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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.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
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
Microsoft research does really cool things, but somehow the bureaucracy always kill them. I don't think it will be different this time.
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.
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.
Somewhere Clippy is sitting unshaven, disheveled, and hung-over -- blowing soap bubbles and popping them in symbolic, disgusted jealousy.
PocketPermissions Android Permission Guide
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.
Not to mention why in the hell would they suddenly shitcan everything for Windows 8 when finally, after all these damned years they got the UI right and made a major leap forward for the masses with Windows 7.
I have to say, and this is coming from an old Win2K guy that HATED the "fisher price UI" of XP, that Windows 7 UI is fricking brilliant. The new taskbar gives me instant access to my recently used folders in explorer automatically, no fiddling, jumplists gives me access to just about everything I'd want to do when launching an app, breadcrumbs makes it trivial to dive several folder deep in ANY direction in the time it takes me to make a single click, it all "just works".
And the best part, and I still haven't figured how they pulled it off yet, is that while they made it trivially easy for a guy like me that has been using Windows for years to get my tasks done faster and easier, at the same time they made it simpler and more intuitive for those like my dad who have never been good with computers. I gave dad the second beta of Windows 7 and after using it for just a couple of weeks pre-ordered the family pack so he'd "have a computer that made sense" as he put it. He has found and used more features in Windows 7 the very first week of use than he did with 9 YEARS of XP usage.
The integrated search bar is so much more than just a finder as it will give you related concepts such as me finding out and using the new performance center when looking for good old perfmon. Finally it helps the user find things they don't even know they had, such as dad plugging in his headset to chat and finding out about Windows 7 voice recognition.
So they'd be insane to just shitcan all that work when they finally have a winner on their hands. Both XP and Vista users whom I've let try Windows 7 have been quite happy to switch and never look back, it allows your older apps to work without needing the crazy constantly having to run as admin anymore, the UAC works without being clippy level of irritating like in Vista, frankly for the first time in ages they "got it right" and I just don't see them shitcanning it when Windows 8 is supposed to be released next year IIRC. My prediction is the next release will be all under the hood and an attempt to make web integration better, such as making it easy and seamless for folks like my dad to have their work and home PCs always interconnected and controllable anywhere he is.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.