Windows 8: Rectangles for all the things explained
Summary: The new Windows 8 user interface discards the desktop metaphor we've used for three decades, and replaces it with a panorama of coloured rectangles. Why? And how does it change the development process?
The now-familiar desktop view of folders of documents, along with its interface chrome of scroll bars and the like, was developed at Xerox Pato Alto Research Centre (PARC) in the 1970s. But for the new "touch first" interface for Windows 8, Microsoft has chosen a different direction.
On this week's Patch Monday podcast, we discuss the new interface with user experience designer Shane Morris from Automatic Studio and developer Nick Randolph from Built to Roam — the team behind the award-winning Qantas app for Windows Phone and the latest Windows app for National Australia Bank.
Morris recaps the presentation he gave to Microsoft's TechEd 2012 event last week, explaining the interface's design inspirations in transport system wayfinding signage, the Swiss Style of graphic design, Bauhaus and motion graphics, as well as the idea that digital natives don't need an icon like a floppy disk to explain how to save documents.
Randolph explains how the development process is more iterative, with more back-and-forth communication between designer and developer. The programming style is different, too — more interactive and almost game-like.
To leave an audio comment on the program, Skype to stilgherrian, or phone Sydney +61 2 8011 3733.
Running time: 30 minutes, 03 seconds.
Stilgherrian travelled to TechEd 2012 as Microsoft's guest.
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Talkback
One word--ugly
I agree, Windows 8 is ugly.
I just don't understand why you can't have, at least the option, to use Aero in desktop mode - I don't know yet if it is a deal-breaker for upgrading to 8 myself. I'll have to wait and see for a bit.
Desktop
Personally I don't mind the flat look, especially after noticing that it's a lot lighter, faster and less memory intensive than Win 7 and Vista.
Legacy?
WinRT may replace Win32 but that will depend on a lot of factors. That doesn’t mean that the Metro cr@p is the only way to make UIs.
transperancy
Stuck in the 50s
Windows 8 is a breath of fresh air, liberated from those desktop graveyards where icons go to die and those stupid animated docks.
It's time to let all that rococo UI disappear and let the content shine.
Considering you're preferring an endless grid of dead icons leading to siloed apps to dynamically updating coloured rectangles that also manage your content, it seems you can't quite grasp the advantages.
Could I get you some add-on chrome fins for your car ;-)
But the content shines better on OS X
Look at an OS X icon for a PDF and you can recognise the content from the miniature image of the page. Look at an OS X icon for a film and you can recognise the content by clicking the icon, which causes the film to start playing in miniature within the icon. Look at the icon for a photograph and the miniature image allows you to see the contents.
How are large, luridly coloured rectangles going to provide this sort of information?
Either Windows 8 will have to follow the path OS X has chosen or you'll have to rely on the file name alone. (MS have chosen the former for pictures, but you can search for the file name.)
What does Windows 8 offer us in return for the loss of all the data that's displayed in an OS X icon? A vast expanse of dead, brightly coloured pixels which _sometimes_ contain some textual data, and otherwise just reproduces what OS X icons already show us.
Of course, in OS X you can always click a button and visit the Dashboard, where you can install any JavaScript-and-HTML powered icons that you like, from a program to a user-chosen clip of a web animation. You can have a rectangular slab slab of any size and colour, which displays changing numbers, or animations, or dynamic graphs.
Dashboard widgets are a lot like (tastefully designed) Metro icons. The main difference is that Metro takes the concept too far. With large widgets replacing icons, you run into problems when you want to view large numbers of widgets en masse, except as as textual lists!
What MS call “share and search” is a lot like a glorified textual interface from the 1970s, but without the flexibility of a command line.
live tiles.
Metro is the past...
Maybe Win8 should be bundled with a coupon for a free lobotomy, then we will all be able to appreciate it as you do.
Save your money
Most people who still have desktops and notebooks use them to get real work done. The last thing we need is an ugly OS designed for (and to sell) tablets.
For OSX or Linux fan, Windows will be always ugly
Not fast from what I've seen
Metro is slow and ugly on non-tablets devices. I have no desire to downgrade my Win7 notebook or Vista 64-bit desktop to a tablet OS.
BoB 2!
Grasping at straws there mate!
Silly
Win 8 Metro is the complete opposite of that, and removing just about any real world object because in this day and age, most people are comfortable enough with common concepts that they don't need to see a folder shaped like a folder, or a delete/recycle function shaped like a trash can.
( Of course it might still fail just like Bob, I'll give you that. ;) ) But a good comparison at this stage it's not.
grow up!
Wake up and smell the coffee!
I've been running Win8 Enterprise RTM and have nothing against the core OS, it's stable enough and has some nice refinements. However, the "not Metro" UI is a total failure and an insult to every desktop user.
IMO, the new generation of UI designers that have been inflicting atrocities like the "not Metro" UI, the grey and washed out Visual Studio UI, the "new look" Google UI etc should be fired and forced to go back to school. There is nothing appealing or superior about pointy rectangles, Crayola color schemes, dumbed down, flat interfaces and generic grey icons that make things harder to use and provide less information.
I don't care about tablet users' fat fingers when I have a mouse and keyboard, nor about tablets' weak-sauce GPUs and battery performance when I have a desktop and a decent graphics card. But I do care about interfaces that provide me with information and helpful hints (expressed in multi-colored icons, for example) and visual feedback that helps me distinguish menu bars from overlapping windows at a glance. I also like UIs that are pleasant to look at (Aero, Glass etc), rather than UIs that look like a pre-schooler's idea of a computer.
And by the way, I'm neither a Mac nor a Linux troll. I've been using Windows all the way since 3.0 and I find the Windows 8 UI is a throw-back to at least that far (Windows 1.0, if you count the one-app-at-a-time Metro UI).
Fine then....
Full screen
However I'm not sold on running everything full-screen on non-tablet devices, with the fig leaf of a severely limited 'snapped' display.
When comparing against other tablets it's clearly a big step forward.
When comparing against the old way of running productivity apps, I'm not yet convinced. I guess I will have to base my impression on the Metro OneNote preview, which pioneers an interesting interface to get to particular functions. I'm just not sure yet.
Then use the Desktop,