Manual window management is awful. Windows 8 ditched windows in favor of fullscreen apps. Traditional desktop window paradigms are powerful but obsolete.
Windows 9 unifies previous contrasting paradigms, taking design cues from all platforms and recent innovations.
Just an unofficial design concept, but damn, this is sexy. This is exactly what Windows needs – a combination of the old and new, leading to something seemingly far more usable than the monstrosity that is Metro in Windows 8.
this reminds me a bit of pre 3.0 gnome-shell designs. functional but needed work and polish.
Except not really functional. Needs moar windows.
I cannot warm up to the swipe and dump mannerisms of Metro. But the dumbest change was killing an option to use the task bar, quick start bar, and sys tray in Metro. Failure to bring back all of those functions would be no incentive to use Win9.
How hard would it have been to create a telescoping task bar like the Yz Toolbar? Fundamentally keep it like the original task bar/sys tray, but grow the buttons as you scroll your finger over it and require a simple double tap within a half second to select.
Edited 2013-10-02 11:08 UTC
Ah yes, the kind of thing that look pretty on pictures but functions poorly in the real world.
Stacking application windows horizontally with a swipe left/right for app switching is barely tolerable on small screen devices, and now this should be a viable replacement for real windows on my 30″ monitor?
I also strongly disagree with the statement from the article that traditional window management should in any way be obsolete. It is a paradigm that has worked well and successfully for over 30 years, and its only real disadvantage is that it doesn’t scale well to small screen devices.
Are you sure about this? I remember windows 3.1 running in 640×480 screen resolution on 12″ or less monitors quite well. Amiga’s could go down to 320×200, but I admit you couldn’t open many windows without overlapping them.
Of course you are correct, but it still doesn’t scale to “small screen devices” that are not only half the size of what you mention (6″) but also have an input (touch screen / finger) that can’t handle pixel-precise input like a mouse can.
EDIT: …but this article is kind of about desktop operating systems… But kind of not… I’m sorry, I don’t even know what we’re talking about any more.
Edited 2013-10-02 14:27 UTC
Well, there are two individual factors in this: input device and physical (not resolution) size.
My experience is that when a screen is really large (typically above 24″), it stops making sense to maximize most applications because you just get more margin and padding. So here non-maximized windows are king.
Then there is there the range between 24″ and approx 14″, where most people seem to prefer maximizing their apps, with a few select exceptions like mp3 apps and instant messengers. Below 14″ it gets increasingly difficult to find any type of application that doesn’t need every inch it can get.
And then there is the input device factor. A fingertip needs a lot bigger area (in millimeters) for a button than a mouse cursor does. This greatly reduces how many elements you can place in a tablet or phone screen, making windows even less useful for small screens.
For those reasons, in my opinion, you always need different user interfaces for phones, tablets and the desktop.
Couldn’t agree with you more!
Personally I love using Android on my SGS3, but I would also hate it on my laptop! Even with touchscreen, it seems counter productive to touch the screen when a mouse or trackpad is so much more precise and easy to use. Even when my kids were about 1 or 2, they were able to grasp the idea of a mouse moving the cursor with some relative precision. If it’s that easy then why do we need to change it?
Tiling Window Managers are so 1981, oh wait Windows 1.0 had it in 1985? W8/8.1/9/X is so nex’gen… it’s heaven
This is an interface for the BRAIN DEAD.
It is definitely not for people who do stuff.
(twitter & facebook & blogging etc is NOT doing stuff)
the dude has Sublime Editor icon, probably doing some python stuff or something, who knows
and they definitely should include VLC player instead of the heavy bunch of nonsense they call Windows Media Player
As an Artist I move content in and out of many windows and apps and am always comparing and referencing things between apps. It is so inefficient for me to look at one window at a time and have to flip between them. Xerox solved this problem years ago… Apple stole/borrowed the idea… and then Microsoft copied it… and computing was vastly improved for the next 30 years. Then someone decided it was too hard and have propagated the idea that computers should be reduced to a multimedia kiosk from the 90s.
Honestly…. these new GUI’s are only good for consuming content and on small screens. If implemented in the real world, this would be like having a huge desk that can only have one thing on it at a time, just because sometimes you use a small desk and for some reason they want everything to work the same way. It is absurd!
This is why I said the best thing that could happen to MSFT is they break it up…I mean look at that crap, lets cut the bull, okay? YOU know what its about, I know what its about, we ALL know this is about shoving tablet and cellphone onto the desktop because nobody wants the WinPhone!
This is nothing but a repeat of WinCE, where they jammed an itty bitty desktop onto the cellphone for years, didn’t work then, not gonna work now. if they don’t split up the company (preferably while putting Sinofsky who was fired for saying sticking a cellphone on the desktop was dumb head of Windows and Office) and instead just put in elop and go full moron ahead? sell your stock, look into alternatives, they are dead, over,done, the fat lasy will be down the street eating a sammich!
I can tell you all the little shops in my area have stopped even carrying win 8 systems, nobody wants ’em. you go to many of the websites and you’ll see “Not ready to switch? we have Win 7!!” in bold letters. You can’t force a set of handlebars on a pickup and call it “innovation” because its dumb, and you can’t take a UI designed for low res devices that sit in your lap and stick it on a 30 inch non touch widescreen because that too its dumb. And sticking a touchscreen on a desktop or laptop IS REATRDED, trying holding your arm straight for a half hour…hurts don’t it? tablets are held like a book, its natural, its comfortable, laptops and desktops have VERTICAL screens so it is NOT in any way pleasant!
Sorry about the rant but its gotten bad enough i’m praying valve figures out how to fix the Linux driver mess, as MSFT seems bound and determined to burn the company to the ground.
“but damn, this is sexy”
maybe compared to 8
but why should i switch from the win2k gui to this?
Win2k is still my favorite version of NT. Sadly quite obsolete now, but its interface is just perfect – it has everything I need, where I need it, and nothing I don’t.
Windows 7 with the “classic” desktop comes pretty close though, despite the extra bells and whistles… Shame I’m incurably hooked on Linux at this point.
Yup, stop right there. Powerful is good. I like powerful. ‘Easy’ makes more-than-casual users’ lives hell. Yes, ‘easy’-lovers are more in numbers, but that doesn’t mean powerful is outdated. It just means that they can’t seem to come up with an UI that could serve the average crowd and not be a PITA of real users.
I can accept that this is happening – although I’m not happy about it -, however, I can _not_ accept that this is presented as the next big thing, everything else becoming outdated or obsolete.
Good is what enables you to do your stuff and helps you do it, or – at least – doesn’t hinder you in doing it. Bad is what brings ‘paradigm-shifting’ ‘novel’ ‘revolutionary’ looks, but makes usage painful and frustrating, and slows routine tasks by obfuscating and hiding functionality.
I like good. I like powerful. Metro and the linked concepts are neither.
Easy doesn’t have to mean hard on technical folks. Easy could just mean “easy to modify without getting in your way”. Microsoft seems hell bent on removing or hiding features that technical folks use regularly and replacing them with non-customizable alternatives. It boggles the mind.
Something I would love to see in any UI: Pinnable, collapsible toolbars. With the following features:
* Pin them to any area of the screen edge
* Allow them to auto-collapse, collapse via trigger (button/switch), stay on top, stay behind, etc.
* Allow them to have as many buttons on them as I choose. Allow me to set a maximum size and having the buttons scroll if needed (with the mouse wheel preferably).
* Allow the icons to be aligned/sorted in any way I wish (single row, grid, arranged by name, manual sorting, etc.).
* Allow me to have icons pinned to the “top” of the list, letting the others scroll off or be accessible via a drop down list, etc. (maintaining the sort order I choose).
* Allow me to have as many of these toolbars as I wish.
I could go on and on in my quest for the perfect toolbar. :p
Do you mean taskbar for managing apps?
Or toolbar for accessing features inside of apps?
If the former, you just described KDE4.
If the latter, sounds like you’re the one person who actually likes how GIMP works.
I’m actually thinking of a mixture of both. I’m a daily user of KDE4 and it doesn’t work like I described, though it is close in some respects. You can add icons to a panel, but you’re at their mercy as to how they are displayed (with a few options available). You can add a folder view widget to your desktop but that is far bulkier than what I’d want, though it shares some of the features I mentioned. Consider me picky. :p
When I do need to do image manipulation I choose Gimp more often than not (it’s free, fast enough, has more features than I can understand, and works on every platform I use).
Sounds to me more like a combination of Win7 with the classic (read, Win2K) taskbar and XFCE than it does KDE4.
I am a fan of XFCE and use it on my Raspbian installs (Raspberry Pi mostly)… I just can’t get into to LXDE.
Interesting. I use LXDE everywhere except my OpenPandora and never gave Xfce a chance because it’s designed by people who have no intention of adding support for tabs to Thunar.
Actually, powerful is outdated. The industry has made it loud and clear that if you use more than a handful of the most basic features, you’re a minority and don’t matter anymore. This is called the war on power users.
Eventually, the only power users left will be programmers as well.
Bingo! We have a winner! I have NO problem with an easy mode for the noobs, what has kept me away from every MSFT OS after Win 7 is that is all you get, if you need more? too bad, no soup for you! With Win 7 I can easily kill noob junk while keeping the good ideas like jumplists and breadcrumbs, win 8? the bling is all there is, it truly IS a Fisher Price OS.
I’ll just leave this here, he lays it out better than I ever could. be sure to watch until the end when he has quotes from actual usability experts on the subject and if you want a good laugh? Click on his name and watch the follow up video where he actually filmed the first time he used Win 8 OOTB. Count how many times he says “no”,”stop” and “I don’t want that”.
I can tell you that I have used just about every OS out there, from win 3.x to BSD to the more offbeat like OS/2 and BeOS and that Win 8 is the first OS I ever felt was actually fighting against the user. if I didn’t do what some “marketing guru” at MSFT thought I was supposed to, which from what I could gather is what I call “FB hits and tweeting twits for shits” social crap? Well then the OS was just gonna keep slapping me until I did what it wanted, not it doing what I wanted to do.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WTYet-qf1jo
Sorry Win 8 actually got rid of a lot of the bling junk of 7 which I hated in the interface that was introduced with Vista.
I am not sure about the hot corners, but then again I am a keyboard shortcut junkie and can type pretty quickly on a clicky keyboard.
Can’t we just get normal windows? I can resize/organize them just fine.
Also, I know it’s hard to believe, but there are applications that use more than four huge-ass buttons to do stuff.
People complained about FisherPrice UI when Windows XP came out. THIS is a true babys-first-computer UI. You CAN create a visually attractive dekstop without removing functionality, apple somehow manages to pull this off (not everyone is a fan of osx but you can’t deny it’s elegant and does not limit functionality the same way metro or this design does).
The great thing about OS X is that, for the things it does limit, it is very easy to implement using open software. OS X’s BSD underpinnings make it a snap to port GNU/Linux software over. So, you get the elegance and ease of use alongside the power to get stuff done and use the old tools you’re used to.
Yes… the next version (mavericks) does not appear to ruin what was good about it. Even on the current release they implemented the Launchpad in a way that power-users can ignore it easily, unlike launching apps win8. (I still don’t get the appeal of that kind of full screen app launcher on a big screen)
Except that it if relies on some parts of OSX being totally unixy … well then it is a PITA.
I learn this less well when I was a Tiger/Leopard user.
Yes, it can be. In fact I recently had a discussion from that point of view with someone on Hackaday.com; their claim was that Apple computers were the most hacker-friendly because OS X was “certified UNIX”. I had to remind them that the hardware hasn’t been hacker-friendly since Jobs came back demanded form over function back in the late 90s (killing off the legacy ports in the process), and that OS X’s hybrid nature (BSD/Mach/Aqua) causes issues with some low level stuff on the software side.
Synergy and a few other apps really had odd things going on in MacOSX back in 2007-8 when I was using it.
Edited 2013-10-04 20:30 UTC
What? No! This is a brave new world! We must eschew the paradigms of the past and re-invent them for the new millennium. Preferably, we should have an art designer do that. Definitely no one with any HCI experience or training at all. If they’ve actually studied this stuff they’ll just be biased towards doing things the old way won’t they? We can’t have that.
Everything has to a ‘phone on steroids, icons have to be huge but entirely free of any useful information about what they do, and options just confuse people so just ’em the defaults.
I don’t like it.
It seems like an non-intuitive interface made for less technical capable people.
What I mean by that is that it’s seems to be made to be useable by anyone, mainly people that aren’t good with computers, but it’s too difficult for them to figure out. For power users it’s a rather pointless effort.
The Metro stuff works fine on mobile phones and tablets, but not laptops and desktops.
Windows 8 is stable and it is faster than Windows 7 (in my personal experience). It’s sad they didn’t make Windows 8 a super Windows 7++. Make it faster, fix the stuff people complain about, add some cool new technology and ship it.
The “classic desktop” may be old and boring, but it works fine and everybody knows how it works.
Sooner or later, Google will have to implement window management in Android, as the other OEMS (and Samsung) are adding it by themselves to their launchers.
They should have done this ages ago, as Android is more than ready to be used as a desktop OS, but they risk cannibalizing the Chromebook market so it seems they are pushing it back as much as they can.
Android apps don’t support on-the-fly resizing: once a size (or more accurately DPI) is set, it is set.
Paranoid android does multitasking right, with Halo: pop-up a secondary app on to of the primary.
The only interesting missing feature in my mind is the fast switch between two apps, or snapping two apps side-by-side. People ask for multi-tasking when in fact “duo-tasking” is sufficient. The notification system should cover 99% of the reasons one would want to keep a third or fourth window displayed.
Yes, actually, they do support re-sizing while running. How else would auto-rotate work with every app?
Android just doesn’t expose the feature properly for use when not rotating the screen.
The OP probably referred to that lo/mid/high dpi settings so apps can adjust layout according to form factor. Still there is no technical reason or limitation to not allow switching between the modes on the fly. Hes wrong assuming Android apps would not support it. Technical they do already, all of them, out of the box.
Edited 2013-10-02 17:27 UTC
Sometimes I use 3 windows. Two browsers and 1 word procesor, 1 word processor and 2 spreadsheet. That is useful for those of us that use the computer for more than Facebook.
*nod* I’m actually looking into options to reroute my Mini-ATX’s motherboard’s SATA lines for similar reasons. (Currently, my SATA cluster is at the end of the PCI-E 16x slot and I want to replace my GeForce GT430 with something that can drive a third 1280×1024 monitor.)
(I think I can do it with two left-angle SATA cables, one “side-angle” cable, and the acknowledgement that I’ll only have 5 usable mobo SATA ports)
It’s just easier to juggle lots of apps when you can glance back and forth without having to keep hitting some kind of focus-switch key.
Edited 2013-10-03 01:38 UTC
When I can, I use my Mountain-Lion powered MBP with its display plus two full hd monitors – and that’s just because I don’t have enough room for a third.
My recipe: Mission Control (formerly Exposé + Spaces) + Spectacle, a handy tool to align windows with a keystroke.
And here I thought that what Windows needed was to throw out the new and go back to the old. I don’t really care what they do with the tablet, but I think that it was a huge mistake to try and combine the tablet and desktop UIs, and metro-style apps make no sense whatsoever for the desktop. As far as the UI goes for desktops, Windows 7 is superior to Windows 8 in ever way, and they really should go back to the same paradigms that they were using before. Those work.
Too many people are interested in change for change’s sake and don’t seem to want to accept that we don’t need to constantly redesign things. The door knob has been essentially the same for centuries. So have pots and pans. Sure, there are plenty of variations on their basic design, but we’ve long since reached the point where their basic design is optimal. And while UIs like Window 7’s or Gnome 2’s can certainly use more minor improvements, they really, really didn’t need major redesigns. And yet we get junk like Windows 8, because the folks in charge of these things can’t accept that they’d already reached something that was at least approaching optimal. Sure, the smartphone and tablet paradigms are new enough that there’s plenty of room for major innovation there, but the desktop doesn’t need a major redesign.
They need to just stop screwing around with the desktop.
I’m 99% sure that Microsoft’s motivations for Metro are to force people into the interface so that buying Windows phones becomes the default. Because phone/tablet sales dominate computer sales, and Microsoft were late to realize this would happen.
“Traditional desktop window paradigms are powerful but obsolete.”
“Obsolete”
“OBSOLETE”
Wut
…if this ever became real, that you would need a wallpaper that was dark on top so that you could read the white text, and of course never use anything full screen so that the apps can all scroll-by when you click on an icon
I don’t understand this need to but useful information on *the desktop*. When am i going to seer that? Once when I start? Yeah, *that* is awesome.
Also, are the Windows settings and “login/logout” menu on the desktop too? For real? Yeah, that’s not stupid design at all.
That’s what I’ve been saying about the Start Screen in Windows 8, myself; the only times I’d ever see anything there is when I boot the PC or when I launch an application. On the desktop I’d see it even less time since, well, I always have something running on top of it.
Bring back Windows 7 UI. Keep Metro on tablets and phones. Job done.
Edited 2013-10-03 09:47 UTC
I see/hear the term “paradigm”, I reach for my pistol.
Why? The word suits when one is discussing user interfaces, especially the different ways to interact with them. Is it overuse of the word that bothers you, the word itself, or some other reason? Is there another word that would work better?
Just curious, not trying to start anything. I guess I just don’t see it as a bad, annoying, or ill-suited word when discussing this topic.
To me Windows 8 looks a lot like the Vista debacle. MS foists poor product on its captive user base… user base rebels… MS makes adjustments and comes up with something pretty good.
It’s great, unless you’re one of the poor suckers who lived through every painful step of the process. The lesson is obvious. Don’t be an early adopter of MS products unless you’re willing to put in a lot of effort on their behalf, not your own.
Manual window management is awful. Eh……that’s why LarsWM says: “Managing windows is the Window Manager’s job!”
That’s just plain rubbish, to be quite frank. There’s no way for the WM to always know what your requirements are and therefore there’s no way for a WM to always come up with an arrangement that’s optimal for your current task. Automatic window management may be fine in general and for simplistic needs, but it sure ain’t a silver bullet that’s going to work in every single situation.
I agree, but it sounds cool, right? 😉 More seriously, having played with lots of window managers, such as openbox, jwm, dwm, i3wm, and desktop environments such as xfce, cinnamon, unity, gnome2 and gnome3, plus stock Android and Touchwiz, and of course various Windows versions, this Windows9 study looks nice but is in no way “different” in the sense that for instance 9WM is different.
I have to say, though, that the study looks nice and the site is well made!
Edited 2013-10-03 17:36 UTC
I don’t really understand the rage of current Windows users about new UI. I mean, it’s Microsoft’s system, they can do whatever they want with it and they have the right to do it. If they smell a better profit in selling the system to a computer non-literate, than to You, power user, then why shouldn’t they do it?
Because they respect your work habits?
This sounds plain stupid to me. Everyone has different habits. It’s very logical they go to the largest similar pool of habits. If you’re not matching this criteria, you’re left out. Raging about the need for the change is only expressing your inability to adapt to different environment. I bet there are people on this planet who think CP/M was a pinnacle of usability and UI design. How is that different for current love for superiority of Win95-like design?
Disclaimer: I don’t use Windows.
For some bizarre reason developers right now are trying to change out things that just don’t need changing — Windows has done this a lot the past decade, instead of fixing what people want fixed they try goofy animated BS, goofy reskins, and neutering functionality to try and … well, I’m not sure what. It almost starts to feel like Hollyweird re-imaginings that change everything and have so little to do with the original, you can’t help but ask “what, too afraid it sucks to launch it under it’s own title?”. It often seems like people working from existing material become so obsessed with drawing in new people, they alienate their existing audience… a stupid move when you have dominance of a specific market.
See the steaming pile of crippleware known as Chrome with the Opera logo slapped on it any old way…
Maybe I’m weird, but I consider Windows 98 the ‘pinnacle’ of desktop interface design — and most everything since has been steps backwards in usability. I mean it’s not bad enough I’ve yet to see a file manager for *nix that apart from LFN support wasn’t even as capable as Windows 2.0… but on the Windows side ‘designers’ just keep crapping all over something that worked just fine as is. When my maternal grandmother was able to master Windows 98 FIFTEEN YEARS AGO, leave the damned UI alone!!! IT’S DONE!
It’s like throwing out the word “obsolete” on something that works great. One of the keys to ‘obsolete’ is for there to be something better — and for the desktop there ISN’T — at least not if you do anything more than herpaderp out l33t on Twitter, talk to the family on fb, game and spank it to porn. You do anything more than that, and half-assed idiotic moronic BULL like Metro or this Windows 9 proposal is little more than crippleware.
I’m sure it’s great on fullscreen handhelds and touch devices, but screwing the entire existing userbase who has no plans to abandon the desktop (even while using those devices) to enter that market is NOT a sound battle plan.
Much of it probably stems from the LIE of system sales being down indicating less desktop users. The question is why buy a new system when you don’t need to. There’s a marketing concept called ‘saturation’ — you have bursts of sales when there’s a legitimate reason to buy a new one, but once everyone who wants one has one, sales peter out. SERIOUSLY, if you aren’t a die-hard gamer and have a four or five year old i7, what SERIOUS benefit is there to buying a new system until it breaks? Unless you’re sitting around video trans-coding all day, it’s overpriced bullshit nobody should be wasting money on. Much less how many people are continuing to use older systems just because they lack the knowledge to rip the steaming pile of **** known as 8 off the system? The basic lie is that sales indicates the number of users — which is the same lie as saying that browser market share says there are a fraction the IE users today than there were in 2004. Dropping from 92% market share to 25% sounds impressive — when you realize that the number of Internet users was only 700 million at that 92% and the 25% is out of 2.8 Billion it becomes a complete lie if you do the math. (686 million vs. 700 million). Amazing how you can gain users while losing share.
I get the feeling the people making these decisions are falling for the same type of lies. They’re using desktop PC sales as a indicator of users — 100% fiction if ever there was.
… also I get the feeling Thom is a tubby chaser; sexy? This ain’t it for a DESKTOP system. Looks more like a ten foot TV interface; and that’s a bad thing unless you happen to be designing controls for a TV.
Edited 2013-10-04 08:45 UTC
So, because everyone (i.e. you) already has a computer they’re happy with, all the software companies should pack up and go home?
If Windows 98 is the best OS for you, then just use it. No one is stopping you.
Don’t be a dumbass, Win98se doesn’t run most of today’s software.
He’s talking UI.
You can get it working quite easily …
It can do a lot more than you’d think. I keep an ancient PIII laptop with 64MB of RAM around for running BeOS, and I have 98SE on another hard drive for it. It can run most open source programs that don’t require 64 bit hardware or hundreds of megabytes of RAM, certainly enough to get along these days. It doesn’t have built in WiFi but I have a USB WiFi adapter that came with drivers covering the full range of Windows from 95 through 8.
Basically, as long as I don’t visit content-heavy websites or try to do 3D work with it, it’s perfectly fine as a light working machine.
I would tend to agree, except that security is really dodgy on older versions of Windows. Given the state of the security arms race, I would not feel comfortable e.g. making commits to a software development repo from Win2k or XP. Even light use would be a hazard, seeing as some script kiddy could be using your computer to host stuff.
I recently switched from Win to Linux after a long time of dual-booting, faffing around, etc.
Always preferred Gnome so went with Cinnamon as a good variant. Then tried KDE.
KDE… so beautiful, so sexy. Yet I switched back to Cinnamon after one session.
Win 8.. .or 9… sorry, no way.
I had a linux desktop with carefully-picked fonts and rendering tweaks, 3D cube desktop, mac-style menubar and custom themes and everything that make it so beautiful and sexy. My previous 2D composition-enabled desktop (by xfwm using RenderAccel) with full translucency of windows even predates Vista.
Years later I dumped it for the ugly windows, because I started to have to do nearly everything inside windows VM: delphi/.NET coding and even photoshopping for modding games. And since they ported every single applications and utilities from linux to windows, the transition was painful but successful in the end.
Sexy != useful.
What’s the point of making the UI dumber or easier? Home PC market will be no more and PC will become some sort of professional-only tool, exclusively used by programmers and graphic designers and such.
If they want to put it on TV, just improve WP8 further. Is the windows team as clueless as GNOME team now?