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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

#51

Post by OniBait »

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…

I tried Windows 10 on both my desktop and tablet. I went back to Windows 8 on the tablet because the UI was horrible for tablet.

If anything, I think the pendulum swung back too much the other direction. There are a lot of UI decisions they made that make the experience with a tablet device painful. For example, the decision to get rid of the Charms Bar (in Tablet Mode) was a horrible one. A lot "Metro" apps don't really run full-screen anymore. Edge Browser isn't nearly as nice of an experience as full screen IE was (with the swipe gestures for page forward/back navigation).

On the desktop though, it has been quite nice to use...

Re: Windows 10 Design: Getting the balance right

#52

Post by joshuapants »

shitloadofbooks wrote: post #50
joshuapants wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think we're paying for a mistake made upon the alter of backwards compatibility There's a book called The Old New Thing (I think I heard about it here on HN, haven't had a chance to get it yet) that discusses a lot of quirks that Windows has and how they came about. Usually there was a purposeful decision behind it, like you suggest with backwards compatibility. It'd be interesting to see if this particular case…

The Old New Thing is Raymond Chen's blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/ and the book is excerpts and articles from his Blog (with some additional content no doubt). Raymond is/was a compatibility engineer at Microsoft. He was responsible for "shimming" a bunch of hacks into Windows to ensure large applications which relied on undocumented API calls wouldn't break when they overhauled libraries in a new version…

Ah that's right, I think someone in a comment linked to an article on his blog and that's how I found out about the book.

Re: Windows 10 Design: Getting the balance right

#53

Post by brianpgordon »

Aleman360 wrote: post #44
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…

The Windows 10 UI framework is resolution-independent and built-in controls are responsive. App devs have everything they need to provide a good UI for every device type. Or you can use HTML/JS. disclaimer: I work on Windows 10

Resolution independence is nice. Has Microsoft figured out how to scale legacy apps on HiDPI displays for Windows 10? I found Windows 8.1 unusable on my Retina MacBook Pro because so many apps didn't use the new fonts/rendering framework (even many built-in Windows tools like the MMC) and text was therefore horribly disfigured. I don't have such problems with any applications anymore on OS X.

Re: Windows 10 Design: Getting the balance right

#54

Post by batiudrami »

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…

Microsoft is sure that this is the future though - one operating system, one set of applications, multiple UI experiences depending on input and screen size. I think they're right, and would love to be able to dock my phone and have it operate seamlessly as a full desktop with a monitor and M+K.

They just need to get the UX right, which they got way, way wrong with Windows 8. Luckily they have so much inertia in the desktop market that at this point it didn't cost them too much.

Re: Windows 10 Design: Getting the balance right

#55

Post by coldtea »

joshuapants wrote: post #25
coldtea wrote: post #10

> We started by exploring concepts to push the boundaries of our design system, going from mild to wild variation, trying out new patterns and controls, new type treatment and using color in bold fresh ways. ...and we ended in the smallest possible variation from an unimaginative merging of the classic start menu and the Metro style blocks...

That doesn't necessarily mean they made a wrong or otherwise bad decision, though. In a way, being too imaginative was what made Windows 8 perform poorly.

Too imaginative? Again there all they did was add some blocks, as the minimal way to have touch targets for running apps and display info.

Re: Windows 10 Design: Getting the balance right

#56

Post by yohui »

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…

> PDF viewer. Chrome is the only non-awful PDF viewer I've found for Windows. Requires third-party install.

There's a version of Evince available for Windows:

https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Evince/Downloads

https://chocolatey.org/packages/evince

Technically Okular is available too, via KDE for Windows, but installation is a bit of a hassle:

https://windows.kde.org/

Re: Windows 10 Design: Getting the balance right

#57

Post by sukilot »

shitloadofbooks wrote: post #50
joshuapants wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think we're paying for a mistake made upon the alter of backwards compatibility There's a book called The Old New Thing (I think I heard about it here on HN, haven't had a chance to get it yet) that discusses a lot of quirks that Windows has and how they came about. Usually there was a purposeful decision behind it, like you suggest with backwards compatibility. It'd be interesting to see if this particular case…

The Old New Thing is Raymond Chen's blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/ and the book is excerpts and articles from his Blog (with some additional content no doubt). Raymond is/was a compatibility engineer at Microsoft. He was responsible for "shimming" a bunch of hacks into Windows to ensure large applications which relied on undocumented API calls wouldn't break when they overhauled libraries in a new version…

I didn't realize that was his specific job. The blog title is so brilliant.

Re: Windows 10 Design: Getting the balance right

#58

Post by kyriakos »

OniBait wrote: post #51
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…

I tried Windows 10 on both my desktop and tablet. I went back to Windows 8 on the tablet because the UI was horrible for tablet. If anything, I think the pendulum swung back too much the other direction. There are a lot of UI decisions they made that make the experience with a tablet device painful. For example, the decision to get rid of the Charms Bar (in Tablet Mode) was a horrible one. A lot "Metro" apps don't re…

Things are changing all the time I hear, you can't judge Windows 10 if you tried one release. Maybe you should wait and give the final version a go when it comes out. I don't run it on a tablet so I can't tell you for sure what changed but I read user comments saying that the latest releases fixed a lot of the tablet mode issues.

Re: Windows 10 Design: Getting the balance right

#60

Post by com2kid »

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…

(Disclaimer, I work for Microsoft, but on nothing at all related to Windows, so all this is my own opinion from having used computers since I was 5 or so :) )

> 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.

That is by design. The Windows clipboard is insanely powerful, it'll paste the best representation of your text in that your destination buffer can handle. If I copy a code segment from Visual Studio (or Notepad++ with the right plugin!) I get to keep syntax highlighting if I paste into a program that can handle colored text. But if I paste into Notepad, all formatting gets cleared.

Pasting into Notepad BTW is the standard way to clear any special formatting. Although an emdash isn't special by any means, it is just a normal character that has a specific use in the typewritten English language.

> Apps that minimise to the small-icon part of the start bar (next to time) don't go to the back of the alt+tab stack.

By design, and 100% up to the app creator. Alt-Tab switches between things on the taskbar. Things are minimized to the tray to keep them out of the way!

> They should bundle a python API to windows and a recent version of python also. Make it easy to create and ship python on Windows. A community would just grow around this, with no further effort from them.

IronPython? :-D

But I know what you mean, Python is fun.

> Weak scheduler, init mechanisms. (from user perspective)

On this I disagree! Windows exposes its startup routines in a very user friendly manner. On top of that, the way Services are initialized actually works w/o worry or concern. End users don't have to deal with it, which is a blessing IMHO.

> There's no nice IPC mechanism available for casual development. Cmd kind of has pipes but they're horrible.

Windows has a plethora of IPC mechanisms available in native land, and .NET add in a few more!

Start off with the old time favorites like TCP/IP loopback and named pipes (both of which are pretty darn easy to get up and running) and go on from there.

But yeah, every OS has its oddities and warts. Heck if you write a clean room OS, by the time you are at version 1.01 cruft will have accumulated!

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