I wrote the previous post, How To Shut Down Windows 8, more as a joke than an actual how-to piece. However, I’ve since updated it to have a more serious tone, since today alone, I’ve had nearly 150 hits for search terms similar to “How to shut down Windows 8″.

Surely, that level of confusion isn’t good. Especially seeing as this is a ‘developer preview’ – essentially alpha software – and the target audience for downloads at the moment is Windows developers, people who are experienced with computers and tend to know what they’re doing.

If Windows 8 was released in its current state, we’d be seeing hundreds, if not thousands, of novice users installing it, then becoming apprehensive about using their own computer. Perhaps even more intermediate users as well as novices. What is it going to do to someone’s confidence using a computer if it takes ten minutes to work out how to shut the thing down?

The problem lies not in the fact that the shut down button is buried a few levels deep, it’s that it’s buried a few non-sensical levels deep. If you’re looking to shut a computer down, would your first (or even second or third) instinct be to look under settings?

It’s not just that the option is hidden under settings, either. To open that menu in the bottom corner, you can’t click a button or press a keyboard shortcut. You have to know beforehand that a menu will appear if you place your cursor off-screen in that certain area. There’s no hint to tell you it’s there, you have to figure it out yourself.

During my initial hunt for the shut down button, I triggered that menu by accident a couple of times, but because there was no obvious path to what I wanted, I disregarded the entire menu. I only went back once I’d clicked everywhere else and found nothing.

The other issue is that nothing looks obviously clickable. There’s no texture to anything; it’s all a ‘flat’ surface. If you look at buttons on OS X, or even previous versions of Windows, they have some depth, and look as though they can actually be pushed inwards. I clicked the word “Start” at the top of the Metro view more than once, thinking it was the Start menu. It looks exactly the same as the clickable buttons in the settings pane (see above screenshot to see what I mean).

All in all, if I’m honest, the Metro UI, used on a computer rather than a tablet, sucks. If I had been using a tablet, I wouldn’t have needed a shut down button, since I would have just hit the lock button, like on the iPad. Windows 8 needs to recognise when it’s on a platform which doesn’t support touch, and adjust accordingly.

I never thought anyone would have to write a how-to on shutting down a computer, but it took me quite a while to work out how to do it myself.

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Are you an amateur burglar hoping to nab some extra loot this weekend? Good news; there's an app for that! No, it isn't called iBurgle or anything like that. It's called Facebook. Yes, everyone's beloved social networking site and the app that goes with it can be used as an aid to someone looking to rob you of your possessions.

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I mentioned a couple of months ago that I was having trouble deciding which universities to choose to apply to. However, I have visited a few of them and I have made my mind up.

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Around the time version 10 was released, the option in iTunes to "Create MP3 Version" seemingly disappeared for a lot of people. It turns out, it hasn't been removed from iTunes, but there's a setting you need to change to get it back.

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I found these Star Wars posters and thought they were pretty good. This is the best one, and there are more on the original site.

I have to say, I'd never have the patience to work out the exact shapes and colours needed to create something like that.

Developers have been given beta access to the web interface of iCloud, and many people have noticed the unique error pages on the site. I enjoy the icons on those error pages, so I created an iPad wallpaper out of them.

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A few weeks ago, I logged in to Facebook and went to open a chat with a friend, when suddenly the chat window disappeared and was replaced with a little warning symbol and the message "Facebook Chat is experiencing technical problems". Oddly, this was only happening in Safari – I could use chat perfectly fine in Chrome.

This went on for a while, until a couple of days after I installed Lion on my MacBook. I was testing out resizing a window whilst holding the Option key (this resizes the window equally from each side as you drag) on a Safari window. I happened to have a Facebook window open as I did it, and once the window got to a certain width, the chat sidebar appeared! I tested a few times, making the window smaller and bigger, and it was definitely the window width determining whether chat was working.

So if you ever run into this issue with Safari and Facebook, try making the window wider. It would be nice if the error message said the window was too small, but at least this seems to work for this particular issue.

There are some people who are complaining about the fact that the Downloads window was removed from Safari in Lion and replaced with a popover instead. How can we possibly cope without a floating window showing the progress of current downloads?! Quite easily, actually.

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If you're looking for a text editor for your iPad that also doubles as an FTP client and a Dropbox client, look no further. The best one you could find is Textastic, a £6.99 ($9.99) app which not only does all of the above, but also includes features such as syntax highlighting. Let's start with a look at some of the best features it has.

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