. But it isn’t the same. In both immersive and desktop IE, Favorites are all but dead… Tucked away in a shoebox like photos from 1978. You put all this love into the Start screen – how about something Start screen-like for Favorites in IE? There has to be something that can be done here, it’s just sort of broken and lost right now. No, pinning pages to the Start screen doesn’t count. That’s nuts. Semantic zoom or not, the human brain can only take so much load – plus, there’s no way to pin Favorites that I specifically want to launch desktop IE.
7. Fix Internet Explorer modes. Explaining the modes in a modeless operating system is becoming challenging for me. Sorry, if you don’t like hearing that Windows 8 has modes, skip to my next wish. Windows 8 vs. Windows RT; immersive vs. desktop; immersive IE vs  desktop IE. Frankly, I don’t even get why there really are two modes of IE. You should really either detect touch and go all-in with immersive, or let the user select and have a default. I find that I use desktop mode far more in my scenario, and immersive is just frustrating to use on a system without touch. Third and final time I’ll invoke iOS here. On the iPhone, Safari hides the browser and goes completely “immersive” all the time. There are no cues to get it to open up again, but it’s there, and you learn what to tap. On the iPad, Safari always has the address bar and list of tabs visible, and has an option to show bookmarks as well. I get that chromeless browsing is the new teh sexy. But this is baby with bathwater stuff. It’s a pain to switch tabs. It’s a pain to open Favorites. It’s a pain to even open a new URL, especially without touch. This is one of the principal reasons I use desktop, not immersive, IE. Some chrome is okay. Really. Users will thank you for it.
8. Let me pin Desktop IE to the Start screen. If you’re not going to make immersive IE less… well… immersive, let me pin an icon for Desktop IE on the Start screen. Believe it or not, that is the only remaining icon pinned on my taskbar now – because I do need it – but as far as I can find, there is no way to pin it to the Start screen. Add that and I’m all in on the Start screen. Seriously. All. In.
9. Copy/Paste for WinRT Remote Desktop app. One of the most beautiful features ever added to RDP in Win32. Works on my Mac’s RDP client. I really wish it worked from the WinRT RDP client as well.
10. Win32 Share charm integration. There’s an icky disconnect between Win32 apps and WinRT apps. You can’t readily share back and forth. Either the clipboard needs to be extended into and out of the Share charm, or Win32 apps (I’m looking at you, Office 2013) should get the ability to implement Share contracts in particular. Try getting a JPG file out of SkyDrive on Windows RT and pasting it into Word. It’s not pretty. As with the previous item, it’d be ideal if you could move files back and forth from WinRT to Win32 and back more readily. I get it’s V1, and this creates a security and workflow issue. But it needs to be solved, as it’s a fundamental disconnect on WinRT.
11. Taskbar group. Especially on systems without touch that are upgraded from a previous version of Windows, create a group of items in the Start screen that is an exact mirror of the Taskbar, called “Taskbar applications” or the like. I did this myself, manually, and it really makes the transition to using the Start screen less foreboding.
12. Startup group. I like to have Outlook start when I log on. I use it all the time. There should be a way to do this without doing that, and the somewhat cumbersome startup tools in Task Manager don’t let you add easily, nor should that be the way to do this. Perhaps add an option on the right-click menu for an app to Add it/Remove it, respectively, from the user’s Startup? Right-click, “Run this program when I log on” or “Don’t run this program when I log on”.
13. Make (re)naming a Start screen group easier. If I right-click above a group of tiles in the Start screen, semantic zoom out, and pop up the dialog for (re)name. This easily isn’t easily discovered as it exists today.
14. Sync my apps/Start screen. Easy, right? Not so much, and I get that. But this is huge. Once you use Office 2013 with SkyDrive or SkyDrive Pro, you realize how awesome deep sync integration is. But this is a bit of a weird hole in Windows 8/RT. All of the advertising for Windows Phone 8 in particular talks about how you can make it yours… so as a user, you spend all this time tweaking your Start screen on Windows 8. Then you get a Windows RT device to test with. And you have to manually sync your apps (the Windows Store could do better here) and then recompose your Start screen. Get a replacement device? Do it again. I have ideas on how this could work that would be elegant – but I really think this has to happen.
15. Don’t hide shutdown. One of the devs I worked with at Microsoft used to have this book on his bookshelf at the office. Much like that topic, it’s something most of us would rather not talk about, but the truth is, shutdown happens. Everything else under the main Settings charm is indeed a setting. But power isn’t a setting. It’s a state. Moreover, it’s not that different from the logged out or locked states that are already present under the user’s tile on the Start screen. Whether on a machine with touch or not, there should be a more discoverable way to reboot the device. It’s a fact of life that once a month you need to reboot a Windows PC, minimum (usually a bit more). It shouldn’t be this hard to do.
16. Finish off the Control Panel. It’s a weird parallel universe – this setting is over there, this one is over here. Running Windows Update from here doesn’t always work, but from over there, it does. Ideally, the Control Panel should be nuked from orbit, except as it must be kept around for legacy/third-party CPLs that can’t run in the new world.

So there it is. Nothing too harsh, but I’m still primarily a desktop guy at this point. We’ll see what wishes I come up with as I spend more time in immersive land.