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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

#61

Post by yaeger »

RaleyField wrote: post #48
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 desktop your experience is going to be degraded by sacrifices made for mobile Or you can view it as mobile being enhanced by commonality of OS with one found on the desktop. If the same UI works in both environments you can see it as harmful influence of mobile on the desktop or you can see it as Microsoft not forcing you to buy and carry around two devices where one would suffice. Disclaimer - I love my W8 tra…

>Or you can view it as mobile being enhanced by commonality of OS with one found on the desktop.

You could, if the mobile didn't have the minority share of the install base. Why would we be okay to enhance the minority at the expense of the majority?

> If the same UI works in both environments...

And that's precisely the thing. it doesn't work in both environments. Windows8 has already showed us what happens when you slap the touchy feely stuff on the desktop and let the user figure it out.

Re: Windows 10 Design: Getting the balance right

#62

Post by rwallace »

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…

> Does notepad handle \n separated lines correctly yet?

Yes, thankfully.

Re: Windows 10 Design: Getting the balance right

#63

Post by cturner »

com2kid wrote: post #60
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…

(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 you…

   > IronPython
That'd be fine.

    > 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!
Right. So the thread is about things that are wrong with the OS. The way it is may be up to the app creator. But it /should/ be not-at-all influenced by the app creator.

Alt+tab is a platform feature, not an application feature. Its value is tied to the consistency of its behavior. If I minimise something, regardless of where it minimises to, it should go to the back of the app stack. That's what the user (me) expects from alt+tab.

By the same principle, there shouldn't be ghost windows from Excel appearing in the alt+tab list. I'm particularly harsh on excel because it's Microsoft's own app, and it has behaviours that undermines the platform.

    > 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.
For my stuff, when I need this on Windows I just roll a TCP/IP even loop in python, and have that act as a message broker. But that's not an option for people who don't grok TCP/IP, which has a fair learning curve. You want a mechanism for casual developers where it's easy to tie things together. e.g. Have a batch script send data to a visual basic app. Maybe named pipes is good, haven't looked at that in windows.

The best take on this stuff that I've seen is the Be API. It has a cascade of IPC systems from unix-style console pipes up to sophisticated and high-performance message passing. All of it is easily accessible from a single set of python wrappers.

Re: Windows 10 Design: Getting the balance right

#64

Post by RaleyField »

yaeger wrote: post #61
RaleyField wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the desktop your experience is going to be degraded by sacrifices made for mobile Or you can view it as mobile being enhanced by commonality of OS with one found on the desktop. If the same UI works in both environments you can see it as harmful influence of mobile on the desktop or you can see it as Microsoft not forcing you to buy and carry around two devices where one would suffice. Disclaimer - I love my W8 tra…

>Or you can view it as mobile being enhanced by commonality of OS with one found on the desktop. You could, if the mobile didn't have the minority share of the install base. Why would we be okay to enhance the minority at the expense of the majority? > If the same UI works in both environments... And that's precisely the thing. it doesn't work in both environments. Windows8 has already showed us what happens when you…

> at the expense of the majority?

My point is that this is just a matter of perspective. Windows UX was never a paragon of design clarity so adding sparsity to accommodate for touch is nothing new in the world of Windows which has seen other transgressions far worse. Windows is still influenced by choices made in DOS age, in some places it still drags graphics from 9x age, the choice of ribbons, menus and sidebars seems random and seemingly non-systematic. If elements are farther apart then this is nothing new for Windows, what is new is that they are going against the view established by Apple which dictates that desktop and mobile OSes should be different for some undeclared a priori reason.

Apple likely did it because they didn't want to obliterate their Mac line with its higher margins and Google concurred because it promoted their emergent Android instead of giving credibility to the established hegemon from Microsoft.

> if the mobile didn't have the minority share of the install base.

I'm of the opinion that choices should be made based on their intrinsic value, not something as arbitrary as the current market share. You can reuse exact same SoC to do both environments so why arbitrarily force one into media-consumption role with choices made in OS.

> it doesn't work in both environments.

This smells of echo-chamber of Vista days. People seem to have bought to the tick-tock theory, not realizing that it is likely something pundits with blogs created to sell them ads.

Windows 8 worked very well to me - it never gave me as much gief as did my old iPad with its arbitrary restrictions. Use Dropbox or iTunes for file transfer - are you fracking kidding me?? I can install everything on Windows. I can run Eclipse. I can hook external monitor and it works. All for the price of learning a few new metaphors which would come to Windows regardless because UI on Windows has always been changing.

Re: Windows 10 Design: Getting the balance right

#65

Post by cturner »

Encosia wrote: post #42
mattkevan wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I only have Win10 handy right now, but the built-in "Reader" app there has an option for fitting a single page, two pages side-by-side, and continuous vertical pages. It's missing an automatic option to fit the page width-wise, which is what I'd prefer, but zooming in to that level is easy enough with the "+" zoom button overlaid in the bottom right corner. Not sure if that's a lot different than the Win8 version. It…

Thanks for your note. I should have mentioned in my original comment, I'm behind with my knowledge of Windows. The fact there's a competent PDF reader in Windows 8 highlights this. Thanks.

Re: Windows 10 Design: Getting the balance right

#66

Post by wahsd »

Encosia wrote: post #29
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…

Outlook got conversation grouping and good search (long as you let Windows Search index your mail) a couple versions back, IIRC.

Sorry, unless I totally missed something, that is not really the case. I am talking about conversation threading like Gmail and outlook global search in Outlook itself. I have not played with the most recent version and maybe I'm just not doing it right, but as far as I can tell in Outlook, searching a mail folder will only search that single mail folder, not a parent, not a child.

Re: Windows 10 Design: Getting the balance right

#67

Post by Encosia »

wahsd wrote: post #66
Encosia wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Outlook got conversation grouping and good search (long as you let Windows Search index your mail) a couple versions back, IIRC.

Sorry, unless I totally missed something, that is not really the case. I am talking about conversation threading like Gmail and outlook global search in Outlook itself. I have not played with the most recent version and maybe I'm just not doing it right, but as far as I can tell in Outlook, searching a mail folder will only search that single mail folder, not a parent, not a child.

Threading like Gmail is called "Show as Conversations" in Outlook. It's been available since 2010. They work almost identically as far as I've noticed (I use both Outlook and the web interface to my Google Apps email account most days).

I'm not sure when exactly it was added, but this dropdown near the search input controls the scope: https://www.dropbox.com/s/7x35rgahnuultnp/outlook-search-all...

For a while before, you could still search globally. If you did a single folder search, there was a link/button/something to expand the search to all folders if you didn't find what you were after in the single folder.

The key with Outlook search is that you need to let the indexing service run. Search from within Outlook depends on that index for quick searches.

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