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Microsoft Teases Windows 10's Upcoming 'Project Neon' Design Language (windowscentral.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Windows Central: Microsoft just gave developers a sneak peek at Project Neon, Microsoft's upcoming design language for Windows 10 that aims to add fluidity, animation and blur to apps and the operating system. We exclusively revealed that this was in the works in late 2016, and today Microsoft has given us a first peak at what Project Neon will look like. During the Windows Developer Day livestream, an image of Project Neon was seen the background of one of the PowerPoint slides being shown off on stage. Although not much, it's further confirmation that this is the end goal for Windows 10's UI, and Project Neon will be bringing a fresh coat of paint to apps. Project Neon should benefit all types of Windows 10 devices, including Windows 10 Mobile, HoloLens and even Xbox. We're still several months away from Project Neon being everywhere in Windows 10, and we're expecting to see more at BUILD this coming May. In fact, a lot of the Project Neon APIs are available in the latest Insider Preview builds of Windows 10, meaning developers can already begin taking advantage of these new user interfaces and design language! Animations and transitions are a big deal with Project Neon, with the goal of making the operating system and apps feel like they work together. Peter Bright does a good job summarizing the looks of the screenshot via Ars Technica: "The picture shows a refreshed version of the Groove music app on a Windows desktop. The fundamentals of the app and its layout aren't changed, underscoring that Neon is very much an iteration of the current Metro/Microsoft Design Language (MDL). The window has shed its discrete title bar and one pixel border, with the application content now extending to the very edge of the window. The search text field no longer has a box around it, and the left hand pane has a hint of translucency to it." You can view the screenshot here and judge it for yourself.
Does it still $py on you?
More useless 'bells and whistles' that do nothing useful, instead distracting the short attention span crowd (read as: the average user) from the fact that their computer is now a full-time surveillance platform that has the secondary function of being an 'operating system' (read as: half-assed program loader). I stick to my opinion that people, in general, are getting dumber, not smarter; everyone should have their tap water tested for lead contamination, I think Flint, Michigan is far from being the only city in the country with that particular problem.
Please fix the mass of significant issues present in the base operating system before diverting your dwindling QA resources to non-critical things.
What do they mean by 'Design Language?'
I see no verbs, nouns, adjectives, operators, variables, constants or other things than characterize a language whether human or programming.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
I know they have been trying for a *long* time to get the UI to a place where it is functional, looks clean and doesn't piss people off.
I have not used Windows on the desktop for at least a decade and don't plan on going back, but competition is always good.
I also hope that the Elementary OS guys get some inspiration from this. I use macOS now but open up my old Thinkpad just to check it out every once in a while.
So... "shed its discrete title bar and one pixel border"... "content ... to the very edge of the window"... "search text field no longer has a box". Sounds (and looks) to me like they've just regressed still further into the tiled layout, hey let's just make everything look like a congealed mess of applications and graphics with no visual cues as to which app belongs to what style of design. Just what the world needs (or not). Oh, and "hint of translucency to it" just to add some vista bleh to the mix (though to be honest I don't mind translucency and a bit of window animation so long as it doesn't hurt performance too much).
Clearly we've moved from the innovation and real development stage of UI design to stagnation and deck-chair shuffling phase.
You can't polish a turd, but Microsoft will try anyway.
Back in the day /. users would poke fun at Microsoft for the quality/stability/usability, etc. of their products but for the most part they worked. The new generation of visionaries are not happening.
The search text field no longer has a box around it, and the left hand pane has a hint of translucency to it.
In other words, making it more difficult for people to figure out where the box is located to do anything. What next, will the search box be made 90% translucent and float around your screen?
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Before working on fuzzy stuff that just doesn't matter?
"Project Neon should benefit all types of Windows 10 devices
At the expense of usability on the desktop.
Will this be another multi-gigabyte update that opens hundreds of simultaneous connections to download, not only making Windows 10 unusable, but shutting down your entire network and making every other device on it unusable?
I love window borders, title bars, scroll bars, and I want text boxes and clickable buttons to look like they're not part of the background please.
Design over function is never good for a tool. But if you want your OS to look like a toy, go ahead.
Try it! Library of Babel
Everything is tone in tone, low contrast and flat and there are huge amounts of empty space. FFS, send these idiots home and give them a modern art museum to play in. The computer is a tool, not a fashion accessory.
Microsoft Threatens Windows 10's Upcoming 'Project Neon' Design Language
From Fisher-Price color scheme right into google blandness where everything looks disabled.
First, can it be disabled?
Second, when are you going to fix the spying?
Everything else, please talk it into the box over there, I'll ignore later.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Windows 10 Hot Dog Stand
love is just extroverted narcissism
Microsoft increasingly reminds me of old Soviet times, where everyone knew the system was mostly done for and artificially propped up, with everyone knowing about the huge problems despite them being denied by the party, and huge and boisterous promises being made of what we'll have "really soon now", despite everyone knowing it's not ever coming to fruition. From time to time, some "achievements" were announced which either nobody really gave a shit about or that were simply and plainly fake. While at the same time the really pressing issues were never even addressed, let alone solved. There wasn't even an attempt to solve them. Instead, money was squandered away on gimmicky, flashy show projects that could be paraded. And the jokes reflect that from
"Little Vova, where's your dad?"
"He's in orbit, but will be back in an hour."
"And your mom?"
"Oh, that could take a while, she queued for butter!"
to
"Comrades! In 5 years we'll all have cars!"
"Yes, yes, but right now, we'd really need some toilet paper."
"And comrades! In 10 years we'll all have our own house!"
"Fine, whatever, but about that toilet paper..."
"Shut up! Kiss my fuckin' ass!"
"Great, so you have a solution for yourself, but what should we do?"
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Aero itself was great, but this is re-inventing the wheel. Just put Classic Shell on your Windows 10, enable the Aero theme and you're good to go
I have been waiting forever for more 'blur'
wtf?
So microsoft is adding more shit nobody asked for and nobody wants.. and nobody will be able to properly impliment it to make it work correctly either..
I like how it looks, but then again I was one of the bunch that mourned Aero...
I also like KDE over gnome, if that tells you anything.
To each their own , I guess...
To summarise: Yuck.
Just wondering if the Microsoft Neon will eclipse eclipse Neon.
It doesn't look bad, but it doesn't look great, either. It seems overall usable, although they've changed the icons so now I don't really know what they mean (what is that circle on the bottom bar on the left by the start menu?)
The most laughable thing is that flat, sparse style is already old. The hip people have already moved on to multi-stop, overlapping, translucent, rotated gradients. Complex gradients. If you want to make a stylish UI, you need to use them. Microsoft is trying to chase trends and now they end up looking derivative.
It doesn't matter, people will still buy Windows, and I will still not use it unless someone forces me.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Clear, easy to understand, and classic. Shame this very old tech isn't available cross platform (that I know of). Tis a solid base.
Corporate folk don't want the shine, they want the very clear to use (make sure and tell them, time after time, about context menus...).
BlameBillCosby.com
Yet another thing that Microsoft will hype for a year or two and then drop.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Are there people on /. in the year 2017 that AREN'T exclusively using unix and unix-like operating systems? You guys know macOS already looks chic and doesn't impose nonstop brain damage upon its users, right? All of the settings are in one application too.
What Aero theme?
...as expected, all the Windows/MS haters are out in full force.
I think MS are showing courage...
it's just a move towards back to windows 2000 gui rules.
you know, like input text boxes looking like input text boxes and buttons being distinctly buttons.
they make it sound all fancy and all that, but thats what it is. basically they're reinventing the wheel they spent tens of millions dollars to research in mid and early '90s.
a good example of how the current metro design language is fucked up is just the windows 10 installer. you have _choices_ where the other choice is a distinct box and the another choice is something that looks like a hyperlink buried in the text - both of these behave the same (take you to the next screen with the choice you made) but look totally different to the point that most users aren't even aware there is a choice to install it without a microsoft account.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
I recently installed a Windows XP machine for retro gaming purposes and I'm still amazed about how better the classic Windows experience was. Every button looks like a button and every menu looks like a menu, with zero possibilities of confusion about what is interactive and what is not. There is an amazing consistency between applications. The dialog box is a great data entry feature where you just abstract out of the screen's contents and focus on your input. In a relatively modern machine, everything works with no delay at all, including the file open dialog, which every recent OS struggle with.
Sorry, but the old design is better in every way possible, including aesthetics. I'll concede text looks better in a 4K modern display, but everything else is much worse.
Who the heck killed the desktop app? It was just better.
I tried Glass8, but eventually had to uninstall it because every. single. (mandatory.) update. from Microsoft. broke it for hours (once, days) at a time. Even after Glass8 learned how to download new symbols automatically, it seemed like Microsoft HOSTED the symbol files on the slowest server still online this century. One particularly bad manual symbol download took five attempts to complete (the first 4 died before completion & couldn't be resumed), and went at something like 80kbps. I hated conceding defeat to Microsoft, but I couldn't deal with having my computer semi-randomly be unavailable for hours or days every time Microsoft did something else to break Glass8 yet another time.
This 'flat' crap is getting ridiculous now. Boring, grey, flat, monochrome, no affordances anywhere, impossible to tell what is and isn't clickable, and all CLEARLY because the idiots who 'design' this shit are blindly chasing after an insane desire to make everything 'clean', whatever the hell that means.
Windows 7 was the most beautiful interface ever, and cannot be bettered, this is complete and utter crap and needs to stop - now. The 'user interface' designers at Microsoft haven't got a clue what they are doing, neither when it comes to the form, nor the function, of the interface.
And you'll notice that they don't give anybody the CHOICE to simply use Aero, or Royale, that would be too much - the damn serfs would doubtless choose those two rather than this 'modern' crap, by a vast majority. And then the idiotic 'designers' would have to admit that they don't know what they are doing. It's sickening, really sickening, to watch user interfaces becoming more and more difficult to use, and ugly, because a tiny handful of dickwads think they know best.
My team is in the process of migrating a large Windows app from a legacy language to C#. After evaluating the various UI options, we've reached a sad conclusion: MS doesn't actually have a viable UI framework for business apps at this time.
Windows Forms - legacy, in maintenance mode. Shouldn't be considered for new app development.
WPF - A single update, a few years back. Cringeworthy level of complexity and tooling suckiness, can't even subclass a button without having to copy-and-paste XAML from the parent. Seems unlikely to be considered "best practice" for much longer.
UWP - Too new, only has basic UI elements
It seems insane, providing business solutions was supposed to be MS's bread and butter.
Hoping for some neon desktops, really. All these drab pastels and off-white colours look kind of tedious after a while, like a show-home.
Until next MS screw-up, and until next, and until next. The only question is how long will it took for you to understand that MS [whatever] has gone insane and that you should start looking for the OS alternatives?
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." - Jiddu Krishnamurti