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Microsoft's Designers Are Now Working Together on the Future of Windows, Office and Surface (theverge.com)
Microsoft has changed the way it approaches design. The new Office icons unveiled this week are the first glimpse at a far bigger design overhaul that's going on inside the company. Windows is also getting its own icon changes, but the bigger change is a collaborative effort going on between the Windows, Office, and Surface teams. From a report: "This is definitely a cross company effort," explains Jon Friedman, Microsoft's head of Office design, in an interview with The Verge. The company's design leaders -- Friedman with Office, Albert Shum on the Windows side, and Ralf Groene for Surface -- all work together now. "We operate like an internal open source team," Friedman says.
"So we're all openly sharing our design work, critiquing the work, working on it together. What we've found is that the best way to develop our Fluent Design system is to truly open source it internally. What's happened is that we're getting the best of everyone's work that way."
"So we're all openly sharing our design work, critiquing the work, working on it together. What we've found is that the best way to develop our Fluent Design system is to truly open source it internally. What's happened is that we're getting the best of everyone's work that way."
Knowing Microsoft they will now contain executable code. Expect gnome to implement a similar but half assed design but with calls to systemd. So now the OS can be aware of any icon changes.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
I had missed the whole new "Fluent" design thing from Build (I normally try to pay attention to what they talk about but was too busy this year).
So I dug down a bit and finally found the Fluent design guidelines. There are some interesting things going on there, like use of light and focus in different ways depending on screen distance (viewing something on a TV screen vs. on a screen right in front of you), probably worth going over to incorporate good ideas into your own UI work...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Yeah it is kind of glaring sometimes that Windows has some theme settings and then Office just does whatever it feels like. Even the versions of Office that have themes don't let you just match the OS theme. So, while it seems like an easy/stupid fix for corporate culture they clearly haven't been sharing notes in the past.
Will the "new way" be as successful as the "new way" Microsoft implements Quality Assurance?
Having fixed issues with deleting user data, excessive CPU and disk I/O during updates, poor-to-nonexistent control of installing updates, user preferences regarding information density and screen resolutions, Outlook handling large mailboxes gracefully (especially with non-o365 servers), Access being super picky about version compatibilities, Sharepoint being an utter disaster, most of the newer Exchange server controls being exclusively Powershell applets, Hyper-V shadow copies being temperamental, convoluted licensing models, and coming to terms with the fact that consumers simply don't want to be locked into a vertical Microsoft ecosystem like Google or Apple...I'm glad they're finally able to spend development time on making prettier icons.
Windows is also getting its own icon changes...
For the love of God, who gives a flying f*ck about new icons? Give us back a working Start menu!
I work on multiple versions of Windows and Windows Server every day, and I am constantly hunting for things. Do I right-click or left-click the Start button?
I used to be able to get to anything I needed by drilling down through a menu or two. Now I resort to the search functionality constantly. Not to mention that settings for related things must be accessed in completely different places. Network-related settings are a good example:
Want to edit network settings for a VPN connection, or authentication details? Two completely different places. I was recently trying to get rid of a remembered WiFi network in Windows 10 and I had to Google how do it!
It's a complete mess.