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Users Decry New Icon Look In Windows 10
jones_supa writes A lot of people got upset about the flat looks of Modern UI presented in Windows 8. Recent builds of Windows 10 Technical Preview have now started replacing the shell icons, and to some people they are just too much to bear. Basically, Microsoft opted to change the icons in search of a fresh and modern look, but there are plenty of people out there who claim that all these new icons are actually very ugly and the company would better stick to the previous design. To find out what people think about these icons, Softpedia asked its readers to tell their opinion and the messages received in the last couple of days pretty much speak for themselves. There are only few testers who think that these icons look good, but the majority wants Microsoft to change them before the final version of the operating system comes out.
why did you vote for Obama? Twice??
Microsoft's UI designers will be first up against the wall...
"Cock Up Your Beaver" does not mean what you think. This sig is intended to clog filters and annoy do-gooders
I was withholding my opinion until I heard the expert opinions of random Softpedia readers, but now it seems pretty clear that Windows 10 is a bust.
Those icons look like someone's first pixel art experiments. It seems that Microsoft has fired all of its professional graphics artists.
Yeah, they're doubling down on the "modern" look, which essentially translates to "flat and ugly" to me. I sort of knew that going in when I saw the Windows 8 styling hadn't changed. Microsoft's Windows 10 is shaping up to be pretty nice in terms of usability. I've been testing it out, and it's fixed most of the most horrible aspects of Windows 8, by which I mean they've pretty much chopped them out and replaced them with UI systems that actually work on a desktop. It's shaping up to be what Windows 8 should (or could) have been. But damn... it's still as ugly as sin.
I guess they're still trying to prove that they can ignore overwhelming customer feedback in a way that's uniquely suited to mega corporations. Seriously, I can't wait until this design trend ends, and people look back like we now do at 70's fashion trends and say, "Dear God, what were we thinking? We really thought that was cool?"
Also:
Keep in mind that this is still a Technical Preview build and the icons we see here might not make it to the final version of Windows 10
Hahahaha, oh man... that's just adorable. Seriously, they're not going to change them because a few people are bitching about them at this point.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
They look like they are from the seventies and using an 8 bit colour pallet.
In the past MS used http://iconfactory.com/
They did not use internal staff.
But the managers that approve it are to go first.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
...that thinks the new icons actually look quite nice? I will reserve judgement until I see them at the smallest size though (i.e. in "details" view).
...there is nothing seriously wrong in that OS (to be fair).
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Hello oblique projection! Here's to the white heat of progress, they've made finally Windows 10 look as graphically sophisticated as Q*bert.
Maybe in another 20 years they'll re-discover perspective.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
You can always turn off the effects for VMs and remote connections. For local use, effects like transparency and whatnot do not introduce any kind of penalty. Even the slowest GPUs (all the way to GMA950) have been able to do it without any perceivable slowdown. Windows is very well optimized in this regard.
The biggest problem with the new icons is not lack of beauty but that the overly stylistic design has made them more difficult to visually parse.
The purpose of icons is to make recognition of objects on the screen easier. The use of three dimensions, contrasting edges, shading and shadows are significant visual aids - and those are the things that these new icons lack the most. It takes more than Photoshop skills to earn the title of UX Designer.
"We mustn't be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology" -- Aldous Huxley
Looks like clickbait is here to stay on Slashdot, and common sense is out.
If you have a GPU to do the work the amount of energy required to render shaded buttons is ridiculously piddling.
Seriously Jobs liked flat UI's and one button mice. While Jobs was off developing Next, Apple adopted 3d shading. One he came back it's forced his developers to put a flat UI on the first iPhone. Since smart phones took off and made an butt load of money for apple, now all the cargo cult morons in the executive suite are playing follow the leader.
I guess operating systems acquiring HiDPI support is one of the reasons going for the flat look. Vector graphics are easy to scale. But maybe some genius will eventually come up with a system that both scales well and looks cool. Some might also say that good appearance isn't the be-all and end-all, but we had quite nice thing going on with Aero, so why go backwards in evolution. The window zoom animations look really good in Windows 10 though.
"after releasing Windows 7"
So the bugs in Win 7 UI were actually created by Microsoft people?
1. In Win 7, open Windows Explorer
2. Get a list of files up.
3. Delete a file
4. Whoa, the file is STILL THERE in the list
5. Delete it again
6. Whoa, ERROR MESSAGE "file not found" - if so, why is it listed?
That's a fundamental breach of the user paradigm. No previous Windows has ever done anything so mindlessly wrong.
This shit is why I decided to stay with XP till the end, and then moved to Linux Mint Cinnamon. Which was an excellent move - it runs lighter and faster on my hardware than XP ever did, and looks and feels a lot more like the UI that I already knew than Win 7, Win 8, Win 8.1 does.
"Cock Up Your Beaver" does not mean what you think. This sig is intended to clog filters and annoy do-gooders
The same one the Mac OS got hit with in the most recent release.
Best Slashdot Co
The sooner idiot 'designers' stop using this stupid phrase to try to justify their inability to design properly, the better...
'Flat' UI design is BAD design, plain and simple. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Windows 95 looked much better than windows 8 and leter. Heck, even 3.1 looked better. This seems more like a 1980 design to me: it had to be what they now call "flat" because the hardware could not handle anything better.
The icons look unfinished as a set. The image linked to shows some hard drives as flat, and some as the old, 3D shaded variety. The folders have a cutout on the right hand side that seems missing from the music folder, but it's there in the downloads variety. You can't see the cutout for documents and others so it looks out of place.
But the my computer icon. Just look at that for 10 seconds. I hereby rename it to the 'Oh My God computer icon'. It's incredibly awful.
Please, no.
The new Windows logo looks like it was made in MS Paint by a child, and these folder icons fit right in to that aesthetic. Good to see Microsoft bringing some visual consistency to their OS.
Security through promiscuity is no better than security through obscurity.
I'd be completely happy with keeping the Windows 7 UI, and just having each Windows release upgrade the guts underneath. And I bet so would 95% of corporations.
I don't understand why Microsoft feels to compelled to tinker with the UI at this point. (Yes I've heard some reasons, I just don't see why they're compelling to Microsoft.)
People complained about the playschool look of XP and hated all the chrome. Those same users swore by XP after Vista came out, and will adapt to metro the same.
Guilty as charged, eventually I had to move off 2k for XP. Skipped Vista (went on a Linux hiatus), got 7, skipping 8.x but Win10 looks like the next usable version. Until either WINE is just as good as the real thing or most games are cross-platform I'll probably be stuck with a box with a semi-recent version of Windows. Currently the WINE rating of the game I play the most is garbage.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I'll throw some screenshots here so people can compare easily.
- Windows 3.1
- Windows 95
- Windows 7
- Windows 10 new icons from the article
- Windows 10 new Recycle Bin and Control Panel icons
For me, the ugliest element is the title bar. The dark blue and black elements are very difficult to see (no contrast). Furthermore, the title bar buttons look like they are mis-aligned.
Goodbye Slashdot. You've changed.
It seems to me that the constant "overhaul" of a GUI to change icons, menu structures, etc is bad design. Not because the final product is necessarily bad, but because whatever improvements the new design brings are dwarfed by the cost of throwing away of user knowledge about the old interface and the cost of re-learning a new interface and its symbols and structure.
There's probably even unconsidered effects. A lot of clients I've worked with have resisted upgrades (they own and have paid for) to Office because of the radical changes in look and feel. By running older versions with weaker security, they're now exposed to greater risk of compromise by malware. There may even be meaningful losses in productivity from missing new features or improved implementations of existing functionality. This can even be made even worse by resisting operating system updates.
I've always been puzzled that some of the best minds in user interface design get together and say "obviously, the best solution is to throw out everything the users have learned and give them something totally different."
Having a button that lets the users choose which style they prefer? Or would that be too revolutionary for Microsoft?
Windows 2000 is prettier than '95.
When the iOS flat look came out it looked like My Little Pony, but now people have gotten used to it nobody cares anymore.
For completeness, some other mid-to-late '90s era icons:
BeOS
Amiga OS 3.5
NeXT
Mac OS 8
GNOME 1
KDE 1
what I like about the "old" windows is that you can clearly see where the window border is (and how to resize windows), and the minimize/maximize buttons are *early* and uniformly identified. I'm also not a fan of complicated icons---I shouldn't have to squint or guess to know what an icon represents! (if an icon has too many informational pixels, then it's probably not a good idea to make it an icon in the first place).
I must be maybe one of about remaining four people who -still- prefers the nice boxy greyness of old beloved OS/2 2.1
http://www.classic-computers.o...
And maybe I'm one of the last two people who loved programming OS/2 apps, or at least remembering doing so.
Probably the reason I try to shoehorn FVWM onto Ubuntu...
-> I dislike sigs...
I've seen worse Icon schemes than what Win10 promises.
Besides, icon file view is for kids, old folks and newbs.
Use detail view to get stuff done.
And now confirmed for Slashdot, making this literally The Last Site. In social media (confirmed with Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Google+, Ello, StackExchange, Digg, Myspace, Twitch, and Slashdot), any discussion with the name "Microsoft" is a toxic public relations stunt where nobody is allowed to express anything not approved ahead of time of by the PR firm.
Slashdot now joins a long list of sites I will refuse to ever discuss or read of Microsoft on. If they keep this up, they may alienate enough of us that their marketers can only talk to themselves. If they are really so intent on having us discuss news about them, then they could just stop posting it. Now watch the negative mod points get spent by their robots, on this below-threshold, third layer comment that almost nobody will ever see.
You could at least add a link to check the icons out OP.
Don't really mind them, they look bad if just viewing by themselves but in a screen shot are not that bad.
Comparing them to Windows 7 the artist that did those was a lot more skilled, throwing in reflections and shading.
The biggest problem for most users (especially non-technical users) when changing Windows versions (upgrading is a bit of a misnomer, imho), is how the UI changes with every version.
:)
By the time end users start to feel comfortable navigating around in Windows and learning what is where (i.e; WinXP: control panel -> add/remove programs), they are forced to 'upgrade' to the latest version of Windows and have to relearn the UI again (i.e; Win7: control panel -> programs and peatures).
As a technical user I find this very frustrating. For non-technical users, this is hell.
Every version of Windows seems to do this, and it is absolutely ridiculous.
On the bright side, there are alternatives. Thanks Linus!
Political correctness is really just herd psychology pushed by insecure people who desperately seek social conformity.
Apple did the same thing with OSX 10.10 / Yosemite. The 'new' icons are flat and just plain nasty. I assume everyone wants to 'streamline the user experience' across phones, tablets, watches, and real computers, but I think pandering to the lowest common denominator is just a bad idea.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
Ah but that was then. I imagine these are more vector graphics than bitmaps. When you get your new 4k monitor, you'll understand why they have to change.
Windows 10 isn't even finished yet. Just stop complaining. On top of that... They are only icons. What's the big deal?
I am in the minority camp, I guess. I actually quite like the flattened look of the Win10 UI, including the icons. I am using it on my primary desktop with very few problems at all.
This happened a few years ago for the iconography in Visual Studio (2010 I believe) too, and the users were up in arms. It took what felt like a tremendous amount coordinated feedback over a very long time to get some very small concessions from Microsoft. If you don't like it you had better start letting them know about it now and en-mass, because this decision will have a LOT of inertia behind it. It won't be easy to get them to change their minds at this point.
I don't use windows much at all. However, any of those beyond the win95 I couldn't use at all because they're out of focus. (Perhaps this can be turned off?)
The win7 one in particular is so painful for me to look at that even in a few seconds my eyes start feeling uncomfortable and I can feel the strain of trying to correct the focus.
God said, "div D = rho, div B = 0, curl E = -@B/@t, curl H = J + @D/@t," and there was light.
Those new icons are ugly, and make Windows look like a poorly designed toy. I do not mind change, when change is for the better. But Microsoft took a big step backwards on this one.
Who gives a shit about slowdown? I don't want to waste an additional 10 or 20W just because my GPU is not completely idle on a fucking desktop.
At last! BeOS icons have become mainstream! I can die happy knowing that average users will get to know the glory of the BeOS icon style!
...but those Windows 10 icons are pretty bad. Someone in the design department doesn't know that "flat" doesn't have to mean "done in MS Paint". The new Adobe CC icons are "flat" but contain very subtle gradients, which is why they look great. The MS icons are thin and hollow in comparison.
My UID is prime!
I mean, what is good about the changes that they make?
A lot of us use our computers for work - they aren't playthings, and we aren't using the machine for entertainment. So when Microsoft randomly changes the UI on a whim, all it creates for me is aggravation with no upside.
windows 2000 was the best.
it was the least bullshit start menu style windows, and did everything window management wise that you would expect.
all downhill from there.(not only ms)
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
And what's happened?
We have gone back to large, simple, flat icons.
We have gone back to a desktop akin to Program Manager (large square blocks of programs on a plain background).
We have gone passed through Active Desktop, only to have it ripped to shreds and reincarnate in the form of the (still loathed) Metro.
We have gone back pre-Start Menus and removed taskbars (in Metro at least), albeit with added features. Then we've put them back in.
The people who work in IT know that these fads come round in cycles and eventually you'll go back to how you were because some things work and some don't. At one point, Windows 95 was going to be "the last Windows OS with a CLI", now we've brought in PowerShell, etc.
And all because, at some point, Microsoft have this ego trip about never being wrong and knowing better. And all the IT guys want is an option. Do I want shiny new stuff, or boring old stuff? Let me choose. It's really that simple. You can put EVERYTHING you want into an OS. Just give me a switch (and ideally a Group Policy setting) to turn it back off if it's not what I want.
I don't want Metro to be thrown in the bin, I want my users to be able to choose whether or not they want to use it. And that means giving them years of both that they can choose between at a click. It takes THIRD-PARTY FREEWARE and faffing about to do that, which isn't the best solution when I've paid for the OS for all my users on an annual subscription.
Nobody cares whether you want new-and-fancy stuff or not. But inevitably, it'll go out of fashion, then come back, then go out. All I want is the option. It's not hard. If a freeware project can give you the option, why can't Windows?
(P.S. Why can't I make Group Policy use AD stored user photos as the Windows 8 login? It's almost impossible with lots of login scripts and downloading an image via third-party software into a particular location on EVERY machine that they might even log onto. Why can't I set a myriad of basic options that are there on the screen for my users, and why can't I *stop* them changing them just as easily? Why can't I just have "skip Metro screen" as an option in Windows to go straight to an old fashioned desktop? Really... it's not that hard).
Apple and Microsoft seem to be working hard to make BeOS look modern again.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Or global warming.
NOT because it's good
NOT because it's intuitive
because designers told us it's good so most idiots say "this is in, it's good"
It's as bad as fucking fashion, for fucks, fucking sakes.
I'm SO over it, websites, phone apps, now phone OS's - everything is going SINGLE colour FLAT, no shading, NO DIVIDING LINES (ARGH) just complete white space (or any other colour)
The new dialler on the Samsung iteration of Lollipop is disgusting. All the numbers are just on one big flat shaded mess.
Forget about what's "cool" forget about aesthetics, tell me which one of these looks easier to hit the fucking numbers on?
http://www.sammobile.com/wp-co...
It's 19'th level, fucking desk smashingly frustrating. I'm a NERD, I'm a GEEK, I'm a fucking IT guy, I WANT TO DO THINGS AS FAST AS HUMANLY FUCKING POSSIBLE. The only thing holding me back should be my fingers, my computer or my device. I should not be sitting there mentally processing shit because it's obfuscated with poor design.
The textless icon 'fad' (which saves them translation costs) is probably the worst part. It's full spec kitten stamping insanity. I don't give 2 fucks if the wifi icon is ubiquitous, they have now dozens if not hundreds of icons for applications across the world on iOS, android, windows which are fucking meaningless and we're meant to know what they do.
"Well just press them to learn once" NO - a, that could be a bad thing I don't want to do and b, EVERY time I see the icon, I wonder "is that?...." I shouldn't think that. I should see the text too. The more I can instantly relate to the better.
I even think (despite it likely being ugly) that we should be consider using colours more.
Wouldn't it be nice if the 'send' button was always not only a "play" looking icon on my Android device, but it was LABELLED "send" and it was ALWAYS green.
Delete / trash icon? Always a trash bin, ALWAYS labelled with text, ALWAYS red? That's THREE fast things which will help me very very (very!) quickly identify what i want to click.
I tire so much of the 0.4'th of a second it takes my brain to 'double check' if I'm going to press the right thing. Those 0.4'ths wouldn't exist if this shit was done properly.
I apologise for ranting but this stuff is BAD, it's UGLY and it's SHIT and I'm ultra sick of it. It's hipster, flat, bland, wank for the sake of wank and it's costing me time.
One more thing, I no longer work in IT support. It was hard enough as it is when I did it, I couldn't begin to empathise enough with some poor piece of shit helpdesk guy now, who not only has to do that work but tell them "no click the icon that looks like an old cupboard but with 2 circular dials on it, no it's up the top right, no there's no colour, no there's no label, yeah it looks like........" for fucks sake.
Madness, utter madness.
LABEL things
put COLOUR on things
USE DIVIDING LINES - 1 pixel thick lines to separate sections ain't gonna kill anyone
If you work in the UI / UX industry and support this stuff. Kill yourself
No, I mean it, actually kill yourself, you're a scourge on technology.
Confirmed, Windows 7 was the best looking Windows.
- chrish
"We don't like change" is the rough translation.
Those icons look no uglier than the old ones.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
The new icons do look pretty terrible, but if that's the biggest complaint so far about Windows 10, then maybe that version of Windows won't be too bad.
Exactly. And when it comes to battery life, running the GPU for no reason matters.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
The new icons don't look great, but the far bigger crime is making the whole GUI look flat where the same washed out white background is used for the foreground and background.
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
I guess none of these people are old enough to remember when XP was introduced. Most people bitched about XP icons looking like they came from a cartoon in comparison to what was in NT, 95, 98 and 2K.
The icons don't like that different than usual, I see no problems with it. They're a bit too bright for my liking, I find it a bit aggressive, but that's the style these days apparently.
What is really problematic in the screenshot though, is the "This PC" text. It's barely readable. There are two shades of blue next to each other that are almost the same, and in one the text is white and in the other it's black. It's incoherent.
They need to fix their color scheme and take accessibility into account.
On previous OS releases, major UI changes were always driven by human-factors concerns. There are entire college majors in human factors, and courses in it are available to nearly every CS major. ACM has a whole group dedicated to it. So it would of course be utterly irresponsible and unprofessional to make UI changes that haven't been analyzed by experts for their impact on the user. I know in the past seemingly odd GUI decisions have been explained to me by human factors experts rationally.
So go ahead and hit me, Internet. I want to see the Human Factors explanation for why low resolution and color icons and flat no-shadowed controls like I used to have on my SunView workstation in 1986 is actually a superior way to design an interface on my 1024x3840 home PC in 2015.
Yeah, I'll agree they look worse, but they're not SOO much worse that I'd find it distracting. They're still relatively professional looking. After a while the icon theme just kinda becomes something I'm gonna ignore anyways.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
News at 11..
Aren't icons tied to a theme and/or customizable anyhow? Last time I checked this was the case, so one should be able to change them if so desired, unless that's now changed and you're locked into the default set.
Yeah I look at these and am just kinda meh. It could be better but I dunno they don't seem any prettier/uglier than any of the previous iterations of icons. Yeah the whole flat thing is annoying but I find it more so now for the mixed mode I have to work with in win7 and office 2013 where half the things look flat half the things don't and it isn't like there wont be themes to apply and change it all up anyway for those who want to do that.
Or should I say not terrible, but there are good things in that lone screenshot. No huge window borders for a start (maybe too thin then, looks like zero pixel border?), title bar a bit ugly but the color theme minimizes the ugliness.
The icons are inconsistent due to a mix of appearances : the trash can and some drives are in "realistic" style, like in XP and early OSX. The "line art" icons, I somewhat like them though perhaps the colors aren't great ("open folder with another icon in it"). But why I like them is they look like 80s icons to me, like Xerox desktop, Apple Lisa, Atari ST etc. !
You can make Win7 look very much like Win2k instead of an attempt to clone a pre-2000 enlightenment WM theme (right down to the little snapshot windows - how cute).
It's funny you say it that way, because with Windows 8's Start Screen default on all computers, Microsoft was effectively telling keyboard and mouse PC users that they were using the wrong human interface devices, and should have been using a touchscreen (perhaps a Microsoft Surface, hmmm?).
Since the run up to Windows 8, Microsoft's marketing plan for their OSes, and by extension, Visual Studio and XBox. This isn't by accident: you can tell the direction from the comments of Julie Larson-Green (creator of the Ribbon) at the 2013 Wired Business Conference: http://winsupersite.com/window...
"There have been discussions... meaningful discussion [of bringing back the classic Start menu]. But we believe fully in the Start screen and the model of having these live tiles. The [old] Start menu was never really built for multiple applications... the Start screen offers dramatic improvement. Windows today is so much more than launching applications... the [old] Start menu is not the be-all, end-all. [But] the button might be helpful to have on the screen. We're principled in the direction we're heading, but we're not going to be stubborn... It's not to spite you." [Laughs]
Yes, Hanlon's Razor applies here, but it feels like there's been a veritable conspiracy of intentionally orchestrated ignorance in Microsoft's UI design. There was plenty of resistance to the Ribbon when it was forced onto Office, but at least the legacy key combinations remained. But many of those UI changes, as well as the Metro marketing push, were force-fed onto the userbase, so I don't blame those users for complaining vehemently. We're at the point where UI duct-tape utilities like Classic Shell are compulsory for proper usability in content-creation scenarios for an operating system, and right now it looks like this is going to continue for Windows 10, as far as icons are concerned.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
It seems to me the problem here is the nightly build process, which seems to have even reached the graphics artists. Rather than checking in nothing, which would break the build, he/she/it/they checked in hastily concocted outline stuff. Heck, that music note on the article screenshot is HARDLY recognizable as one. After all, when one does read sheet music, notes are akin to typeset letters, not merely baubles hanging off a washing line by their tails.
Well, this is what I HOPE to be the case, and that something more polished goes into that software, both what one can see on-screen and the stuff behind the scenes....
Free, as in your money being freed from the confines of your account.
It's great to have a ringside seat watching the devolution of operating systems.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
It looks like shit, that's why.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
Nice to see I'm not the only one... I always keep saying, "If it was up to me, we would still be running Windows 2000". Ironically I said it last night with my gaming buddies.
If the main complaint people have about the new version of Windows is that the icons don't look very nice it must mean this is a pretty good version.
After all, it's not like you can't just change the icons to whatever you want them to be. I'm sure by the time it ships there will be more than a dozen "Classic Icon" themes available for download. I may spend 45 seconds finding one I like and then never think of it again.
The icons aren't the worst thing. There's plenty else on the screenshot that would drive me batty before the new icons. I'm so glad that I only have to use Windows once or twice a year because I got so tired of fighting with it. Now if I could just find a good software package to do Canadian business taxes on the Mac.
It looks like a clean, white shirt with mustard stains. Why do the folders have to be yellow? Why not choose a color that actually blends nicely with the rest of the scheme?
sig: sauer
I think the new one looks like 8-bit 'IT crowd' art. It's not bad, just bad in this context.
It is probably just a fashion, like windows 8 / office 2013 flatness. I doubt there is any practical reason for changing the icons to look ghetto'er.
Microsoft seems to have abandoned depth. Perhaps they are working toward a 'Pay for the 3rd Dimension' business model.
-
Talk about hypocrisy http://www.iwillfolo.com/2014/...
If icons are all we have to bitch about then I'll be fine.
Can we get past the yellow, "folder" icon yet? It doesn't go with the rest of the interface at all, and its based on a wildly outdated concept. Even when I still use folders, they're never yellow. It's time to move on.
Maybe there's even a new way of visualizing "folders" altogether. Let's get creative.
Windows users hate the OS they love the most. They think they know what they want. They want a modern OS with all the bells and whistles but without any of the bloat or a UI they are unfamiliar with.
For all the people who hate the new windows: You'll still use it no matter how much you complain, and Microsoft knows this and therefore doesn't care what you think. What are you gonna do? Switch to mac or linux? You don't know how, or you would just complain even more.
For everyone else: I'm sure it will be fine. It will seem weird at first and have its quirks, but it will probably work pretty well for the most part, and after some time you'll just get used to it, like every other UI.
Windows 10 will sell. Why? Because it's there. Microsoft's goal is to push their tablet OS's and stuff. So they are making the UI more like the tablet, so you'll be used to it and want their tablet offerings.
Democracy Now! - your daily, uncensored, corporate-free
I think "fresh and modern look" is designer speak for the fashion trend du jour. This is like all of Windows 8, 8.1 and now 10. "Screw actual usability and functionality...we'll never sell this to the Apple sheep unless it is fresh and modern". Note to Microsoft, you aren't going to sell this to the Apple types, they'll never settle for "just as good as" and you are only pissing off your own user base. Get over Metro already. Release Windows Classic with the Windows 7 GUI and the more recent kernel refinements under the hood. You can always make the Metro run-time available as an option if folks just have to run Metro apps on their computers.
I think part of the flat icon craze is directly related to touch interfaces. Our mind, like it or not, sees 'bubbly' icons or buttons like the old XP start menu as an item where pressing on the edges is no good, like accidentally pressing the edge of a real-world rounded button and it not fully depressing. In a touch interface, this gives the illusion that the contact area is much smaller than it actually is, and makes for a hesitant approach. 'Flat' icons or targets give the impression that you can register a press on any part of the item. This is important on touch interfaces where tactile feedback is limited and your big fingers block what you're actually pressing.
This becomes quite obvious when looking at some of the old touchscreen keyboard UIs on the early touchscreen-era phones. The start of 'flat' UIs didn't come from windows 8, it came from the touchscreen phone. As someone else mentioned, DPI scaling might also be a factor, but this also came from the DPI race on touchscreen phones.
Windows 10. Nice and flat, just like twm circa 1990.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twm
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Twm
I remember this happening with iOS and the first thought that came to mind was "Naw... you're just too lazy to make a good icon, that's why you switched".
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Not exactly unsurprisingly, NeXT was still one of the best UI's overall and it was very predictable and functional.
A bit contrasty with the lines, but otherwise superior to all successors.
| Seriously Jobs liked flat UI's
no
| and one button mice.
Yes
| While Jobs was off developing Next, Apple adopted 3d shading.
NeXT did it far earlier of course. NeXT used 4-intensity grayscale on its first machine (very tastefully) when most Mac was 1 bit black and white. The grayscale displays obviously didn't have any RGB phosphors, and were extremely clear for the time.
Take a look here and compare contemporaneous Apple/Amiga/Microsoft vs NeXT.
http://www.theoligarch.com/microsoft_vs_apple_history.htm
NeXT was 15 years ahead of competitors, both in UI and software architecture. Windows 95 was a low-end rip-off of NeXTSTEP UI, but at least they had the taste to rip off the best. Note the W95 close button. Note how Windows screwed up by putting minimize & maximize very close to the destructive close 'X' button. NeXT of course but the close button alone and the other menu on the other side.
| One he came back it's forced his developers to put a flat UI on the first iPhone.
iPhone wasn't flat until Steve was nearly dead. I have a very old iPod Touch that runs iOS 4.x. The UI is really good and nice looking, predictable, and fast and efficient. Better than my much faster iPad on 8.
Windows Phone 7
This was, and still is, a UX that fitted the device perfectly, it is intuitive, efficient and beautiful.
Some 'for instances'
why do we need a 'button'? This is already an artificial construct; if an idea is captured by text then touch the text to access the associated sub-levels. Or headings that extend beyond the screen; so you naturally swipe to see the end of the title and you get to the next page with a new title.
I am probably as upset as anybody for how Windows8/8.1/10 has evolved but for entirely the opposite reasons of most people.
"Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs," I said. "we have a protractor"
The latest Icons largely are stellar looking with great usability.
And yet, Jason Buckman believes that Microsoft shouldn't be criticized for this new set of icons. “I don't think they're bad at all. They're icons. Who cares?" he concludes.
What else can happen when an unstoppable force collides with an immovable object?
even on windows
This is nothing, wait until you see the new Control Panel icons.
http://www.winbeta.org/news/wi...
Folder icons are easy to change, and no you don't need 3rd party software to do it, just go into properties.
Netflix changed the its Icon from having a red background to a white background. While this seems like a minor change, when I scan the screen on my tablet or phone I don't see it right away. It is like having muscle memory that suddenly fails you.
When I upgrade to 4K it will be to show more content on the screen, not showing the same stuff with more pixels. Scaling is irrelevant.
My current setup is a QVGA 27" primary flanked by 2x 23" 1920x1080 monitors. The pixel densities are close enough that dragging windows between displays doesn't jar badly and it feels acceptably close to a single wide surface (albeit not rectangular). Again scaling is not just irrelevant, it would be bad.
Even my phones offer differing size icon grids for each screen size.
In any sane implementation any scalable elements would be rendered scaled then cached, no need at all to make the initial render efficient. Scaling is a BS excuse for this crap.
These are just piss poor graphics. If they insist on rendering them with vectors then they need to spend more time getting them right, instead of blaming
What idiots. It's the metric system that does that. They'll charge you as much for a kilogram as they do for a demifirkin, just you watch.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Scaling will matter when you have a 4K display, and half your dialogs appear a quarter of the size you're used to. Take one of your dialogs and think how small that is. More pixels means better looking dialogs, and most of the time you still want them to be the same physical size.
Windows was never about the look or design. It's about functionality, customization, and widespread adaptation. Somehow Gates communicated this without saying it. Windows may still be a success, but it seems to bounce around aimlessly in these ways now, satisfying no one. If you want sumptuous design, go with Apple. If you want no frills nuts and bolts, go with Linux. If you want the most universally used OS on the planet, you go with Windows. Microsoft: stop trying to be Apple! Gamers don't care, Grandma doesn't care, the people on the assembly line don't care, the employee at the POS screen doesn't care. They aren't using Windows for its looks.
In the past MS used http://iconfactory.com/
They did not use internal staff.
But the managers that approve it are to go first.
At least the folks at Icon Factory know a thing or two about iconography, which is as much of an exact science as UI design ever was; part pixel art, part language. As other 'dotters here have happily provided links to not only the historical iconography of Microsoft, but other platforms as well, you can see the evolution of aesthetic choices; the playful isometric simplicity of BeOS, the monochromatic elegance of NeXT, and the neo-realism of Gnome. Saying that the flat colors is a throwback to the primitive computer era (8/16 bit) is rather ignorant, simply because the color-palette choice wasn't a matter of preference, as much as necessity. Back then, the engineers were put in charge of defining the color gamut based on just 16 or 256 'slots' to use. Naturally, the engineers approached this in an algorithmic fashion, rather than aesthetically. That's why it took us 30 years to come up with color rendering that could represent natural/earth/skin tones, because there were all these mathematical gaps in the subtle spectra of blues, browns and greens. In that sense, I suppose the selection of flat saturated colors is indeed ironic in the age of hyper-realistic imagery. I applaud an aesthetic choice for elegant iconography, however the execution can be equally delightful or disastrous.
While I agree in part with the dissent over the design choices, I don't agree that TFA is representative of any significant "majority". Let's be real here, the headline reads, "icons look like a bad joke." Do you really think that contributing readers would be unbiased? You might as well have a big sign out front, "MS-bashing Trolls Welcome!" ...majority indeed.
But here's the catch. It's hard to have a serious discussion about UI choices even in this forum, one that's so inclined to conflate the design with every poor PR move, questionable politics and troubled past of the legacy platform, all making it impossible to take a step back and appreciate the design choices for what they are. It's also important to add that UI choices aren't just about making it artful, but mostly, meaningful. These mini-pictures are purpose-made to fall into the background, rather than be their own eye-candy. (that's what custom icon sets are for)
So here, I'll take a stab at it. This icon gallery clearly perpetuates the traditional Windows brand "manila folder" trope as a foundation. With flat colors and angled lines, it does an attempt at three-dimensional appearance, which arguably does look very 'flat', with or without comparison to its predecessors. While those do not make up 100% of the new icon set, the "folders" establish the overall paradigm and 'look' of the interface. I'm not convinced that the non-folder icons are even complete, since most of them still resemble Aero's photo-realistic set of devices. The icons that notably reflect the new art style are the "My Computer" and "Network" icons, which is a simple line-art treatment style. This is not consistent with the folder paradigm, not only because they don't resemble folders, but because these images are using boundary lines to define shapes, rather than flat colors. Overall, it's rather inelegant and poorly executed. The folders use subtle boundary lines, but inconsistently, and the line doesn't diminish on the smaller icons, making the left face of the folder look awkward, like a backwards "L" from a varsity jacket. Again, we see that the Redmond workshop has neglected the beauty of scale and only centers their model on an 'ideal' size, whatever size that may be, and also belies an underlying framework that is—yet again—bullishly ignorant of modern, precision rendering. As I'm running Win10-TP myself, I can also see that File Explorer attempts to express folder contents a
This post © Copyrite Duggeek, all rights reversed.
The sound I use to indicate that the system is shutting down (the "that's it man, game over (NSFW)") sound bite from Aliens. Icons could be the same way, I would think, sort of like themes. But ultimately icons are shortcuts to replace long words like "Save" or "Stop". And look how far the Egyptians of 4,000 years ago got with their icon-based language. And cross cultural issues abound. The red "X" used in 1990's German software caught me off guard, compared to common English usage to indicate "Delete".
... everyone has their own, sometimes just for marketing.
In the final analysis, icons are like standards
"There is no god but allah" - well, they got it half right.
I like them. The body of the icon contains descriptive info. Not all of it has to be textual next to the icon
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
I do not care about windows but I have to agree that these icons aren't even modern, whatever that means.
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In my opinion, that would actually be Vista.
Vista
It's basically the same look as Windows 7 except the colors are more subdued and aren't as garish. I also like the "classic" theme in Windows XP. The default "Luna" theme in XP still has to be the ugliest thing out of Redmond.
There's still some Windows 2000 machines kicking about around here. It's amazing how fast those computers seem, just because of how responsive the Windows UI is. This is despite them running on Windows 2000-era hardware.
Those people who swore by XP for the most part switched over to "Classic" mode and never went back. I actually haven't seen Luna in a while - the sticks in the mud who still won't move off of XP are all using "Classic" mode.
For those who haven't used Windows 8 or later, Windows 7 is the last version that where you can revert back to the Windows 2000 look. As far as I can tell you can't actually customize much in the later versions of Windows except the titlebar color.
... sometimes clumsily (iPhoto icon good. Photos icon bad.) they too need to decide flat&tilted vs roundrect vs circles. They're still a bit schizophrenic about device icons within programs and in the Finder. Given the history of Windows 7 to 8 to 10, they don't need any more flash points. I'd imagine they simply need to lock the door until they can release a coherent UI. And please stop with the size-shifting icons/panes. It's useless on desktop UI (it know which icon I need - letting me make some of them the size of baseball cards is no gain) and just reduces focus on a small screen. Someone needs to stop imagining that there is a non-modal better way to use a small device.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Ya, exactly. Not sure what was trollish about my original post but whatever - the mods around here have really gone downhill lately.