Unnoficial design concept for Windows 9
eiskis.net
eiskis.net
Just NO NO AND NO, I can't be the only one who hates the new Windows interface, I want to be able to place my windows where I want them not be forced to use full screen for everything, or rely on some automated way to place them, I know better than the OS how and where I want my windows.
Sorry but I had to get that out of my chest, I can't deal with the new Windows interface, it annoys me.
Microsoft please stop trying to force a tablet/touch interface into a desktop computer it just doesn't make any sense.
Users never arriving to the TIFKAM-scene ensures no developers will bother developing for it.
Mistakes that are being made:
1) Thinking that touch is superior to mouse, that touch is the future. That's simply untrue, mouse is quicker and more productive.
2) Focusing on first-time users too much, forgetting experienced users. Example - animations - nice at first, but get annoying quickly.
3) Trying to unify the tablet and the desktop interface. The optimal interface for tablets and for desktops are different.
For me the ideal desktop environment would be:
- take the classical desktop concept
- do a design update (Gnome 2 or Win 7 aren't especially pretty, the design looks outdated)
- add some nice features without changing the whole concept, e.g. some tiling support, useful keyboard shortcuts etc.
The design idioms seen in Gnome 2 and Windows 7 are essentially highly refined versions of what existed on the Apple II OS. Personal computers and what we use them for have come a long way since then and it makes sense to redesign the UI to reflect this. Often this means getting your hands dirty and trying new things. Also - first time users are going to be around for longer than experienced users ;)
I don't have anything against designers trying new things - unless they are trying them on me. For me, Win 8 or Gnome 3 is clearly a downgrade in terms of user experience.
Personally I find manual window-management extremely tedious. I want a window-manager to actually manage my windows for me. So on that part, I agree with the statement. That however doesn't mean that any automatic window-management is an improvement simply by being automatic.
There are bad automatic window-managers. The one in Windows 8 can clearly be be categorized as such. That however doesn't mean that all automatic window-management is bad.
On Linux, I like tiling VMs, because that means I no longer have to manage Windows manually, yet I get to remain in control of what I do and how I position my "windows". This is good automatic Window-management.
One day I hope Windows will be able to get there and get something of equal power and usefulness. That is, without throwing all the users not power-users out the Window, because current Linux tiling-VMs are obviously aimed at and created for power-users. User-friendlyness and intuitiveness has been sacrificed in the process.
Wrong. Manual windows management is just what a professional needs. The window manager will never know what is the best position and size for your programming editor/environment. It will never know where is the best position and size for your preferred debug window. And how to place and size your browser windows for API documentation.
Sure, a typical computer user needs only a full-screen browser window. But when you're really trying to get work done, Microsoft's "new" concepts are just wrong.
Ever since getting used to this (in XFCE), using windows in Windows feels incredibly annoying and infuriating.
We need something else for the desktop.
[Having to use a demo VM that has 2012 installed at the moment and I'm finding it incredibly annoying].
If you do end up having to select something in the menu, you now have more space to see what's available and modifying the layout to match your usage is a lot more accessible.
And the first ten do have keyboard shortcuts - Win-0 to Win-9.
Actually, you don't - on the server I am using there is an (otherwise excellent) Microsoft product installed that prefixes all of it's menu items with the same name so all you see is a number of items with the same logo and "Really long product name...." and to find out which one is which you have to hover the mouse over them, which rather defeats the purpose of the whole exercise.
I wonder how many options will go the way of the shutdown button in Windows 9 - that is, moved entirely.
A full-screen menu appearing on top of whatever I am working on completely breaks my flow. It's immensely distracting to me. As a result, I literally never use it. Instead I use Launchy [1] which is well behaved and keeps within the confines of a very small dialogue box.
That doesn't completely fix Windows 8, though - there's still a bunch of touch-orientated stuff that there's no native way to deactivate.
I do think Microsoft should have made it optional - it's obvious this is what people wanted, and it's not like it would have cost them much in development/support. Still, at least there's now a huge bunch of third party software to replace/augment it, most with far greater configurability than the original Start menu.
- Install
- Type in visualstud... I get CALCULATOR...
- Uninstall...
Launchy has absolutely NOTHING on Windows 8 Key + typing.
I have seen some people put the windows 7 style start menu on win 8 - it just doesn't make sense to me, the world moves on, things change, learn to adapt and life is so much sweeter!
I manage a number of 2012 VMs, and actually log onto them via RDP very rarely.
You should use RSAT on a workstation, or perhaps Powershell and Enter-PSSession (alias: etsn) in order to manage your machines. If you're a masochist you could even use winrs.exe from inside cmd.exe.
I can't think of much you can do with those two tools that you can't do otherwise, unless it involves [random third-party software]. Even with third party software, I don't see a reason people should be logging on to servers often enough that the start screen should be an appreciable problem -- especially since the start screen is likely to have an immediately obvious and clickable 100px*100px "tile" to get to the software you need to.
Yes - but this one is a completely standalone demo VM from Microsoft with a pile of different products installed - so logging in directly and using the Screen Eating Menu From Hell is difficult to avoid.
While Metro/Modern/Whatever is incredible annoying in itself when not on a tablet, having it (which depends on screen-corners) running in a VM which is typically window'ed brings the madness to new dimension.
For minimum frustration, I recommend fullscreen.
Honestly, I feel like it's a break in my momentum and flow of creativity (that really sounds pretentious, but it's true) to move my hands from keyboard to screen. It's not like keyboard and mouse where both forms of input are on the horizontal plane.
I rather liked the idea behind the Nintendo DS where inputs are available on both the horizontal and (semi) vertical plane. If a touchpad can be made sufficiently intuitive and comfortable enough to serve as both keyboard, touchpad and display screen, I'm in.
If anything, it does borrow elements from the Android interface and modern DEs like Cinnamon.
I'll just stick to my window manager. There's something charming about their raw simplicity compared to the overt modern "glossy minimalist" interfaces of today.
Using a mouse, in particular is a little bit foreign to our natural instincts.
Kind of explains the popularity of thinkpads' nipple mouse, though.
Welcome to 2011. Your complaints are now fresh and new again.
Instead, I'd have to flick back and forth between the apps like a headless chicken?
[Edit] Actually, take his example apps as a suggestion. He's running VLC to watch star trek, but can't watch it at the same time as say using the browser. In a traditional window set-up, you can just set VLC to stay on top and overlay a portion of the screen while you can continue doing something else (like using the browser).
Although the concept looks pretty, it almost seems to be a step backwards in available functionality.
Do you use a desk?
Do you use paper?
Do you use folders?
How big is your desk?
How do you keep the papers on your desk?
Do you hold up one sheet to read and one sheet exclusively?
Do you keep a bunch of sheets side-by-side and compare them to each other?
Do you like to open folders repeatedly or open a few papers from each folder?
In any multi-monitor situation living without manual window management is awful. What they need to do is to offer a choice instead of forcing users down a specific path.
A simple way to see where window management should have gone is to look how it has changed within applications, where the resistance to change is lower. 15 years ago it was all MDI applications, where the idea that a doc has a window . Soon people realized that noone really needs to overlap their word documents windows, or move their photoshop tool dialog by 3 pixels, so more modern applications used docking managers to snap and tile their workspace together to use as much of the available area as possible.
As usual in the demos and mockups of both Win8 and this concept, the applications demonstrated happen to be simple communication apps, media players and so on. I'd like to see Photoshop, Visual Studio, AutoCad etc. that actually have a large workspace with several confgurable areas. I don't think it would be horrible to lose the movable windows, but I'd want something as powerful in return: Windows should manage the desktop the way a good desktop application manages its different areas.
Trying to force a tablet interface on a desktop machine is simply not acceptable. It makes matters even worse when you look at a server operating system such as Windows Server 2012. That is simply the biggest FAIL for an interface on a server OS I have ever seen.
I'm starting to get feeling, that Microsoft consciously abandons PC as a workstation with a fully functional OS model and moving towards dumb browser-only tablet-like terminal. And I bet that some cloud based, .NET like IDE for Windows developers is on their plans.
..and I'm sooo happy that I can do all my development work on Linux machine.
People who say they need to be able to have multiple windows on screen should really be having multiple monitors if they don't already. Because even with high-res monitors, most productivity applications (IDEs,Excel,etc) are unusable anyway when not in full screen.
The drag&drop can be easily solved by dragging content from one app to another by dropping on their desired app icon on the taskbar. Or have dedicated share button to other apps like how Android does it.
Multiple monitors are used because hires monitors are expensive. Once that changes we are back to the same problem.
About the drag&drop I have a problem with that, supose the application supports more than one place to drop with different functionality, how do you solve that?
Now I try to have only two things open at once to streamline my work flow. Everything in excess, I try to have it my IDE when possible using plugins.
Not going to give those options up
Overlaying windows is brilliant. It isn't a problem to press Alt-Tab or use the taskbar. Personally, the grouped buttons on the taskbar is a nuisance as you need to click on it (XP) or hover over it and wait for a popup (7+) rather than just seeing loads of window buttons.
I have multiple hires screens but this doesn't suddenly mean I want one fullscreen window on each screen. That effectively reduces the windowing system to only displaying two items at a time. My physical desk has more - why should the computer suddenly be limited to only a couple of items?
Yes. Manual window-management is tedious and in an ideal world should be obsolete, but I don't think this is the solution either.
Basically, I hate this automatic window-management more than I hate manual window-management and then we've not really gone anywhere useful.
For reference, I use tiling WMs in Linux and I'm happy with that, but I can see how that's not a solution for most people. We need to reach a middle-ground somehow.
Now Microsoft has a new kind of failure. Is evolving it in this proposed direction or any other going to succeed? I think this proposal is good. It helps the "bouncing back and forth" problem. One problem is that Microsoft has different security models for "Modern" and legacy apps. (Never mind what kind of sense it makes to have a stronger and weaker app security model in the same OS.)
Here is a potential irony: Ubuntu Touch is an evolutionary approach to bringing a conventional implementation of the desktop metaphor to touch. I could see using an Ubuntu tablet. It probably won't be widely popular since it will have some touch-unfriendly legacy in it. But it might end up being a better evolutionary path than what Microsoft chose. But I'd know what I'm getting and probably be comfortable with it.
This design is much 'nicer' than mine, and probably more progressive. I would have liked to have seen what was returned in the search, and the layout of a search.
For example, the keyboard shortcuts for snapping a window left or right let you customize how wide the window is after the snap. So for example, alt + ] snaps the window to the right half of the screen. The same shortcut again grows the window to 90% wide, then 80%, then 60%, and finally back to 50%. So if I want whatever I'm reading to be decently wide at the cost of letting my SSH window take up slightly less than half the screen, I can make that happen without a mouse. Or for a good responsive site, 20% or 30% of my screen is all the site needs.
In addition, when I have two windows each taking up 50%, hovering on the window edges they share them brings up an additional handle that lets me adjust the width of both windows simultaneously (if I want). Why can't Windows do that?
Finally, there's a keyboard shortcut for centering a window on the screen, which I am a total sucker for.
I think Microsoft got the point with their tablet-orientation fullscreen-only-apps, driven by touchscreen interfaces, but agreed, forcing everyone into that (currently coupled with the dual-old-desktop-mess) is ridiculous, user-hostile and typically Microsoft. This inofficial Windows 9 concept does not really help either.. IMHO they are looking for what tiling window managers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiling_window_manager) have implemented since a long time (without being driven by the touchy-concepts), without taking away any freedom like Microsoft always does it, because MS thinks they know what's best for their users? :
• Provide automatic placement for windows, fullscreen, halfscreen, spiraled, any layout which makes sense for you. • Have the nice side-effect that they are much more controllable by keyboard only, increasing productivity even more (at least for developer's kind of work) • Provide the freedom, that if you want to, you can just take windows and resize them freely like default window managers
Introducing and playing with new concepts still is the right, however i think MS should stop forcing users into every new concept, but leave the freedom for the advanced user to customize to their style... if i have ever to go back to windows i hope there is a tiling window manager with the features i am accustomed to ;)
Was it just because not so many people used win 3.x and so ms could change it without so much moaning?
If metro was developed instead of the windows 95 start menu, would it have been hated as much??
What you meant to say was that VLC does not exist for the MetroUI (I forget what that POS is called these days).
http://williamtpayne.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/gui-ng-desiderat...
Perhaps not to everyone's taste, but hey-ho.
"Personalization
Users are given control over the desktop background that gives personality to the user experience."
--
What the fuck???!
If they advertise like that then why don't they just sell Windows 95 again?
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