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Windows 10 Design: Getting the balance right

blogs.windows.com

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Re: Windows 10 Design: Getting the balance right

#31

Post by Cakez0r »

cturner wrote: post #19
wahsd wrote: post #5

I'm going to lose it if Win10 does not integrate automatic time zone adjustment like OSX. What, does no one at MS mind having to manually change the time zone with 7 clicks every time they travel? Why is it not just two clicks to change the time zone at least? Maybe something like right-click time, select from list of preset "favorite" time zones. That doesn't even requite a time network, let alone being able to read…

PDF viewer. Chrome is the only non-awful PDF viewer I've found for Windows. Requires third-party install. Copying and pasting text causes weird characters to be carried around (e.g. emdash), and I haven't found a reliable way to sanitise it. Does notepad handle \n separated lines correctly yet? Something about excel breaks the behaviour of the alt+tab stack. (if you have multiple documents open) Also, it's annoying t…

Agree with all of your points! A lot of them could be addressed by powershell (unfortunately). I have no idea what they were thinking with powershell. They pretty much just had to give people bash + all the unix command line favourites on Windows and somehow they arrived at Powershell. It's like they made a deliberate effort to make something different when the unix way is already tried, tested and loved. It seems to me that they were shooting for the simplicity of bash, but with the power of .NET. Unfortunately the middle ground between the two is useless. Why, why, why, whyyyyy :(

Re: Windows 10 Design: Getting the balance right

#32

Post by lotso »

mhomde wrote: post #16

I'm a bit skeptic about the direction of Windows (Phone) 10. It's not that its bad, it's just that it isn't great and they've missed the opportunity to but in substantial UX improvements. Also having the same interface for Phone/tablet/desktop is a dangerous idea if pushed to far, jack of all trades, master of none. Of course they should share some common ground but they risk sacrificing an tailored experience for ea…

> They haven't made any greater strides in addressing thumb ergonomics on larger screens. Sure at least the buttons are at the bottom again but to make it truly next generational they should have utilized more gestures.

Imo gesture based UIs are UIs that are hard to use for average users.

Re: Windows 10 Design: Getting the balance right

#33

Post by brianpgordon »

> We want to deliver an experience that flexes elegantly across a continuum of devices

And there's the punch to the gut. Just like with Windows 8, if you want to use Windows 10 on the desktop your experience is going to be degraded by sacrifices made for mobile. I was really hoping that Microsoft would learn their lesson, since DirectX 12 is going to be exclusive to Windows 10 and I'm going to have to upgrade.

They're killing Windows on the desktop (where they have 91% market share) for the sake of Windows on mobile/tablet (where they have 2% market share). Again and again I think how much more attractive Microsoft would be if they decoupled their titanically-successful cloud/enterprise world from their depressing, clueless consumer arm. Microsoft shareholders shouldn't be paying for Nokia, the red ring of death, or the Windows Store.

Re: Windows 10 Design: Getting the balance right

#34

Post by mhomde »

freehunter wrote: post #28
mhomde wrote: post #16

I'm a bit skeptic about the direction of Windows (Phone) 10. It's not that its bad, it's just that it isn't great and they've missed the opportunity to but in substantial UX improvements. Also having the same interface for Phone/tablet/desktop is a dangerous idea if pushed to far, jack of all trades, master of none. Of course they should share some common ground but they risk sacrificing an tailored experience for ea…

I hate gestures, especially on larger screens. It 100% ensures I will need to be using two hands, at which point I might as well just have a button. Occasionally I'll try to swipe and find there is a smudge on the screen or maybe the humidity has gone up and my hands are a bit more grippy and whoops, there goes the entire phone out of my hand. On something the size of an iPhone 5, it's fine. On an iPhone 6+ (where yo…

That depends on what kind of gestures you use and where. The closest edges for instance are more easily accessible. Also gestures doesn't necessarily mean swiping.

Re: Windows 10 Design: Getting the balance right

#35

Post by nandhp »

pjmlp wrote: post #24
cturner wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PDF viewer. Chrome is the only non-awful PDF viewer I've found for Windows. Requires third-party install. Copying and pasting text causes weird characters to be carried around (e.g. emdash), and I haven't found a reliable way to sanitise it. Does notepad handle \n separated lines correctly yet? Something about excel breaks the behaviour of the alt+tab stack. (if you have multiple documents open) Also, it's annoying t…

UNIX file locking is broken. Requiring all processes to play along. It suffices one process to ignore fcntl calls to corrupt files. All non-POSIX OSes with proper file locking use the same approach as Windows does. You can install telnet via the add features option from the control panel. Who wants to have such insecure program available anyway? Commercial UNIX systems were know to charge at least $2000 for their SDK…

> You can install telnet via the add features option from the control panel. Who wants to have such insecure program available anyway?

There's no security problem with the telnet client, unless you're using it to log into remote hosts without encryption. But OP, and presumably many other people (like me), use telnet as a simple TCP client for troubleshooting. On Linux, one can use netcat (though I never remember to type nc, and always try telnet first), but of course Windows doesn't come with netcat.

Re: Windows 10 Design: Getting the balance right

#36

Post by mhomde »

lotso wrote: post #32
mhomde wrote: post #16

I'm a bit skeptic about the direction of Windows (Phone) 10. It's not that its bad, it's just that it isn't great and they've missed the opportunity to but in substantial UX improvements. Also having the same interface for Phone/tablet/desktop is a dangerous idea if pushed to far, jack of all trades, master of none. Of course they should share some common ground but they risk sacrificing an tailored experience for ea…

> They haven't made any greater strides in addressing thumb ergonomics on larger screens. Sure at least the buttons are at the bottom again but to make it truly next generational they should have utilized more gestures. Imo gesture based UIs are UIs that are hard to use for average users.

and "hamburger menus" are immediately intuitive? :) Don't people swipe to get to the notification center in most mobile UI's? I think saying gesture based UI's are harder to use is an overstatement.

What do would you rather use, an UI that's super easy to learn but cumbersome to use, or an UI that required learniing a few basic gestures and then being much more efficient and ergonomic to use?

Re: Windows 10 Design: Getting the balance right

#37

Post by mattkevan »

Encosia wrote: post #30
cturner wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PDF viewer. Chrome is the only non-awful PDF viewer I've found for Windows. Requires third-party install. Copying and pasting text causes weird characters to be carried around (e.g. emdash), and I haven't found a reliable way to sanitise it. Does notepad handle \n separated lines correctly yet? Something about excel breaks the behaviour of the alt+tab stack. (if you have multiple documents open) Also, it's annoying t…

> PDF viewer. Chrome is the only non-awful PDF viewer I've found for Windows. Requires third-party install. The built-in viewer that shipped with 8 is no-frills (like Chrome's), but works well enough. If you have touch/pointer input, you can annotate and sign PDFs in that viewer too, which is great on a Surface. > It'd be useful to be able to mute an application from the OS interface, and to see an indicator for audi…

Argh, the Win8 PDF viewer is so infuriating. It seems to only have two zoom levels: 100%, and grid of thumbnails. Great if I want to only see a bit of a page or all of then very small, but not so much when I just want to view a whole page on the screen. Which I would have thought would be a fairly basic task. For a document viewer.

Happy to hear if I'm wrong though.

Re: Windows 10 Design: Getting the balance right

#38

Post by jenscow »

brianpgordon wrote: post #33

> We want to deliver an experience that flexes elegantly across a continuum of devices And there's the punch to the gut. Just like with Windows 8, if you want to use Windows 10 on the desktop your experience is going to be degraded by sacrifices made for mobile. I was really hoping that Microsoft would learn their lesson, since DirectX 12 is going to be exclusive to Windows 10 and I'm going to have to upgrade. They'r…

Without a doubt.

They're a "mobile first, cloud first" company, creating a "tablet that can replace your laptop".

Re: Windows 10 Design: Getting the balance right

#39

Post by pjmlp »

nandhp wrote: post #35
pjmlp wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UNIX file locking is broken. Requiring all processes to play along. It suffices one process to ignore fcntl calls to corrupt files. All non-POSIX OSes with proper file locking use the same approach as Windows does. You can install telnet via the add features option from the control panel. Who wants to have such insecure program available anyway? Commercial UNIX systems were know to charge at least $2000 for their SDK…

> You can install telnet via the add features option from the control panel. Who wants to have such insecure program available anyway? There's no security problem with the telnet client, unless you're using it to log into remote hosts without encryption. But OP, and presumably many other people (like me), use telnet as a simple TCP client for troubleshooting. On Linux, one can use netcat (though I never remember to t…

There are better GUI tools for such purposes.

Re: Windows 10 Design: Getting the balance right

#40

Post by pistle »

brianpgordon wrote: post #33

> We want to deliver an experience that flexes elegantly across a continuum of devices And there's the punch to the gut. Just like with Windows 8, if you want to use Windows 10 on the desktop your experience is going to be degraded by sacrifices made for mobile. I was really hoping that Microsoft would learn their lesson, since DirectX 12 is going to be exclusive to Windows 10 and I'm going to have to upgrade. They'r…

It sure would be nice if they could come up with something that provided developers an opportunity to develop best of breed experiences based on the type of device, screen, pixel resolution, etc.

But, then they did. The Universal App template project provides for making separate UI layers for your applications. If your applications don't make use of screen space, blame developers. The OS and tooling support optimized experiences. There are fewer "opinions" than with 8.

Decent Continuum experiences seem intended to make developers stretch, not users.

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