4 ms·

You don't see a benefit to having a unified experience between Laptop, Tablet and Phone? And Xbox? By standardising the interface, you standardise the environm

You don't see a benefit to having a unified experience between Laptop, Tablet and Phone? And Xbox? By standardising the interface, you standardise the environment and interactions for apps. Metro apps for a Win 8 phone will also run on Win 8 tablets and laptops. I think its a pretty brave decision from Microsoft, and it may well pay off massively.

silverbax88 14y ago
It's a horribly bad decision. Why would you need a unified experience between devices with vastly different interaction and input scenarios? Desktops make up 80% of user interaction, but Microsoft is focusing on the 20% who use mobile or tablet. A small handheld device which is used primarily for content consumption would be best served with a Win 8 style UI, but for the desktop, it makes working much more difficult - people work at desktop PCs in a vastly different way.
- drharris 14y ago
  I've been using Win 8 on the desktop for almost a year, and I have no need for a start button/menu/etc. The Metro (er, Modern UI) paradigm works as well with a mouse as it does with touch. The days of touchless screens are coming to an end; in the near future most laptops and desktop monitors will all be touch-ready. I find most of the FUD about the new paradigm is coming from people who haven't even used it. Use it for a month; you'll find it gets out of your way and lets you work just fine.
Aardwolf 14y ago
No it will not pay off, do you want Ferrari's to have a crappy engine to deliver a unified experience between city cars and race cars? No you don't. And for user interfaces it's the same. A desktop computer provides a lot more space than a mobile device, so just because mobile devices exist, is no reason to suddenly make a design meant for small screens on the big screen with comfortable input devices.
- codeulike 14y ago
  To draw on your Ferrari analogy: Ferrari market to a tiny percentage of the car driving consumers as a whole. So of course that would make no sense. Also, Ferrari drivers don't tend to also drive Minis, so why have a unified experience. PC-users and Tablet-users and Phone-users are all huge, mainstream, overlapping markets. I can see there might be some trade offs and problems with unifying experience - which is why I said this is a brave move by Microsoft. But you're basically bringing up one of the trade offs (screen size) and using that to write off the whole initiative.
ANTSANTS 14y ago
This "we'll control the whole ecosystem by standardizing the interface!" scheme honestly sounds about as ridiculous to me as "it's a 5 billion dollar market, so if we take just 1% of it, we'll be rich!" It doesn't take a genius to understand that there are significant differences in interacting with a computer by touching a tiny screen held up to one's face, touching a larger screen held slightly farther away, pointing a mouse around and typing on a keyboard, and selecting menu items with a d-pad while looking at a screen that is several feet away. If you deliberately try to use the same interface across each of those interfaces, you're just going to get an unusable mess. It's amazing that some of the same people that understand the idea that "you need a responsive design for your website because no one wants to hunt for 32x32 pixel buttons on a phone" can completely miss that concept when it's applied to anything that doesn't have a touch screen. Sharing technology and development tools between the platforms makes sense. Tying the tablet and phone experiences closely together makes sense. Adopting a similar visual style across the platforms makes sense. It's still a horrible idea to say "we'll just take our smart phone app, make all the touchable buttons clickable ones, and voila, we have a full-featured desktop app!" Desktops are inherently oriented towards small items on high resolution displays. If you make menu items too large, both reduce the amount of stuff you can fit on the screen at once and increase the travel the user has to make to select them. More importantly, desktops are inherently oriented towards multitasking, and hiding the entire screen just to open a program is inherently hostile towards that. I'm usually the last one to complement them, but I'm consistently dumbfounded that Apple seems to be the only of the major (or even minor, if you consider the various Unix DEs) players that understands that tablets are not desktops, even when they have a keyboard plugged into them. Tablets are all about single tasking, desktops are all about multitasking, and you should not attempt to get that peanut butter in that chocolate.
- codeulike 14y ago
  I think what they are attempting just 'sounds ridiculous' to you because no-one has succeeded yet. If they fail, then you'll turn out to have been right. If they succeed, then they'll do very well. It's still a horrible idea to say "we'll just take our smart phone app, make all the touchable buttons clickable ones, and voila, we have a full-featured desktop app!" Which is why they haven't just done that. They've put a lot of thought into it and come up with a system that scales through different interfaces. Tablets are all about single tasking Except for windows tablets, that encourage multi-tasking.

silverbax88 14y ago

It's a horribly bad decision. Why would you need a unified experience between devices with vastly different interaction and input scenarios? Desktops make up 80% of user interaction, but Microsoft is focusing on the 20% who use mobile or tablet. A small handheld device which is used primarily for content consumption would be best served with a Win 8 style UI, but for the desktop, it makes working much more difficult - people work at desktop PCs in a vastly different way.

drharris 14y ago
I've been using Win 8 on the desktop for almost a year, and I have no need for a start button/menu/etc. The Metro (er, Modern UI) paradigm works as well with a mouse as it does with touch. The days of touchless screens are coming to an end; in the near future most laptops and desktop monitors will all be touch-ready. I find most of the FUD about the new paradigm is coming from people who haven't even used it. Use it for a month; you'll find it gets out of your way and lets you work just fine.

Aardwolf 14y ago

No it will not pay off, do you want Ferrari's to have a crappy engine to deliver a unified experience between city cars and race cars? No you don't. And for user interfaces it's the same. A desktop computer provides a lot more space than a mobile device, so just because mobile devices exist, is no reason to suddenly make a design meant for small screens on the big screen with comfortable input devices.

codeulike 14y ago
To draw on your Ferrari analogy: Ferrari market to a tiny percentage of the car driving consumers as a whole. So of course that would make no sense. Also, Ferrari drivers don't tend to also drive Minis, so why have a unified experience. PC-users and Tablet-users and Phone-users are all huge, mainstream, overlapping markets. I can see there might be some trade offs and problems with unifying experience - which is why I said this is a brave move by Microsoft. But you're basically bringing up one of the trade offs (screen size) and using that to write off the whole initiative.

ANTSANTS 14y ago

This "we'll control the whole ecosystem by standardizing the interface!" scheme honestly sounds about as ridiculous to me as "it's a 5 billion dollar market, so if we take just 1% of it, we'll be rich!" It doesn't take a genius to understand that there are significant differences in interacting with a computer by touching a tiny screen held up to one's face, touching a larger screen held slightly farther away, pointing a mouse around and typing on a keyboard, and selecting menu items with a d-pad while looking at a screen that is several feet away. If you deliberately try to use the same interface across each of those interfaces, you're just going to get an unusable mess. It's amazing that some of the same people that understand the idea that "you need a responsive design for your website because no one wants to hunt for 32x32 pixel buttons on a phone" can completely miss that concept when it's applied to anything that doesn't have a touch screen. Sharing technology and development tools between the platforms makes sense. Tying the tablet and phone experiences closely together makes sense. Adopting a similar visual style across the platforms makes sense. It's still a horrible idea to say "we'll just take our smart phone app, make all the touchable buttons clickable ones, and voila, we have a full-featured desktop app!" Desktops are inherently oriented towards small items on high resolution displays. If you make menu items too large, both reduce the amount of stuff you can fit on the screen at once and increase the travel the user has to make to select them. More importantly, desktops are inherently oriented towards multitasking, and hiding the entire screen just to open a program is inherently hostile towards that. I'm usually the last one to complement them, but I'm consistently dumbfounded that Apple seems to be the only of the major (or even minor, if you consider the various Unix DEs) players that understands that tablets are not desktops, even when they have a keyboard plugged into them. Tablets are all about single tasking, desktops are all about multitasking, and you should not attempt to get that peanut butter in that chocolate.

codeulike 14y ago
I think what they are attempting just 'sounds ridiculous' to you because no-one has succeeded yet. If they fail, then you'll turn out to have been right. If they succeed, then they'll do very well. It's still a horrible idea to say "we'll just take our smart phone app, make all the touchable buttons clickable ones, and voila, we have a full-featured desktop app!" Which is why they haven't just done that. They've put a lot of thought into it and come up with a system that scales through different interfaces. Tablets are all about single tasking Except for windows tablets, that encourage multi-tasking.