Did Metro UX Elements Come From a 2009 Demo? 68
First time accepted submitter oso2k writes "In 2009, as reported by gizmag, Robert Clayton Miller proposed a UI that borrowed from familiar iPhone gestures and translated them to a multi-tasking data-input rich desktop UI. It would seem, however, Microsoft was paying attention. Elements in Miller's design seem to have been lifted for Metro UI, such as dynamic sized widgets (tiles in Metro UI) on the home screen, swipes alternate between open, fullscreened apps, left tap for the app context menu, right tap for the system context menu. And in Miller's video at [5:41], it would seem Microsoft used the same or nearly the same font [4:30]." It's interesting to spot resemblances here, but how many UI ideas don't have more than one inventor?
Metro? (Score:1)
Original Ideas Stream Forth from Redmond (Score:5, Funny)
Just like a flood of Athenas - flooding from the forehead of Zeus!
We are awash in the innovations and creativity gushing from Microsoft. One simple antecedent in the case of the Metro interface hardly mars the unbroken record of stunning inventiveness and groundbreaking vision that can be directly attributed to the far-sighted leadership of Ballmer's Microsoft.
Someday, the humble Zune will be recognized as the beginning of the post-PC era, which Microsoft ushered, leading from behind.
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Someday, the humble Zune will be recognized as the beginning of the post-PC era...
You forgot about "Utopia"... the prequel to Metro.
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ZuneHD got it "right" for UI.
The entire device+store copy of iPod business model was doomed to failure. The market was big enough for EXACTLY ONE of those - and it was already occupied by Apple.
Of course, ZuneHD was binned, for Windows Mobile 7. Microsoft. Occasionally getting something right, and then executing on the exactly wrong thing...
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My sister had a Zune. On the PC side, the UI of the software was virtually unusable. Maybe it was just because it was an early, buggy version. I recall having to go through some bizarre gymnastics to get playlists of music to load onto it.
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Either Slashdot didn't get the memo that the name is now "Windows Store Apps", or else they can't believe any company would pick such a dumb name and are waiting for the "ha ha you almost fell for it - it's really still called Metro" announcement from Redmond.
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Don't you mean the interface formally known as Metro?
Right. Which is written as an incomprehensible collection of primary colored squares.
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It's not called metro, After showing Windows 8 to several people the interface is actually called, "Jeebus, what the hell is that?"
and no my name is not Jeebus... I wonder how all these users know that it's called "what the hell is that"?
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Don't you mean the interface formally known as Metro?
*formerly, unless Metro is wearing a tuxedo
OMG, time to sue! (Score:2, Insightful)
They should be sued and shamed - they are supposed to do their design and development in a bubble!
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Yeah, really.
Whenever I argue that Apple's crusade against Android vendors will give them a smartphone monopoly, somebody says, "No, there's still Windows 8." The good news here is that I no longer have to point out how lame that alternative is.
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This doesn't even deserve the obligatory defense of "nothing is invented in a bubble".
There's no real similarity between Windows 8 and the Con10uum interface beyond the fact that both support multi-touch.
Dynamic sized widgets (tiles in Metro UI) on the home screen.
Wow widgets you say? On the desktop? You mean like "gadgets" in Windows Vista (shipping 3 years prior) and pretty much every theme since the 90s? The 'tile' innovation isn't that it's a widget it's that it's both a widget and an icon to launch an application. Which also in of itself isn't much of an innovat
Zune circa 2006 (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Zune circa 2006 (Score:5, Informative)
I mean, it's pretty easy to tell "first time accepted submitter oso2k" (by the way oso2k, what exactly are we supposed to infer at 4:30 in Microsoft's video, which is a black screen with a copyright notice? Great job doing your job Slashdot editors) doesn't have much experience with Windows 8, as the similarities he or she draws between the two GUIs are tenuous at best. The whole point of this "con10uum" interface is a 1D window manager which arranges open windows in a line. You essentially pan back and forth in this window list and you can resize and reorder windows using multi touch gestures. This is nothing like Windows 8, which essentially allows you to only swipe through windows in order and place at most two side by side.
The only real similarity between the two GUIs is the existence of a global menu (not novel) an application specific menu (not novel) and a gesture to activate them (not novel). 10/GUI suggest this gesture is tapping on a specialized region separate from the touch screen, while Windows 8 uses a swipe in gesture from the edge of a touch screen. These are very different operations and require specialized algorithms and technology for each case (gesture recognition, edge to edge touch detection etc).
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Well that and all the touch changes they made - with the WM_GESTURE stuff, has been around since Vista... how long ago was that?
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Yep. Everything in Windows 8 is if anything pilfered from previous Microsoft products.
App Context menu a swipe from the bottom: WP7
Swapping between maximized windows: Alt+Tab
Global "Charms" menu: WP7 'sharing' menu/hardware search button.
Segoe Font: Media Center, WP7, Zune etc.
Live Tiles: WP7 and kind of Media Center and Zune HD before that.
Metro Design: Zune
WP7 was supposed to be out by October 2009 and was announced in early spring 2010 so unless Microsoft redesigned key parts of WP7 in a couple months r
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Not that it is applicable in this case (not at all IMO), but using the arguments of patent trolls against them is a way to point out their hypocrisy.
Apple only has to convince a jury (Score:2)
Apple only has to convince a jury. Then Microsoft will have "samsung" that same sad tune.
Re:Zune circa 2006 (Score:4, Interesting)
You've only mentioned style and appearance. This is about the function of the UI.
Con10uum: Every window should be always open and you just scroll left to right between them. Dynamically scaling each window with pinch/zoom.
Windows 8: Only 1 or 2 apps should ever be open and you swap the one currently on the screen.
Functional comparison: Fingers are involved in both gestures. Functionally completely different windowing philosophy.
Con10uum: You should click a button off to the left side of the screen to bring up the app context menu.
Windows 8: You swipe from the bottom of the screen.
Functional comparison: Both acknowledge the fact that applications have menus and provide a means of accessing said menu.
Con10uum: You should click a button off to the right side of the screen to open the launcher.
Windows 8: You should swipe from the side of the screen to reveal an onscreen button to open the launcher. You also reveal global actions such as sharing or printing the current page.
Functional comparison: Both involve clicking on the right area of the screen. Seeing as there are only 3 usable sides to a touchscreen it's a stretch to say that this was a rip-off. Especially since Microsoft's explanation of "It's where your thumb is when you hold a tablet" is a perfectly good rationale and makes more sense than "because some web video that nobody saw put it there."
Con10uum has no equivalent to Microsoft's global sharing button. In Con10uum that would be part of the application's file menu and would be in a different menu.
Con10uum: Desktop widgets.
Windows 8: No desktop in Metro. The launcher icons though can display extended information.
Functional Comparison: Widgets have been around for decades. Every customized windows theme included an RSS/News widget on the desktop. It's just "what you do". But functionally a widget and a metro tile are completely different. A widget is an enhanced part of the desktop and was in Windows Vista as part of the OS for years before Con10uum. A tile though serves dual purposes as primarily an icon but a secondary duty as a widget.
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This. How about a post on the battery issue in the last OSX update? Or, failing that... news?
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"Bob" called. He wants his house back
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Microsoft didn't switch the Xbox UI over to the metro style UI till late last year / early this year. Prior to that it looked less like metro and more like shelves at a video store.
Honestly the video seems a lot more like the Apple full screen app movement in OS X... sliding back and forth between apps with multitouch gestures.
Haters will hate, don't let them ruin your day...
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And Microsoft has already stated/admitted they borrowed major parts of the design language from the King Country Metro system maps in Seattle (hence the name Metro, get it?)
Hmm, maybe this developer DID THE SAME?
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That's what I thought. I remember seeing this video back when the squircle Zunes were coming out, and Courier concept video had just been released a few months earlier. People's reaction to it was "yeah, I like it, but Courier is coming out man!" Ha! what a disappointment that was...
Slashdot comedy gold... (Score:4, Funny)
Metro design elements date back to at least 2006 with the Zune and evolved in 2008 with the new Xbox 360 UI. The font Microsoft uses for Metro is Segoe and dates back to 2004. Seriously, I know Slashdot is anti MS, but this is just getting ridiculous... first a post about how only 25% of Windows 8 prefer the OS to other versions of Windows, when 74% of those polled say they never even used Windows 8, and now this?
If you want to see some Slashdot comedy gold, you should go back and read some of the past anti-Microsoft stories and comments on Slashdot.
For example take this one http://tech.slashdot.org/story/09/02/16/2259257/Draconian-DRM-Revealed-In-Windows-7 [slashdot.org]
If these kind of retarded stories were run on some other company, it would be called a FUD campaign secretly sponsored by some evil corp.
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How many? (Score:3, Funny)
"... how many UI ideas don't have more than one inventor?"
Anything "invented" by Apple. Duh! Just ask their legal team!
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Whoosh. Please see Apple v. Samsung
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Offtopic? I quoted TFS for goodness sakes!!!!
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Woz basically invented overlapping windows - he was puzzling over how the Alto did it, and worked out regions (patented Woz) for how to handle when windows overlapped each other. It wasn't until much later that the Alto guys admitted that they didn't allow overlapping windows.
After his plane crash (but before he had a chance to code it or patent it) the first thing Woz said to Jobs in the h
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Happy to see non-stacking approaches get notice (Score:2)
This is actually an interesting concept.
As one who enjoys tiled window interfaces, I'd like to see more concepts that avoid the stacking window management we've had for so long.
I do think the model posed is a bit more restrictive than I'd like, though.
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They're not the same thing.
UI is user interface. This can be a CLI (command line interface), GUI, touchscreen, or really whatever sort of way in which you can think to interact with a computer. As such, conflating it to a GUI, a graphical user interface, is narrowing things down too much, since it's much more general by definition. Each different input method is then going to have different things in which it's good for or not good for, and will need to be taken into consideration when designing.
For instanc
Wait a minute (Score:1)
While it looks cool and all lets consider this for a minute. Mouse one point, hand 10 points? Wrong! mouse and keyboard 3+3 and one pointer. But wait the 3 keyboard say shift alt ctrl and 3 mouse can be differentiated! that means 6+6 combos fro touch for total of 12 different interaction modes that too can be combined for 1*2*3*4*5*6 = 720 combos. so ten gui has what 2*(3+3 pinch) plus 2 pointing areas gee.. doesn't sound so great now does it. granted the FIRST pointer of the flour sliders makes sense toug
Silly question... (Score:1)
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I take it you've never heard of Eli Whitney [wikipedia.org], Ben Franklin [wikipedia.org], or Charles Babbage? [wikipedia.org]
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Well, let me reply to this with Eli Whitney [wikipedia.org], Ben Franklin [wikipedia.org], and Charles Babbage [wikipedia.org]. Those first two links are to the same articles you linked to, just specific sections. The first one talks about all the previous versions of the cotton gin and then about Eli Whitney's version and competing claims to the invention. The second talks about Benjamin Franklin inventing the lightning rod in the Americas in 1749, then goes on to talk about previous lightning rods from thousands of years before that. The third link isn
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All three of your inventors built on existing technology.
Babbage didn't invent the cam/ratchet/gear/etc., the logic behind the operations either the difference engine or the analytical engine, nor did he conceive the concept of a mechanical computing device.
Whitney didn't invent the concept of interchangeable parts nor invented all or even a majority of the constituent components of the cotton gin -- even the main unit that separates the cotton from the seeds is alleged to have been inspired by an overly am
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A thing is more than the sum of its parts.
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True enough, but that misses the point: they built on the work of others.
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Even if a thing is more than the sum of its parts, a lightning rod invented thousands of years ago trumps invention a few hundred years ago.
Tap = Click (Score:2)
So just like Left Click and Right Click then.
Except with a finger instead of a mouse button...
Actually, they do... (Score:2)
All decent UI ideas were already done by Douglas Englebart.
You'll have to pardon me, though, I don't have time to elaborate -- speaking His name reminds me that I have to go dust the shrine and do my ritual obeisance again.
(To meet Poe's law requirements: :-) )
Really? (Score:2)
Evolutionary not revolutionary! (Score:1)
This is evolutionary not revolutionary. Aspects that were designed for one platform are moving to another. Big deal. The Dinosaurs are not inheriting the earth.
There is an obvious explanation for this (Score:2)
Zune was around in 2006 (Score:2, Informative)
Zune was around in 2006, and Metro is obviously just an evolution of the ideas in Zune. So no, Microsoft didn't steal anything from a 2009 video, and Slashdot editors are idiots for posting this without even doing the most cursory examination of the claim.
Metro is from Windows Media Center (Score:1)
Nice thought, but a majority of the Metro UI has been around since at least 2007 on Windows Media Center/Vista (including the fonts, a proto-version of the tiles, and many other familiar elements).
looks like Palm's WebOS deck (Score:2)
the demo is exactly like webOS.... except in webOS it looks good, and is useful.
the demo fells kinda retarted showing the side apps instead of giving the full screen to the app... also, dragging in from the bottom of the screen to enter "window selection mode" instead of dozen fingers gesture...
BORING ! (Score:1)
Who copied who arguments....
Really how boring is this argument?
People have ideas, ideas that are derivatives of other ideas. When it comes to user interface design these ideas have to be derivative as otherwise people wouldn't find them intuitive, communication is all about expressing things in terms people understand, e.g. alphabets, left to right writing systems, touch, gestures.
You change the paradigm too much and no one will understand it, this doesn't leave a whole lot of options, repetition in amongs