The Woman Charged With Making Windows 8 Succeed
technologyreview.com
technologyreview.com
Internally she doesn't seem so popular.
I'm not claiming it isn't true, but I can't say that I've seen it used outside of Microsoft-products either. Does anyone have any examples supporting the "much copied" statement?
With menus, at least you could dig through the menus to find what you're looking for. With the ribbon, you're forced to rely on google to figure out how to use your application.
Ever try and figure out how to display the headers of an e-mail in Outlook?
ld;o
1. You just open the email,
2. look for the area on the ribbon that says "Tags", which is under the message tab,
3, don't click on any of those large icons and look for the itsy-bitsy little box with an arrow at the bottom-right of the "Tags" area, click on that.
4. Up pops a window, look for the subbox at the bottom that says "Internet Headers:"
5. The headers are always larger than that box, but you can click on the box and select-all (ctrl-A, very convenient)
6. Copy and paste into another text tool, which can be a faux-new-email which you bring up by hitting ctrl-N.
[I just had to go through the exercise this morning, and it was such a brain-damaged thing that I couldn't resist documenting it.]
That said, in Microsoft Office it was a horrible idea.
The "ribbon" interface may have been a novel idea for Microsoft, but it did have precedents in ealier software (although the implementation was obviously different).
Here, for example, is a screenshot of Adobe PhotoDeluxe. Adobe discontinued this software in 2002: http://goo.gl/q1LFn
And here's a Lotus Word Pro screenshot with it's tabbed, floating "properties" palette: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Word_Pro.png
In many ways, the Microsoft Office "ribbon" takes a similar approach, but anchors the ribbon to the top of the screen rather than in a floating palette.
The examples above aren't identical to the Microsoft "ribbon" design, but they contain seeds of the same idea.
1. The ability to pin my frequently-used items manually.
2. Showing the recently-used apps that I haven't gotten around to pinning.
3. The way it arranged hundreds of app icons in a halfway-memorable heirarchy. (Yes, I know that makes me a small minority "power user", but Windows had always catered to us PUs.)
I never, ever, used search and don't like having to use it in Win8. The background search service had such a bad habit (at least through Vista) of churning my disk drive at the worst possible moment that I disabled it wherever possible.
It's a little customizable bundle of joy, and it'll optionally boot you directly to the desktop.
And just out of curiosity in response to a comment below, I typed "powershell" into this menu's search and it instantly found powershell.exe and powershell_ise.exe
Just like iTunes, the Windows 7 Start Menu seems only useful for people who don't organize their program menu. I organize mine similar to how KDE does it (but I was doing it long before I ever saw KDE) and I can find any app in about 3 clicks.
Vista, not so much, but no one I know preferred the two-column layout of the start menu in XP.
I did nothing to make this work: http://i.imgur.com/AGShX.png
It's just ridiculous to have to switch visual interfaces from desktop to start screen to gain access to a programs list. There's no good reason to have to do it (ie it wasn't done that way due to superior design choice); and the reason it is that way, stems from mistakes that Microsoft made in the past, that left them drastically behind Android and iOS in mobile. It's an extremely simple thing made unnecessarily more complex and visually annoying for anybody doing work.
For example, if I have an Excel spreadsheet open, why on earth should I have to dive into the start screen just to pull up a list of programs? It's bad design.
After about two weeks, I find Windows 8 more productive.
What is a bit disorienting is that the mouse is being deprecated, somewhat. I believe that Microsoft has determined that the interfaces of the future are keyboard and touch. Windows 8 does a lot of things from the keyboard...like switching between modes.
The more I use it, the more impressed I am with the way in which the two modes, Metro and Desktop, integrate.
This impressed most about her resume and makes me hopeful about the future of Windows. Visual Studio is one of the few products were Microsoft was truly innovative and she was a key factor. I just hope Ballmer will stay out of her way.
Their careers contrast markedly with that of Sinofsky who went from straight from grad school to Microsoft.
Luckily for her, she will have a much easier number of users to worry about shortly, and her efforts are helping greatly in reducing this number further. Bravo!
Here is an interview with her from 2009. Make your own judgements.
It feels incredibly solid and fast at the core. I use Win8 as my work machine now and the only thing that would make me happier is if they'd stop shoving the apps approach down my throat.
I'm interested in why you think having a start button provides faster access than the start screen.
With the start screen, you can press the windows key to bring up the start screen, start typing the name of a program you want to start, and press enter to launch it. It seems like a more efficient way to start programs than the start menu.
I got hooked on Win8 once I really embraced that, for both app launching and file searching. I went back to Win7 for a few days and felt like I was 10 years in the past.
1) The start button menu has a built in search function that makes the search typing function in the start screen pointless - if I want to use the search approach. It responds in real time just like the start screen search does as well. And importantly: no need to switch visual interfaces to get to the program search. Windows key > type, all inside the desktop visual mode.
2) I use a two-pronged approach to pinning programs. First, I pin everything I use for work to the taskbar, so that's one click and no typing or start screen visual switching (which is obnoxious to work flow). Then some slightly less frequently used programs I pin to the first layer of the start button menu, so that's two clicks (to launch) and no typing to access another ten or so programs (20 programs, in one or two clicks, no switching screens and no typing; covers 99% of what I use daily). And if I want to, I can obviously use a key approach to opening the start button menu as well. Windows key > start typing, initiates a search, or an arrow key tap upward rolls me into the program list or into my pinned group. All from the same interface, without a visual switch.
3) With the start button menu I get a very fast alphabetical listing of practically everything on my system. Tiles take up considerably more space and require a left / right roll to see everything. It's cute for a few items, it's obnoxious and messy for 50.
4) The start button menu has a settings section that I can roll over to a control panel sub list or network settings sub list etc etc. The control panel item, for example, spawns an alphabetical list of 50 items on my system that relate to system management. This is similar to the small icons view under Control Panel, but I can get to the list with one 'click' and it's nicely hidden away in a compact multi-use start button menu.
5) This is just purely convenience: the start button menu has direct access to power / reboot (switch user etc). With the new Win8 approach I can swipe the right side of the screen (annoying), then access "Settings" and then access power control (more steps, less options under one item, much slower). And obviously ctrl-alt-delete still gets you quick access to these options as well, but that's just another reason the swipe screens and start screen are pointless for me on the desktop.
6) I can customize the start button menu more than I can the start screen.
7) I work in the desktop mode, everything I use is in the desktop mode, it's ridiculous to boot me into the start screen to begin my experience.
The start screen doesn't even come close to how compact and fast the start button menu is. Not to mention the visual switching the start screen requires is a nasty work flow breaker because I have to dive into and out of a different interface, when I shouldn't have to do that just to access simple programs.
Cool, I didn't realize you could do windows key > type with the start menu (it's been a while since I've used Windows beyond just trying out the new stuff).
Why would I want visual change when launching something when I can do exactly same on W7 without sudden switch to some "home screen" and while still watching youtube on my desktop?
http://winsupersite.com/windows-8/windows-8-tip-embrace-chan...
If I'm just using it for playing games or watching Netflix, sure, then who cares much. Microsoft intentionally forced their start screen apps vision onto everybody to spur adoption of their lagging apps / mobile ecosystem. So Windows 8 by default punishes their power users, because of mistakes Microsoft made years ago, when a few simple options would alleviate all of that by giving power users more choice in customization.