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Microsoft.com New Design Preview

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Re: Microsoft.com New Design Preview

#101

Post by tomp »

cageface wrote: post #76

Microsoft now has, IMO, the most interesting design language of any of the big tech players. I guess it remains to be seen if there will be any reward for them in the market for this but, as a developer, I find this a lot more appealing than anything Google or Apple are doing and C# kicks the shit out of Java or Obj-C.

What do you mean by "design language"? A programming language, a programming language used for design (like HTML, CSS), a the style of language used in their websites (e.g. Lorem Ipsum), or something else?

Re: Microsoft.com New Design Preview

#102

Post by saint-loup »

karlshea wrote: post #97
cageface wrote: post #76

Microsoft now has, IMO, the most interesting design language of any of the big tech players. I guess it remains to be seen if there will be any reward for them in the market for this but, as a developer, I find this a lot more appealing than anything Google or Apple are doing and C# kicks the shit out of Java or Obj-C.

I totally agree about the design language. I work on a Mac most of the day and love my iPhone, but damn does Metro look nice. And it's great seeing that come across with their other products as well.

I fell in love with Metro the minute I saw it. I bought a Lumia 800 on day one. I'm all for chromeless interfaces. But I'm starting to think I was mistaken.

1. They followed design principles too well. Strong constraints: check. Simplicity: check. But Metro is too constrained, too systematical. App designers are left with too few breathing space. Apps look all the same and feel too cold. I want my gradients back.

2. It doesn't look that good on big screens. For instance, launch screens of Windows 8 apps : it's too minimalistic to have big white icons on a flat monochrome background.

Re: Microsoft.com New Design Preview

#103

Post by thisishugo »

tomp wrote: post #101
cageface wrote: post #76

Microsoft now has, IMO, the most interesting design language of any of the big tech players. I guess it remains to be seen if there will be any reward for them in the market for this but, as a developer, I find this a lot more appealing than anything Google or Apple are doing and C# kicks the shit out of Java or Obj-C.

What do you mean by "design language"? A programming language, a programming language used for design (like HTML, CSS), a the style of language used in their websites (e.g. Lorem Ipsum), or something else?

He means Metro[1].

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metro_(design_language)

Re: Microsoft.com New Design Preview

#104

Post by Trezoid »

tomp wrote: post #101
cageface wrote: post #76

Microsoft now has, IMO, the most interesting design language of any of the big tech players. I guess it remains to be seen if there will be any reward for them in the market for this but, as a developer, I find this a lot more appealing than anything Google or Apple are doing and C# kicks the shit out of Java or Obj-C.

What do you mean by "design language"? A programming language, a programming language used for design (like HTML, CSS), a the style of language used in their websites (e.g. Lorem Ipsum), or something else?

From wikipedia: A design language or design vocabulary is an overarching scheme or style that guides the design of a complement of products.

In microsofts case it's the "metro" style, with lots of bright (almost cartoony) colors, big blocks filled with lots of light-weight, sans-serif fonts.

Re: Microsoft.com New Design Preview

#105

Post by gouranga »

Jacobi wrote: post #100
hk__2 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Java runs everywhere. C# runs only on M$ plateforms…

I use Mono on a daily basis. It's a mature full featured cross platform .NET implementation.

It's not full featured. It's a pretty small subset. The most powerful things in the .Net platform are the big chunks of code which take on large business cases and make them go away.

For example the following either don't exist or are half-baked:

WCF (WsHttpBinding in particular), WWF (entirely which we use for WCF correlation), EF (not a biggy but would be nice), WPF (the best part of .Net), MEF (buggy and missing bits).

If I wanted cross platform, I'd go Java.

Re: Microsoft.com New Design Preview

#106

Post by mitsche »

wisty wrote: post #78
billpatrianakos wrote: post #64

It looks great actually! What kills ,e about Microsoft though is that, especially recently, they've done a great job in making their sites, OS, and software quite pretty but they still after all this time have absolutely horrendous font rendering in Windows which kills every design they come out with. I'm a developer who uses a Mac as my primary machine, Linux as a secondary machine and in the past month has been for…

Microsoft font rendering is different, not worse. If you want to make it more like OSX, there's a tuning app here: http://www.microsoft.com/typography/cleartypeinfo.mspx

AFAIK there is no way in Windows to control hinting, which in my opinion is the thing that makes Windows' font-rendering unbearable, especially on displays with a high PPI count.

There's hacks out there, but they're exactly that: hacks. And they don't always work that well.

Re: Microsoft.com New Design Preview

#107

Post by rplnt »

zackham wrote: post #11

Really nice support of different browser sizes. Resize your browser from wide to really narrow to check it out.

Except one thing that bugs me most on these "responsive" sites. The images are still loaded at their full resolution. Even when I reloaded after I resized the tab. Tried private tab to avoid cache - result still the same - 1600px wide image loaded.

It's working really nice and all but I think the point of responsive sites is to make them usable on small, mostly mobile, devices. And we still live in a age when the mobile bandwidth is something to worry about. I'd imagine the battery life would suffer a bit too.

Re: Microsoft.com New Design Preview

#108

Post by chris_wot »

__float wrote: post #91
chris_wot wrote: post #87

That's a totally odd font choice they are using. Check out the "d", the "b" and the "p" - looks horrible in Firefox 13! [1] Oh, and it looks terrible in Internet Explorer 8, as the layout is completely out of whack. [2] 1. http://static.inky.ws/image/2290/image.jpg 2. http://static.inky.ws/image/2291/image.jpg

Wow, bizarre. It looks nothing like that in Chrome. http://i.imgur.com/Ny3fo.png

I've logged a bug with Mozilla: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=769573

Re: Microsoft.com New Design Preview

#109

Post by Jacobi »

gouranga wrote: post #105
Jacobi wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Mono on a daily basis. It's a mature full featured cross platform .NET implementation.

It's not full featured. It's a pretty small subset. The most powerful things in the .Net platform are the big chunks of code which take on large business cases and make them go away. For example the following either don't exist or are half-baked: WCF (WsHttpBinding in particular), WWF (entirely which we use for WCF correlation), EF (not a biggy but would be nice), WPF (the best part of .Net), MEF (buggy and missing b…

I do agree with you : mono is a subset of .NET, Cross platform compatibility is not the main reason for using Mono. I really like the C# and the .NET ecosystem. I use a native UI for each platform, but the core code is the same. I'm not a big fan of those generic UI toolkit ...
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