Microsoft Shows Off Radical New UI, Could Be Used In Windows 8 403
autospa writes "In a three and a half minute video, Microsoft may have shown the world what it has in store for the eagerly awaited Windows 8. In the video Microsoft showed a radically different interface from past versions of Windows — even Windows 7. Running on Surface 2, the touch-screen successor to the original Microsoft Surface, the device accepts input from a Windows Phone 7 handset (HTC HD7). Gone are the icons that drive Windows, OS X, and Linux operating systems of past and present. In their place are 'bubbles' that interact with files and post streaming information off the internet."
Wild speculation! I did not hear/see Windows8. (Score:4, Interesting)
People, please watch that video. The article is wild speculation. I did not hear or see anything that ought to be how Windows 8 looks. Its just MS saying what they recently did with Surface and Kinect.
Those bubbles some speak about (which where in visibly only for seconds, not even showing how interaction would actually work) are not represented as being how Windows 8 would or could work.
Not that i appreciate the idea of such a big company thinking really hard to remove that hassle of having to use a mouse and even then perform verbose, repetitive actions that could be represented with a single voice command. I'd love that.
This works, if EVERYTHING is streamline, the world (Score:5, Interesting)
This works, if EVERYTHING is streamline, the world isn't streamlined.
[.jpeg] [.jpg] [.jpe] [.jpg] [.gif] [.] []
The above where ALL extensions I found for jpeg images. Yes, the last one is empty and the gif? Just one of the many wrongly named ones. How do you deal with this uniformly? How do you write a super smooth UI that shows images if even determining what is an image is already that hard.
Link the weather to my airplane ticket? That only works if somehow the ticket data exposes location data in a way the weather plugin can understand AND if then the ticket plugin can understand the weather data. My airport is Eindhoven, my weather plugin only knows about Amsterdam (Schiphol is NEAR to it but NOT the same). So how does that work? Ah, only unified services work... nice lock-in you got going there then. This kind of stuff is a chain and chains are only as strong as the weakest link.
It is not like this kind of stuff hasn't been tried before, it is the intelligent home dream.
The dream where you put a carton of milk in your fridge and it tells a phone that it is getting old. My local supermarket has four brands of milk at least. That is ONE supermarket. If my carton I picked up at a new supermarket on the way doesn't register, the entire service is useless and I might well end up drinking spoiled milk trusting that my intelligent home would have warned me.
My flight can not be just delayed because of the weather at departure airport but also by weather enroute and arrival airport or indeed whatever area my plane is coming from in the first place. My ticket doesn't have route information or where the airplane is coming from, how can my PC check this info if even the airline company can't? And does any of this check the road conditions? How about public transport? Does it KNOW whether I will be driving, a friend, a cab or I will be going by train?
Another one, language and subtitle choices. this should be trivial as long as everyone and every coded uses ISO encoding and then agrees on how many letters. Should be trivial, it isn't. Nobody can ever agree on someone elses standard.
Oh, your services are ALL going to MS supplied? Better hand in that iPhone then, just give it to me, I will take it off your hands. GIVE IT... geez, you expect a Windows 8 experience to work out of the box with iOS? No? Then what is the point.
We can't even get MS to smoothly discover various makers MP3 players. They going to bother with any services that don't pay through the nose for it and share all their data?
There is a reason we don't have integrated services that could power such a UI. The world is filled with individuals who all like to do things their own way. See Google and its chrome window that doesn't work the same as every other window on Linux.
This kind of UI is limitted to the movies where god, the writer, knows exactly what is going to be needed to get done next.
Re:And I thought Office 2010 was hard to use (Score:5, Interesting)
Bubbles reminds me of the original vision for KDE4, except that "Bubbles" was/is referred to as "Widgets". Information flows to and from the internet into these
"widgets" in the KDE4 desktop. They have stuff like Facebook/Twitter feeds directly accessible and writable through these widgets and something like an OpenSocial framework for social interaction. Not exactly the same, but the idea seems to be very similar to KDE4.
Drop the bubbles and just copy OS X Lion (Score:3, Interesting)
This is wildly unexciting. Want to build excitement about an OS, Microsoft? In my opinion at this point in MS's life the best thing is to go back to the playbook and lift some ideas from Apple.
Launchpad: An overlay of application launch icons right, sorted how I want them, just like on your mobile device. Not buried in menus or folders. Proven interface. Just give me a touch screen in my macbook now.
More Gestures: Unlike Windows that ships to most users on 2nd and 3rd rate hardware with a USB two button mouse, OS X ships on high quality hardware with an amazing multitouch gesture pad, or available to desktop and home theatre users via the bluetooth magic trackpad. Windows will continue to be built for the least common denominator hardware until MS gets a clue.
Air Drop: Finally. Transferring files between devices without cables and without a fucking "Sync Wizard"
Built-in Version Control: Finally. Integrated RCS for your documents at no cost to you in a consumer OS. Yes, its been done on Linux but never this end user friendly and never this well integrated.
Resume on Reboot: Finally. Done right in a consumer OS. Yes it was done on Unix 20 years ago, but application support for it on Linux was mostly allowed to fall into disrepair over the years where application state really wasn't saved as part of your session. No more spending 20 minutes to get all applications and windows back how they were after work after rebooting for a security patch or turning it back on after being packed away for a trip.
Mission Control: Better than Expose, task bar, and alt+tab combined. No MS, stacking task bar windows is not an improvement.
Re:And I thought Office 2010 was hard to use (Score:5, Interesting)