Windows Phone 8 - A first look

Talkback

• Hey Apple

  Passbook, I'd like you to meet your boss, Wallet. Wallet, this is Passbook, he's new too but he's not starting with quite as many features (if you know what I mean..)

  

  adrian913

  22 June, 2012 05:20

  Reply 2 Votes

  • I know what you mean...

    ...Passbook doesn't have a lot of "features"... but the most important "feature" it doesn't have is a loser OS that is way too late to the party from a bunch of desperate and clueless geeks in Redmond who are trying to look cool. The screenshots of this phone are *hideous.* The Metro-sexual interface is the Emperor's New Clothes... so let me play the part of the little kid who accidentally tells the truth.
    
    Foisting a ridiculous Mondrian interface on your hapless users does not make you hip (you know, Mondrian, the guy who invented art for stupid people to buy). Flooding the screen with a monochromatic color does not unify the graphic theme (especially when the colors are lipstick pink or babysh*t yellow!). Cutting off parts of the titles does not make you a designer (it does make it harder to read). As an *actual* designer, I will tell you right now: this interface will absolutely *disgust* most users within 6 months. I'm totally sick of it already and I just saw a few screen shots. From a visual as *well* as a functional design, this interface is a complete disaster. What looks "refreshing and new" to some reviewers will be horrible and tedious when you actually have to use it. This is truly the end of days for M$. Welcome to Applegeddon...

    

    eastmont

    22 June, 2012 10:31

    Reply 1 Vote

    • Well, kinda

      I hear you but even you have to realize that until you play with a device, you are just guessing on its design success. I'm a huge Apple fan but I'm not looking for another player to copy Apple's interface. Different is good, a non focused gaming device is good, a business centric device is good (at first), a device that works with the Windows ecosystem (whatever that is, xbox?) is good. But you magically assuming that this interface with *disgust* most users is a very funny opinion (as I am a .net/Sencha html5 developer). If I have another group of customers to provide solutions too, then go Microsoft. Competition is good although on a personal level they lost my business as I am v very happy iDevice customer.

      

      lvavila

      25 June, 2012 07:57

      Reply 1 Vote

    • Disgusted? Really?

      Every single person I have met, who actually bought a Windows Phone, loves it and still uses it. I have never met anyone who traded it back. We've issued them to people at my company and no one has been unhappy. Even iPad owners are very pleased with the stability and speed. The design is clean, animated and LIVE. It is FAR more useful than the 256 colour 32x32 icon crap of iOS. Android would be in the same boat if it hadn't introduced widgets!

      

      12312332123

      7 August, 2012 13:35

      Reply Vote

• The design's the thing...

  @lvavila:
  
  I'm not "magically assuming" anything. I can simply look at it and tell it won't work well. My own career is actually as an interface designer, and I know from my own experience (which includes designing interfaces for Windows, Mac and now iPad apps) that there is no way that interface will be a smooth experience for the user. It is oversimplified, and monotonous while at the same time managing to be confusing, busy, garish and cluttered. The graphics of an interface are vital to helping the user along... the Metro interface appears to work *against* this goal.
  
  One of the biggest problems with Metro is the color(s). While the user *initially* sees color from the backgrounds of all those little rectangles, the color is simply a flat color (no shading or texture, etc.). Eventually, after viewing these flat colors for awhile, your mind will tune them out, as they add nothing to your perceived information. So, after you tune out those flat colors, all you're left with is a white silhouette of an icon (reminiscent of the original old B&W Mac monitors... where you could use any color you wanted as long as it was black!). A white silhouette hardly counts as a color. So instead of having beautiful miniature works of art in 16 million colors (as they are on previous versions of Windows, Mac and iPad, etc.), we are forced back to the bad old computer graphics days when everything was monochromatic. Believe me, color not only sells... it also is a great way to identify things. Removing color just for the sake of style is counter-productive to any computer interface. That's why we have color now, instead of being stuck in the past with monochrome displays.

  

  eastmont

  26 June, 2012 17:41

  Reply Vote

  • Design

    That seems to be the direction they're taking with everything right now (at MS). Instead of the brilliant interfaces with all the color and art, they're dragging everything back into the past. Up until now I was really enjoying the progression of the GUI, tending toward more color and more sophisticated color icons. The 24 and 32-bit colored icons when built into a nice toolbar interface seemed to me to be a really compact and attractive way to organize functionality. Icons began to really tell a story just when you looked at them!
    
    Besides "Metro", one of the first places I noticed this backwards trend was in the front-end of Visual Studio 2012. Yuck! 2008 has a much more appealing GUI to me. Highly customizable and full of brilliant (and easy to understand) icon pictures. The 2012 version drops back into these ugly monochrome tools that are tough for my eyes to adapt to.
    
    Fortunately since I develop mostly desktop applications I'm going to be able to sit most of this out. VS2008 (and my copy of Office 2003) are kept under lock and key. I've tested them both on Win8 and they both function perfectly. Fortunately nothing going on in the technology renders either of those tools (among others) irrelevant. You want to talk about "making do" with what you have. I'm going to seriously be doing that for awhile!
    
    -Max

    

    Max Peck

    27 June, 2012 07:36

    Reply Vote

• I LIKE

  Some peoples opinions are so contorted, it doesn't make sense. Its so cool when a company can break away from the norm. This OS will be a hit.

  

  reefshop

  27 June, 2012 05:29

  Reply 2 Votes

• Love the stereotyping.

  Soccer Mums with pink.
  Activity dude with blue.
  
  Same stale Microsoft, this isn't Toys 'R Us you know Mr MS. People are a lot more complex than say "lets pick my favorite color".

  

  Bozzer

  27 June, 2012 05:46

  Reply Vote