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Microsoft Is Working On a New Design Language For Windows 10 Codenamed Project NEON (windowscentral.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the shiny-new dept.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Windows Central: Microsoft has made several adjustments to its design language over the last few years, starting with Windows 8 and evolving into what we now know as "Microsoft Design Language 2" or MDL2 in Windows 10. With MDL2 being the current design language used throughout Windows 10, Microsoft has plans to begin using a much more streamlined design language with Redstone 3, codenamed Project NEON. Cassim Ketfi at Numerama.com confirms our information and has heard Project NEON called "basically Metro 2." That designation refers to the first Metro design language (nee Modern) that harkens to Windows Media Center up through Windows Phone 7 and Windows 8. Per our sources, Project NEON has been in the works for over a year internally at Microsoft. It builds upon the design language introduced with Windows 10, with its simple and clean interfaces, but adds some much-needed flair to the UI that the current design language just lacks. Details are still scarce, but we hear some of the new designs in the plans include adding more animations and transitions, with the overall goal of making the UI very fluid and "beautiful" compared to the current, almost static UI that is MDL2. One source familiar with Microsoft's plans described NEON as "Very fluid, lots of motion and nice transitions." Some more information about NEON reveals that it serves as a bridge between holographic and augmented reality (AR) and the desktop environment. It's a "UI that transports across devices" with a UX that maps to the physical world. It uses textures, 3D models, lighting and more.

66 comments

  1. Sounds like a waste by corychristison · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Sounds like a waste of time, to be honest.

    The OS could use a lot more effort put into various places, instead of all of this effort on making Windows "beautiful".

    Just my opinion.

    1. Re: Sounds like a waste by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      imo, design does matter. There is a psychological effect when you use a well-designed and sleek looking program/OS/etc that gives you the feeling that it is not just junk. Somewhere along the line, someone obsessed over the details... that makes the program have a bit of art in it. This is a reason why freeware programs sometimes lack appeal. They're just ugly. Art matters, and influences us in more subtle ways. That being said, I am a Linux user. I enjoy how easy it is to change themes and layout - or various aspects of UI design - far more easily than in Windows.

    2. Re: Sounds like a waste by bondsbw · · Score: 0

      I disagree. It is a good thing to improve all areas.

      --
      All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
    3. Re:Sounds like a waste by Dracos · · Score: 1

      And probably CPU/GPU cycles. They'll inevitably animate a majority of elements, even things no other GUI animates, just to say they did it. Very little of this "beautification" will actually bring a net improvement to the experience.

      MS design language used to be "shiny", now it's "flat", and soon to be "wiggly".

    4. Re: Sounds like a waste by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      To you maybe.

      Normal people like flowy transitions and crossfades and such.

    5. Re: Sounds like a waste by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      like all the 2nd and 3rd level dialog boxes that are essentially unchanged since Windows 98?

      I wish it was more themeable, perhaps even driven by CSS3. That could be interesting, ala csszengarden.

    6. Re: Sounds like a waste by ArmoredDragon · · Score: 2

      Too many animations ends up making the interface feel slow because the user has to wait for them after each action.

      Windows phone was particularly bad at this, and UI experts and ends users alike tended to dislike it overall.

    7. Re: Sounds like a waste by JustAnotherOldGuy · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Normal people like flowy transitions and crossfades and such.

      Actually most people find them annoying after the novelty wears off. Unless the transitions are very rapid, they're usually just time-wasting distractions.

      First they're neat, then they become tiresome, then they're downright annoying, and finally they're just infuriatingly cartoony.

      Almost everyone I know turns off all that flashy transition shit after a day or so.

      --
      Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
    8. Re: Sounds like a waste by JustAnotherOldGuy · · Score: 1

      It is a good thing to improve all areas.

      That depends on what "improve" means. That word is bandied about a lot these days and seems to mean very different things depending on who's defining it.

      --
      Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
    9. Re:Sounds like a waste by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 1

      My first thought was that this "design language" was some kind of formal specification language that could be used to do exactly this - simplify the design of the next version of Windows. Nope, think again... :-p

      --
      Ezekiel 23:20
    10. Re: Sounds like a waste by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 1

      Too little, too late... How the UI elements look is rarely correlated to usability. That's more about what they do. You can't fix, say, unintuitive or complicated manipulators of the elements in a document, or the behavior of those elements, with a new collection of icons.

      --
      Ezekiel 23:20
    11. Re: Sounds like a waste by thegarbz · · Score: 1

      Everyone I know turns them off too. But then I know techies, and slashdot users and others who care about things such as efficiency.

      Unfortunately most users don't. They don't even know how to control them, much less put the effort in to turn them off.

    12. Re: Sounds like a waste by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      A design language is more than just a new set of icons - see Google's Material Design for a good example of a strong design language. Material is all about applying real world physics to digital objects so user will get subtle cues as to UI elements will react to actions.

      I'm really looking forwad to Neon, Metro formed the basis for Material and I'm hoping Neon will take Material from a 2D world into 3D.

    13. Re: Sounds like a waste by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Really? I recall Windows Phone 7 (Metro) was pretty much universally praised, to the point where the principle of 'meaningful animations' was picked up by Google and included in Material Design - I also used Windows Phones for years and the animations never felt slow

      It did feel painfully slow when the 'Resuming ...' dialog started popping up when switching apps in later versions but that was another matter, nothing to do with animation.

    14. Re: Sounds like a waste by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Very true - look at Office 2016 - the dreadful 'Ribbon' and then throwback dialogue boxes that aren't usable at all on touchscreens, with tiny up/down arrows, etc. No effort at all, from a multi-billion dollar company. What is their 'User Experience' team actually doing every day?

    15. Re:Sounds like a waste by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Ought to call the language "Lipstick on a Pig"

    16. Re: Sounds like a waste by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 1

      strong design language

      Ugh. :-p

      applying real world physics to digital objects

      That would make them fly away at the speed of light, because they have no mass.

      --
      Ezekiel 23:20
    17. Re:Sounds like a waste by syntotic · · Score: 1

      That is not language but framework support. As long as they do not eliminate real life C++ accessible APIs and documentation... it is OK.

    18. Re:Sounds like a waste by arglebargle_xiv · · Score: 1

      Sounds like a waste of time, to be honest.

      More like "about bloody time". The flat UI brain-rot that's infested most of the UI-wank community, jumping across from one vendor to another like a genetically-engineered plague, may finally be coming to an end.

    19. Re: Sounds like a waste by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Office 2016 is not designed to be used on a touchscreen, so why should anyone care if it was usable on a touchscreen?

      There are tablet versions of the Apps. Use those on touchscreen devices. They actually are usable on that form factor; they were designed for it...

  2. Will it still send my data to third parties? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    If so, I don't give a fuck.

  3. Microsoft gets even farther out of touch... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    from users. It's a shame with their number of employees that they just can't make good software.

    1. Re: Microsoft gets even farther out of touch... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      My roommate that works there makes les tan I did nearly twenty years ago. With inflation, he's making about half of what I did. When you keep hiring bottom of the barrel people and not paying them crap, it's hard to make good products.

    2. Re: Microsoft gets even farther out of touch... by ArmoredDragon · · Score: 1

      I don't think pay impacts that nearly as much as stack ranking.

    3. Re: Microsoft gets even farther out of touch... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Stack ranking was done away with three years ago - http://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-does-away-with-stack-ranking/

  4. Lipstick by ChodaBoyUSA · · Score: 4, Insightful

    ...on the spyware pig?

  5. So... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    ...does that mean they're reintroducing 3D effects and support for more than 16 colors?

    Windows for Apps 3.1!

    1. Re:So... by AHuxley · · Score: 1

      Recalls the old Microsoft Chrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... projects :)
      "Throughout its brief lifespan, the product was widely derided as an example of Microsoft's embrace, extend and extinguish strategy of ruining standards efforts by adding options that only ran on their platforms."

      --
      Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
    2. Re:So... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      "This led to promises on the part of MS to better interact with these technologies in the future."

      ...

      "Microsoft did deliver on their promise to better track internet standards, releasing Microsoft Vizact which was based on HTML+TIME. Vizact saw little uptake and was discontinued in 2000."

      But of course this is slashdot and we're talking about Microsoft so we only focus on the bad things. Ultimately it took over a decade for the W3C to get their act together and get the level of interactivity of the web to the level that Microsoft, Netscape, Adobe, and others had with proprietary plugins.

  6. Re: MightyMartian is a bully by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    You're a rotten bastard, Xenographic. Fuck you, I hope you don't reproduce.

  7. Slashdot quote is broken; fix it by reboot246 · · Score: 1

    At the bottom of the page it says,
    "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." - Bert Lantz

    That is incorrect. His last name is Lance, but he wasn't the first one to say it anyway.

    Who writes/researches these things? Bozo?

    1. Re: Slashdot quote is broken; fix it by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You did understand who it was though. So why fix it?

  8. Yeah, but... by wtfbill · · Score: 1

    will it still look someone puked their guts out after binging on a bucket of Jolly Ranchers?

  9. Re: HEY, Anybody got a slashdot account who could by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    If that's true, how was this story submitted by an anonymous reader?

  10. Too. Damn. Slow. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    MS "Modern" apps seem to have a shitload of runtime dependencies and load/startup very slowly. This was the kiss of death for .NET apps, IMHO, and it seems Modern/Metro apps are likely to suffer a similar fate. Win32 UI + Windows Common Controls are already baked into the runtime and will always be the gold standard for Windows apps in terms of performance and memory footprint. No amount of scarf wearing, Soylent chugging UI designers are going to change that.

    1. Re: Too. Damn. Slow. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      So true, a splash screen for a calculator is unacceptable.

  11. Whoah by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Whoah, it's NEON, doing its thing again.

  12. Re:MightyMartian is a bully by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I looked at MightyMartian's comment history and I didn't see anything wrong.

    I saw lots of instances of disagreeing with people and asking for citations to things.
    Ooooooooooooooh wait I forgot. These days, disagreeing == harassment?
    Carry on with your attempts to silence people. It's totally okay.

    captcha: remorse

  13. Resolution independence by hackwrench · · Score: 1

    Too bad it is a new language for GUI programs to be written in instead of something that tricks all programs into being resolution independent. My laptop is shut and hooked to a 1080 television. Every time I turn the television off and back on, it appears to switch from the resolution of the laptop's display panel despite never actually using it.

  14. Will it make scrollbars visible? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Please please please get rid of the off-white-on-white color schemes.

    1. Re:Will it make scrollbars visible? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      But you, as any stupid user, do get distracted with those functional elements on the screen. The design also requires, that there is just one color in the screen and less functionality there is visible the better. Users just love that they will need to discover the features by randomly moving mouse cursor in screen just as on Scumm games and to find the secret functional areas. Bonus points if these secret functionalities are in different places on each application and double points if they change places depending on program states.

  15. NEON by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Very fluid, lots of motion and nice transitions.

    So it really is a sign language...

  16. WTF is a Design Language? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Is that what they speak in Eastern Westphalia ?

  17. Can't this be saved for Windows 11? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Yes, I know Microsoft does not want a Windows beyond 10, but if Microsoft is going to keep making big changes, there will eventually be some compatibility problems. On the other hand, if there are too many versions of Windows, Microsoft will have a lot of big teams making bug fixes. I guess 6 years would be a good period of time for each 'big' version of Windows to be on the market. Windows Vista and 7 could have shared a lot of the same guts.

    I used to be more pro open source Desktop Environment. But, the number of users of Windows is so enormous, it makes sense to have a big team of paid programmers, under a single rulers, a cathedral if you will, to ensure exact compatibility.

    1. Re:Can't this be saved for Windows 11? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      MS is not caring for bugs as they fired most of their QA people. They outsourced testing to their users and only QA they make is to silence the press if the reports of bugs do get visibility. MS will also push any change of UI as mandatory update, so users get them by surprise at any time. It must be fun to find out on big presentation at customer site that MS had decided to randomize the UI.

    2. Re:Can't this be saved for Windows 11? by tysonedwards · · Score: 1

      They will pull an Apple and release 10.1 - Husky

      --
      Thirty four characters live here.
  18. "More animations" = "More shit to disable" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    I have a solid gaming PC and all that type of shit still gets disabled day 1 after a fresh windows install. Just put the windows up and take them away when I tell you to; you're an OS, not a movie.

    (At least, in the past. Gradually transitioning to Linux Mint rather than taking the Windows 10 dick up my ass.)

    1. Re:"More animations" = "More shit to disable" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      taking the Windows 10 dick up my ass.

      You're doing it wrong.

  19. Lipstick on a traitorous, deceitful pig by jenningsthecat · · Score: 0

    'Nuff said.

    --
    'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
  20. Windows 10's user-interface is still half-assed by Misagon · · Score: 1

    What Windows needs in way of user interfaces are not more pieces of flair but actual improvements in interaction that would make it possible to use touch, pen or mouse and keyboard everywhere in the operating system. When Windows 8 came out, the support was half-assed for either.

    They did restore the mouse and keyboard part a few bits in Windows 8.1 and then more in 10 because mouse and keyboard is what users were used to using and were yelling the loudest at Microsoft for.

    But even now after the latest Windows 10 update, trying to perform anything but the most basic of basic tasks on a Window tablet using only touch or touch and pen is a very frustrating exercise. For instance, most standard apps and dialogue boxes, such as in the File Manager and the Control Panel are still made for mouse and keyboard only.
    A pen or a mouse (and sometimes a physical keyboard) is therefore still a necessity .. and then most tablets have only one USB port that also doubles as charging port, so you can't borrow a mouse or keyboard from the desktop PC. And don't get me started about not being able to transfer files from another computer to a tablet over otherwise OTG-capable USB ports...
    It's sad, really. I can still not recommend a Windows tablet to anyone, no matter how fast the CPU is or how much RAM, storage or pixels it has.

    Windows 8 became available to developers in 2011 and available to the public in October 2012. That's four years - that's ridiculous!
    Oh, I'm sorry, I forgot... Windows for Pen Computing came out in 1992! Knowing Microsoft's that's probably older than the (inexperienced) programmers who will be tasked with whizzing up Metro.

    --
    "We mustn't be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology" -- Aldous Huxley
    1. Re:Windows 10's user-interface is still half-assed by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I still hold Windows 2000 as the best UI Microsoft ever made. Ever since then it's been change for the sake of change, "toyification", busywork and a jobs program for "partners" busy with training and "certification" for their crap. I think Microsoft fundamentally neither respect the computer as a tool, nor their users intelligence.

      WRT to tablets etc, I actually think they should learn a thing or two from the KDE team. They have _one_ desktop, but it's easy to shift it into various "modes" depending on what kind of device it's running on. The one size fits all mentality that seems to underlie anything Microsoft ever does will eventually be their undoing. Again, no respect for the computer, no respect for the user.

      And of course things doesn't work, it's Microsoft we're talking about. It's more important that things change and have a "fresh" look than that they actually work. After all it's not like these people actually use or care about their products.

    2. Re:Windows 10's user-interface is still half-assed by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I still hold Windows 2000 as the best UI Microsoft ever made. Ever since then it's been change for the sake of change, "toyification", busywork and a jobs program for "partners" busy with training and "certification" for their crap. I think Microsoft fundamentally neither respect the computer as a tool, nor their users intelligence.

      I think that's the bit that *you* are missing. Unless it impacts the use of the user's applications then it's almost entirely inconsequential. In Windows 10, just like 95 through 7, you start your applications through the start menu, the desktop icon, the taskbar, the command line or windows explorer. Then once in your applications they operate exactly as they always have.

      The bits that have really changed (rather than simply minor restyling) are some of the settings dialogs (additions rather than changes though), the notification center and its quick access to some settings (which you dont have to use, and in fact I dont think I ever have) and that's about it. You can even unpin all the tiles from the start screen on the side of the start menu and it will disappear entirely so you're back to a slim start menu. Control Panel is still the same as it was as are all the group policy tools.

      The issue seems a bit overblown, I would be very curious to hear what your daily workflow is like and what specifically is signficantly different in say Windows 10 vs Windows 7 for you.

  21. I have a proposal for a name.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    How about "Sentient Header Interleaved Text"?

  22. Project Neon? Don't they dare to call it Ubuntu? by allo · · Score: 2

    Project Neon is the Name of a Linux Distribution for KDE. Stop stealing names!

  23. Re: HEY, Anybody got a slashdot account who could by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Try it. You need to be logged into an account, with a verified email address, to submit an anonymous story.

  24. Re:Project Neon? Don't they dare to call it Ubuntu by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Coming from Microsoft, I first mis-read it as project PEON.

  25. "simple and clean interfaces" - LOL by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    They forgot to put "modern" too, just as meaningless as "clean". And "simple" means "dumbed down so much that you can't even see a scrollbar or a dividing line because - the shiny!"

    These people are fucking idiots who have no idea whatsoever about user interface design - as proof, I give you Windows 8 Start screen and 'The Ribbon'. And Office 2013's (or is it 2016?) GREY TEXT on a white background in right click menus.

  26. Re: Project Neon? Don't they dare to call it Ubunt by UltraZelda64 · · Score: 1

    I'm glad I wasn't the only one...

  27. Re:HEY, Anybody got a slashdot account who could h by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I kind of lost the thread after all the telemetry (*cough* spying) and selling our private life to third parties...

    Seriously are you people fucking retarded? We all know not even Google (the biggest data mining advertisment company) sells data to third parties, they aggregate data so that they can provide a service to advertisers to target a specific market. We all know this already and have known it for a long time so why the incessant indulgance in this stupidity?

    This is why people don't take privacy seriously, the supposed advocates of privacy prove time and time again they aren't interested in reality, just perpetuating hyperbole in order to try and distort the issue. Why trust your opinion when you clearly either don't know what you're talking about or just lie to try and make it seem worse than what it is?