6 ms·

I don't know. From that demo, I really doubt that the tiled interface will ever provide enough functionality for these apps to be really useful or as full-featu

by pilif 15y ago

I don't know. From that demo, I really doubt that the tiled interface will ever provide enough functionality for these apps to be really useful or as full-featured as their real desktop counterparts. I see this tile-thingy more as an additional overview-shell, but the real work will remain to be done in the classic apps. This is more comparable to the Mac Dashboard widgets than to a complete UI redesign. As such, I see no problem in doing these widgets in HTML/JS which is what we have used ever since. The "real" applications will still be done in whatever technology is available under windows. Of course, everything is just speculation. I just know that I'm sure as hell never going to use a touch interface on my desktop PC nor drag around tiles with the mouse trying to fake enough inertia to get the scrolling to go.

thom 15y ago
I think the comparison to the Mac Dashboard is a very good one. With the introduction of SideShow in Vista, Microsoft showed an interest in simple at-a-glance apps, and it seems like they want to push that interaction model for 'tablet mode', while still leaving everything in place for 'desktop mode'.
- rbanffy 15y ago
  I would think more on the lines of a cross between Dashboard widgets and full-screen apps.
illumin8 15y ago
I think you are onto something here. I think the tiled interface will be very similar to the Windows Media Center shell. It's a specialized interface for touch, just like WMC is a specialized interface for couch surfing. In the end it's not going to be very useful for end users unless Microsoft really bites the bullet and forces developers to migrate to the tiled interface, en mass. Apple did that with iOS, basically forcing developers to create entirely new apps, because the input method of touch was so drastically different that apps requiring mouse-level precision would never work. Microsoft will never do that, so instead they need to fragment their OS into two interfaces, touch and classic. I fear a Windows 8 tablet will be the worst of both worlds. It will need enough horsepower to run "classic mode" with all of the baggage that brings, yet most tablet users are just doing simple media consumption so they can stay in tiled mode most of the time. In the end you bring a product to market that costs $1500, has a quad core CPU and 4GB of RAM, and gets 4 hours of battery life - not to mention it weighs 3 pounds. Basically you end up with the current crop of Windows tablets. A stylus will probably be included just to make classic mode usable. I'm not saying there isn't a market for a powerful tablet that can run Windows 8 in classic mode, but those tablets have been around for years and they haven't gotten mass market traction for a reason.
- kenjackson 15y ago
  Actually MS directly addressed the horsepower aspect. Remember they're going to have this running on ARM. I've used Win7 for consumption scenarios on a $250 netbook - worked like a champ.
- beaumartinez 15y ago
  > It will need enough horsepower to run "classic mode" with all of the baggage that brings. Microsoft managed to squeeze Windows 7 (albeit crippled) onto netbooks; I'm hoping they'd see the use case you're describing and make Windows 8 tablet-friendly (which at least now looks touch-friendly). (Microsoft demoed Windows 7 on ARM, and AFAIK ARM chips aren't that powerful―there's hope yet.)
- eropple 15y ago
  At least in Windows-land, I really don't see the point in a touch OS. I've played with Lenovo X-series tablets, and I love the older ones (Wacom-based) and can't stand the touch ones. But I love being able to run Photoshop and draw in my lap, so I'm kinda biased.
- recoiledsnake 15y ago
  Have you seen the demo hardware?
jodoherty 15y ago
I agree. For most existing users, especially power users, this will probably be as insignificant on the desktop as Active Desktop and Active Channel were in Windows 98 or maybe desktop gadgets in Windows Vista. I mean, who even remembers that stuff? For some users like my dad, the tiled interface with a touch screen should make it easier to use the computer. He doesn't use them enough to learn the whole stacks of windows metaphor and all the operations involved with it, but he can pick up an iPad and use it just fine. The real significance I see here is that Windows mobile developers with just the skills of a web developer can now target desktop and tablet users fairly easily with the same exact code and a similar UI. If Microsoft releases their own App store for Windows 8, then that provides a unified platform for developers to sell the same product to every kind of Windows user from kids with smartphones to grandparents with a desktop PC. And if the tiled interface takes off with the not so computer-literate, there'll be a great new demand for applications that fit into it's metaphors to prevent the jarring experience of being thrust back into a classic Windows-like environment, kind of like the demand for GUI applications after Windows supplanted MS-DOS.
StrawberryFrog 15y ago
The argument that "xyz on the web is a toy and will never be fast enough / xyz in html,css,javascript will never provide enough functionality to be really useful or as full-featured as their 'real' desktop counterparts" is an argument that has been consistently wrong, or at least become wrong over time in every case. Why should the next few years be any different?
- rbranson 15y ago
  ^^^ pretty much. Full featured applications are and have been being built with what is basically 10 year old web technology. Simultaneously, users are coming to the realization that full featured isn't what they need. Thanks to the drastically lower cost of distributing software over the web, instead of monolithic, multi-purpose software from giant companies, small shops are building single-purpose applications that target niche markets. User experience is better, and costs are lower. Consumers and the economy as a whole wins. If I had built my career on client-based Windows development, I'd be getting out of that burning building as fast as possible.
  - StrawberryFrog 15y ago
    instead of monolithic, multi-purpose software from giant companies I'm not so sure: amazon.com seems to fit that description fairly well.
- bphogan 15y ago
  Agree 100%, but also would like to add that the only reason we can't develop things faster, better, and more performant is that so many companies have been focused on making their own tools faster and more performant. If Microsoft can design something as cool as F#, they can make a responsive HTML + JS rendering engine. They just haven't put their money there.
  - StrawberryFrog 15y ago
    They're certainly turning their gaze onto it. IE9 and the IE10 previews show this.
tomlin 15y ago
If IE10 supports hardware acceleration, CSS timelines, and a strong JS engine there is no reason why this couldn't work. JS owes some of its process problems to lower priority in the typical OS. What if JS had higher priority and it's own dedicated thread of CPU? .NET developers shouldn't fear the future. They should be happy that, for once, their ecosystem may see a growth that actually works for them.
- kenjackson 15y ago
  It would cool if you could style the whole UI with CSS.
  - luffy 15y ago
    But what would that CSS end up looking like? There will be a lot of proprietary extensions (at least their should be) and a lot of quixotic classes and element id's that you'd probably have to work around. I envision something like Office's awful "open" format - the same people are driving this bus. I've done the MS HTML/JS client route for a long time - I've set up a lot of gadgets, and InfoPath(!) has an HTML/XML/JS programming model. Truth be told this model is actually really painful to work with if all you have is HTML/JS. Keep in mind that the "web" isn't just HTML. It's Perl, Rails, Json, JS, Google, Wikipedia, RSS, etc. Now, if these tiles are something akin to mini-web browsers, where you can use the full power of the web & web technologies (is this what they are actually saying?), that is a different story.
    - kenjackson 15y ago
      The difference though is if the intent is for the markup to be styled, it will be written differently. For example, take a look at the WPF built-in controls. Those are written in very clean XAML. Easy to read, style, and modify. I'm sure they could have made it difficult, but their intent was that you'd modify the built-in controls. If they want to do this with the UI, they could do it. The theming you could do with this could be incredible. I doubt this is something they're going to do for V1 (if ever), but I can dream.
adolfojp 15y ago
Mac Dashboard widgets are the equivalent to Gadgets on Windows. And Windows gadgets are already made with html and js. I don't see why anyone was surprised to see Microsoft continue with this tradition. And I don't know how anyone who has a programming background can think that HTML5 will replace the incredibly large and rich .NET ecosystem. But it makes good sensationalistic news so everyone is freaking out about it.
- asadotzler 15y ago
  You're seriously suggesting that the .Net ecosystem is bigger than the Web ecosystem?
  - adolfojp 15y ago
    You're taking the word ecosystem out of context. 1. I am not comparing .NET to the web. That comparison is impossible. The web is an abstract entity that .NET is part of and .NET is a software framework. 2. I am comparing .NET to HTML5 and JavaScript. 3. The capabilities of.NET are far greater by an absurd margin than the capabilities of HTML5 and JavaScript for Windows application development.
nchlswu 15y ago
The tile interface is definitely a shell, right now. It's a stepping stone for Microsoft to step into a post-desktop world. I've read a lot of commentary that is very impressed with the tiles and just as much commentary writing it off as something that's not enough and not appropriate for Microsoft to make a step and just put a new pretty face on Windows. To me, I see it as a thought out stepping stone to reaching the post-desktop era that reaches a pretty good compromise. I don't think many people have to be worried about this new transition, but that's my own speculation - you'd have to wait for MS's official word.
bonch 15y ago
> I see this tile-thingy more as an additional overview-shell, but the real work will remain to be done in the classic apps. This is more comparable to the Mac Dashboard widgets than to a complete UI redesign. Microsoft hasn't been portraying the new shell that way. It seems to be where the first-class Windows 8 applications will reside, with the icky old legacy applications relegated to the classic desktop.
teyc 15y ago
I just know that I'm sure as hell never going to use a touch interface on my desktop PC Looking into the future, a dual use tablet like the Asus tablet with a keyboard portends a new reality that execs don't like lugging laptops to meetings. Have you tried to balance an open laptop, a mouse, power supply on top of folders? There's no hand left for that cup of coffee.

by pilif 15y ago

thom 15y ago

I think the comparison to the Mac Dashboard is a very good one. With the introduction of SideShow in Vista, Microsoft showed an interest in simple at-a-glance apps, and it seems like they want to push that interaction model for 'tablet mode', while still leaving everything in place for 'desktop mode'.

rbanffy 15y ago
I would think more on the lines of a cross between Dashboard widgets and full-screen apps.

illumin8 15y ago

I think you are onto something here. I think the tiled interface will be very similar to the Windows Media Center shell. It's a specialized interface for touch, just like WMC is a specialized interface for couch surfing. In the end it's not going to be very useful for end users unless Microsoft really bites the bullet and forces developers to migrate to the tiled interface, en mass. Apple did that with iOS, basically forcing developers to create entirely new apps, because the input method of touch was so drastically different that apps requiring mouse-level precision would never work. Microsoft will never do that, so instead they need to fragment their OS into two interfaces, touch and classic. I fear a Windows 8 tablet will be the worst of both worlds. It will need enough horsepower to run "classic mode" with all of the baggage that brings, yet most tablet users are just doing simple media consumption so they can stay in tiled mode most of the time. In the end you bring a product to market that costs $1500, has a quad core CPU and 4GB of RAM, and gets 4 hours of battery life - not to mention it weighs 3 pounds. Basically you end up with the current crop of Windows tablets. A stylus will probably be included just to make classic mode usable. I'm not saying there isn't a market for a powerful tablet that can run Windows 8 in classic mode, but those tablets have been around for years and they haven't gotten mass market traction for a reason.

kenjackson 15y ago
Actually MS directly addressed the horsepower aspect. Remember they're going to have this running on ARM. I've used Win7 for consumption scenarios on a $250 netbook - worked like a champ.
beaumartinez 15y ago
> It will need enough horsepower to run "classic mode" with all of the baggage that brings. Microsoft managed to squeeze Windows 7 (albeit crippled) onto netbooks; I'm hoping they'd see the use case you're describing and make Windows 8 tablet-friendly (which at least now looks touch-friendly). (Microsoft demoed Windows 7 on ARM, and AFAIK ARM chips aren't that powerful―there's hope yet.)
eropple 15y ago
At least in Windows-land, I really don't see the point in a touch OS. I've played with Lenovo X-series tablets, and I love the older ones (Wacom-based) and can't stand the touch ones. But I love being able to run Photoshop and draw in my lap, so I'm kinda biased.
recoiledsnake 15y ago
Have you seen the demo hardware?

jodoherty 15y ago

I agree. For most existing users, especially power users, this will probably be as insignificant on the desktop as Active Desktop and Active Channel were in Windows 98 or maybe desktop gadgets in Windows Vista. I mean, who even remembers that stuff? For some users like my dad, the tiled interface with a touch screen should make it easier to use the computer. He doesn't use them enough to learn the whole stacks of windows metaphor and all the operations involved with it, but he can pick up an iPad and use it just fine. The real significance I see here is that Windows mobile developers with just the skills of a web developer can now target desktop and tablet users fairly easily with the same exact code and a similar UI. If Microsoft releases their own App store for Windows 8, then that provides a unified platform for developers to sell the same product to every kind of Windows user from kids with smartphones to grandparents with a desktop PC. And if the tiled interface takes off with the not so computer-literate, there'll be a great new demand for applications that fit into it's metaphors to prevent the jarring experience of being thrust back into a classic Windows-like environment, kind of like the demand for GUI applications after Windows supplanted MS-DOS.

StrawberryFrog 15y ago

The argument that "xyz on the web is a toy and will never be fast enough / xyz in html,css,javascript will never provide enough functionality to be really useful or as full-featured as their 'real' desktop counterparts" is an argument that has been consistently wrong, or at least become wrong over time in every case. Why should the next few years be any different?

rbranson 15y ago
^^^ pretty much. Full featured applications are and have been being built with what is basically 10 year old web technology. Simultaneously, users are coming to the realization that full featured isn't what they need. Thanks to the drastically lower cost of distributing software over the web, instead of monolithic, multi-purpose software from giant companies, small shops are building single-purpose applications that target niche markets. User experience is better, and costs are lower. Consumers and the economy as a whole wins. If I had built my career on client-based Windows development, I'd be getting out of that burning building as fast as possible.
- StrawberryFrog 15y ago
  instead of monolithic, multi-purpose software from giant companies I'm not so sure: amazon.com seems to fit that description fairly well.
bphogan 15y ago
Agree 100%, but also would like to add that the only reason we can't develop things faster, better, and more performant is that so many companies have been focused on making their own tools faster and more performant. If Microsoft can design something as cool as F#, they can make a responsive HTML + JS rendering engine. They just haven't put their money there.
- StrawberryFrog 15y ago
  They're certainly turning their gaze onto it. IE9 and the IE10 previews show this.

tomlin 15y ago

If IE10 supports hardware acceleration, CSS timelines, and a strong JS engine there is no reason why this couldn't work. JS owes some of its process problems to lower priority in the typical OS. What if JS had higher priority and it's own dedicated thread of CPU? .NET developers shouldn't fear the future. They should be happy that, for once, their ecosystem may see a growth that actually works for them.

kenjackson 15y ago
It would cool if you could style the whole UI with CSS.
- luffy 15y ago
  But what would that CSS end up looking like? There will be a lot of proprietary extensions (at least their should be) and a lot of quixotic classes and element id's that you'd probably have to work around. I envision something like Office's awful "open" format - the same people are driving this bus. I've done the MS HTML/JS client route for a long time - I've set up a lot of gadgets, and InfoPath(!) has an HTML/XML/JS programming model. Truth be told this model is actually really painful to work with if all you have is HTML/JS. Keep in mind that the "web" isn't just HTML. It's Perl, Rails, Json, JS, Google, Wikipedia, RSS, etc. Now, if these tiles are something akin to mini-web browsers, where you can use the full power of the web & web technologies (is this what they are actually saying?), that is a different story.
  - kenjackson 15y ago
    The difference though is if the intent is for the markup to be styled, it will be written differently. For example, take a look at the WPF built-in controls. Those are written in very clean XAML. Easy to read, style, and modify. I'm sure they could have made it difficult, but their intent was that you'd modify the built-in controls. If they want to do this with the UI, they could do it. The theming you could do with this could be incredible. I doubt this is something they're going to do for V1 (if ever), but I can dream.

adolfojp 15y ago

Mac Dashboard widgets are the equivalent to Gadgets on Windows. And Windows gadgets are already made with html and js. I don't see why anyone was surprised to see Microsoft continue with this tradition. And I don't know how anyone who has a programming background can think that HTML5 will replace the incredibly large and rich .NET ecosystem. But it makes good sensationalistic news so everyone is freaking out about it.

asadotzler 15y ago
You're seriously suggesting that the .Net ecosystem is bigger than the Web ecosystem?
- adolfojp 15y ago
  You're taking the word ecosystem out of context. 1. I am not comparing .NET to the web. That comparison is impossible. The web is an abstract entity that .NET is part of and .NET is a software framework. 2. I am comparing .NET to HTML5 and JavaScript. 3. The capabilities of.NET are far greater by an absurd margin than the capabilities of HTML5 and JavaScript for Windows application development.

nchlswu 15y ago

The tile interface is definitely a shell, right now. It's a stepping stone for Microsoft to step into a post-desktop world. I've read a lot of commentary that is very impressed with the tiles and just as much commentary writing it off as something that's not enough and not appropriate for Microsoft to make a step and just put a new pretty face on Windows. To me, I see it as a thought out stepping stone to reaching the post-desktop era that reaches a pretty good compromise. I don't think many people have to be worried about this new transition, but that's my own speculation - you'd have to wait for MS's official word.

bonch 15y ago

> I see this tile-thingy more as an additional overview-shell, but the real work will remain to be done in the classic apps. This is more comparable to the Mac Dashboard widgets than to a complete UI redesign. Microsoft hasn't been portraying the new shell that way. It seems to be where the first-class Windows 8 applications will reside, with the icky old legacy applications relegated to the classic desktop.

teyc 15y ago

I just know that I'm sure as hell never going to use a touch interface on my desktop PC Looking into the future, a dual use tablet like the Asus tablet with a keyboard portends a new reality that execs don't like lugging laptops to meetings. Have you tried to balance an open laptop, a mouse, power supply on top of folders? There's no hand left for that cup of coffee.