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Did Metro UX Elements Come From a 2009 Demo?
First time accepted submitter oso2k writes "In 2009, as reported by gizmag, Robert Clayton Miller proposed a UI that borrowed from familiar iPhone gestures and translated them to a multi-tasking data-input rich desktop UI. It would seem, however, Microsoft was paying attention. Elements in Miller's design seem to have been lifted for Metro UI, such as dynamic sized widgets (tiles in Metro UI) on the home screen, swipes alternate between open, fullscreened apps, left tap for the app context menu, right tap for the system context menu. And in Miller's video at [5:41], it would seem Microsoft used the same or nearly the same font [4:30]." It's interesting to spot resemblances here, but how many UI ideas don't have more than one inventor?
Metro design elements date back to at least 2006 with the Zune and evolved in 2008 with the new Xbox 360 UI. The font Microsoft uses for Metro is Segoe and dates back to 2004. Seriously, I know Slashdot is anti MS, but this is just getting ridiculous... first a post about how only 25% of Windows 8 prefer the OS to other versions of Windows, when 74% of those polled say they never even used Windows 8, and now this?
"... how many UI ideas don't have more than one inventor?"
Anything "invented" by Apple. Duh! Just ask their legal team!
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
This is actually an interesting concept.
As one who enjoys tiled window interfaces, I'd like to see more concepts that avoid the stacking window management we've had for so long.
I do think the model posed is a bit more restrictive than I'd like, though.
Just like a flood of Athenas - flooding from the forehead of Zeus!
We are awash in the innovations and creativity gushing from Microsoft. One simple antecedent in the case of the Metro interface hardly mars the unbroken record of stunning inventiveness and groundbreaking vision that can be directly attributed to the far-sighted leadership of Ballmer's Microsoft.
Someday, the humble Zune will be recognized as the beginning of the post-PC era, which Microsoft ushered, leading from behind.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Either Slashdot didn't get the memo that the name is now "Windows Store Apps", or else they can't believe any company would pick such a dumb name and are waiting for the "ha ha you almost fell for it - it's really still called Metro" announcement from Redmond.
#DeleteChrome
Metro design elements date back to at least 2006 with the Zune and evolved in 2008 with the new Xbox 360 UI. The font Microsoft uses for Metro is Segoe and dates back to 2004. Seriously, I know Slashdot is anti MS, but this is just getting ridiculous... first a post about how only 25% of Windows 8 prefer the OS to other versions of Windows, when 74% of those polled say they never even used Windows 8, and now this?
If you want to see some Slashdot comedy gold, you should go back and read some of the past anti-Microsoft stories and comments on Slashdot.
For example take this one http://tech.slashdot.org/story/09/02/16/2259257/Draconian-DRM-Revealed-In-Windows-7
If these kind of retarded stories were run on some other company, it would be called a FUD campaign secretly sponsored by some evil corp.
It's not called metro, After showing Windows 8 to several people the interface is actually called, "Jeebus, what the hell is that?"
and no my name is not Jeebus... I wonder how all these users know that it's called "what the hell is that"?
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
They're not the same thing.
UI is user interface. This can be a CLI (command line interface), GUI, touchscreen, or really whatever sort of way in which you can think to interact with a computer. As such, conflating it to a GUI, a graphical user interface, is narrowing things down too much, since it's much more general by definition. Each different input method is then going to have different things in which it's good for or not good for, and will need to be taken into consideration when designing.
For instance, a CLI is going to almost always be the most powerful input method, although it suffers from low discoverability, since you need to learn some basic commands to interact with it first before you can become too proficient at it. And the best CLIs are going to be ones in which you can infinitely chain commands together and even string them out in its own programming interface, so that you can then set up a batch of jobs together with a few clicks of the keyboard. Heck, I'd even classify voice command interfaces as CLIs as well, like Dragon NaturalSpeaking or even Siri, since while they don't involve keyboards, they have the same strengths and weaknesses as user interfaces (although the voice input could be seen as a fuzzier input method, much like how touchscreens are to GUIs, since you lose a bit of precision in the interaction, due to voice recognition software having to figure out what you intend to say).
While for UX, that stands for user experience, which is a completely different concept entirely. UI only designates how someone interacts with a computer, while UX is more so about whether that interface is optimal for the task at hand, or even whether there's consistency between the user interface interaction. So in essence, the UI designates the what, but the UX is how.
For instance, let's focus on using a touchscreen interface, which is one GUI implementation, and compare it to a mouse input. For starters, a touchscreen is never going to be a precision interaction method, because while you might be able to increase the screen size, you'll never match a mouse without lowering the DPI of the screen drastically, which then makes interaction a bit clumsier. Likewise, a mouse is going to be confined to a single input, while a touchscreen doesn't have to be, but can take in multiple inputs simultaneously, and as such, the mouse will never be able to quite match a touchscreen on this front. As such, while they both do represent graphical user interfaces, they do not share the same user experience, which is part of the reason why you hear complaints from people who don't like having to use one for a desktop, because forcing one UI for both then requires that in order to not completely suck on one input method, it needs to make compromises in the other.
Of course, there are some people who seem to believe that designing for the fuzzier interface while providing ways of doing tasks with single inputs will automatically make it optimal for both (I'm looking at you GNOME 3 and Windows 8), but this is sheer lunacy. Much like a CLI interface is not the most optimal for all cases (e.g. graphical manipulation), despite being the more powerful alternative, a touchscreen is not going to be a replacement for the old tried and true mouse and keyboard, which then allows for you to cram and browse through more information on one screen than a touch interface would, since a touch interface can't handle as much precision as the mouse can, and needs to be fuzzier by default in order to be useful.
So perhaps you might not care about all of this, since it does at least appear like you aren't within the industry since you dismissed all of this as being names for the same things, but at least you've had a brief 101 excerpt of HCI (human computer interaction), and can't claim ignorance to these terms as a defense any more. Because surely you likewise wouldn't say "CPU? GPU? RAM? Why do we need so many names for the same damn thing? It's not like we're using desktops anymore, so what difference does the C or G make."
Well, let me reply to this with Eli Whitney, Ben Franklin, and Charles Babbage. Those first two links are to the same articles you linked to, just specific sections. The first one talks about all the previous versions of the cotton gin and then about Eli Whitney's version and competing claims to the invention. The second talks about Benjamin Franklin inventing the lightning rod in the Americas in 1749, then goes on to talk about previous lightning rods from thousands of years before that. The third link isn't a link to the same article, but is directly linked to from the article you linked to. It talks about all the previous inventions and ideas that pre-dated Babbage's work. Now, none of those people ever actually managed to build one, but neither did Babbage.
Now, all of those people are important inventors, but none of them are examples of single inventors who didn't draw from other sources.
This doesn't even deserve the obligatory defense of "nothing is invented in a bubble".
There's no real similarity between Windows 8 and the Con10uum interface beyond the fact that both support multi-touch.
Dynamic sized widgets (tiles in Metro UI) on the home screen.
Wow widgets you say? On the desktop? You mean like "gadgets" in Windows Vista (shipping 3 years prior) and pretty much every theme since the 90s? The 'tile' innovation isn't that it's a widget it's that it's both a widget and an icon to launch an application. Which also in of itself isn't much of an innovation since icons previously carried information (gmail/outlook notifier changing colors when you had new emails etc) but it's certainly different from a pure RSS widget on your desktop.
swipes alternate between open, fullscreened apps,
4 fingered swipes in Con10uum, and the entire point of con10uum is that every window is always open. Swiping from off screen in Windows 8 is essentially a gesture for Windows Vista's Flip3D (again from 2006). Windows 8 for better or for worse pushes a full screen window manager or split screen. There are essentially no similarities between con10uum and Windows 8 as far as window management philosophies are concerned... and the gesture is completely different.
If there is any similarity it should be to Palm's webOS which was announced in January 2009 about 10 months before Con10uum.
left tap for the app context menu,
In windows 8 it's a bottom of the screen swipe.
right tap for the system context menu.
In Con10uum the "system context menu" is essentially the start menu. In Windows 8 it's actually a menu. And again it's a swipe not a button.
And in Miller's video at [5:41], it would seem Microsoft used the same or nearly the same font [4:30]."
Yes I'm sure Microsoft went back in time to 2002 to create a font for their devices and operating systems in order to avoid the legal implications of ripping off some random web video in 2009.