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

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.

Comments

Sounds like a waste

[corychristison]

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.

Re: Sounds like a waste

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Sounds like a waste

[Dracos]

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".

Re: Sounds like a waste

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re: Sounds like a waste

[ArmoredDragon]

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.

Re: Sounds like a waste

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

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.

Re: Sounds like a waste

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

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.

Re:Sounds like a waste

[K. S. Kyosuke]

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

Re: Sounds like a waste

[K. S. Kyosuke]

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.

Re: Sounds like a waste

[thegarbz]

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.

Re: Sounds like a waste

[K. S. Kyosuke]

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.

Re:Sounds like a waste

[syntotic]

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

Re:Sounds like a waste

[arglebargle_xiv]

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.

Will it still send my data to third parties?

[Anonymous Coward]

If so, I don't give a fuck.

Microsoft gets even farther out of touch...

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re: Microsoft gets even farther out of touch...

[ArmoredDragon]

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

Lipstick

[ChodaBoyUSA]

...on the spyware pig?

Slashdot quote is broken; fix it

[reboot246]

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?

Yeah, but...

[wtfbill]

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

Re:So...

[AHuxley]

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."

Resolution independence

[hackwrench]

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.

"More animations" = "More shit to disable"

[Anonymous Coward]

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.)

Windows 10's user-interface is still half-assed

[Misagon]

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.

Project Neon? Don't they dare to call it Ubuntu?

[allo]

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

Re:Can't this be saved for Windows 11?

[tysonedwards]

They will pull an Apple and release 10.1 - Husky

Re: Project Neon? Don't they dare to call it Ubunt

[UltraZelda64]

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