The Windows 8 user interface is a mix of old and new. While we think that both the old desktop and the new Metro interface work well when considered individually, the combination of the two leaves something to be desired, thanks to, among other things, radically different looks-and-feels, and a dependence on hot corners that play poorly with multimonitor systems.

Microsoft is planning a bunch of changes to Windows 8 that directly address the concerns we had, changes that should greatly improve the Windows 8 user experience. The company has outlined them in a pair of posts on its Building Windows 8 blog: the Windows 8 desktop will sport a new, simpler, flatter theme, and the handling of multiple screens is going to be vastly enhanced with a couple of changes. The desktop will now contain special "traps" in the corners to stop the mouse sliding between screens, and the Start screen, charms bar, and task switcher will be invokable on every screen, not just the primary.

Strangely, the multimonitor post was originally published—briefly—last week, before being removed. It was reposted today.

No more Aero

The design aesthetic of the Metro environment is to be unapologetically digital: it eschews the simulations of real-world physical materials and constraints that most current interfaces feature, with their shaded pseudo-3D buttons, brushed metal texturing, and glassy window borders, in favor of something that is stripped back to its functional core. Buttons, for example are denoted by simple text labels or highly stylized iconography. Window chrome—title bars, borders, scrollbars, toolbars, and menus—is either removed entirely or hidden, appearing only when useful and relevant.

The Aero Glass theme—used in Windows Vista, Windows 7, and current prereleases of Windows 8—is typical for its time. The chrome is heavy and intrusive, with thick, glassy, translucent window borders, bulbous, raised buttons, and extensive use of color and ornamentation to subdivide and segregate content.

On their own, each concept was reasonable, but wedded together, they felt odd: two diametrically opposed ideas about what an interface should look like, and how it should work, crammed together in what we called an "awkward hybrid."

Windows 8's new theme, shown off only in a small screenshot, will take some steps toward reconciling these two UI viewpoints. The new theme will introduce a little more harmony between Metro and the desktop. The glass effect is gone, replaced by flat color. The window buttons are no longer bulky curved blobs in the corner of the window; they're now simple flat rectangles.

The Windows desktop still isn't Metro, and existing Windows applications are not going to use Metro any time soon; they still use resizable windows, toolbars, borders, and more. Software such as Zune, MetroTwit, and Device Center are still going to be truer representations of the Metro ideal than the most regular Windows software. But with the new theme, it looks as if the (almost spurious) stylistic differences between the two worlds will be addressed in some ways.

Microsoft notes that the forthcoming Release Preview, due in early June, will not include the new theme; it will be "hinted at," but the final look of the operating system will only ship with the retail release. New icons are also rumored to be a feature of the final theme.

Improved multimonitor support

A significant minority of desktop Windows users—about 14-15 percent, by Microsoft's figures—use multimonitor systems. The current Windows 8 experience leaves a lot to be desired on multimonitor systems. Windows 8 uses hot corners for a number of fundamental operations, and while these hot corners present infinitely large targets on single-monitor systems (just fling the mouse into a screen corner and it'll automatically land on the right spot), they're closer to needles in a proverbial haystack on multimonitor systems, because an attempt to hit the magic pixel more often than not results in the mouse overshooting and moving onto an adjacent screen.

To make them considerably easier to hit, the hot corners in Windows 8 Release Preview will include small "traps:" 6 pixel barriers along the edge of the screen to make the target bigger and prevent overshooting. The Release Preview will also make every corner hot, allowing the task switcher, charms, and Start screen to be called up on any screen.

These refinements are small in themselves, but we've heard that they make a considerable positive improvement to the overall usability of the operating system. The gesture to bring out the charms still requires a little care and attention. To make the charms appear, the mouse is moved into the top or bottom right corner, and then moved in a straight line down or up, towards the middle of the right edge. While the corner traps make it easy to get the mouse into the right place to start the gesture, the movement straight up or down is still unconstrained, and the mouse can still spill out of the target area.

While Windows 8 won't ever escape its hybridity, the changes that Microsoft is making are both steps in the right direction. Will they be enough to make it feel like a coherent single operating system? That's a judgment that will have to wait for the final release.