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Microsoft Shows Off Radical New UI, Could Be Used In Windows 8
autospa writes "In a three and a half minute video, Microsoft may have shown the world what it has in store for the eagerly awaited Windows 8. In the video Microsoft showed a radically different interface from past versions of Windows — even Windows 7. Running on Surface 2, the touch-screen successor to the original Microsoft Surface, the device accepts input from a Windows Phone 7 handset (HTC HD7). Gone are the icons that drive Windows, OS X, and Linux operating systems of past and present. In their place are 'bubbles' that interact with files and post streaming information off the internet."
And I thought Office 2010 was hard to use. The new Excel is a nightmare to learn well. And now, "bubbles"?
by whom?
"eagerly awaited Windows 8" - say what ? :)
next version of grub might be more eagerly awaited than windows 8 or whatever.
ms hired a pr company to build up some buzz ?
Rich
I read TFA, I watched TFV, and I still can't connect the summary to anything of substance.
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This has got to be the dumbest thing ever. Microsoft is just being different for the sake of getting attention, because they know they are quickly becoming irrelevant.
Well, so long Microsoft, it was a good run, but you finally have reached the limit of what you can steal from others and the ideas you come up with on your own are pants-on-head retarded. Goodbye.
You know if you use these Linux and such OS, there is so much of cost retraining the employees in the new system. You stick to Microsoft, you can rest assured that all the training costs you have spent will be investments that pay dividend over a long time to come. That is why you should invest in microsoft and stay away from those platforms that keep changing their UI.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I didn't see anything interesting. The promo-video was a waste of time. Someone could have said the same things 10 yrs ago.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
Microsoft research does really cool things, but somehow the bureaucracy always kill them. I don't think it will be different this time.
Don't you remember all the promises about Vista and all the fancy changes etc? Not even half of those made it and we're using Win7 now... I suppose it'll get cut at the last moment for Win9... Maybe it'll be in Win10 or Win11 provided M$ is still functioning :)
There's nothing here you haven't seen before. It's the usual Microsoft Surface things, drawing Fantasia-y colors by waving your hands and rotating 3D objects, which you've seen before. Add to that a lot of vagueness about how everything is going to change and a soundtrack that could easily have come from any HR video on sensitivity training or proper timecard procedure.
Maybe these features will be nifty when we get them. But this video is the worst kind of marketing speak.
People, please watch that video. The article is wild speculation. I did not hear or see anything that ought to be how Windows 8 looks. Its just MS saying what they recently did with Surface and Kinect.
Those bubbles some speak about (which where in visibly only for seconds, not even showing how interaction would actually work) are not represented as being how Windows 8 would or could work.
Not that i appreciate the idea of such a big company thinking really hard to remove that hassle of having to use a mouse and even then perform verbose, repetitive actions that could be represented with a single voice command. I'd love that.
Hivemind harvest in progress..
This works, if EVERYTHING is streamline, the world isn't streamlined.
[.jpeg] [.jpg] [.jpe] [.jpg] [.gif] [.] []
The above where ALL extensions I found for jpeg images. Yes, the last one is empty and the gif? Just one of the many wrongly named ones. How do you deal with this uniformly? How do you write a super smooth UI that shows images if even determining what is an image is already that hard.
Link the weather to my airplane ticket? That only works if somehow the ticket data exposes location data in a way the weather plugin can understand AND if then the ticket plugin can understand the weather data. My airport is Eindhoven, my weather plugin only knows about Amsterdam (Schiphol is NEAR to it but NOT the same). So how does that work? Ah, only unified services work... nice lock-in you got going there then. This kind of stuff is a chain and chains are only as strong as the weakest link.
It is not like this kind of stuff hasn't been tried before, it is the intelligent home dream.
The dream where you put a carton of milk in your fridge and it tells a phone that it is getting old. My local supermarket has four brands of milk at least. That is ONE supermarket. If my carton I picked up at a new supermarket on the way doesn't register, the entire service is useless and I might well end up drinking spoiled milk trusting that my intelligent home would have warned me.
My flight can not be just delayed because of the weather at departure airport but also by weather enroute and arrival airport or indeed whatever area my plane is coming from in the first place. My ticket doesn't have route information or where the airplane is coming from, how can my PC check this info if even the airline company can't? And does any of this check the road conditions? How about public transport? Does it KNOW whether I will be driving, a friend, a cab or I will be going by train?
Another one, language and subtitle choices. this should be trivial as long as everyone and every coded uses ISO encoding and then agrees on how many letters. Should be trivial, it isn't. Nobody can ever agree on someone elses standard.
Oh, your services are ALL going to MS supplied? Better hand in that iPhone then, just give it to me, I will take it off your hands. GIVE IT... geez, you expect a Windows 8 experience to work out of the box with iOS? No? Then what is the point.
We can't even get MS to smoothly discover various makers MP3 players. They going to bother with any services that don't pay through the nose for it and share all their data?
There is a reason we don't have integrated services that could power such a UI. The world is filled with individuals who all like to do things their own way. See Google and its chrome window that doesn't work the same as every other window on Linux.
This kind of UI is limitted to the movies where god, the writer, knows exactly what is going to be needed to get done next.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
The academic world worries about citations and plagiarism in their works but the commercial world never bothers or usually takes credit for others work as their own; the marketing departments go even further.
We (the community) should be pointing out and calling BS to this heavily marketing driven society that has created a world in which smart people and educational institutions lack their due respect as the true innovators and instead we are told to worship the mighty corporations; its no wonder so many Americans are anti-intellectual and pro-corporation -- they see new technologies like this Microsoft PR and think Microsoft "innovated" all that stuff when I didn't see anything there that they innovated other than perhaps the bubble thing which they didn't show much of (and I likely just missed some paper somebody did on the concept 10+ years ago.)
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Somewhere Clippy is sitting unshaven, disheveled, and hung-over -- blowing soap bubbles and popping them in symbolic, disgusted jealousy.
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Most of Linux GUIs (window manager/desktop environment, etc) either disable Desktop icons by default, or allow to disable them easily.
In fact, most of linux innovative GUIs (yes, by windows' standards, 2007 Fluxbox is innovative.) are built around a minimal-to-no-desktop-icon paradigm, using the desktop as a menu generator, or widget emplacement
the only ones still using this 1998-ish idea of letting you flood your screen with a shitton of pointless icons with no organisation whatsoever are those who admit imitating windows' interface to make the transition easier for noobs.
I haven't used a single linux GUI that didn't organize launch icons in a logic and structured menu for like 5 years.
Gone are the icons that drive Windows, OS X, and Linux operating systems of past and present.
Seriously GP, try harder. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desktop_environment#Gallery
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Did you watch the video? I found the summary's weaknesses much more palatable than the ridiculously vague video in TFA, which was filled with corporate-speak, and showed off a bunch of interactivity projects without demonstrating how any of these would be used in real world applications, let alone how they would improve the way we currently interact with computers.
Yeah, let's stay with one freaking file (though there may be 3 it only takes one) that when it becomes corrupt it takes everything down. A better system would be one that decentralizes this task and only affects one or a few programs (and not the OS). If you aren't aware of it, and it really makes your argument seem silly, is that every program writes tons of files to their folders. Some write them all over the place. To look at what there was (with .ini files) and what we have today (the registry) and you consider that programs can place hundreds if not thousands of files on your computer in various folders, one would have to admit that them putting their little .ini file into their folder isn't going to add much to the complexity. The registry is a poor solution that was never improved and it is a single point of failure on the whole system that causes more than its share of grief for users.
And, as far as how Linux accomplishes the same feat you appear to be clueless about the configuration files. I actually see no detriment to being able to show hidden files and to locate the ones that correspond to the program in question and to rename them in an effort to debug issues.
And, as far as incompatible formats go, why would my photo editor need to know the file format of my CD player program's configuration file? And since when do we not have total incompatibility, even in the Windows registry, amongst programs? Why would my photo editor need to know what's happening to the registry settings (or configuration file settings) of my CD player program? They don't know anything about each other nor do they need to know.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
This is wildly unexciting. Want to build excitement about an OS, Microsoft? In my opinion at this point in MS's life the best thing is to go back to the playbook and lift some ideas from Apple.
Launchpad: An overlay of application launch icons right, sorted how I want them, just like on your mobile device. Not buried in menus or folders. Proven interface. Just give me a touch screen in my macbook now.
More Gestures: Unlike Windows that ships to most users on 2nd and 3rd rate hardware with a USB two button mouse, OS X ships on high quality hardware with an amazing multitouch gesture pad, or available to desktop and home theatre users via the bluetooth magic trackpad. Windows will continue to be built for the least common denominator hardware until MS gets a clue.
Air Drop: Finally. Transferring files between devices without cables and without a fucking "Sync Wizard"
Built-in Version Control: Finally. Integrated RCS for your documents at no cost to you in a consumer OS. Yes, its been done on Linux but never this end user friendly and never this well integrated.
Resume on Reboot: Finally. Done right in a consumer OS. Yes it was done on Unix 20 years ago, but application support for it on Linux was mostly allowed to fall into disrepair over the years where application state really wasn't saved as part of your session. No more spending 20 minutes to get all applications and windows back how they were after work after rebooting for a security patch or turning it back on after being packed away for a trip.
Mission Control: Better than Expose, task bar, and alt+tab combined. No MS, stacking task bar windows is not an improvement.
Let's be clear. There is NO INDICATION this actually for Windows 8 and not just a pretty looking tech demo. The article for some reason seems to latch onto the idea this might be Windows 8 but ignores every other tech demo in the movie.
Sigh. Yet another minority report style interface. It always astounds me that conceptual designers really think that holding your arms outstretched to interact with anything for an extended period of time is a good idea. Anyone working in human-machine interface design and ergonomics should be able to tell them that it's a load of crap. People sit with their arms in a rest position over the controls because it's the lowest-energy means of interacting. I cringe in anticipation at the coming wave of multitouch-only interfaces that require pinching and other large motions of the hand - it's just asking for RSI. Sure, there's no reason why some of the better ideas being developed can't be adapted to low displacement/strain finger motions, but those interfaces won't look especially different from a keyboard-mouse combination anyway. On some level, it's change for change's sake.
And while I'm hating, I'm also going to hate on designers who consistently conceptualise every gawddamned visual interface as being a bezel-less, zero-thickness sheet of image. It's a wonderful vision and we're all terribly keen to build such things, but in the meantime, why don't they design something that doesn't rely on that form-factor for practicality? For example, the smart bookmark shown in the parent's linked video - it's cute, but nobody is going to be building such things for a while yet. Yes yes, it's fine to think about the future before we get there, but it would be nice to see them come up with some novel ideas and improvements that can actually be implemented with existing technology, for a change.
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andrea noted that the interface was: .... nice to watch but utterly useless.
which inspired maird to assert:
There is the proof....
You see, maird was saying that the demonstration of something pretty but useless stands as proof that its in the new Windows. The implication is that Windows releases have been dominated by attractive, but worthless items.
By responding to andreas comment with this statement, maird successfully introduced a discontinuity, which the reader may perceive as a delightful surprise, sometimes reacting with laughter. In the traditional world, where this discourse may have occurred around a fire, Mairds companions may have slapped him affectionately on the back, making cooing sounds about wittiness and "bons mots". In this disconnected world "+5 funny" is the depressing equivalent.
Some interpret the delightful surprise as a confusing consternation; often spurning an irrepressible desire to resolve the ambiguity. While this activity in itself is also quite funny, it is more the sad kind of funny.
One small problem with your post:
From a business standpoint, a revenue stream of $30-100 dollars per update per machine every 6-months seems better strategic plan to me than $100-150 per new OS per machine every 2-3 years. Perhaps Microsoft should take more than just UI design ideas from Apple and the linux distros.
Every six months?
You could've been less obvious with your trolling, especially when one considers that OSX 10.6 came out in 2009, 10.5 came out in 2007, 10.4 came out in *2005*, and 10.3 came out in 2003. Come to think of it, it's the same timetable that Windows used to keep (until that long hiatus between XP and Vista).
That's some screwball "every 6-months" schedule you got there, sport. ;)
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