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UI Features That Didn't Make It Into Windows 7
TRNick writes "TechRadar talks to Windows 7's Senior User Experience Designer and discovers the interface ideas the Windows 7 team almost, but didn't put into Windows 7, and the stages various UI features went through to their final form. Quoting: '... The next prototype, in February 2007, was called the Bat Signal; when you moved your mouse over an icon in the taskbar, the full window would pop up on screen, highlighted by beams of light (a little like the Batman signal projected over Gotham City). Bat Signal made it easy to find the right window but it caused other problems: 'sometimes people toss the mouse down to the bottom of the screen when they're typing because they don't care where the mouse is and the Bat Signal pops up and that's really intrusive in their flow.' Bat Signal evolved into Aero Peek in Windows 7; you can hover over an icon to get thumbnails and hover over a thumbnail to get a preview of the window."
Anyone know of something similar for Linux?
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
when I worked at MS, I used to always install the IDS and IDW builds. Not the dailies - they never worked. But I got really tired of learning about possible features that would never really exist, and now from the outside world I'm tired of learning about betas, because it's never exactly like the shipping product. Who cares? I'll just learn about it when it's done.
It does me zero good to know about things that I'm not going to create myself. If MS will implement it in five years, I'll learn about it in five years.
I've read (though I don't know for sure and can't find backup at the moment) that Microsoft's GUI design is much more of a trial & error approach than Apple's. They throw stuff in, put it in front of users, ask users what they think, and study the users' reactions in a scientific sort of way. If it make test users' workflows more efficient by Microsoft's measures and causes positive reactions in test users, then the design is used. There exact process may be much more complicated than that, but from what I've heard, that's the general idea.
I've read that Apple's process, on the other hand, has a little more emphasis on the opinions and views of GUI designers and experts, as well as the personal opinion of Steve Jobs. (again, supposedly)
It wouldn't be clear to me at the outset which approach would give better results.
Ignoring number #3 and assuming that "productivity" is a goal of the user, here is my assertion:
;-) And because speed is a critical part of UI, having to swap out memory slows it all down. Chances are, there is ONE APP that dominates your workflow, whether it WordProc, Spreadsheet, Coding Environment, Graphics/Flash. Whatever that is SHOULD dominate your 24" monitor. All the other stuff (the web page yer copying text from, the Email your reading for specs, etc) are in the background, BEHIND the window that's doing the work. What if it were off to the side? And what if your chat and stuff were on the computer beside you. Why buy Moore's Law next machine, when the 1.8GHz, 1GB can run your side-surfing, and it only takes a glance, not an Alt-Tab? And chances are, you have older machines and CRT monitors. Oh, but they use energy? And shipping them to the Third World doesn't?
"It is amazing how much more productivity you have with multiple computers with multiple screens."
So much of the UI is spent on "switching" apps or discerning between windows/tabs of the same app. Think Office/Email/PhotoWhatever/MSVC. Behind all that is your websurf, Facebook, chat, tunez, Skype, FTP, Remote Sessions, site monitoring, Limewire
I like UI. UI is everything, but... But I like ignoring it while I work. Most UI improvements aren't.
"despite all the 'Vista sucks!' being thrown around, it didn't slow down adoption at all"
Where can I go into a shop and buy a PC with the previous incarnation of Windows? And if Vista is such a success why is MS moving to Windows 7 already?
Amen! I work for a refurbished notebook/desktop retailer and even when we are buying 'end of line' etc... (older models likely to have older operating systems) they ALL are coming with Vista. Of course adoption is speedy when you have a choice of Vista or Vista...
Looks great. So what? What productivity advantages does it give you over XP? In fact, for a business user, it's a new interface and that means a drop in productivity for most users -- at least in the short term.
Now, in these times of recession, explain to me why I want to spend extra money on an operating system that will only cost me money in production loss.
What is the point of Windows 7 exactly? Prettier, sure. Who cares. MS doing better? Probably. MS doing enough? MS doing a comeback? Maybe for IE8 admittedly, but Chrome can still beat it -- while FF has long since lost its way. But overall MS back, or even good? Not yet, not at all.
Are virtual desktops going to be in Windows 7? I haven't tried the beta, and all I get with google is some stuff about RDP. Any desktop without virtual desktops is pretty much unusable for anything non-trivial. What is taking them so long? UNIX has had them since the early 90s.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Except that statement isn't even true. It's just a perpetuation of FUD and urban mythology.
It's not. Notice that I didn't say that MSSQL is always cheaper than Oracle (I'm fully aware about free editions of Oracle, BTW). I merely pointed out that there may well be cases where you do get more bang for the buck for MSSQL. For .NET development, for example, MSSQL is a reasonable default choice because of its superb integration with the platform, and many Microsoft shops (particularly partners) get MS software heavily discounted. Then, of course, maybe the company already has SharePoint, which requires an MSSQL instance, so depending on the task at hand it may make sense to reuse that. Etc.
Just to remind, the GGP claim was: "why dick around with a tinkertoy DB when Oracle has done it all for years?". Now that is indeed perpetuation of FUD and urban mythology!
I'm going to hold out till we get the official release version, but I'm right there with you. I HATE wasted screen real estate and gimmicky gadgets.
I can "de-vista" Vista in about 5 minutes ... completely turn off Aero, remove the gadget bar thing, turn on classic menus and interfaces, turn off the UAC, reduce the size of icons on the desktop, and a few other things. It turns out not to be all that bad to use then, but at this point, it is indeed looking like Windows 7 will not be giving us those options.
I'm ready and willing to go Linux, just need that last little push. This may be it.
The Digital Sorceress
EXACTLY. Since Win 98, I always customized Explorer to show most of the extra buttons on the toolbar, changed the folder options to suit me, etc. In Vista these options are gone. You see, in designing the Vista UI they just used the old Explorer defaults and threw away all the extras, figuring that nobody used them anyway. In other words, they designed for the inexperienced users who hadn't been using it very long, not an experienced user that knew they could choose which view they preferred for that directory, icons or what have you and could choose that with the press of a button. No, they had to spread that out over half of a toolbar so they'd be sure to see it.
This philosophy is how they redesigned the entire system so far as I can tell. I used Vista at work and yes, SP1 did improve it, but I still hated it. All the little simple tools I'd taken advantage of for years (e.g., in Explorer before Vista, just glance to the left to see how big a file is) were missing, it was slower than my XP box at home that had the same amount of RAM and actually a less powerful CPU (Superfetch is supposed to make frequently-used apps load faster, but that only sped them up to ALMOST XP-speed). Now, I expect that a newer, more powerful version of something to use more resources, but I expect something in return for that besides a prettier UI. I may not get transparency out of it, but I can patch the uxtheme.dll in XP, apply a theme or msstyle and it will look pretty good without it using up hundreds more megs in RAM. Vista just doesn't offer me anything that I actually need since I have XP and know how to use it.
I haven't tried 7, but at least from what I hear it does have two features that interest me: minimize other windows by shaking the one I'm using ("aero shake") and making items on the taskbar appear as icons instead of as an icon and a text description. But that probably still means giving up all those little extra tools I've used for years that I mentioned above, so I'm not sure that I want it yet. Most likely not, since I hear that the DRM is absolutely Draconian. The last thing I want is more DRM and I'm willing to go without rather than put up with that crap.
I dream of a better world... one in which chickens can cross roads without their motives being questioned.
As almost anybody with even passing knowledge of how Microsoft schedules OS releases knows, work on the next version starts before the current release is even done. They started Win7 work long before Vista release. Ergo, they had no idea it was going to fail or succeed. Given Linuxs success of 1% in 15 years, (Happy birthday!) I'd say Vista was a Super duper mega success.
Also, I find it funny that secretaries in my office can use Vista just fine and yet the "nerds" here find it so confusing. If you cant administer something as simple as a Windows Box you are dumb as rocks.
How sad that the only way to promote Linux is to lie about Windows. Cant be good to be a F/OSS shill these days.
No a modern OS shouldn't look flashy or at least in my case, it should have an OPTION to make it look basic and crappy like XP classic, 2000, 98SE
I still run Windows classic UI on Vista, Windows 7 and XP to this day, not because I don't like the other look but because this is the neatest, fastest way of getting things done.
I realise this place is a linux shop but we do have Windows users like myself here and I can tell you, we DO a lot of RDP in Windows and RDP is rubbish with all the fluff turned on.
If I'm to have a CONSISTENT experience, I need the same experience from machine to machine, so I need classic mode in my RDP, classic in my local workstation and classic on the server(s) I work on.
Classic is simple and easy to work with and could easily be improved while still looking bland and simple.
Feel free to enable 'fluffy 3d' mode for users but when it comes to getting things done, I don't WANT to wait 200ms every time I click something, for it to animate, that adds up to a lot with the work I and others may do.
What a troll, you clearly didn't spend much time with Vista.
Look to the left for file data? Now you look to the bottom. Or you use the details mode. There are so many ways of finding that information. Hundreds of MBs? DWM used around 30MB I found. Windows 7 uses around 23MB for the window manager. And while Vista on a low resource system was, admittedly, pretty bad. On a high resource system, it more intelligently used extra CPU cycles, extra RAM, and most computer's largely idle built in graphics to do useful work.
And the administrator tools! My god, you can't begin to compare the tools in XP and Vista. Every administrator tool got better, command line tools appeared for even the most esoteric functions. Command line differencing or full system image backups using a snapshotting filesystem the user has control over (wbadmin and vssadmin respectively, allow control of those features.) Task scheduler gained a truly ridiculous number of capabilities. I have my computer wake me up to music, and at the same time, the computer wakes itself up. Out of sleep mode. Computer management, disk management, the firewall, the performance monitor, the reliability monitor, the security policies, ... every administrative aspect became vastly better.
I just, I can't keep listening to people troll Vista like it's an administrative nightmare. If anything, it gives IT people vastly more control over their OS than they've had with XP. Ever since I've installed Vista I've had free, automated system backups, reliable sleep and wake, a snappier display because I use discrete graphics cards, I've had better control over what I can do with regards to guest accounts (SteadyState + UAC + fine grained ACLs means so, so much.)
And lastly, the DRM. I've never encountered it. Not once. Music from iTunes, AFAIK, doesn't use it. They have their own draconian DRM that they implement. None of my ripped music has ever been abridged by Vista or 7. None of my videos have ever been paused or downgraded in resolution, and that includes HD quality video. The DRM is solely for those who choose to implement it in software, to provide them with that guarantee if they choose to. I don't agree with that choice, but I'd rather the OS let me watch the damn thing (and let me exploit the analog hole) than have to watch it on a piece of hardware I have no control over (most Blu-Ray players and movies with HDCP enabled.)
Frankly, what Vista screwed up on were a few operations (file copies, how did they F that up?) and public relations. When that troll of an article on DRM came out, they should have responded with an open letter the next day. Instead, they've never addressed those concerns. They needed to be on top of things, and they essentially ignored widespread public criticism. It's not hard to understand why Vista would be so disliked if they never attempted to alleviate or address concerns.
I hope this changes with 7. Certainly, the Engineering Windows 7 blog has done that so far. We'll see if that continues post release.