Microsoft Tries Another Icon Theme For Windows 10

jones_supa writes: Back in February, users decried the new icon look in Windows 10. In response to that feedback, Microsoft has implemented a new icon pack in build 10125, which was leaked early but expected to arrive soon for Technical Preview testers. Screenshots show what the final version of the OS could look like when it goes live this summer. The new icons go all-in on a flat approach, following the same design cues as the rest of the operating system, but the "pixel art" style has been abandoned. Once again, Softpedia asked for user experiences, and this time the comments have been mostly positive.

Comments

They look like they could be

[PsyMan]

very iconic.

Re:They look like they could be

[Anonymous Coward]

They are not iconic enough if they have not been hand-painted by Orthodox monks at the Valaam Monastery using Microsoft HoloLens on a Google Glass.

Screenshots?

[ArcadeMan]

Those "screenshots" are only 600x375. They're more on the side of being huge thumbnails than actual screenshots.

Unless of course you're still using a 640x480 display, in which case you're seeing an article from the future. Hello from the future! Buy these things called "Bitcoins", they'll be worth hundreds of dollars some day!

Re:Screenshots?

[Opportunist]

If 640x480 is the standard resolution of the time, you might want to warn them about 9/11 too. There'd still be time to avoid it.

Re:Screenshots?

[TWX]

Those "screenshots" are only 600x375. They're more on the side of being huge thumbnails than actual screenshots.

Unless of course you're still using a 640x480 display, in which case you're seeing an article from the future. Hello from the future! Buy these things called "Bitcoins", they'll be worth hundreds of dollars some day!

Heh. Given how the icons are looking more like icons did in the days of Windows 3.1, maybe having a low-res screen is next. The Hipsters will love it!

Re:Screenshots?

[tepples]

Sending warnings back in time doesn't work because top leaders just ignore the warnings. This sort of Novikov effect is how the timeline remains consistent despite chronomeddlers.

And 640x480 was still the standard resolution for set-top boxes until around 2007 when HDTV sales took off.

Re:Screenshots?

[Anonymous Coward]

You're probably thinking about the old icons which had the Windows 3.1 look.

The new ones are shaded icons with a 3D look.

Re:Screenshots?

[tlhIngan]

Those "screenshots" are only 600x375. They're more on the side of being huge thumbnails than actual screenshots.

It's actually kind of incredible given that Windows still uses 16x16 and 32x32 icons ("large" icons are 48x48). OS X was slightly more forthcoming when it allowed icons as big as 512x512 (and larger now, I think, with 2x "retina" icons...), turning pixel art into huge paintings.

Or heck, what was a "large" screenshot back then was 640x480 (most thumbnails were smaller than QVGA). Even now, on a 4K monitor, "giant" images that are under 1080p look tiny.

Re:Screenshots?

[Anonymous Coward]

Bullshit, my old CRT TV could handle up to 1024x768.

Re:Screenshots?

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows has allowed icons as large as 256x256 since XP and has included 256x256 icons as standard since Vista.

Nice attempt at trolling though.

Re:Screenshots?

[houstonbofh]

I was doing 1600x1200 on my CRT with Windows 95. Which, actually these icons look sort of like...

Re:Screenshots?

[CronoCloud]

And 640x480 was still the standard resolution for set-top boxes until around 2007

Define "set top box", since both you and I know, that both the PS2 and the original Xbox were capable of putting out a 1080i signal.

The PS3 was released in 2006, it's a set top box, when using HDMI by default it outputs the highest resolution your display supports up to 1080p.

Now admittedly, if you're you, and you're babysitting kids in the early to mid 2000's with a SNES/PSone/ or perhaps a PS2 attached to an SDTV, you might not realize the HD revolution is passed you by. Sony was selling nice little 15" 720p HDTV's in the early 2000's if I remember correctly, I think they cost about $550 - $600 or so.

Re:Screenshots?

[rubycodez]

Hello the Future of May 2015, This is January 2014. I bought a $880 bitcoin just like you said! How's it doing, will be I be rich then?

Re:Screenshots?

[ArcadeMan]

Better hold them for a little longer... I only said "hundreds of dollars" so you kind of overshot there, mister optimist. Didn't you notice them going from 1200 to 880? Who buys on a down trend?

Re:Screenshots?

[Anonymous Coward]

1600x1200 on a CRT television?

Re:Screenshots?

[Black LED]

The new icons remind me of BeOS. It's that whole isometric, pixel-art looking thing I suppose.

Re:Screenshots?

[thegarbz]

Those "screenshots" are only 600x375. They're more on the side of being huge thumbnails than actual screenshots.

I like the fact that an article that talks about the recycling bin icon actually hides the recycling bin icon under some stupid overlay when you open the oversized thumbnail.

Re:Screenshots?

[houstonbofh]

No, just CRT like I typed. A Viewsonic 24 inch that I paid a FORTUNE for! And a 3dfx daughter card...

Re:Screenshots?

[Anonymous Coward]

Buy these things called "Bitcoins", they'll be worth hundreds of dollars some day!

And sell them the moment they cross USD1,000 ... Start of Jan 2013 would be nice.

Re:Screenshots?

[Anonymous Coward]

... or Dec 2013 even.

Re:Screenshots?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, just CRT like I typed. A Viewsonic 24 inch that I paid a FORTUNE for! And a 3dfx daughter card...

Well hang on, this post started by saying "And 640x480 was still the standard resolution for set-top boxes until around 2007 when HDTV sales took off".

Then this post seems to be attempting to refute that in response starting with "Bullshit" and then justifying it with the assertion "my old CRT TV could handle up to 1024x768" which doesn't make any sense given the post it was in response to made it clear in no uncertain terms it was discussing "set-top boxes".

Now you have taken it further off topic with the resolution of your "CRT" (presumably monitor).

Re:Screenshots?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Set-top box" is an ambiguous term. It could mean anything from a cable box to a PC.

Re:Screenshots?

[arglebargle_xiv]

Not really, they (or at least the GUI as a whole) look more like a pre-alpha release of Motif before they added the styling. Dear Ghod, what are they smoking in Redmond to think I'd want my desktop to look like something drawn by a 10-year-old? Looks like Stardock will have another profitable few years ahead of them.

Re:Screenshots?

[houstonbofh]

The Amiga CD32 Set Top box did high resolutions... What's your point?

People have horrible tastes

[Anonymous Coward]

The draw ones are better. It makeme ponders if these people voicing their opinions have a horrible style.

They were better before

[tom229]

Sorry, but they were. I'd rather simple and clean.

Re:They were better before

[Njorthbiatr]

Why not include both?

Re:They were better before

[mister_playboy]

Because the concept of "choice" is anathema to UI designers circa 2015.

Re:They were better before

[iampiti]

Exactly! Seems like the motto is :"One true,flat,ugly way".

Re:They were better before

[westlake]

Because the concept of "choice" is anathema to UI designers circa 2015.

"Choice" --- as the geek defines it --- has never been a big part of Microsoft's success in its core markets. The same can be said, of course, for Apple.

Re:They were better before

[Anonymous Coward]

In a triangle consisting of "simple", "clean" and "icons," you can have only two of those.

Re:They were better before

[DocHoncho]

It's not ugly! It's modern and elegant!

You know, unlike all those other UI designs that were modern and elegant. They're all old and busted now. UI design has more to do with fashion trends than any sort of objective basis in usability.

Re:They were better before

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd rather have that than gaudy, multi-coloured icons and glass shader effects everywhere. It's supposed to be an operating system, not a video game.

Windows 8 got a lot of the look right. Minimalist and clean. It runs my programs and stays the hell out of my way, unlike previous versions of Windows which always seemed to have some kind of annoying and distracting "bling" for any little thing that you did.

Re:They were better before

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, Microsoft seems to have successfully done all three, considering how both Google and Apple have ripped off the MS look for their own OSes.

Re:They were better before

[sootman]

The other motto is "hide everything, because we don't understand the difference between 'actually making something simple to use' and merely hiding complexity."

Dear Mozilla (and everyone else), fuck you. This shit is RETARDED. "Look everyone! We got rid of all those confusing menus! Now there's just one button! ... Which spawns a bunch of menus.

Oh, and the regular menus also all still exist.

Oh, and we have TWO buttons like that, because we are in full-on shithead mode. Why hide everything behind one button, when you can force user to FIRST choose from one of TWO buttons! Mwa ha ha ha ha! One looks like a fox, the other looks like a hamburger. NEITHER has ANYTHING to do with what lies underneath! Hey, "New Private Window" is pretty important... put it in BOTH! But only put "new tab" in one. But make "new tab" a menu, and put "new window" underneath it. Got all that? Good. I need another drink. It's almost 10am!

Seriously -- I couldn't make this shit up. There's a special spot in hell waiting for you douchebags. You are collectively wasting YEARS of people's lives with this monkey shit.

Re:They were better before

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, troll, you can always change the icons yourself. You've always had the choice, troll.

Re:They were better before

[Anonymous Coward]

And those products that do implement the geeks' "choice" -- Linux desktop for example -- are not at all successful in the broader markets because they are a mess of different mish mashed looks and UI paradigms.

Re:They were better before

[exomondo]

Because the concept of "choice" is anathema to UI designers circa 2015.

I'm pretty sure Windows 10 still allows changing of icon themes as well as the UI theme just as previous versions have, if they didn't want you to have choice these options would be removed, yet they remain.

Re:They were better before

[Barlo_Mung_42]

Windows will still let you use whatever icons you like. MS tends to give people more choice than they know what to do with.

Re:They were better before

[Anonymous Coward]

The one thing I wish Microsoft would do is allow third party visual styles without the need to hack in support. There are shitloads of user-made styles that would suit any taste.

Re:They were better before

[chrish]

Gather 'round children, and let me spin a yarn of the old days when human-computer interface guidelines existed, and were created using actual science instead of fashion trends...

Re:They were better before

[steveg]

You sure it's not just a case of all of them getting ahold of the same batch of bad drugs?

Re:They were better before

[shutdown -p now]

The problem for the OS is that if you provide a radically different choice of standard OS icons, then there's no clear standard against which apps should design their own specific icons. Or, if you provide several themes, they have to offer designs that match all of them.

Re:They were better before

[Anonymous Coward]

No no he's right, it is pretty ugly. Lack of borders make it hard for people with bad eyesight like me who need those borders to distinct buttons and such. So it functions badly for certain people as well.

Looking better

[Ol Olsoc]

Much better.

I wonder if people get too hung up on system icons however - same thing happened with OSX Yosemite. I can change icons in a few seconds rather than beyatch about it.

Now if I just don't have to go to the web to find out how to do things I've done for years, in their other Os's, we might be talking here.

Also, I hope they've put POPmail back into the system mail program. It's not like half the world uses it or anything.

Re:Looking better

[Bing Tsher E]

system mail?

I've been carrying Sylpheed along with me from Windows 2000, through my NetBSD desktop days, and into the future.

Good lord, do people actually use the 'built in' email provided with Windows?

Re:Looking better

[Gadget_Guy]

Good lord, do people actually use the 'built in' email provided with Windows?

Of course they do. Most people in the world will have never heard of Sylpheed, let alone know what it is for. It is pretty arrogant to think that people don't use the built-in email simply because you don't.

Re:Looking better

[QuietLagoon]

...I wonder if people get too hung up on system icons...

The icons are the first things the user sees when the desktop loads. The icons are what is shown when the notebook or PC sits on display in a store.

.
The icons are the visual "come hither" for the operating system. An OS with unappealing icons has to work harder to appeal to customers.

Re:Looking better

[Dutch Gun]

It's not "beyatching", it's feedback, and Microsoft is ASKING for feedback regarding Windows 10. As a beta user and long time customer, it's perfectly reasonable to let them know I think their icons look horrible. I've given feedback for more substantial improvements, but I make sure to let them know about any aesthetic issues I see as well.

Is it really a major deal? No, not really. Part of it, though, at least for me, is the notion that all the way up the chain of command at Microsoft, there isn't one person who looked at those icons and said "My God, those are hideous! Someone fix those damned icons!". It just feels sort of pathetic, I guess, in a "King's New Clothes" sort of way. The designers that made a mess of Windows 8 have apparently convinced everyone that ugly is the new sexy.

Re:Looking better

[Ol Olsoc]

system mail?

I've been carrying Sylpheed along with me from Windows 2000, through my NetBSD desktop days, and into the future.

Good lord, do people actually use the 'built in' email provided with Windows?

Yes, a lot of people do things I don't do either.

Problem is, When you are setting up a computer for other people, they have a tendency to like things like they like them. That's why I ended up with pissed off people because they couldn't put all the programs they liked on the desktop - on the desktop (desktop apps vs metro apps).

I don't do that either. But when a potential customer can't find a good reason to change everything they do - for absolutely no improvement, they won't.

Re:Looking better

[WrecklessSandwich]

I have never heard of Sylpheed. Unlike many other parts of Office, I have never had any issues with Outlook (for work email). Where's my incentive to switch? What's so great about Sylpheed that I should care?

Re:Looking better

[Ol Olsoc]

No, not really. Part of it, though, at least for me, is the notion that all the way up the chain of command at Microsoft, there isn't one person who looked at those icons and said "My God, those are hideous! Someone fix those damned icons!". It just feels sort of pathetic,

Its groupthink in action. It's the same exact thing that allowed KFC to thing that this was an appropriate commercial:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Whereas normal people would call that assault, The sociaopatchs that produced it, and whatever assholes at KFC that approved it never thought for a second it was wildely inappropriate.

The craziest thing is, both processes, the awful icons and the filmed assault probably went through dozens of people to be approved. Whereas a couple people in a office throwing a rubber ball against the wall would certainly have done much better.

Re:Looking better

[SpankiMonki]

What's so great about Sylpheed that I should care?

Sylpheed's primary advantage over all other e-mail clients is its inability to send HTML formatted mail.

Isn't that awesome?!?

Re:Looking better

[CronoCloud]

Good lord man, Sylpheed? Do you pine for the days of teco on a tty as you snap your suspenders and smooth your beard? Do you have a fetish for slightly quirky japanese-developed-and-centered open source software? Hasn't everyone who isn't Japanese switched to the Claws-Mail fork of Sylpheed by now?

Re:Looking better

[CronoCloud]

The fork of sylpheed known as Claws-Mail is more well known. Since the Sylpheed community is Japanese-centric, I recommend Claws-Mail over Sylpheed to anyone who isn't Japanese.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...

http://www.claws-mail.org/feat...

Re:Looking better

[CronoCloud]

Sylpheed's primary advantage over all other e-mail clients is its inability to send HTML formatted mail.

Not "all other". Claws-Mail, the more well known and more popular fork of Sylpheed has the same feature....and more.

Re:Looking better

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, grow up. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that commercial, you're just a sheltered little prude.

Re:Looking better

[Ol Olsoc]

Oh, grow up. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that commercial, you're just a sheltered little prude.

And you are an anonymous Coward.

Checkmate atheists!

Re:Looking better

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you pine for the days of teco on a tty as you snap your suspenders and smooth your beard?

I still use pine you insensitive clod!

Re:Looking better

[Anonymous Coward]

Is "Ol Olsoc" your true and legal name? If not, then you're just as much of an anonymous coward, you prissy fuckwit.

Re:Looking better

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd like a client with the inability to receive HTML formatted mail. The ability to avoid sending such mail is built into me, as the user.

Re:Looking better

[Anonymous Coward]

It's only feedback when they want to hear it. Not when they stick their fingers in their ears, like they did with Windows 8/8.1.

Re:Looking better

[Anonymous Coward]

I tried Claws once. Even though it was a fork of Sylpheed, there was something about my setup it didn't allow (I don't remember the details, possibly it didn't allow specifying an outgoing smpt server, when incoming mail was coming through fetchmail).

As Sylpheed does everything I need, I don't see any reason to try again just to see if they have "un-removed" the feature from Sylpheed that I was missing

Re:Looking better

[antdude]

Many computer newbies don't even know how to change colors, font sizes, wallpapers, etc. :(

Re:Looking better

[Ol Olsoc]

Is "Ol Olsoc" your true and legal name? If not, then you're just as much of an anonymous coward, you prissy fuckwit.

Oh, don't be more of an ignorant douchbag than you already are. I'm not anonymous in the least, and you are only one very small level more so. Don't for a minute think you are actually anonymous. For the purposes of these discussions you effectively are, because no one gives a shit. We're all just having fun. Say or do the wrong particular thing, and you'll be known rather quickly.

And I don't really recommend testing that one.

Re:Looking better

[Samizdata]

I'll just stick with my Mailbird, thank you very much.

Re:Looking better

[Anonymous Coward]

Pegasus Mail or Opera Mail is better.

Re:Looking better

[Anonymous Coward]

Learn to read, you illiterate twat.

Is "Ol Olsoc" your true and legal name? If not, then you're just as much of an anonymous coward, you prissy fuckwit.

Your tactic of trying to change my words isn't going to work here, son.

3 screen shots of the desktop

[Anonymous Coward]

There is a large amount of information missing to be able to base the icon set as being good or bad. Basic click bait from softpedia

flat as a pancake: invasion pending

[etash]

I (genuinely) don't understand this tendency with flat buttons and interfaces, they do look slight of "90-sh revamped". Generally speaking through the years, changes in the UI have been positive and IMHO they were at their peak with Windows 7.

What's the sudden (the last year or two) appeal with the super flat GUIs all over the place ?

Change for the sake of .. UX experts...I apologize, for the sake of change ?

Re:flat as a pancake: invasion pending

[ArcadeMan]

The problem is, it seems companies are letting designers do the job of the UI experts.

Re:flat as a pancake: invasion pending

[Njorthbiatr]

The horror!

We may end up with intuitive and user-friendly software, oh no!

Re:flat as a pancake: invasion pending

[rot26]

Because they're dumbing everything down so that they can use the same icons on a supercomputer as on the least powerful phone or dishwasher available. The pretty icons take more memory and more graphics power, something that wasn't necessarily an issue until they started planning on putting them on appliances, and possibly shoes or yard tools. "One windows everywhere", remember that? Same thing gates is doing with schools, by the way.

Re:flat as a pancake: invasion pending

[itzly]

No, we'll end up with beautiful icons that are hard to use.

Re:flat as a pancake: invasion pending

[Ol Olsoc]

The horror!

We may end up with intuitive and user-friendly software, oh no!

Like Windows 8?

Re:flat as a pancake: invasion pending

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure, let me know when that happens... you idiot.

'Flat' design means 'designers' are attempting to design user interfaces, when they clearly have NO CLUE on how to design a user interface, let alone improve the current one we have. Windows 7 was perfection, but some idiot at Microsoft is actually paying people to RUIN their own company - hello? Jensen Harris anyone? 'The Ribbon'? Metro? Microsoft lost hundreds of millions of dollars because they couldn't admit they were wrong, and they couldn't leave things as they were - because some assholes' jobs depended on changing everything.

What is 'intuitive and user friendly' about buttons that no longer look like buttons, so the user has to GUESS what is and isn't a button, by mousing over every bit of text in the program?

Re:flat as a pancake: invasion pending

[ArchieBunker]

Change for the sake of change. Programmers can't grasp the fact that maybe there is an ultimate end design. A hammer made today still looks like a hammer from a century ago. There is a reason for that.

Re:flat as a pancake: invasion pending

[gstoddart]

We may end up with intuitive and user-friendly software, oh no!

You know, if people are actually doing proper user interface design, that might be true.

But having seen Metro on a Windows 8.1 box ... that's not what is happening.

Graphic designers focusing on pretty, but with no understanding of functional are producing shitty interfaces which, while they might be fine for a tablet or a handheld, are complete garbage for a desktop machine with no touch screen and operated with a keyboard and mouse.

So, I don't care which shade of pastel and crayons the useless interface is. I want to turn off the useless interface entirely, because it provides nothing in the way of utility.

Windows 8.1 is fast and stable, and has nice features. But it's only usable as a desktop once you install something like Classic Shell and turn off the crap that these "designers" have put in.

They're spending all the time tweaking the wrong things.

Re:flat as a pancake: invasion pending

[jones_supa]

What's the sudden (the last year or two) appeal with the super flat GUIs all over the place ?

It's the move to fully scalable UIs. Cool graphics have not yet arrived at that scene. Making everything flat and simple is the easy way out.

Re:flat as a pancake: invasion pending

[Anonymous Coward]

Sad but true. Metro apps have thrown all GUI design guidelines into garbage can. Everything looks like a hacky mess of colorful 's splattered all around.

Re:flat as a pancake: invasion pending

[Gadget_Guy]

We may end up with intuitive and user-friendly software, oh no!

But the problem is that you don't get an intuitive and user-friendly system. You might get a clean system without clutter, but then have to figure out and dragging from the top of the screen to the bottom is the way to close a program. Or that clicking in the space that used to have a design element (but is now just blank) was the way to bring up the start screen. Or that things that look like they are just decoration are actually active buttons, but you only know this (and what function they perform) by blindly clicking, dragging, swiping over every part of the screen.

Even when you do this, you still have to face the final insult when you find that the function you are looking for was removed from the software because it was deemed too advanced for modern users - even though Windows has been able to perform that function for decades up until now.

Modern user interfaces have absolutely nothing to do with intuitiveness. I looked at some really old software recently and found it so pleasant because I could tell exactly what functions were available and how to perform them simply because they used textual buttons and menus. It was so much better than being faced with a bunch of similar-looking graphics with no mouse-over pop-ups to explain what they were for.

Re:flat as a pancake: invasion pending

[ArcadeMan]

What is 'intuitive and user friendly' about buttons that no longer look like buttons, so the user has to GUESS what is and isn't a button, by mousing over every bit of text in the program?

The same thing happened to OS X and iOS. What once was clear and easy to understand is now pretty and mostly useless.

Re:flat as a pancake: invasion pending

[TheDarkMaster]

My guess is that this is an invasion of "design experts" who have zero ability to make a beautiful and usable UI element at the same time. Or if you prefer, is plain incompetence in an area where the subject needs to be an artist. For example, why my Windows icons cannot be like this ones? Everaldo Coelho (the designer of my example link) is too expensive for Microsoft?

Re:flat as a pancake: invasion pending

[ArcadeMan]

Even an interface that requires mouse-over pop-ups to understand is a fail in my book.

Re:flat as a pancake: invasion pending

[Imazalil]

Well about the only thing all the "UI experts" in Redmond have managed to do in 15-odd years is the Windows snap functionality (or whatever it's called - win key + arrows).

Re:flat as a pancake: invasion pending

[Njorthbiatr]

Yeah stupid people making UIs for end-users and not for programmers!

I'm sure graphic designers have a load to complain about how you're incompetent too, while we're at it. Show me a bad metro UI by a graphic designer and I can show you an awful UI by a programmer. The opposites of this are also true. It's almost as though you'd have to work together as a team to produce something that's simple, clean, aesthetically pleasing, intuitive, and functional! But actually communicating what you need to a non-programmer? The horror!

GUIs are the way of the future and the metro style is here to stay. But if you don't like that you're welcome to go play around on COBOL or something.

Re:flat as a pancake: invasion pending

[Wheely]

I completely agree.

On my ipad I have three icons next to each other that look almost exactly the same. On my Android phone I have something similar and the Dolphin browser on my phone has loads of little blobs that bear no relation to anything and the only way to find out what they do is to press them.

With OSX I have chosen not to upgrade to the latest just in case I end up not knowing what anything does. Strangely, Apple are still producing Logic X with things that look exactly like their physical counterpart, right down to useless cables in some cases.

Re:flat as a pancake: invasion pending

[TWX]

We may end up with intuitive and user-friendly software, oh no!

So, I don't care which shade of pastel and crayons the useless interface is. I want to turn off the useless interface entirely, because it provides nothing in the way of utility.

Windows 8.1 is fast and stable, and has nice features. But it's only usable as a desktop once you install something like Classic Shell and turn off the crap that these "designers" have put in.

They're spending all the time tweaking the wrong things.

I think it's hilarious when Windows 95 icons are more intuitive than an OS that'll literally be twenty years later from the same company. That was with icons that only had the basic sixteen ANSI colors available to them at-launch. It required an update to enable 256-color icons. If anything, limiting designers to those sixteen colors and requiring a common faux-3d paradigm ensured that all of the icons had a design consistency about them that made it difficult for others to copy, so one could usually tell if a program was a Microsoft one versus a third-party.

There's been a lot to dislike about Microsoft over the years, but historically their user interfaces were legitimately not on that list. These 'advances' are changing that.

Re:flat as a pancake: invasion pending

[Anonymous Coward]

Please explain the presence of Metro on Windows Server 2012.

Re:flat as a pancake: invasion pending

[gstoddart]

Yeah stupid people making UIs for end-users and not for programmers!

Wow, nice either or.

In between clueless people who want to access the intertubes and programmers is pretty much everything else computers are ever used for.

And business software users do not gain a damned thing from Metro. They gain a clunk interface which is useless to them.

So, while Metro has its place for some people ... it is completely unsuited for the tasks of what many many people do with computers.

So Microsoft (and idiots like you) can keep pretending that Metro is a suitable interface for everything. Or Microsoft (and idiots like you) can actually realize that "one size fits some" isn't going to cut it.

You sound like a whiny graphic designer who still doesn't understand that a GUI which doesn't suit the task is fucking useless.

Yes, for many home users Metro will probably do everything they need. For for people with more demanding tasks, and most people in business ... Metro is utterly useless as a UI.

I can assure you, Metro is not all of "simple, clean, aesthetically pleasing, intuitive, and functional" ... it's anything but, in fact unless you're doing fairly trivial tasks on a tablet.

With a keyboard and mouse, on a large screen with no touch ... Metro is a completely fucking useless UI.

So you can boo hoo about how the graphic designers will save the day. But if all they have is eye candy which impedes function compare to existing UIs ... all they're doing its making pretty garbage.

But people who use computers for grown up things will simply not benefit from Metro. Because it's the completely wrong interface paradigm for many things, and Microsoft (and idiots like you) whining it's the wave of the future doesn't make it a good universal UI.

This isn't about the interface for normal people and programmers ... this is about the entirety of human computer interface design, and is much more sophisticated than your clueless reductionism.

Re:flat as a pancake: invasion pending

[Hognoxious]

I totally agree like sixty million percent times.

It's like houses. Who needs architects? If the door's in the wrong place and it's too narrow who cares, so long as the colour looks nice with the curtains.

Re:flat as a pancake: invasion pending

[Anonymous Coward]

Heh, you call that 90s glossy stuff pretty?

I bet a million dollars you're some middle-aged nerd with high IBM.

Re:flat as a pancake: invasion pending

[dinfinity]

A hammer made today still looks like a hammer from a century ago.

No, it doesn't.
Hammers come in all kinds of different colors with all kinds of designs.

Also, a UI for an inherently complex and extremely powerful and versatile thing such as an OS is not a fucking hammer. That's like comparing an industrial complex to a dog house.

Re:flat as a pancake: invasion pending

[gstoddart]

I think it's hilarious when Windows 95 icons are more intuitive than an OS that'll literally be twenty years later from the same company

LOL, that's because Windows '95 was still using visual metaphors they'd 'borrowed' from Apple -- and since Microsoft won a court case which said you can't own look and feel, there's no denying they borrowed from Apple.

The problem seems to be now that they're borrowing elements of a tablet interface, and trying to innovate ... they seem to be painting themselves into a corner by believing a tablet interface is somehow suitable for all kinds of tasks.

I think the Metro UI is probably really well suited for a tablet or a phone. But I think for many of the things people still use computers for will not be well suited to this new UI.

The problem is the belief that having Metro as a default UI isn't a stupid idea when it's not on a platform optimized for it.

On a 23" monitor with no touchscreen ... Metro is a giant leap backwards which has decided ergonomics and proximity are archaic ideas, and that everybody wants to move from corner to corner.

My Windows 8.1 feels like a fast, rock-solid platform. But Metro felt like a child's interface slapped on the front which needed to be replaced.

Re:flat as a pancake: invasion pending

[Kjella]

The same thing happened to OS X and iOS. What once was clear and easy to understand is now pretty and mostly useless.

Strange how so many people around the world choose to use these "mostly useless" products. I'm not saying it's all for the better, but the "OMG I can't use this app it has a ribbon" people really should find some kind of job frozen in time where nothing will ever change. Funny enough, this place is crawling with all sorts of new languages yet very few go like "OMG I must learn a whole new syntax and standard library", then it's like change and multiple skills is no problem at all. Whatever they throw at me I'm sure I'll find a way to work with it...

Re:flat as a pancake: invasion pending

[WaffleMonster]

I'm sure graphic designers have a load to complain about how you're incompetent too, while we're at it. Show me a bad metro UI by a graphic designer and I can show you an awful UI by a programmer.

Show me one fool operating out of their domain with poor results and I'll show you another doing the same. Neither should be working UI design.

GUIs are the way of the future and the metro style is here to stay.

Microsoft's competitors certainly hope this is the case.

Re:flat as a pancake: invasion pending

[I'm New Around Here]

I would love to hear a rational explanation for that one.

I just installed Server 2012 for a client, and it was my first view of it. Also, I don't use Windows 8, so am not used to the Metro crap either.

Trying to find the usual server configuration tools is ridiculous now. It's not that they are completely hidden like it Win8 (move mouse to random corner, something useful may appear), but trying to use them without having to escape from the metro tile field first is a nightmare.

Re:flat as a pancake: invasion pending

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually they "borrowed" it from Xerox, the same place that Apple did.

Re:flat as a pancake: invasion pending

[I'm New Around Here]

Wait, wait, wait.

Does the carpet match the drapes? That's all I care about.

Re:flat as a pancake: invasion pending

[TheDarkMaster]

So what? Why you should have a problem with that? Or are you one more of these useless new "designers" that draws a rectangle and call button it by sheer laziness or incompetence to do something better?

Re:flat as a pancake: invasion pending

[bondsbw]

You know, if people are actually doing proper user interface design, that might be true.

But having seen Metro on a Windows 8.1 box ... that's not what is happening.

To be fair, I don't know that any of the problems are with the Metro (now called Modern) design language itself. Most UI complaints in Windows 8.1 fall into two categories:

1) usability problems such as auto-hiding UI elements, removing buttons in favor of gestures, moving right-click menus to the screen edge, and so on
2) dislike for the flat, clean, chrome-minimized theme

Metro/Modern only deals with #2, and for the most part that is user preference. Meaning, if #1 were fixed, then Metro can work right for many users, and might even be loved by many (such as myself). This is where I think Windows 10 is improving things in general, getting us back to almost Windows 7 levels of usability without completely sacrificing the clean, chromeless look of Windows 8.

Re:flat as a pancake: invasion pending

[I'm New Around Here]

What if he works for a company other than IBM?

Re:flat as a pancake: invasion pending

[itzly]

Change just for the sake of change is stupid, especially if the change is a step backwards in functionality.

Re:flat as a pancake: invasion pending

[Anonymous Coward]

Hammers come in all kinds of different colors with all kinds of designs.

Sure, if you put multiple models of hammers from multiple companies in a box you'll see differences. The story is talking about the icon theme for Microsoft Windows, so to make a valid comparison you have to look at the evolution of a particular model of hammer by the same company.

Re:flat as a pancake: invasion pending

[Anonymous Coward]

Get to 2012R2 (win8.1) interface. A bit easier.

Close eyes, press window button, type what you want to use, press enter/return You are there. Just like Win7.

To log out, press windows button, and right click your name, choose log off.

Re:flat as a pancake: invasion pending

[ArchieBunker]

You have maybe three kinds of hammers. Standard claw hammer for nailing, A sledgehammer with two blunt faces, and a ball peen hammer to concentrate the force. A quick check on Wikipedia shows a claw hammer design from the 16th century that looks exactly like a hammer made today. What does color have to do with it?

Re: flat as a pancake: invasion pending

[Anonymous Coward]

I see your point, even though you haven't made it well.

Re:flat as a pancake: invasion pending

[Anonymous Coward]

They don't actually take more graphics power, and they only take a tiny amount more memory, which isn't a problem on modern phones, etc. It's down to STUPIDITY of asshole 'designers' who know that they must CHANGE everything, or lose their jobs.

Re:flat as a pancake: invasion pending

[rikkards]

You missed the Powershell train. Microsoft spent so much time trying to come up with a command line based admin tool when everyone griped at how bad vbs was for it that by the time it was done people had worked around it using vbs and had no need for Powershell.
Microsoft's solution was to force the admins to use it either by hiding the usual admin tools or making them so slow that if you wanted to get anything done you would learn Powershell.

Re:flat as a pancake: invasion pending

[AmiMoJo]

The ribbon is a step forwards. Instead of scanning through menus with hundreds of lines of text arranged in some order that is combination of what some programmer thought made sense and the chronological order the features were added in, you get a nice visual representation of what each item does and can scan through them quickly.

Re:flat as a pancake: invasion pending

[rot26]

More memory requires more power. If you disagree with that then you don't know enough to be having this conversation. Or did you think those bits in memory moved themselves around?

Re:flat as a pancake: invasion pending

[Anonymous Coward]

The changes in OS X and iOS are not even close to the clusterfuck that is Modern apps and abandonment of human-interface guidelines at Microsoft.

The only red-hot mistake in the Apple camp is the attempt to throw out Save/Save As... for Keep/Discard file management that nobody can get their heads around. Fortunately, Apple isn't trying to push that very hard. The rest of it is just aesthetics... the appearance hasn't change THAT much (be honest) and the functionality stays pretty much the same.

At Microsoft, you've got THREE different interfaces: traditional pull-down menus (most 3d-party software), Ribbon with File as a menu (stock apps like Wordpad), and full Ribbon (Office apps exclusively) where File isn't a menu or a tab - it takes over the whole window making your document disappear.

Oh, wait, then there's Modern apps, so that's FOUR, FOUR different UI interfaces.

and yes, iOS apps may work under Windows 10, so that's FIVE, FIVE different UI interfaces.

Not even Linux is as insane as this... in spite of innumerable UI toolkits from Xlib to Motif to GTK to KDE, Linux has never sent users on some weird hunt for the charms or how do I quit and get out of this?

Re:flat as a pancake: invasion pending

[Anonymous Coward]

It was a lot easier to "borrow" it from Xerox once Apple proved it was worthwhile.

Re:flat as a pancake: invasion pending

[Anonymous Coward]

Even an interface that requires mouse-over pop-ups to understand is a fail in my book.

You, sir, are hard core.

Re:flat as a pancake: invasion pending

[CSHARP123]

Wow Brother. Can you please tell me how you feel about that MS metro design?

Re:flat as a pancake: invasion pending

[Anonymous Coward]

...which is a dumbed-down set of window management capabilities known from Linux desktops and commercial products like Actual Window Manager.

Re:flat as a pancake: invasion pending

[Anonymous Coward]

Requiring pop-ups is a failure? Yes, mostly. If you're part of the target culture you should be able to understand everything without pop-ups. However, everything should still have popups. They're good for people with poor vision, good for screen readers, makes it easier to automatically generate the 'this button does that' section of the manual (like anyone does that anymore), they provide additional information when done right (like a pop-up for a phone prompt saying not to include dashes), are extremely useful for people new to the software, are important on lesser used features, and are great when they include the shortcut key that performs the same operation.

Re:flat as a pancake: invasion pending

[TheDarkMaster]

Uhh... The Metro, "intuitive"? Are you smoking crack? Clean it is, after all is difficult to be more "clean" than a plain pastel-colored rectangle with some text. "Aesthetically pleasing"? Bah, just look for a few seconds to realize that the real reason is laziness/lack of time to do something more elaborate than pure rectangles with some text (good UI elements are a art and good art is HARD).

Trust me, when I make a button using "flat elements" is because I have no time to make a more elaborate button that is appropriately represented in several resolutions and can be resized, I'm deliberately compromising the elegance in exchange for facilities on a limited UI or limited time. Now want to justify such a decision with "easy plain dumb rectangle is more elegant" is simply ridiculous.

P.S: Just between us, even when I have to do something as soon as possible I give myself the trouble to do something more decent than damn rectangles without even edges to serve as buttons as they are doing in interfaces like the Lollipop crap (Android 5.0).

Re:flat as a pancake: invasion pending

[dinfinity]

What does color have to do with it?

Really?

What does the pixel configuration of the recycle bin icon have to do with its functionality?
That's right, very, very little. Even if it were just a yellow square, it'd still have 'Recycle Bin' under it and the fundamental functionality would not be different. Just like a yellow polka dot hammer.

Also: http://stanford25blog.stanford... (reflex hammers)
And Google 'design hammer'. There are definitely hammers out there that look as stupid as all the flat UI crap we're dealing with today.

The big difference here is that switching away from Windows (or the flat design) isn't as easy as not buying a ridiculously looking hammer. I'm pretty sure that if MS would make the icon sets and a lot of the interface easily switchable, that many would indeed switch away from the flat stuff. Sure, a lot of people wouldn't know about it or even give a shit (I've see many an XP desktop with the hideously bloated blue look and the default desktop background) and sure, that would make MS say: "See! They LIKE it!", but for those among us with a brain, it would quickly show the collective dislike for the flat style.

Re:flat as a pancake: invasion pending

[oogoliegoogolie]

Strange how so many people around the world choose to use these "mostly useless" products.

But many people chose not to use these new products with their new-fang-dangled UI designed by some young whippersnapper fresh out of UI design school.
People avoided upgrading to Windows 8 because of the design and stuck with Windows 7 or even Windows XP, and the only way Apple could get the large percentage of Snow Leopard holdouts was to drop security updates. They kept using an older version of OSX because they knew it was a bad idea to reverse the default mouse scrollwheel behavior, auto hide the already narrowed-down grey flat scrollbars, the progressive flattening of the icons, and changing every colored UI elements to 50 shades of gray or just black.

These are all changes that added nothing useful to OSX, but were added because someone wanted change for the sake of change. It's like project managers see pics of the original Mac and think 'OOoooo...let's make our UI look awesomely retro"

Re:flat as a pancake: invasion pending

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure, let me know when that happens... you idiot.

Sigh... we use to have civil conversations here... Not mod trolls to +5 insightful.

Re:flat as a pancake: invasion pending

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not random. It appears you missed the first-install tutorial. Furthermore, if you're too stupid to figure out how to find what you're looking for, then you're apparently in the wrong business. In other words, your client hired an idiot.

Re:flat as a pancake: invasion pending

[Anonymous Coward]

"The ribbon" isn't a Windows 8 invention, in fact it predates Windows 7.

And Windows 8 is just fine as an OS. What it loses in eye candy, and I'll concede the eye candy is crap, it more than wins back in sheer speed. I'm frankly surprised that the groupthink on Slashdot, of all places, values prettiness over speed.

Re:flat as a pancake: invasion pending

[mjwx]

I can assure you, Metro is not all of "simple, clean, aesthetically pleasing, intuitive, and functional" ... it's anything but, in fact unless you're doing fairly trivial tasks on a tablet.

This, a thousand times this.

The first thing I do with metro on a desktop is replace it with one of the many start menu alternatives. Metro is an interface I dont want on a phone, let alone a workstation. However I cant do this on servers as no IT organisation will permit it.

I press the windows icon to have something replace my entire screen. That is stupid as it completely breaks my concentration on my current task (and I dont log into servers just to stuff around), beyond this if you try clicking on down button it only flips between the metro screen and the programs screen, you have to press escape to get out of it.

Microsoft has slowly been fucking up a very usable GUI since Windows XP. The first thing I do on any new Windows 7 or Server 2008 box is to set the Taskbar buttons to "never combine". I never have so many applications open that I need them to be combined. Ironically, Apple and their bollocks User Experience pseudo-science are to blame for this.

Re:flat as a pancake: invasion pending

[mjwx]

A hammer made today still looks like a hammer from a century ago.

No, it doesn't.
Hammers come in all kinds of different colors with all kinds of designs.

I bet you believe in UX too.

Why does it matter what colour a hammer is? What function does the colour have?

A hammer is the same basic shape it has been in for millennia. A flat sided lump of metal attached to a handle. Even the claw hammer is over 500 years old and looks very similar to a modern claw hammer.

The biggest innovation in hammers in the last 100 odd years was switching from wooden handles and leather wraps to plastics and polymers. Even then, this is a slow evolution rather than a radical change and was mainly done to save costs and did not in any way alter the function of the hammer.

Metro is like redesigning a hammer to have the head in the middle of the handle. Its change for changes sake and ends up being less usable than the old design. However people like you will advertise it as "Hammer 2.0" or the "iBanger" and claim it's magically superior despite all evidence to the contrary.

Re:flat as a pancake: invasion pending

[thegarbz]

UI trends are following marketing all around the world. It has nothing to do with UX experts. The designs are all about not wanting to be the person walking to work in a bright blue suit in the 90s after everyone has moved on.

The entire world is changing to a flat look, not just advertising and company logos, but also physical things (tables, chairs and even whole houses have modern styles which emphasises flat colours and straight edges). The UIs are simply catching up with what the rest of the world is doing.

For some fun, do a quick google search for 90s house décor, 2000s house décor, and modern house décor. You'll get a lovely progression from a bland look with lots of patterns, through sparsely set out houses with lots of rounded edges and strange styles, to the modern square and flat look that dominates current style magazines which closely matches what we see on the computer.

Re:flat as a pancake: invasion pending

[thegarbz]

Change just for the sake of change is stupid, especially if the change is a step backwards in functionality.

Change for the sake of change is something spouted out by people who simply don't bother researching the change or understand the use case behind it. Change costs money and it's always driven by something. Sometimes it can be simple such as "redesign the UI and rev up the version so we can sell the next product", and other times it's more complicated.

The current trend towards "ugly" is driven by the user requirements, not by marketing. New icons emphasise the usable space on which to click them (hence square rather than round). Window borders are larger (and uglier) but easier to click on. And the whole metro interface was driven by one simple fact:

We are in the world of touch. You can deny it, but I walk down my local electronics store and more than half the laptops there have touch screens. Half of those again are transformable into a tablet style. The Windows flagship product (Surface Pro) is one of the most non-PC like PCs released, and that is what is driving the whole UX design these days.

Is the current product perfect? Heck now. It's the product of a retarded mind that should not have made it past early alpha testing, however it is attempting to solve a very real problem which is that Windows 7 is utterly unusable on a touch screen. I can't wait for Windows 10... eeerrr lets say I can't wait for Windows 11 because I get the feeling Windows 10 won't have solved the many issues in Windows 8 yet.

Re:flat as a pancake: invasion pending

[thegarbz]

Cost. Maintaining a common UI code between products.

It's a horrendous idea, an abortion of an idea, but that's the explanation and it makes sense as to why they did it.

Re:flat as a pancake: invasion pending

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry to break this to you, but you're a relic and your halcyon days aren't coming back, no matter how much you whine on the internet about it.

Re:flat as a pancake: invasion pending

[thegarbz]

Graphic designers focusing on pretty, but with no understanding of functional

Except that the opposite of what they've done. They've been focusing on functional, just that the modern view of functional has changed to a tablet interface. Windows 7 is utterly unusable on a touchscreen and Windows 8.1 is a great move in sort of the right direction. A ugly drunken walk which results in leaning on fences and occasionally dodging traffic as you stumble onto the road, but at least still heading in the right direction.

Re:flat as a pancake: invasion pending

[Anonymous Coward]

The word you are looking for is "failure".

Re:flat as a pancake: invasion pending

[thegarbz]

And business software users do not gain a damned thing from Metro. They gain a clunk interface which is useless to them.

What's your point? It's not like Windows 10 needs to ever see the metro interface for general use.

So, while Metro has its place for some people ... it is completely unsuited for the tasks of what many many people do with computers.

And yet I see more and more people give up general laptops and desktops in favour of tablets. You are still right of course. I just don't think you're going to be right any more next year.

So Microsoft (and idiots like you) can keep pretending that Metro is a suitable interface for everything. Or Microsoft (and idiots like you) can actually realize that "one size fits some" isn't going to cut it.

You mean like the way Metro interfaces co-exist with the desktop, and how after the stumble that was Windows 8 every further update has so far shown that the two interfaces are going to co-exist precisely because one size doesn't fit all?

You sound like a whiny graphic designer who still doesn't understand that a GUI which doesn't suit the task is fucking useless.

You sound like the graphic designer who doesn't understand the task.

Yes, for many home users Metro will probably do everything they need. For for people with more demanding tasks, and most people in business ... Metro is utterly useless as a UI.

I can assure you, Metro is not all of "simple, clean, aesthetically pleasing, intuitive, and functional" ... it's anything but, in fact unless you're doing fairly trivial tasks on a tablet.

With a keyboard and mouse, on a large screen with no touch ... Metro is a completely fucking useless UI.

So you can boo hoo about how the graphic designers will save the day. But if all they have is eye candy which impedes function compare to existing UIs ... all they're doing its making pretty garbage.

... agreed.

But people who use computers for grown up things will simply not benefit from Metro. Because it's the completely wrong interface paradigm for many things, and Microsoft (and idiots like you) whining it's the wave of the future doesn't make it a good universal UI.

This isn't about the interface for normal people and programmers ... this is about the entirety of human computer interface design, and is much more sophisticated than your clueless reductionism.

Disagreed. The paradigm has changed you just haven't seen it yet. Go and walk down the isle at wallmart and check out how many of those laptops are sold without touchscreens.

Now I'm not claiming metro is good. It's not, it's quite the abortion as it was released. But the Windows 7 interface alone is quite unusable on touchscreens, tablets, and slates (who the fuck came up with that, call them convertibles). Something had to change. I do hope it continues to change. Worst case scenario would be going for a full one-size fits all approach. But fortunately it looks like MS has realised this and is separating the metro and desktop UIs to interchangeably allow you to do everything from either.

Re:flat as a pancake: invasion pending

[Anonymous Coward]

Because those icons look amateur.

Re:flat as a pancake: invasion pending

[thegarbz]

What's the sudden (the last year or two) appeal with the super flat GUIs all over the place ?

What's the appeal of flat colours in marketing material? What's the appeal of companies changing their logos to flat colours? What's the appeal to kitchen tables in the local home centre all being almost perfectly rectangular with sharp corners? What's the appeal of ikea draws no longer having handles instead now have a bevelled edge to grasp? And why did we stop wearing bright blue suits to work?

The GUI is following the design trends of the day, nothing more. We now have the processing power to display what we want so the GUIs tend towards "modern" looks, and "modern" by all accounts of life is is flat with predominantly straight lines.

Re:flat as a pancake: invasion pending

[TheDarkMaster]

Very well AC... So you can do better? :-)

Re:flat as a pancake: invasion pending

[I'm New Around Here]

You're so funny. I love the way you pretend you can't comprehend details of what people write.

I can't wait to see more of your work. It's a hoot.

Re:flat as a pancake: invasion pending

[Anonymous Coward]

A reflex hammer is a frivolous toy and hardly an actual useless hammer.

When something is frivolous it doesn't matter what it looks like, so there will be a wide range of forms available.

For those who don't know what a reflex hammer is, a doctor uses it to test reflect, like the knee jerk. The reality is that the doctor can just tap you with their finger if they had to, so the function of this particular design is pretty much irrelevant.

The excellent points made by the GP poster regarding claw hammers and their unchanged form still stand and I agree 100% with their post.

Re:flat as a pancake: invasion pending

[Vitriol Angst]

I'm a veteran user of MicroSoft Office products -- so much so that I still spell it "PowerPoint." I've noticed that for MOST of the functions I've used, the advances are usually not huge (2008 brought a color sampler tool so I could mage colors -- hooray!), and for the most part, the icons get re-arranged. I could deal with that by creating my own menu for most common features.

The Ribbon sucks -- it truly absolutely sucks. It takes up a lot of space, disorganizes where I need to click and ruins context, and manages to make simple, common tasks more confusing. I've used more than a few hundred Apps, and I can tell you where the interfaces are good and bad. Adobe still screws up on their bezier pen tool and have yet to catch up to FreeHand's "one tool does it all" for lines and their easy "paste inside" for masking.

And then Metro really, really sucks, because simple OS tasks are now a series of actions. Sliding to hot corners is context sensitive with no indication of what the context is. Icons are either icons for buttons, or a picture of the family dog -- or an advertisement. The Xbox is NOT a design for getting things done -- it's a video game interface, that usually gets inbetween you and a game, or you and Netflix, and tries to sell you aftermarket crap that they kept out of the game in order to sell to you later.

So, yeah, I'm going to whine about that damn Ribbon, because I can use Office 2008 faster than any of the later Ribbon additions. and I could use Keynote with more proficiency in 2 weeks than 10 years with PowerPoint. The little floating panel with a few tabs (LOGICALLY organized) allowed me to make changes quickly. Because of the superior interface, I'd import presentations into Keynote, get the work done, export it to PowerPoint and then clean it up again -- because THAT was quicker than using the Ribbon interface.

Re:flat as a pancake: invasion pending

[Vitriol Angst]

The Ribbon is awful UI.

I never "scanned" through those menus -- I just put frequently used action buttons in a palette. The Ribbon pretends to be "friendly" but takes up space and hides what I need to access with little hard to press triangle in the bottom right corner of each pane.

It takes me more time than the same function used to. I'm teaching myself to use High end 3D animation apps these days, so I am not afraid of change or complexity. I just get annoyed at bad designs when they've had 30 years to make Office products right.

Apple's products may have fewer features, but they are much faster to use for both novice and advanced users. Adobe Indesign is even better for page layout, but inexplicably, I find Illustrator to be annoying and it overcomplicates layers and complex vector illustrations -- but nobody remembers any other vector illustration programs so they think it's the best.

Microsoft's fans seem to suffer from the "don't know any better designs so they think this is awesome" syndrome.

Re:flat as a pancake: invasion pending

[Vitriol Angst]

Change costs money? Yes it does; businesses buy the new Microsoft product because they changed the file types integration with Outlook.

Microsoft has to change things enough so that they can justify the "new thing" to sell -- and often that's a cosmetic change because 98% of their users aren't going to be using that new, deviation feature on a pivot table.

I could show a whole slew of changes Microsoft made that MUST HAVE had a lot of rationale associated with the change but makes no sense to me. Also a major complaint is why they changed the names of standard words in desktop publishing to useless and vague terms so you could never get a Help to find it for you. "Leading" is a term, "Paragraph Space" is a vague rearrangement of common speech. OK, rant over - the point is they started using terms for functions in their programs while ignoring real conventions. Then they made interface conventions based on some religion of UI while ignoring users.

I've spent many, many years annoyed at bad choices in UI by Microsoft. My fingers have had to travel MANY many miles because they couldn't have one alignment command with shortcuts and had to have an icon for every alignment -- they were ten years after everyone else to finally add a context menu so you didn't have to travel to center an object.

And Word still has major issues for anyone trying to do real page layout with it, or try and overlay high resolution graphics. It's a bloated text editor, no longer efficient and speedy at the first thing, and still hobbled by legacy to be good at graphics and page layout. But it's good at some email macros, and automation, as long as you don't have too many. Lot's of features, as long as you don't depend on them.

I just get really annoyed at bad designs -- it's not like I didn't KNOW how to use these product, or try and find better methods. It was the repetitive nature of using a damn baby hammer when I could see 50 ways they could have done it better. Why did someone get paid to make this lackluster app?

So now you are saying it's all driven by the touch screen. Well that's great, but I'm not using Windows on a touch screen and Surface is a tiny, tiny part of their market. Why not make a Surface interface for the Surface, and then a different one for the Desktop and marry the two when they've finally figured out the touchscreen and the desktop?

I'm not interested in researching Microsoft UI, because I've been too annoyed by their past efforts. Making icons big enough for a finger to touch them is NOT something I'd call a huge innovation, nor is it something that should have made Windows 8 such a bad hybrid.

I would really love to get into UI design -- actually "back into it" would be more accurate. But I did this stuff before they had degrees and certifications and NOW the UI is some sort of formal "it's done this way because WE KNOW these things." It's like the old "psychology for management" they used to teach in business school I suppose.

There are some things you can codify for "concepts" of a good interface, but it's really about a designer and a tool user crafting something that makes sense. There has to be a logic AND an aesthetic, it needs to let you know where you are and where you are going. It needs to be simple and elegant at the same time, and powerful should be one or two clicks away. It needs to be forgiving and let you know before you mess up.

It seems to me that UI designers are trying to create more and more UI, when really they should be like special effects in a movie; "There, but part of the story, and if possible, not even noticed." Strip away everything you can but no more from a UI and now you've got a tool.

Microsoft doesn't seem to have the mindset to to this; they look at the customer as something to market to and a touch screen as something to do LOTS of touching with. So I think whatever their UI is going to be, it's going to reflect the corporate culture, and then someone will "rationalize" in the new babble of UAX why it made kinesthetic logic to annoy everyone once again.

Re:flat as a pancake: invasion pending

[J-1000]

The problem is, it seems companies are letting designers do the job of the UI experts.

"UI expert", "designer", "UX"... it's all the same. There are people who are in charge of the interface. Call them whatever you want. People in these comments are inventing a boogeyman and attempting to give him a name.

In answer to a few of the concerns brought up in these comments:

• The problem with not trying something new with UI designs is that new challenges don't get addressed, and as a result the experience of using a computer gets worse as time goes on. And even more importantly, why would we ever assume things are perfect? They've never been perfect. Windows 7 is not perfect. It's just familiar to those of us who already know how to use computers. And you know what? We are exactly the people who are best equipped to handle radical UI changes, because we've been around the block a time or two. I know half you guys probably still do word processing from a command line, but believe it or not that kind of stuff is a wee bit intimidating to new users. I doubt many people miss having the WordPerfect paper stencil flapped over their keyboards at all times.
• Sometimes tearing something down and rebuilding it from scratch is the only way to see a path forward. Yes early designs are going to suck. Yes Windows 8 metro sucks. But at least they are trying something! They were faced with a brand new class of devices upon which they had no foothold whatsoever, so yes of course they are going to try to unify their operating system (including the UI) as much as possible in order to bridge the gap for their existing user base.
• Flat icons are merely a trend. No one is saying they are better. Since the beginning of GUIs technology has been inhibiting designers' attempts at skeuomorphism, so they really went nuts with it once adequate technology finally arrived. The current trend is just a rebound after people grew tired of the art style.

Let people try new ideas. Don't be such negative Nancy know-it-alls.

Re:flat as a pancake: invasion pending

[bluegutang]

KDE and GNOME have had vector graphic icons for years now. You're telling me Microsoft doesn't have the resources to do the same thing?

Re:flat as a pancake: invasion pending

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it was due to Vista requiring too much graphics processing that it took a toll on performance on the hardware at the time and thus bad publicity, so a simpler and easy on the hardware GUI became a target.

Re:flat as a pancake: invasion pending

[jones_supa]

GUI is more than just icons.

Re:flat as a pancake: invasion pending

[thegarbz]

So now you are saying it's all driven by the touch screen. Well that's great, but I'm not using Windows on a touch screen and Surface is a tiny, tiny part of their market. Why not make a Surface interface for the Surface, and then a different one for the Desktop and marry the two when they've finally figured out the touchscreen and the desktop?

Funny that's exactly what they are trying to do. Also trends would show that no, touch screens are definitely no a tiny tiny part of their market. It's actually the single fastest growing part in an industry that is otherwise completely stagnant.

But I do agree with your comment that Windows 8 is a bad hybrid. However I am looking forward to a GOOD hybrid, and not a revert. Hybrid systems are the way things are heading and that's not Microsoft's decision.

I agree they have lost their way though.

Re:flat as a pancake: invasion pending

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple started this shit!

Fuck Jonny Ive and his ilk!

Re:flat as a pancake: invasion pending

[dinfinity]

A reflex hammer is a frivolous toy and hardly an actual useless hammer. [...] The excellent points made by the GP poster regarding claw hammers and their unchanged form still stand

No. I explicitly included the query 'design hammer' to show that the same holds for normal hammers.
Next time: read.

Also: you only attacked (and failed at it) what you regarded as the weakest part of my post and disregarded the rest (which was independent from that part). That is the sign of a coward.

Re:flat as a pancake: invasion pending

[Anonymous Coward]

The ribbon is a step forwards. Instead of scanning through menus with hundreds of lines of text arranged in some order that is combination of what some programmer thought made sense and the chronological order the features were added in, you get a nice visual representation of what each item does and can scan through them quickly.

It kills muscle memory. And to claim that fruit salad is a "nice visual representation" and allows you to scan quickly is silly. Hierarchical menus work. They allow a very large number of functions to occupy a very small space. Unlike a ribbon (which just a marketing drivel name for a responsive tool bar).

Most so-called design these days is just marketing anyway. Like the traditional annual car grill change. Functionally useless but gives the marketers something to talk about when they're selling a me-too product.

Re:flat as a pancake: invasion pending

[dinfinity]

1. We weren't talking about Metro.
Metro is a piece of shit, introduced due to MSs tablet market-'us too'-thinking (but that is a whole other story and even then still not 'change for the sake of change').
We were discussing flat design which doesn't fundamentally change the functionality. Just the visuals.

2. See the sibling posts and threads. The flat design also generally doesn't matter, functionally. There are some points to be made about affordance and intuition which aren't applicable to a(n again: fucking) hammer, but that's about it.

3. 'Believe in UX'?
I believe users experience things, yes. Your point?

Re: flat as a pancake: invasion pending

[Billly Gates]

Shoot it's 2015 man ...

I hated nested menus in Office 2003 with a passion! Microsofts own statistics showed back then 85% of users only used 20% of features or something silly.

Worse users requested features Office already had?

The ribbon changed this and shows it was better. It took a good week for me back in 2008 to learn. Now you couldnt pay me to go back. I am visual and can even hover my cursor to preview changes :-)

For the Unix geeks try this? Hit the alternative key? Notice the letters and numbers of the ribbon appear. With Office 2007 and later it is more keyboard friendly.

Re:flat as a pancake: invasion pending

[strikethree]

I do not know which window I am closing when I have multiple windows open... that is assuming I can even find a "close" button anywhere in the confusing mess of windows that are open.

Drop shadows helped a LOT to show which window was on top of which window. Gradients on the buttons and window edges differentiated them from background noise.

All I see are lines. I have no idea which line indicates a window edge or some menu/workspace delineation marker.

Removing all of that (shadowing/gradients) removes vital clues that ANYONE, programmer or novice, needs in order to be able to operate a windowing interface efficiently.

Perhaps I am supposed to be using the taskbar to choose which application window I am trying to manipulate? If that is true, then why don't sub-windows always show up in the taskbar? Many do not. How can I manipulate the windows effectively without clues as to what is what? It is supposed to be a windowing paradigm right?

I am not disagreeing with anything you said, I am reinforcing it. The only point that I am making is that the interface is terrible for everyone, not just one class of user as your parent poster implied.

Re: flat as a pancake: invasion pending

[Billly Gates]

The apeal is it makes it easier for consumers to identify the products.

McDonald's has a flat big Mac logo on it's bags. It is not photo gradient and easy to tell what it is without being distracting.

Android is but ugly too. It is a new thing and not a Windows 8 thing.

Windows 10 does have a aero glass start menu back so it is not so dang pastelish

Re:flat as a pancake: invasion pending

[PPalmgren]

Everyone is doing flat for one reason: touch. Look at a beveled button vs a flat button of the same size. To the layman, and you'll notice this if you ever have to help a PHB with a computer problem, they don't realize they can click the bevel and think only the center of the button is pressable. This is a natural reaction to something that looks that way. Something flat, on the other hand, gives the impression that pressing the corner will have the same effect as pressing the center.

If you look at the evolution of touchscreen keyboards on smartphones, you'll notice the bevels started wide with gaps on keys, and the bevels slowly faded away with the gaps getting smaller / non-existent to more accurately portray the acceptable key-press area to the user. This isn't done because of some industry-wide UI conspiracy, its done because they tried several options and users liked the flat style more. Apple and Google pay big money to study what people like more, as does Microsoft. The flat UI is just the logical extension of these previously discovered preferences.

Re:flat as a pancake: invasion pending

[Anonymous Coward]

I can and I have. So has Microsoft.

Re:flat as a pancake: invasion pending

[TheDarkMaster]

Then prove it, let me see a sample of your work.

Re:flat as a pancake: invasion pending

[wbo]

Please explain the presence of Metro on Windows Server 2012.

Why did you install Metro on your server? The default install options for Server 2012 and 2012R2 is the Core install which doesn't include Metro and is designed to be managed orimarly via Powershell or via Server Manager running on a workstation.

There is an option to install GUI components but that it primarly designed for Terminal Servers and similar environments where the server is expected to provide desktop sessions to end-users via Remote Desktop or RDWeb. As a result, the server GUI is made to look as much as possible like the client GUI.

Administrators are expected to use Powershell, and/or Server Manager and the Remote Server Admin toolkit (which consists mainly of various MMC snap-ins that haven't changed a whole lot in recent times.)

Indeed, managing servers via the Admin Toolpack running on workstations was preferred in most cases even back in the Server 2003 days and Powershell works really well for machines running Server 2008 or later.

Re:flat as a pancake: invasion pending

[Anonymous Coward]

Change just for the sake of change is stupid, especially if the change is a step backwards in functionality.

Wholeheartedly agree. However, it's also a fact of life when egomaniacal idiots get to where they make the decisions ... which happens all the time. Says something about our culture. Maybe Dunning-Kruger + Emperor's New Clothes.

Re:flat as a pancake: invasion pending

[Anonymous Coward]

Wait, I thought this was about Microsoft's icons vs those crappy ones you linked.

By your idiotic logic I could say unless you post examples of your own icons that are better than Microsoft's that you can't complain. If that's how you actually think, then remember that before you ever pan anything again, hypocrite.

Re:flat as a pancake: invasion pending

[hattig]

This wouldn't be such an issue if they provided an alternative. Or hell, make it themeable, even at a very basic* level.

And no, the Windows 95 style 'alternative' isn't reasonable.

For example, adding settings that were only:

* UI element bevel, inset: 0 - n pixels
* UI light source: Top Left, Top, Top Right

You could allow unflattening of UI elements with just some bevel drawing and light sources. Hell, it could be a normal map on the UI elements and the GPU could render the bevels itself, no line-drawing required.

Metro is a big ass of a UI, that requires the user to learn locations of functionality rather than being easy to discover by use of functional groupings and large identifiable icons (not small monochrome abstractions). It's one of those UIs that's good on paper, and maybe screenshots (because of the blocks of colour), but is just horrible to use.

Re:flat as a pancake: invasion pending

[TheDarkMaster]

Ohhhhhhh I hurt your delicate feelings, AC? Sorry, but the the only idiot here is YOU.

I do not know from where your very limited understanding capacity took I would be saying that the icons I showed are better than Microsoft's, dumb one. And as I predicted in time to show something better as I asked, you set off for the offense, for failing to to present something better and not knowing how to do something better. Try harder next time dumb one ;-)

Re:flat as a pancake: invasion pending

[TheDarkMaster]

After having a fun conversation with an AC that he thinks is the greater design of the universe, I should add that they are not only incompetent to make a good icon, they also fail to realize the mediocrity of what they are doing.

Re:flat as a pancake: invasion pending

[Maritz]

Yeah 2102 R2 fixes most of the 2012 horribleness.

Re:flat as a pancake: invasion pending

[Anonymous Coward]

Using a restricted rights browser instead of one running ActiveX components or plugins on the server is a good thing(r) when the service person eventually tries to access manuals from the "office" network. Perhaps also they have seen the service people operating tablet or laptop style interfaces on the data center floor. Touch interface as a rip-away console replacement may seem a progressive idea for some, not so much for others.

Re:flat as a pancake: invasion pending

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux has never sent users on some weird hunt for the charms or how do I quit and get out of this?

Have you ever seen a person trying to use Vim for the first time?

Re:Windows 10 is for cows!

[ArcadeMan]

Moo-moo, moo?

Signed,
the Cow King.

Fiddling while Rome burns?

[gstoddart]

So, instead of trying focus on what kind of user experience we're going to have (which sounds like they think the tablet interface is what people actually want for everything) ... and focusing on making all of that good and usable ... why does it sound like throwing out new sets of icons means someone has lost the plot and is focused on the eye candy, and ignoring the fact that for a desktop machine Metro is a completely garbage interface?

I like my Windows 8.1 machine. But it was really only useful once I basically removed all of the stuff that Microsoft thinks they innovated or that was valuable.

Metro on a 23" non-touch screen monitor is a pathetic interface for Windows. If Microsoft is going to think everybody is running everything on a touch screen interface, instead of a mouse and keyboard ... they're doing a shitty job of knowing what people actually use computers for.

But, hey, we've been working diligently on the icons. 'Cuz, that's what people really want.

Re:Fiddling while Rome burns?

[hey!]

I believe the metaphor you're looking for is "re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic".

Re:Fiddling while Rome burns?

[MyNicknameSucks]

For the record, I also don't like Metro on a desktop PC.

That said ... Metro was optimized for touch and keyboard (but definitely not mouse). Type to search is usually faster than drilling through the Start menu with a mouse if you go more than a menu or two deep. Old-school shortcuts like alt-tab to switch windows and alt-F4 to close the current window are still there. If anyone cares, here's a list -- http://windows.microsoft.com/e... . We're going back 30 years or so, but I believe that some of those shortcuts go all the way back to WordStar (ctrl-c to copy, for instance).

FWIW, I don't think it's Metro that MS bungled, but rather how the plain old desktop, Metro, and settings were intermingled, especially in 8.0. Metro is fine for what it is: a UI designed for single / double-tasking media consumption. The default full-screen view is slick for Netflix and YouTube, while the default Mail and Calendar apps are good enough for my mom, but horrible for work needs. My biggest gripe is that the default apps for image viewing, the calculator, user settings and so on were all Metro apps -- even when launched from the desktop. One of the absolute stupidest things I've ever seen on a PC was day 2 or 3 with 8.0. I was writing an email in Outlook and wanted to double check some math. I fired up the calculator and was presented with a 22" fullscreen 4 function calculator that completely obscured the numbers I wanted to check.

Throw in how some OS settings were only available in Metro ... and, yeah.

But my issues with Metro were, by and large, focused on how I kept on being punted into it even when I most definitely did not want to be.

As for the icons? I think MS is simply going for consistency across the different flavours of device (phone, tablet, desktop). As 8.1 stands right now, it has two sets of icons, one for desktop, one for Metro. With 10's move towards windowed Metro apps, it doesn't really make much sense to maintain multiple sets of icons -- that lack of consistency, in and of itself, I believe, is poor UI design.

Re:Fiddling while Rome burns?

[Hognoxious]

That plus painting the bike shed.

Re:Fiddling while Rome burns?

[Anonymous Coward]

The only time Metro made sense to me was when I tried a Surface Pro... in tablet mode. The size of the screen and lack of a mouse made the traditional desktop problematic, and touch-oriented Metro apps had much more appeal.

Until I plugged in the keyboard and started thinking like a laptop. Again, the size of the screen favored Metro apps, but the more I used it the more the Metro apps became irritating due to their limited functionality. I get the idea that Windows designers are all chained to desks with Surface machines, and all their decisions center on these devices. and Why not? They're Microsoft products and Microsoft wants to sell them.

Re:Fiddling while Rome burns?

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft is saying, "Here's some retro-modern hip cool trendy-word-stuff that all the kids are like "That's so cowabunga!""

The users are replying:

"No, that looks like shit, and because you made me look at that crap I'm going to leave a big steaming pile on it, and just because I don't think you'll get the message, I'm also going to light the place on fire and send you a stream of death-threats in order to make you never change anything ever!

Sincerely,

The Internet"

Re:Fiddling while Rome burns?

[thegarbz]

If Microsoft is going to think everybody is running everything on a touch screen interface, instead of a mouse and keyboard ... they're doing a shitty job of knowing what people actually use computers for.

Actually based on current trends they would simply be watching the market. Desktop sales are plummeting. Laptop sales are stagnant and touch laptops / tablets / slates are increasing.

Windows 8.1 may be jarring to use on a desktop.
But Windows 7 was utterly unusable on a touch screen.

They've tried the one size fits all approach and failed. Now let's see how they go with their 2 UIs on the 1 OS approach.

Re:Fiddling while Rome burns?

[thegarbz]

I agree with most of what you said.

Type to search is usually faster than drilling through the Start menu with a mouse if you go more than a menu or two deep.

I don't understand why people say this is a great feature of Metro... It was present in Vista and IMO worked even better in Windows 7.

Throw in how some OS settings were only available in Metro ... and, yeah.

And visa versa too. How come I can only pair a bluetooth device from the Metro Interface, but can only enable it as a network device from the desktop version of devices and printers?
I really hope they fix it so that I'm either using the desktop or the metro interface whenever I want, and don't get forced to bounce between them.

Re:Fiddling while Rome burns?

[shutdown -p now]

So, instead of trying focus on what kind of user experience we're going to have (which sounds like they think the tablet interface is what people actually want for everything) ... and focusing on making all of that good and usable

Have you seen Win10 preview, or at least read some reviews and look at the screenshots? Because it is exactly what it is about... I mean, the most obvious change that you see once you install Win10 over Win8 is that the Start menu is back. Other changes include things like Metro apps actually running in resizable windows, and the "charm bar" is gone, and all the actions are integrated into the window title bar. Etc... basically, all things Metro are desktopified.

What's that saying????

[Anonymous Coward]

About putting perfume on a pig. :-)

Re:What's that saying????

[Anonymous Coward]

It's lipstick on a pig, dear.

Re:What's that saying????

[crunchy_one]

Probably needs both. Lean in for a kiss, and oink, what a smell.

Re:What's that saying????

[Hognoxious]

Wrong end!

Re:What's that saying????

[mister_playboy]

Wrong end!

But should you happen to prefer that end, you could annouce it proudly in a comment, get modded +5 Informative and then make it a Slashdot signature memorable enough that it is brought up in otherwise unreleated comment threads like this one.

Really?

[Dusthead Jr.]

Why is this a big deal anyway? Couldn't you personalize the icons any. I'm sure that Windows always had the ability to add custom UI anyway, so what does it matter what the defaults look like.

Re:Really?

[Ol Olsoc]

Why is this a big deal anyway? Couldn't you personalize the icons any. I'm sure that Windows always had the ability to add custom UI anyway, so what does it matter what the defaults look like.

Certainly can. I use personalized icons all the time. Different colors for different purposes, sometimes a letter as an icon. Just pretty much whatever I want.

The icons however, for many(most) people are just the part of the system they interface with, so inordinate attention is paid to them when they are fugly.

The part I am curious about is the stuff under the interface. Windows 8 was such a dog's breakfast that I just stopped supporting it. Weird stuff like no popmail for the integrated program, the insane distinction between "Desktop apps" and "Metro Apps", where you couldn't make a desktop shortcut with the metro apps, and the need to play Whack a Mole when trying to perform basic system functions. Then going to the web to look it up (shouldn't that tell you something that ther are websites telling you how to shut down a computer with Windows 8?You'd be surprised how many people use popmail, or like to have their programs shortcutted to their desktop.

Its not that it didn't work. It just didn't work in a way that made much sense to too many people.

Re:Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you don't change how it looks, people will decide you did no work, even if you changed a bunch of stuff.

Re:Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

The default set is what most people will see and base their impression on the operating system upon.

NOOOOOO!!!!!!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

NOOOOOOO!!!!!!!

Why can't they just stick to what works instead of shoving new things that nobody wants down our throats? Like all the new apps with the way too touch friendly interface and no way to revert back to a standard non-touch interface... Lync 2010 is MUCH more user friendly than Lync 2013, you know, unless you fell for all the hype and purchased a shitty little touch enabled laptop... fuck touching the screen and getting fingerprints on it. FUCK MICROSOFT!

Re:NOOOOOO!!!!!!!!

[tepples]

unless you fell for all the hype and purchased a shitty little touch enabled laptop... fuck touching the screen and getting fingerprints on it.

But are there 10" laptops that aren't touch-enabled, like the netbooks of 2008-2012? Or should I just buy an ASUS Transformer Book (a 10" tablet with a snap-on keyboard) and live with getting fingerprints all over it?

Re:NOOOOOO!!!!!!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Why can't you plug in a mouse?

Crazy idea

[itzly]

Why not simply let the user choose what they want ? Personally, I don't really care what they look like, but once I'm used to a set of icons, I would prefer to keep it.

Re:Crazy idea

[TheDarkMaster]

This. IconPacks for Windows, why not?

Re:Crazy idea

[Anonymous Coward]

What, you mean like implement a "Classic" theme for new versions of Windows like they did in Windows 8 or newer versions of Office when they brought in the toolbar?

No, you're supposed to take what they give you because it's better by default. Their super-advanced user testing proves it. There's no reason to offer "old" options in case people prefer it that way, because nobody would, right?

Honestly, I'm with you. They could change it how ever they like and make it the default, but PLEASE offer people the option to keep things closer to what it was, in case some people like the old way better than the new way. When Microsoft abandoned the option of a "classic" mode in some of their recent products it was a huge mistake. Some people would have said the new interface was silly no matter what, because there are always people who don't like changes, but they wouldn't have been so bitter about it (like me) if the option was there to adopt something similar to previous versions. Doing a wholesale remodelling of the UI like they did with "Metro" would be a fine experiment if people had other options. Thankfully, third parties have stepped in (e.g., Classic Shell), but without that the default setup is awful. It's pretty sad when your flagship product is so counter-intuitive that when I first used Windows 8.0 I couldn't even get to the desktop and had to ask someone how to do it. And that's after decades of using all sorts of computer UIs with weird ideas.

Re:Crazy idea

[Anonymous Coward]

It can still be customized.

Re:Crazy idea

[TheDarkMaster]

Uh... Some shitheaded dude thinks that a "icon pack for Windows" is overrated? When I think I already have seen everything...

Re:Crazy idea

[blind biker]

Why not simply let the user choose what they want ?

Because the user would choose Windows 7, and Microsoft can't allow THAT!

Re:Crazy idea

[cascadingstylesheet]

Why not simply let the user choose what they want ? Personally, I don't really care what they look like, but once I'm used to a set of icons, I would prefer to keep it.

Because ... because ... er, we don't have enough disk space or something? Yeah, that's it ...

What do you want? It's not like these are computers and you can configure them or anything!

Yuck

[QuietLagoon]

Probably one of the most unappealing set of icons that I've seen in a long while.

Summer?

[Anonymous Coward]

Goes live this summer? So that's December some time?

No difference

[ArchieBunker]

It still looks like flat Windows 8 icons. What am I supposed to be seeing? Looks about as good as FVWM did in the 90s.

Re:No difference

[Bing Tsher E]

Hey. I still use FVWM on my X11 desktops. Once you have a good working .fvwm2rc there's no need for anything more.

Except for where I use the Tab Window Manager (TWM), which has the advantage of being as default a part of X11 as the Xterm program.

Sometimes you just want to get stuff done with your computer.

Re:No difference

[H0p313ss]

We need a law for this; mention a crusty 20 year old technology that still gets the job done and a avid user will manifest.

eg, vi, emacs,

Re:No difference

[I'm New Around Here]

???

You think vi and emacs are only 20 years old?

Noob. :^)

Re:No difference

[ArchieBunker]

Oh I have nothing against FVWM. My point was 20 years later Microsoft is pushing a UI design that looks extremely dated.

Re:No difference

[H0p313ss]

Q.E.D.

The truth is...

[Anonymous Coward]

Recycle Bin has yet to save a single tree.

Make a new windows 7

[CrAlt]

You know what would make the most people happy?
Just make a new version of Windows7. Why would I want to re-learn how to do everything...again?

Going from Win95->Win98->Win2K->XP->Win7 was easy. People stuck with windows because they knew how to use it. Companies stuck with it because re-training was easy. It kept people from jumping ship to OSX/Linux/ChromeOS.

Going from Windows 7 to Linux Mint is easier then going from Windows 7 to 8.

Microsoft spent 20 years teaching people how to use their UI then just throws that all out for no reason at all.

Re:Make a new windows 7

[baka_toroi]

Microsoft spent 20 years teaching people how to use their UI then just throws that all out for no reason at all.

There is a reason: apps for the new paradigm (Metro?) have to go through their app store and they get a cut for each app sold there. As always, it all comes down to money.

Re:Make a new windows 7

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft spent 20 years teaching people how to use their UI then just throws that all out for no reason at all.

The desktop was quite polished in Windows 7. They had to shuffle things around to have something new to sell. The mobile hype showed a direction. It was a trainwreck, though. Now Microsoft has invested too much into the Metro strategy to turn back. Thus they are making Windows 10 all-Metro and hoping to make it work as good as possible. With a fake smile and pearls of sweat surfacing on the forehead.

Well, their monopoly market position will take care of it.

Re:Make a new windows 7

[Anonymous Coward]

You have no idea what you are talking about.. every version, a small extremely vocal group of users bitches up a storm about UI changes to each version.. WinXP had ALL of the same type of complaints when it came out.. or do you just not really go back that far?

Re:Make a new windows 7

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: "Microsoft spent 20 years teaching people how to use their UI then just throws that all out for no reason at all."

Uh, no. That lovely UI continuity you quoted, going all the way back to Win95? Critics all over (technological, business, design) kept hammering Microsoft over the head about that. It was dated, who needs a Start menu, Microsoft never produces anything original, ... On and on it went.

More seriously, the desktop environment was in a relatively static mode growth wise, and even shrinking. Mobile was king and Microsoft just hasn't been terribly successful in mobile (smartphones and tablets particularly). Need I remind you of Apple? How about Samsung or Android?

So Microsoft created something truly new. Metro debuted on Windows Phone and moved to Xbox and now Windows. Microsoft is creating a mechanism (for real this time, although delivering results will be where it counts) to allow a single application to run on all those platforms. Ultimately that was the main purpose of Metro. A single UI that ports to platforms with vastly different screen sizes, with only minor UI and behaviour adjustments. The flat colour palette helps a great deal on mobile devices which may have limited video hardware, and always have limited battery life.

Oh I get it. Metro/Modern/Windows is a poor match for a traditional desktop user. The whole Win8 reaction thing was about that. Windows 10 is going to address that with the Continuum system and installation defaults. And the Start menu returns, and Modern apps can run in a desktop window now.

I've rather enjoyed Win8. It's not for my clients just yet, but for me it's really interesting and I see where Microsoft is taking this design. All the Modern stuff I had to turn off (or down) because I'm a desktop user.

No, it wasn't "...for no reason at all." Microsoft viewed their very future as depending upon some innovation from Redmond.

If "meh" is positive, then yes

[Opportunist]

Comments have overwhelmingly been to the tune of "erh... yeah. ok. Whatever". But I guess MS counts anything but outright resistance to the point of making a shitstorm a "positive reaction" these days.

Arc of deception

[tepples]

Most people in the world will have never heard of Sylpheed

And even if they have heard of it, they think it's a shoot-em-up for Sega CD and Xbox 360.

Re:Arc of deception

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it's an old shooter for DOS which predates the console versions and that mail client by decades.

Re:Arc of deception

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean the delete key isn't the fire button? Damn I've been messing things up bad.

Why not test? I just don't get it.

[dpbsmith]

People used to do real tests with real people, in controlled situations, measuring response time, counting errors, videotaping what they were actually doing, finding out where people are getting stuck and using that feedback to redesign and try again.

This was common all the way back to the 1970s. People like Ben Schneiderman were doing formal research and writing textbooks in the 1980s.

Why do I no longer hear about any of this being done? Why is it all about the visual tastes of individual designers?

There's nothing wrong with beauty--the original edition of Inside Mac, 1983, said in so many words "objects are designed to look beautiful on the screen." But beauty and style are not the same as usability.

All of the insane "mystery meat" UI of today, in which you cannot find an affordance unless you already know where to click to make it visible, cannot possible be usable, even if some people enjoy developing the necessary skill set.

Without real testing, you always get the same things: the personal taste of the manager in charge, who is sure that what is natural for him is natural for everybody; or, the personal taste of the developer, who is sure that what is natural for him is natural for everybody.

Re:Why not test? I just don't get it.

[iampiti]

I read somewhere that, while developing Windows 8, it was found in internal testing that most people hated the Metro interface. They kept it anyway.
The takeaway is that they did test and tests were negative but they went on for business reasons.
They want you to get used to the metro UI so that you'll get used to it and you'll buy a Windows Phone phone. Also so that you buy metro apps through their store and they get a 30% cut, so that you use their services and they get your data and money , etc.
TL;DR: They know it sucks but they want the money they think it'll make them

Re:Why not test? I just don't get it.

[Anonymous Coward]

This is because UIs are no longer about usability, they are about generating revenue. Apple taught the software industry that getting a cut of all of the apps sold on the platform is a huge bonus. All UI changes are meant in some way to direct users to your app store. It is more about corralling users than helping them get a specific task done.

Re:Why not test? I just don't get it.

[phantomfive]

Microsoft has one of the best internal test setups in the industry, complete with mirrored windows etc.

They failed anyway.

Re:Why not test? I just don't get it.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's the next generation thing. All the people that made Windows 95 to XP successful are retiring/moving to management. They've got their stock options, you know. The new kids i) don't want to learn and support old code, ii) need their own job-security by making their own products. They have every reason to throw everything out and start things over their own way.

Re:Why not test? I just don't get it.

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to work at Microsoft. They have one of the most extensive testing programs compared to other companies. If you look for them you can find some of their UI research papers. The ribbon interface was extensively tested and was shown to be a better UI for managing the complexity of all those buttons. The downside was the 'AI' part that rearranged some of the icons based on how often you used them. You can't use muscle memory when the menus keep moving. Of course everyone used to the old layout complained because it broke their muscle memory, but the ribbon design is better for tons of groupable features.

The 'used to be called Metro' visual interface works well on touch screens. There's no deep menu nesting, tiles take up as much space as they can, and the main menus are within reach of your hands while you're holding the device. The bad part of it is that there are no conventions for touch UIs. Almost every desktop OS has an X or similar button to click to close a Window. Every mobile device does that differently (and the fuckers all patented their methods) and there's no hinting UI elements. You have to randomly explore the interface to figure out how to do things. The other way Metro failed was integration and apps. Integration SUCKED and the basic apps were far too basic. Want to view your pictures? Browse to your pictures and double-click on one like you always did. Now a Metro app opens full screen and showing you that single picture. Unlike before when you could use arrows to move through your picture, that feature no longer exists. To view the next picture, you have to close the app and double click on the next image. WTF? Someone else already mentioned the issue with the calculator. That's the same issue most modal dialogs have.

Modal dialogs are a horrible UI control. Please stop using them. It's almost daily when a modal opens and I want to copy some text into it from the application but can't because I can't focus on the main UI, or the dialog is blocking something I needed to see and it can't be moved out of the way, or I need to move the main UI to get at something else and it refuses to move, or you minimize the main UI and the model stays there, or the model pop-ups behind the main UI and since it doesn't show up in the taskbar you don't know it's there and think the app froze, etc... Modals suck and forced full-screen apps are super sucky versions of modal dialogs.

More back on topic, business requirements always trump user testing. Metro allows Microsoft to transition to an app store. Metro allows them to have a consistent target when developing for the desktop or mobile (and stupidly they have/had multiple teams developing the exact same widgets for different platforms using different libraries instead of having one team control their 'one' UI). In the future their unified interface (if it ever actually becomes unified) could pay off, but they tried to shove it down users' throats well before it was polished (feature polish, not shiny UI polish) and people tend to throw up when you try to do that to them. Metro also needs better mouse support.

Flat UIs were a natural progression of application complexity. When you cram more and more buttons into shrinking spaces those button borders really add up. They take up too much space and make the UI confusing. I think moving from beveled and rounded borders to single, shared borders would have been better, but everyone went one step further and removed the border. The simpler icons are also now vector graphics. They scale properly instead having multiple version of the same icon at specific sizes. We'll eventually cycle back to bordered and more detailed icons when they can become a marketing point. Both bordered and non-bordered buttons have benefits and people tend to forget why they're using the current attributes, and believe the grass is always greener on the other side, so they push everyone to switch. The next generation will do the exact same thing and we'll all switch back becaus

History?

[Anonymous Coward]

Are these screenshots from 10 years ago?

Who the fuck still has a floppy drive?

Re:History?

[Anonymous Coward]

I do. Still use it too - it's the easiest way to transfer data to some computers.

New floppy disk icon for the modern age.

[Anonymous Coward]

Nothing says "modern" like that new floppy drive icon.
Progress!

Hipsters. Hipsters everywhere.

[Overzeetop]

Jony Ive, who is really a 12 year old girl, has convinced all the hipsters that 1960 is cool, retro is in, and flat, neon colors are the ebst thing in the world. And since hipsters buy everything for 3-10x what it's actually worth for the aesthetic, everyone wants to sell to them.

flat colors suck

[Anonymous Coward]

MS has been pretty good at inventing new UI's like the one from Windows 95 and Windows 8 but limited when it comes to customizing. It needs a section under personalize where users can add their own custom skin themes, icons, etc.... The flat colors are so eye straining that it makes me very tired and feel like going to sleep. I will be stuck on Win7 for a long time i guess.

Changelog for Windows 11...

[Anonymous Coward]

New Icons.

Looks like KDE 3 from a number of years ago...

[Anonymous Coward]

they seem to have finally advanced to the mid 90 to late 90s...

NOOOOOOO

[Anonymous Coward]

It's the same crappy flat design for Microsoft Office. It looks like a sheet of paper with no delineation between the various components of the application.

It's ugly

But what do I care, with their proposed subscription program, I have no intention of buying it anyways.

Here is a REAL pic of the future MicroSoft GUI!

[Anonymous Coward]

Here...here is the future of MS's GUI!!!!

http://geeklit.blogspot.com/2007/01/microsoft-bob-through-lives-through.html

Microsoft is listening???

[Anonymous Coward]

Did it really take getting rid of Ballmer before they'd ever change? Really?!

Upscaled image

[Anonymous Coward]

A bit better http://i.imgur.com/jg7CsU4.png

Um....

[Anonymous Coward]

they abandoned pixel art starting with Windows XP, and i've hated those 'vector-made' icons since.

I'll take nice edgy pixeled 32x32 icons any day.

Windows 10 on tablets

[unixisc]

I agree w/ this. While Windows 10 has attempted to undo most of the damage, fact remains that Windows 7 was perfect for laptops and desktops: all that MS needed to do was to swap the underlying kernel, which is the good thing in Windows 8. In fact, since Microsoft was in the Apple copying mode, they could have left Windows 7 as the equivalent of OS-X, while introducing a Metro OS just for tablets. And avoid trying to make the hybrid, which looks more and more like an afterthought solution to accommodate Windows, rather than Windows accommodating the different form factors.

I use the Windows 10 Preview Edition on my Winbook, and right now, the icons and everything are too small. I just bought a stylus today hoping to improve it, since my fingers aren't sharp enough to touch exactly the part of a button that needs to be touched, as I found out today. So even in its current form, Windows 10 is fine for laptops, but somewhat shabby for tablets, even if one has a keyboard and stylus for them. To those who say use a mouse, the tablet has just 1 USB port, which may be needed by other peripherals, and I'm not sure that attaching the wireless USB dongle to a hub would have the same effect. Anybody seen that work?

Microsoft is trying to be cheap

[Anonymous Coward]

And do icon design in-house instead of outsourcing the project to IconFactory.

Historically, Microsoft and aesthetics are not very fond of each other.

Yes! The icons!

[Anonymous Coward]

That is the big problem with Windows 8. Shitty icons!

Re:Yes! The icons!

[Anonymous Coward]

Here, lemme get you a fedora...

Because I'm not at a desk

[tepples]

I do plug in a USB mouse when I'm at a desk. But it's hard to use a mouse while riding the bus, so I use the laptop's trackpad instead. Yet all 10" laptop-like devices sold nowadays happen to be touch-enabled tablets with a detachable keyboard and trackpad, such as the Transformer Book and Surface 3.

Windows 10 might be MS' big make-or-break moment

[TheOneFreeman]

After Windows 8 and MS gutting so many important sub-systems to fast-track release on mobiles and tossing out decades of UI design guidelines to only produce pathetic unusable interfaces (with bad documentation) to seem touch-oriented and competitive, Windows 10 might be the only chance MS ever gets at keeping its crown in the OS space. People have options now although most will stick with Windows 7 or whatever bespoke solutions they are using. Sure, MS is expanding into services and trying to get a cross-device strategy working (with some encouraging signs) but it never achieved success on mobile. If it cannot provide a true desktop experience it may just fall flat in promoting its other product lines that generally rely on developers using its platform end to end. By now most UI designers hopefully realised touch and desktop are two paradigms so chimera interfaces missing critical options and properly designed workflows like Win8 are something to avoid. We do live in a strange age where the technological capability exists but many of the designers and builders making use of them have forgotten about things like reliability, privacy, security and giving control to the user, hopefully things change.