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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

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.
- ANTSANTS 14y ago
  "You don't know if it's a bad idea or not because it hasn't been done yet" is a conversation killing sentence if I've ever heard one. Ok, we agree to disagree, let's stop talking about this for a few months and see what happens! Meanwhile, it "sounds ridiculous" to me not because it's an untested concept, but because I think tablets are inherently different enough from desktops to justify keeping their interfaces distinctly separate. I don't think it's possible to fit more than one full touch app (or maybe a condensed version of a second one for a few simple use cases) comfortably on a 10" screen (to say nothing of a 7" one). I don't think giant buttons and pleasant whitespace are a good use of a desktop or laptop monitor. >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. Except that they didn't, in the case of the Start Screen. Program and location menus, quick launch buttons, "pinned apps," and lightweight search bars ala Unity Search/Windows Vista and 7 start menu search/dmenu, all of which don't obscure the entire screen while I'm trying to do something, are just some of the desktop workflow-friendly solutions to the "how do I start doing something else" problem that come to mind. The Start Screen doesn't completely break Windows, but it's still a bad idea on the desktop, and at least one instance of Microsoft prioritizing their tablet interface over their desktop interface. >Except for windows tablets, that encourage multi-tasking. Being able to prop a condensed view of an app up against an even more condensed view of another app is a far cry from being able to switch between dozens of running programs with a few keypresses and/or a mouse click. I'm not saying that it's not a good option to have available, it's just not in any way comparable to the style of multitasking that desktop interfaces are designed around.

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.

ANTSANTS 14y ago
"You don't know if it's a bad idea or not because it hasn't been done yet" is a conversation killing sentence if I've ever heard one. Ok, we agree to disagree, let's stop talking about this for a few months and see what happens! Meanwhile, it "sounds ridiculous" to me not because it's an untested concept, but because I think tablets are inherently different enough from desktops to justify keeping their interfaces distinctly separate. I don't think it's possible to fit more than one full touch app (or maybe a condensed version of a second one for a few simple use cases) comfortably on a 10" screen (to say nothing of a 7" one). I don't think giant buttons and pleasant whitespace are a good use of a desktop or laptop monitor. >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. Except that they didn't, in the case of the Start Screen. Program and location menus, quick launch buttons, "pinned apps," and lightweight search bars ala Unity Search/Windows Vista and 7 start menu search/dmenu, all of which don't obscure the entire screen while I'm trying to do something, are just some of the desktop workflow-friendly solutions to the "how do I start doing something else" problem that come to mind. The Start Screen doesn't completely break Windows, but it's still a bad idea on the desktop, and at least one instance of Microsoft prioritizing their tablet interface over their desktop interface. >Except for windows tablets, that encourage multi-tasking. Being able to prop a condensed view of an app up against an even more condensed view of another app is a far cry from being able to switch between dozens of running programs with a few keypresses and/or a mouse click. I'm not saying that it's not a good option to have available, it's just not in any way comparable to the style of multitasking that desktop interfaces are designed around.