37 ms·

Designing Aero Snap (2009)

43 points by fomine3 5y ago

tentacleuno 5y ago
> In the scenarios below you’ll notice sequences of interactions that are fully written out. Sequences like: select the window, click the caption button, and then resize the window. This is interesting. I wonder if the caption button step is a leftover from previous design iterations, where you had to click a button on the title-bar to Snap a window...
dantondwa 5y ago
Seeing the beautiful, uncluttered, elegant simplicity of those screenshots makes me quite nostalgic. The lack of bullshit and the aesthetic coherence of that UI is really something I miss. The last decade has been disastrous for Windows, experience-wise. Wish we could have the Windows 7 experience with the core and security improvements of Windows 10!
- LAC-Tech 5y ago
  People joke about the year of linux on the desktop, but it remains the best place to create an environment you like. XFCE is a good starting point if you're an old school windows fan.
  - nyanpasu64 5y ago
    What's a good X11 or Wayland environment if I want a lightweight low-latency environment with Super+Number app launching and Super+arrow or drag snapping/tiling? Xfce with Docklike is X11-based, and gets me everything except for window snapping/tiling (when I try configuring the keyboard shortcuts, it doesn't work).
    - LAC-Tech 5y ago
      Openbox is super configurable, and I've definitely done similar things to what you just descrubed. Last time I tried swapping out xfwm with openbox it was pretty easy.
- DaiPlusPlus 5y ago
  > Seeing the beautiful, uncluttered, elegant simplicity of those screenshots makes me quite nostalgic You're nostalgic for a time that never existed. While I agree that Windows 7 was more coherent than Windows Vista and Windows XP, every single Windows release has had its associated "bullshit" (as you put it): * Windows 98: Advertising on the desktop (Active Channels) * Windows XP: "Fischer-Price" default UI skin and chunky, toy-like iconography. * Windows Vista: The whole OS release was maligned - and this site collected it all: https://web.archive.org/web/20110515033457/http://www.aerotaskforce.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20110515033457/http://www.aerota... * Windows 7: (Okay, I'll admit I can't immediately think of any major power-user criticism of Windows 7) * Windows 8: Start Screen, terrible store apps, the DWM cannot be disabled, etc. * Windows 10: Criticism of telemetry and data-collection, and how there's still some leftovers from Windows 3.11 or Windows 95 (I forget) lying around:
  - dm319 5y ago
    I'd say 7 was one of the best Windows, but even that had a lot of UI inconsistency and clutter. Still, better than most. Not as cohesive as my MATE desktop.
  - twic 5y ago
    > every single Windows release I don't see NT 4 on that list! NT 4, 2000, and 7 were all fairly low-bullshit, i think. You also haven't listed Me, which probably needs a whole comment to itself.
  - nyanpasu64 5y ago
    When I first got Windows 7, I was annoyed by it placing libraries and homegroups in Windows Explorer's sidebar. Though Windows 10 is worse, with 3D Objects, the OS shilling OneDrive, Edge, mandatory Microsoft accounts, etc.
- marcodiego 5y ago
  Although the screenshots are indeed uncluttered, they're definitely not simple. There are many clickable items, unnecessarily large windows with wasted empty space, icons that are hard to read unless you have experience with them redundant information, rarely used bars and text fields... Windows UI became just too busy starting with xp. The last sober windows UI was windows 2000.
mattowen_uk 5y ago
Reading to the bottom, I notice that they talk about a cursor effect (light glow) when you've hit the snap trigger. I never noticed this on Windows 7, and it's definitely not in Windows 10 - did it ever make it into production?
- dantondwa 5y ago
  It is there on Windows 7 and even 10 (just tested it to be sure)! When you drag a window to the side, a sort of circle/drop effect appears around the cursor. I think this is what they are referring to, but I might be mistaken.
  - ygra 5y ago
    That's what's also shown in the screenshot, so I'm pretty sure that's what they're referring to and the feature has always been there, indeed.
    - kevingadd 5y ago
      It's possible the effect won't show up if you have special effects turned off in the windows performance settings ("adjust the appearance and performance of Windows")
      - mattowen_uk 5y ago
        AH I do! Forgot about that.
ginko 5y ago
Windows 7 was really when Microsoft took a bunch of features that had been in Linux display managers for ages (tiling, window snapping) and added them to their own OS.
- nguyenkien 5y ago
  I don't think Microsoft copy Snap from Linux. I use Ubuntu 8.10, and it doesn't have snap, I do try KDE4 and it also not has anything like Snap
  - ginko 5y ago
    XFCE had it for ages
    - nguyenkien 5y ago
      What ages we talk about? Because Windows 7 also aged.
      - ginko 5y ago
        Like 2000 and earlier ages: https://web.archive.org/web/20000619002010/http://www.xfce.org/ https://web.archive.org/web/20000619002010/http://www.xfce.o...
        nguyenkien 5y ago
        The "Windows snapping" in early Xfce version mean to stick the windows together or with the screen edge (Doesn't resize the window). It doesn't work like the snap on Windows 7. The name is similar, but the function is different. This is a patch for Xfwm4 to make it work like Windows 7 (2012) https://launchpad.net/~fossfreedom/+archive/ubuntu/xfwm4 https://launchpad.net/~fossfreedom/+archive/ubuntu/xfwm4
    - marcodiego 5y ago
      Actually me and friends made fun of windows user when windows 7 was released. Most of those effects were things we had on compiz for a few years but with MUCH more power.
captainmuon 5y ago
The Windows UI team did a lot of great work around this time. I remember reading a post on the Windows Shell blog where they explained an ingenious they made to explorer. They added some margin on the left hand side of the detailed listview. Try it out and select a file, there is a blank space of about 15 pixels to the left of the row. This is so that you always have space to start a rubberband selection, even if the window is full with files. (You may also start it over the greyed out columns, but if you start on the name column, you start dragging the file instead.) I wonder if anybody archived the blog post somewhere? I cannot find it in archive.org unfortunately. I've never seen this feature implemented anywhere else (except in an unpublished Gtk app of mine where it was a pain to implement :-)).
- jeroenhd 5y ago
  This is a feature I often miss on many Linux file explorers. In Windows, there's always a way to right click on an empty area to get the context menu that allows you to create a new file. On my Linux file managers, you have to scroll to the bottom or zoom out if the amount of files lines up exactly with what could theoretically fit. It's the little bits of attention to detail that really made me appreciate the Windows 7 UI.
- captainmuon 5y ago
  For future reference, here is the blog (called Shell: revealed): https://web.archive.org/web/20071015032920/http://shellrevealed.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20071015032920/http://shellrevea... There is a post about the inconsistent wizard titlebars in Vista and 7, for example. (There is a "back" button in the top left, but there is space above it. The reason is they didn't want to or couldn't do ownerdraw stuff on the titlebar, and then later stuck with it. The original plan was to have it look like in the Windows Vista/7 installer, where the back button is vertically centered in the titlebar). https://web.archive.org/web/20070206051159/http://shellrevealed.com:80/blogs/shellblog/archive/2006/09/25/Why-is-the-Aero-Wizard-title-bar-so-big_3F00_.aspx https://web.archive.org/web/20070206051159/http://shellrevea...
yarcob 5y ago
Coming from macOS, I have to say that this feature is extremely neat. This feature alone makes working with multiple windows on a large display so much nicer on Windows than on Mac. On the Mac you have all those different modes — full screen, side by side, resize — and confusing ways to trigger the modes: click green button, alt click green button, drag to top of screen and wait, etc. The Aero Snap feature was something I immediately understood when I started using Windows, and I learned about it just from the feedback you get when you drag a window to the side. You can see that they tested it with real users. It feels like Apple didn't test their feature with real users at all. It's bad on the desktop, but it's even worse on iPad — I only ever triggered the multi-tasking features accidentally and ended up confused what was going on.
- nicoburns 5y ago
  There's a $0.99 app for macOS called Magnet that implements aero snap like functionality. I'd highly recommend.
  - razodactyl 5y ago
    Additionally an app called Spectacle for keyboard accelerated window management. I found that once I got used to the keyboard shortcuts, my window management on macOS became second nature. https://www.spectacleapp.com/ https://www.spectacleapp.com/
    - jibbers 5y ago
      I think Rectangle is the spiritual successor to Spectacle. https://rectangleapp.com https://rectangleapp.com
      - JoBrad 5y ago
        That developer has some really cool apps. Just switched to macOS from Windows and already discovered there’s no way to mimic middle click on the touchpad. This person has an app for that!
dm319 5y ago
With ultrawide displays we need an update of this paradigm. Maybe we need to introduce the concept of areas on a display that partially take over the role of a physical screen. For starters I have just adjusted my MATE desktop to vertically maximise the window on double clicking the titlebar.
- kroltan 5y ago
  I use Windows, and there's a third-party application called WindowGrid which is pretty cool to use. It splits your screen space into a configurably dense grid (I use it at 16x9 cells, for example, so they're roughly square), and you can position windows on it using mouse gestures. Start dragging a window, move your mouse to where you want one of the corners to be, hold right click, and drag it where you want it to fit to. It's basically a manual tiling WM, but it's quite useful. Here's a tiny example of the usage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ziWVGyjwdw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ziWVGyjwdw
- captainmuon 5y ago
  Check out the Windows 10 PowerToys https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys With it you can hold Shift when moving a window, and the window will snap to a predefined grid. There are also other nice tools, like a Color picker when you press Win+C.
  - adamrezich 5y ago
    this changed my life with my three-monitor setup (1 portrait, 2 landscape) at work when I discovered it a few months ago! I can't imagine going back to life without it now, it's so useful.
- jeroenhd 5y ago
  On Linux there are a whole bunch of tiling window managers that do this. i3 is probably the most famous one. I use Pop_OS shell on Manjaro to combine GNOME and tiled windows (with sadly very limited customizability on window positioning) which works quite well; it's tiling windows without the need to remember a billion system specific shortcuts. On Windows you now have FancyZones, part of the Windows power pack thing Microsoft provides on Github, which allows you to draw areas you can snap windows into. Windows 11 even has some common window layouts built right in. More traditional Linux desktops (like MATE) will probably try to avoid this paradigm, as they're more about sticking to what works than experimenting with new stuff. However, I think I see a trend where some sort of tiling is becoming part of more and more desktop environments.

43 points by fomine3 5y ago

> In the scenarios below you’ll notice sequences of interactions that are fully written out. Sequences like: select the window, click the caption button, and then resize the window. This is interesting. I wonder if the caption button step is a leftover from previous design iterations, where you had to click a button on the title-bar to Snap a window...

dantondwa 5y ago

Seeing the beautiful, uncluttered, elegant simplicity of those screenshots makes me quite nostalgic. The lack of bullshit and the aesthetic coherence of that UI is really something I miss. The last decade has been disastrous for Windows, experience-wise. Wish we could have the Windows 7 experience with the core and security improvements of Windows 10!

LAC-Tech 5y ago
People joke about the year of linux on the desktop, but it remains the best place to create an environment you like. XFCE is a good starting point if you're an old school windows fan.
- nyanpasu64 5y ago
  What's a good X11 or Wayland environment if I want a lightweight low-latency environment with Super+Number app launching and Super+arrow or drag snapping/tiling? Xfce with Docklike is X11-based, and gets me everything except for window snapping/tiling (when I try configuring the keyboard shortcuts, it doesn't work).
  - LAC-Tech 5y ago
    Openbox is super configurable, and I've definitely done similar things to what you just descrubed. Last time I tried swapping out xfwm with openbox it was pretty easy.
DaiPlusPlus 5y ago
> Seeing the beautiful, uncluttered, elegant simplicity of those screenshots makes me quite nostalgic You're nostalgic for a time that never existed. While I agree that Windows 7 was more coherent than Windows Vista and Windows XP, every single Windows release has had its associated "bullshit" (as you put it): * Windows 98: Advertising on the desktop (Active Channels) * Windows XP: "Fischer-Price" default UI skin and chunky, toy-like iconography. * Windows Vista: The whole OS release was maligned - and this site collected it all: https://web.archive.org/web/20110515033457/http://www.aerotaskforce.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20110515033457/http://www.aerota... * Windows 7: (Okay, I'll admit I can't immediately think of any major power-user criticism of Windows 7) * Windows 8: Start Screen, terrible store apps, the DWM cannot be disabled, etc. * Windows 10: Criticism of telemetry and data-collection, and how there's still some leftovers from Windows 3.11 or Windows 95 (I forget) lying around:
- dm319 5y ago
  I'd say 7 was one of the best Windows, but even that had a lot of UI inconsistency and clutter. Still, better than most. Not as cohesive as my MATE desktop.
- twic 5y ago
  > every single Windows release I don't see NT 4 on that list! NT 4, 2000, and 7 were all fairly low-bullshit, i think. You also haven't listed Me, which probably needs a whole comment to itself.
- nyanpasu64 5y ago
  When I first got Windows 7, I was annoyed by it placing libraries and homegroups in Windows Explorer's sidebar. Though Windows 10 is worse, with 3D Objects, the OS shilling OneDrive, Edge, mandatory Microsoft accounts, etc.
marcodiego 5y ago
Although the screenshots are indeed uncluttered, they're definitely not simple. There are many clickable items, unnecessarily large windows with wasted empty space, icons that are hard to read unless you have experience with them redundant information, rarely used bars and text fields... Windows UI became just too busy starting with xp. The last sober windows UI was windows 2000.

mattowen_uk 5y ago

Reading to the bottom, I notice that they talk about a cursor effect (light glow) when you've hit the snap trigger. I never noticed this on Windows 7, and it's definitely not in Windows 10 - did it ever make it into production?

dantondwa 5y ago
It is there on Windows 7 and even 10 (just tested it to be sure)! When you drag a window to the side, a sort of circle/drop effect appears around the cursor. I think this is what they are referring to, but I might be mistaken.
- ygra 5y ago
  That's what's also shown in the screenshot, so I'm pretty sure that's what they're referring to and the feature has always been there, indeed.
  - kevingadd 5y ago
    It's possible the effect won't show up if you have special effects turned off in the windows performance settings ("adjust the appearance and performance of Windows")
    - mattowen_uk 5y ago
      AH I do! Forgot about that.

ginko 5y ago

Windows 7 was really when Microsoft took a bunch of features that had been in Linux display managers for ages (tiling, window snapping) and added them to their own OS.

nguyenkien 5y ago
I don't think Microsoft copy Snap from Linux. I use Ubuntu 8.10, and it doesn't have snap, I do try KDE4 and it also not has anything like Snap
- ginko 5y ago
  XFCE had it for ages
  - nguyenkien 5y ago
    What ages we talk about? Because Windows 7 also aged.
    - ginko 5y ago
      Like 2000 and earlier ages: https://web.archive.org/web/20000619002010/http://www.xfce.org/ https://web.archive.org/web/20000619002010/http://www.xfce.o...
      - nguyenkien 5y ago
        The "Windows snapping" in early Xfce version mean to stick the windows together or with the screen edge (Doesn't resize the window). It doesn't work like the snap on Windows 7. The name is similar, but the function is different. This is a patch for Xfwm4 to make it work like Windows 7 (2012) https://launchpad.net/~fossfreedom/+archive/ubuntu/xfwm4 https://launchpad.net/~fossfreedom/+archive/ubuntu/xfwm4
  - marcodiego 5y ago
    Actually me and friends made fun of windows user when windows 7 was released. Most of those effects were things we had on compiz for a few years but with MUCH more power.

captainmuon 5y ago

The Windows UI team did a lot of great work around this time. I remember reading a post on the Windows Shell blog where they explained an ingenious they made to explorer. They added some margin on the left hand side of the detailed listview. Try it out and select a file, there is a blank space of about 15 pixels to the left of the row. This is so that you always have space to start a rubberband selection, even if the window is full with files. (You may also start it over the greyed out columns, but if you start on the name column, you start dragging the file instead.) I wonder if anybody archived the blog post somewhere? I cannot find it in archive.org unfortunately. I've never seen this feature implemented anywhere else (except in an unpublished Gtk app of mine where it was a pain to implement :-)).

jeroenhd 5y ago
This is a feature I often miss on many Linux file explorers. In Windows, there's always a way to right click on an empty area to get the context menu that allows you to create a new file. On my Linux file managers, you have to scroll to the bottom or zoom out if the amount of files lines up exactly with what could theoretically fit. It's the little bits of attention to detail that really made me appreciate the Windows 7 UI.
captainmuon 5y ago
For future reference, here is the blog (called Shell: revealed): https://web.archive.org/web/20071015032920/http://shellrevealed.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20071015032920/http://shellrevea... There is a post about the inconsistent wizard titlebars in Vista and 7, for example. (There is a "back" button in the top left, but there is space above it. The reason is they didn't want to or couldn't do ownerdraw stuff on the titlebar, and then later stuck with it. The original plan was to have it look like in the Windows Vista/7 installer, where the back button is vertically centered in the titlebar). https://web.archive.org/web/20070206051159/http://shellrevealed.com:80/blogs/shellblog/archive/2006/09/25/Why-is-the-Aero-Wizard-title-bar-so-big_3F00_.aspx https://web.archive.org/web/20070206051159/http://shellrevea...

yarcob 5y ago

Coming from macOS, I have to say that this feature is extremely neat. This feature alone makes working with multiple windows on a large display so much nicer on Windows than on Mac. On the Mac you have all those different modes — full screen, side by side, resize — and confusing ways to trigger the modes: click green button, alt click green button, drag to top of screen and wait, etc. The Aero Snap feature was something I immediately understood when I started using Windows, and I learned about it just from the feedback you get when you drag a window to the side. You can see that they tested it with real users. It feels like Apple didn't test their feature with real users at all. It's bad on the desktop, but it's even worse on iPad — I only ever triggered the multi-tasking features accidentally and ended up confused what was going on.

nicoburns 5y ago
There's a $0.99 app for macOS called Magnet that implements aero snap like functionality. I'd highly recommend.
- razodactyl 5y ago
  Additionally an app called Spectacle for keyboard accelerated window management. I found that once I got used to the keyboard shortcuts, my window management on macOS became second nature. https://www.spectacleapp.com/ https://www.spectacleapp.com/
  - jibbers 5y ago
    I think Rectangle is the spiritual successor to Spectacle. https://rectangleapp.com https://rectangleapp.com
    - JoBrad 5y ago
      That developer has some really cool apps. Just switched to macOS from Windows and already discovered there’s no way to mimic middle click on the touchpad. This person has an app for that!

dm319 5y ago

With ultrawide displays we need an update of this paradigm. Maybe we need to introduce the concept of areas on a display that partially take over the role of a physical screen. For starters I have just adjusted my MATE desktop to vertically maximise the window on double clicking the titlebar.

kroltan 5y ago
I use Windows, and there's a third-party application called WindowGrid which is pretty cool to use. It splits your screen space into a configurably dense grid (I use it at 16x9 cells, for example, so they're roughly square), and you can position windows on it using mouse gestures. Start dragging a window, move your mouse to where you want one of the corners to be, hold right click, and drag it where you want it to fit to. It's basically a manual tiling WM, but it's quite useful. Here's a tiny example of the usage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ziWVGyjwdw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ziWVGyjwdw
captainmuon 5y ago
Check out the Windows 10 PowerToys https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys With it you can hold Shift when moving a window, and the window will snap to a predefined grid. There are also other nice tools, like a Color picker when you press Win+C.
- adamrezich 5y ago
  this changed my life with my three-monitor setup (1 portrait, 2 landscape) at work when I discovered it a few months ago! I can't imagine going back to life without it now, it's so useful.
jeroenhd 5y ago
On Linux there are a whole bunch of tiling window managers that do this. i3 is probably the most famous one. I use Pop_OS shell on Manjaro to combine GNOME and tiled windows (with sadly very limited customizability on window positioning) which works quite well; it's tiling windows without the need to remember a billion system specific shortcuts. On Windows you now have FancyZones, part of the Windows power pack thing Microsoft provides on Github, which allows you to draw areas you can snap windows into. Windows 11 even has some common window layouts built right in. More traditional Linux desktops (like MATE) will probably try to avoid this paradigm, as they're more about sticking to what works than experimenting with new stuff. However, I think I see a trend where some sort of tiling is becoming part of more and more desktop environments.