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Windows 8 to get some desktop UI changes


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In a new and massive post on the Windows 8 blog site, Microsoft talks about some of the design choices the Windows 8 team made, including some new changes for the desktop interface.

Of all the things that have been talked about and written about for Windows 8, none have been more discussed than its new Metro user interface and its touch screen centric design. Many have complained that it is too much of a change from previous versions of Windows. Today, in a new and massive post on the Windows 8 blog, Microsoft goes over the decisions it has made for the Windows 8 user interface.

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Written by Jensen Harris, the Director of Program Management for the Windows 8 User Experience team, the blog first goes over all of the user interfaces for the previous versions of Windows, starting from from Windows 1 in 1985, which was made to be interacted with mainly by a keyboard (the PC mouse was just an option).

Windows 3.0/3.1 was next in 1990, which introduced the Program Manager and File Manager interfaces. Windows 95, launched in 1995, brought us the now familiar Start button, the taskbar, the Explorer and the desktop which remain even now in Windows 7. Windows XP, launched in 2001, brought some refinements to those features, including the Start menu.

Windows Vista, in 2007, gave use the controversial Aero "glass" art style. Finally, Windows 7 in 2009 gave us even more changes to the Start button and other aspects of the OS.

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Harris said that for Windows 8, Microsoft had a number of goals in terms of supporting new features, including being able to have a PC or other Windows 8 product be connected to the Internet all the time. Having content not just on the PC itself but also stored on cloud servers was another feature goal, as was supporting the rise of PC portability. Finally, Microsoft wanted to emphasize the person that would be using a Windows 8 device, rather than the files.

The blog goes over some of the other aspects of Windows 8, much of which has been written about before. That includes giving Windows 8 devices a long battery life, the use of Live Tiles and of course the Windows 8 touch interface with the Metro UI.

Even though Windows 8 has the Metro touch interface, the regular desktop will still be around, and Harris says it is just as important to Microsoft to support such an interface for Windows 8. He states:

It is pretty straightforward. The desktop is there to run the millions of existing, powerful, familiar Windows programs that are designed for mouse and keyboard. Office. Visual Studio. Adobe Photoshop. AutoCAD. Lightroom. This software is widely-used, feature-rich, and powers the bulk of the work people do on the PC today. Bringing it forward (along with the metaphors such as manual discrete window sizing and overlapping placement) is a huge benefit when compared to tablets without these features or programs. It is an explicit design goal of Windows 8 to bring this software forward, run it better than in any previous version of Windows, and to provide the best environment possible for these products as they evolve into the future as well.

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Harris said that Microsoft will be making some changes to the desktop UI for Windows 8, which will include having some of the Metro look put into the UI. However, he added that not everything will be transferred. He said:

While much of the Metro style UI uses white text on a colorful saturated background, the desktop in Windows 8 will continue to use black text on light-colored chrome, as in Windows 7. This choice was made to help preserve maximum compatibility with existing programs.

The desktop windows will still look "light and airy", according to Harris. The team also wanted it to look much like Windows 7. Harris said:

We made a conscious effort to relate the visual appearance of the Windows 8 desktop to the visual appearance of the familiar Windows 7 desktop. This helps people who want to predominantly use the desktop feel comfortable and immediately at home in the new environment.

The blog also goes over much of the other small changes that will be made to the desktop UI in Windows 8. Harris said:

We applied the principles of “clean and crisp” when updating window and taskbar chrome. Gone are the glass and reflections. We squared off the edges of windows and the taskbar. We removed all the glows and gradients found on buttons within the chrome. We made the appearance of windows crisper by removing unnecessary shadows and transparency. The default window chrome is white, creating an airy and premium look. The taskbar continues to blend into the desktop wallpaper, but appears less complicated overall.

To complete the story, we updated the appearance of most common controls, such as buttons, check boxes, sliders, and the Ribbon. We squared off the rounded edges, cleaned away gradients, and flattened the control backgrounds to align with our chrome changes. We also tweaked the colors to make them feel more modern and neutral.

Harris added that some of these changes to the desktop will be seen in the upcoming Release Preview version of Windows 8, which is scheduled to launch in the first week of June. However, the rest of the changes to the desktop UI won't be seen until the final version of Windows 8 is launched later in 2012.

Harris ends the blog by saying that he and the team know that the large changes in the Metro user interface for Windows 8 have generated a lot of debate, some for and some against. He added:

The full picture of the Windows 8 experience will only emerge when new hardware from our partners becomes available, and when the Store opens up for all developers to start submitting their new apps. At the same time, there's no doubt that all the features of Windows 8 are compelling on today's hardware designed for Windows 7—with or without touch. Since we designed Windows 8 to work great for laptops and desktops, it will work naturally for your Windows 7 hardware. Think of past versions of Windows that worked on existing hardware but were even better with new hardware. That's our approach with Windows 8.

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Gone are the glass and reflections. We squared off the edges of windows and the taskbar. We removed all the glows and gradients found on buttons within the chrome. We made the appearance of windows crisper by removing unnecessary shadows and transparency. The default window chrome is white...

We squared off the rounded edges, cleaned away gradients, and flattened the control backgrounds to align with our chrome changes. We also tweaked the colors to make them feel more modern and neutral.


Back to 1995 then, in those times it was hardware limited, now its gonna be software limited -.-

Am I the only one who doesn't like 16 Color Metro Style with no gradients, reflections, round corners etc? :(
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Gone are the glass and reflections. We squared off the edges of windows and the taskbar. We removed all the glows and gradients found on buttons within the chrome. We made the appearance of windows crisper by removing unnecessary shadows and transparency. The default window chrome is white...

We squared off the rounded edges, cleaned away gradients, and flattened the control backgrounds to align with our chrome changes. We also tweaked the colors to make them feel more modern and neutral.

Back to 1995 then, in those times it was hardware limited, now its gonna be software limited -.-

Am I the only one who doesn't like 16 Color Metro Style with no gradients, reflections, round corners etc? :(

i am with you mate

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I agree with both of you. I have hated the Metro Style from day 1. Its a pain in the ass and ugly as fuck

-BTY

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Please re-add the start menu and have an option to disable the metro shit...

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No glass, reduced button shadows etc -- terrible. Why would they make it look cheap and nasty?

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Gone are the glass and reflections. We squared off the edges of windows and the taskbar. We removed all the glows and gradients found on buttons within the chrome. We made the appearance of windows crisper by removing unnecessary shadows and transparency. The default window chrome is white...

We squared off the rounded edges, cleaned away gradients, and flattened the control backgrounds to align with our chrome changes. We also tweaked the colors to make them feel more modern and neutral.

Back to 1995 then, in those times it was hardware limited, now its gonna be software limited -.-

Am I the only one who doesn't like 16 Color Metro Style with no gradients, reflections, round corners etc? :(

Couldn't agree more mate.

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I'm afraid MSFT has lost it's way. They don't even seem to believe in the platform where they have 95% dominance. How the mighty have fallen.

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ROMANTICGUY50

I agree. I am gonna get Windows 7 Soon and I don't intend to update to 8 cause of all the comments I have been reading here and other places.

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Microsoft kills Aero Glass

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The Windows 8 user interface is a mix of old and new. While we think that both the old desktop and the new Metro interface work well when considered individually, the combination of the two leaves something to be desired, thanks to, among other things, radically different looks-and-feels, and a dependence on hot corners that play poorly with multimonitor systems.

Microsoft is planning a bunch of changes to Windows 8 that directly address the concerns we had, changes that should greatly improve the Windows 8 user experience. The company has outlined them in a pair of posts on its Building Windows 8 blog: the Windows 8 desktop will sport a new, simpler, flatter theme, and the handling of multiple screens is going to be vastly enhanced with a couple of changes. The desktop will now contain special "traps" in the corners to stop the mouse sliding between screens, and the Start screen, charms bar, and task switcher will be invokable on every screen, not just the primary.

Strangely, the multimonitor post was originally published—briefly—last week, before being removed. It was reposted today.

No more Aero

The design aesthetic of the Metro environment is to be unapologetically digital: it eschews the simulations of real-world physical materials and constraints that most current interfaces feature, with their shaded pseudo-3D buttons, brushed metal texturing, and glassy window borders, in favor of something that is stripped back to its functional core. Buttons, for example are denoted by simple text labels or highly stylized iconography. Window chrome—title bars, borders, scrollbars, toolbars, and menus—is either removed entirely or hidden, appearing only when useful and relevant.

The Aero Glass theme—used in Windows Vista, Windows 7, and current prereleases of Windows 8—is typical for its time. The chrome is heavy and intrusive, with thick, glassy, translucent window borders, bulbous, raised buttons, and extensive use of color and ornamentation to subdivide and segregate content.

On their own, each concept was reasonable, but wedded together, they felt odd: two diametrically opposed ideas about what an interface should look like, and how it should work, crammed together in what we called an "awkward hybrid."

Windows 8's new theme, shown off only in a small screenshot, will take some steps toward reconciling these two UI viewpoints. The new theme will introduce a little more harmony between Metro and the desktop. The glass effect is gone, replaced by flat color. The window buttons are no longer bulky curved blobs in the corner of the window; they're now simple flat rectangles.

The Windows desktop still isn't Metro, and existing Windows applications are not going to use Metro any time soon; they still use resizable windows, toolbars, borders, and more. Software such as Zune, MetroTwit, and Device Center are still going to be truer representations of the Metro ideal than the most regular Windows software. But with the new theme, it looks as if the (almost spurious) stylistic differences between the two worlds will be addressed in some ways.

Microsoft notes that the forthcoming Release Preview, due in early June, will not include the new theme; it will be "hinted at," but the final look of the operating system will only ship with the retail release. New icons are also rumored to be a feature of the final theme.

Improved multimonitor support

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The red corners will have the mouse-catching barriers inserted. Barriers are one-sided, so moving from monitor 2 to the bottom of monitor 1 won't catch the mouse.

A significant minority of desktop Windows users—about 14-15 percent, by Microsoft's figures—use multimonitor systems. The current Windows 8 experience leaves a lot to be desired on multimonitor systems. Windows 8 uses hot corners for a number of fundamental operations, and while these hot corners present infinitely large targets on single-monitor systems (just fling the mouse into a screen corner and it'll automatically land on the right spot), they're closer to needles in a proverbial haystack on multimonitor systems, because an attempt to hit the magic pixel more often than not results in the mouse overshooting and moving onto an adjacent screen.

To make them considerably easier to hit, the hot corners in Windows 8 Release Preview will include small "traps:" 6 pixel barriers along the edge of the screen to make the target bigger and prevent overshooting. The Release Preview will also make every corner hot, allowing the task switcher, charms, and Start screen to be called up on any screen.

These refinements are small in themselves, but we've heard that they make a considerable positive improvement to the overall usability of the operating system. The gesture to bring out the charms still requires a little care and attention. To make the charms appear, the mouse is moved into the top or bottom right corner, and then moved in a straight line down or up, towards the middle of the right edge. While the corner traps make it easy to get the mouse into the right place to start the gesture, the movement straight up or down is still unconstrained, and the mouse can still spill out of the target area.

While Windows 8 won't ever escape its hybridity, the changes that Microsoft is making are both steps in the right direction. Will they be enough to make it feel like a coherent single operating system? That's a judgment that will have to wait for the final release.

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Windows 8’s Desktop Arrives with No Aero Glass

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One of the major interface changes that Microsoft will include in Windows 8 compared to the previous versions of its desktop platform is the lack of Aero Glass.

The company introduced this UI in Windows Vista and refined it in Windows 7 and in the first versions of Windows 8, but it will no longer pack it inside the next Windows 8 releases, it seems.

Jensen Harris, director of program management for Microsoft’s User Experience team, explains in a blog post that the idea is to bring the desktop closer to the Metro aesthetic, and that they flattened surfaces, removed reflections, and scaled back distracting gradients.

However, he also notes that Windows 8 would continue to use black text on light-colored chrome, as in Windows 7, so as to deliver increased compatibility with the existing platforms.

The main idea is to bring the content of the application in the center, through offering a chrome style that doesn’t distract, even if Windows 8 will move beyond Aero. Moreover, the goal was to maintain the visual compatibility with Windows 7, Harris notes.

According to Microsoft, Windows 8 will arrive with a variety of improvements brought to the visual appearance of the desktop, all falling in line with the new design language that the Metro UI proposes.

“We applied the principles of ‘clean and crisp’ when updating window and taskbar chrome. Gone are the glass and reflections. We squared off the edges of windows and the taskbar. We removed all the glows and gradients found on buttons within the chrome,” Harris explains.

“We made the appearance of windows crisper by removing unnecessary shadows and transparency. The default window chrome is white, creating an airy and premium look. The taskbar continues to blend into the desktop wallpaper, but appears less complicated overall.”

Most of the common controls (buttons, check boxes, sliders, and the Ribbon) come with an updated appearance, with squares and edges, flattened backgrounds, and tweaked colors to feel “modern and natural.”

Some of these changes will make it to Windows 8 Release Preview, which is due in a couple of weeks, while others will not be visible until the final flavor of the new platform is made available.

The upcoming iterations of the operating system will also bring a series of improvements in usability, specifically in areas such as swiping from edges and moving the mouse to the corner.

Those who use a mouse will find it more easily to target corners with it in the future releases, while the touch capabilities will be better in upcoming hardware, specifically designed for Windows 8.

Although many complained about the fact that Windows 8 is hard to use on traditional computers, Microsoft is confident that people will adapt, and that they will eventually find the platform great to use.

Overall, Windows 8 comes with a user experience that, in Microsoft’s vision, is a bet on the future of computing. The platform should play an important role in this, the Redmond-based software giant notes.

“We tried to break new ground in imagining how using a PC might become a fluid and enjoyable experience, how apps might work together to simplify the tasks you do every day, and how a single screen could bring together everything you love and care about into one always up-to-date place,” Harris adds.

Windows 8 was designed towards the convergence of tablets and lightweight laptops, but a full image over what it has to offer won’t be available until the first hardware from Microsoft’s partners arrive on shelves.

“Our vision for Windows 8 was to create a modern, fast and fluid user experience that defines the platform for the next decade of computing. One which upends the way conventional people think about tablets and laptops and the role of the devices they carry,” he concludes.

http://news.softpedi...ss-271093.shtml

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Bloody muppets!!! :o

The handful of folks who installed it would head-bang their way back to Window 7.

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Tweety.Abd

This is even worse than I thought.

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Threads merged.

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Damn, glass is a fantastic thing, and Windows 8 looks really poor, I don't know what they are thinking.

Cheers ;)

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