Metro: don’t be afraid to dream a little bigger | Hacker News Reader

Metro: don’t be afraid to dream a little bigger

aaronisthinking.com

36 pointsmichael_fine8 comments

What is neat about metro (ooops windows 8 style) apps is that you get the whole canvas by design to play with. The pattern that controls are out of sight when you don't need them is really neat.

Does anyone remember the first iPhone apps? They all looked exactly the same. I think that as time goes on, designers and developers will do some really cool stuff with Metro, just like they did with iOS.

But Metro is not to blame... When most people think of Metro, they think of rectangular boxes, Segoe fonts, and not much else.

Whatever people think of Metro as being is Metro's fault. Metro is the "design concept" or "design language" and so whatever is communicated as "being Metro" is exactly Metro's fault.

The point the article was going for (and that I think it made successfully) is that the concept/language has more possibilities than have been explored in the two years its been publicly available. So far most third-party apps have done little more with the ideas than copy how Microsoft has used them so far, that doesn't mean there's no possibilities to do more.

It reminds me a bit of my first Powerbook running OS X and the slew of poorly-Aquified 3rd party apps that didn't take real advantages of the differences in the OS X interface, but just slapped on the pinstripes and gumdrops.

We are a Microsoft ISV and have actually taken some of those concepts and morphed them to introduce something Metro-esque in a new product release that is about to RTM.

Got rave reviews @ Microsoft Tech Ed -- would love to show the people on HN about different UI/UX concepts in biz apps.

Please do that!

Can we dream for sideloading unsigned apps for all user that desire it?

Metro (yeah I'm not going to stop calling it that, it's annoying), I think is a mostly a flash in the pan. It will probably be gone in the next consumer OS. It wouldn't be the first time Microsoft offered some UI "game changer" and then backed off. In fact ...

It's just so generic boring and not particularly useful. I haven't paid close attention, but if you look at demos of what Microsoft called Surface back in 2007 for tabletops vs this Metro stuff now, which one is more visually compelling? Kind of a strange place they went, in my view.

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