With a "Windows 7 mode" AKA regular Windows UI/UX:

http://www.engadget.com/2011/06/01/microsoft-unveils-windows-8-tablet-prototypes/



Gut reactions? Cognitive reactions? About the direction of Windows? About the direction of the industry and/or consumer computing habits (niche and mainstream)?

I think I puked a little.

Ugh. Too much like a phone.

I'll keep 100+wpm on a real keyboard; thanks.

"apps"?

If they ever do another Adam's Family movie, that guy should audition of the role of Uncle Fester.

Considering I've raped windows 7 to give it the windows 95-2k gui, I don't think I have any place commenting regarding home usage.

Office use though, if those "apps" are easily customizable, then they could be useful for the kind of portlets that currently get built into intranets, eg. sales stats, FUM, callcentre statistics.

Excel, unmodified, on a tablet.

FFS.

After reflecting for a couple of minutes, I'm still pretty damn disappointed in this. WP7 looks great, and is just about catching up with iOS. The reason iOS works well, is because it doesn't try to do too much. Yeah, iWork has spreadsheets but they're built from the ground up. The idea is you leave behind all the stuff you can't do on a tablet and let your "PC" pick those bits up.

Trying to cram windows 7 onto a tablet hidden behind a swishy Metro interface is just plain dumb.

If there was windows 8 desktop, and windows 8 touch I'd be thrilled with this. But there isn't. There's f**king Phil Schiller waving a tablet about shouting "look! I've got full windows on my tablet! It's BETTER!" when what would really be good is if he said the COMPLETE F**KING OPPOSITE.

Grrr.

I've seen a lot of comments on other sites regarding this video and think a lot of people are missing the point,

The new UI we are seeing in 95% of the video won't be used on Desktops, see that "Desktop" tile in the bottom right of the video, that will take you back to the normal win7 UI that we all know and love.

Clearly touchscreen is pretty pointless on desktops and MS would be idiots to base the whole OS around it, what they are doing is trying to create as similar feel as possible between tablets, phones and desktops at a certain level.

For those of us that have macs, I'm seeing this new "homescreen/metro UI" feel as the dashboard for Windows and quite frankly I love the look of it. I'll spend most of my time on the normal desktop UI and then, say if I have my PC plugged into my TV, I switch over to this dashboard for browsing dvds/films/etc that I have stored on my desktop.

Clearly this new MetroUI look is more at home on tablets/touchscreen devices, but it'll have a spot on normal desktops.

The basic HCI model is more or less based around the architecture of the OS. The OS hosts your programs as individual processes, your programs take your input and give you output. If you want to perform a task or get some information you navigate to a specific app that runs in its own process and you do it there. I think the point of this is to challenge that and give the user more direct access to content, only opening an "app" when it's really necessary. What is so inherently good about a taskbar/dock and a bunch of browser windows or apps running? We're used to it but it's not really the best for what many people do on a daily basis.

Looks great for tablets. Not sure how it's going to interact with a traditional desktop shell... what about the desktop as a working space for files? I could at least see it being useful on a second monitor. Given that it's probably just a shell that runs on top of Windows 7 I imagine it'll be really easy to shut off.

Yeah, I don't think people realize that this UI is designed for tablets that will (mostly) be running on the ARM port of Windows. Regular Windows isn't going anywhere, folks.

Putting it on desktops gives congruence across all Windows products. And lets them share apps more easily too.

I think you're slightly confused. Its not meant to be a tablet only operating system. They were saying that it's touch enabled, but it works mostly the same if you've got a mouse and keyboard.

The Metro UI seems to be more like the iOS dashboard that you can pull up at any time or even like the quake console.

I really like the concepts they were showing. I imagine the swipey things are also going to have hotkeys (along the lines of win+arrow keys) so that should be pretty sweet.

Also I still don't understand why people refuse to let go of pre-xp windows. Seems silly to me.

Pre-7 Windows is awful and broken, I don't get why people hold onto it either.

We would like to show you our secret project, code name "Windows 8."

This title was better than what we were going to code-name it: "The next iteration of Windows."

I also really like the idea of the Dashboard. booting to something like that is much more useful than booting to a blank screen.

I'm grumpy because I think (and I realise how conceited this sounds) that touch and desktop shouldn't ever meet. I think apart from a questionable multi-task Alt-Tab replacement it looks lovely. Until you realise Phil wants you to have Windows on a tablet, and not some focussed lovely thing like iOS.

But thanks for invoking feelings of great joy and nostalgia with your Quake console reference. Tilde FTW.

What's IDDQD in Quake language? <_<

Why the hell do you keep talking about Phil Schiller?

It's a metaphor for Microsoft and its direction.

I sort of agree, but its not replacing physical inputs like mouse and keyboard. Touch only comes into play with things like the magic mouse for desktops.

Edited for less Apple bias. I really think if MS took WP7 and carried on developing it for tablets separately from "full" windows, it'd be lovely.

What I'm getting at isn't that Win 8 on a desktop would be bad (it'd be Win 7 with extra nice bits by the look of it which is no bad thing) it's that Win 8 will also be for tablets and it will suck horribly. Which is actually a crying shame.

eesh! i know its probably just me being stuffy, but not a fan of the dashboard setup. i like it for phones and tablets where i am almost exclusively consuming content. but i think i would hate it for any type of content creation. anything like website building or level editing ive got a minimum of 4 or 5 windows open at once that i am constantly editing an flipping between. this just seems very...mooshy... i like my UI's crisp and clean... like an unused paper towel!

p.s. i think thats why many people prefer the win 95ish look. it screams "It's business time!" whereas the bubbly look of Mac's and newer windows OS's scream "im a damn hippy!"

Phones, tablets and desktops are merging closer together all the time whether you like it or not. This seems like a reasonable start to addressing that merge.

Keep in mind this is a prototype, people.

There was still a full windows interface in the video. the swipey things were all of the side apps.


But the 95ish look isnt functional. Windows 7 taskbar is far superior to anything out there. Just because it looks nice doesn't make it inherently less functional.

One that Microsoft did choose to publicise widely though.



Yarp.

Also, because I've had a MASSIVE BRAIN FART and meant Steve Ballmer.

WACKWACKOOPS.

(I'm having a bad day)

I'm going to apologize to Martyn in advance, because I am about to destroy his entire argument:

1. This is a unifying experience, not just a layer on top of Windows. On tablets, especially ones running ARM, the expectation is that you will NEVER need to run traditional windows applications. You should NEVER need to leave the Metro UI.
2. Just because Apple made iOS and it was successful, does not mean that merging platforms is impossible.
3. Microsoft has been criticized lately for doing exactly what you want them to. They're enforcing strict control over third party manufacturers for tablets here.
4. iOS may be good as a phone/tablet OS, but it's far from perfect. For example, there's the problem of file access. This is such a critically huge flaw that it ensures that I never, EVER create documents on my iPad using apps like Pages. I don't want to sync every time I want a file off my iPad. I also don't want to email it. Dropbox fits my entire lifestyle for documents, and on iOS it's essentially useless. What good is a well-written tablet application if you have no intention of ever using it?
5. This is a stepping stone. This sort of merging HAS to happen. People are already getting lost in the cracks due to different usage paradigms. If Microsoft had the option of just outright dropping support for non-Metro apps, they would probably do so. But it would be the end of Microsoft, so we have this.
6. Keep in mind that Metro, as stated by Microsoft explicitly, is NOT just another shell or a layer. It exists in tandem with the old Windows.
7. Although they demonstrated traditional Office, they have explained that they intend things like Office 365/web apps to be part of the mobile experience. There's absolutely no reason to expect full Office to be the only solution on the tablet.
8. Any ARM-based tablet won't be able to run existing Windows programs anyway, which is actually somewhat of a good thing. It means that Metro will be more readily accepted.
9. The reason they're even demonstrating the ability is so that it addresses all possible usage scenarios. Besides, even in the video they show significant touch UI improvements even on the traditional desktop UI. Click targets were easier, scrolling was easy and bounces when it reaches the end, etc. And that was only a few seconds of footage.

In short, you're being extremely judgmental without reading about what they're planning, how it works, or understanding that this is far from a finished product.

Yeah, but it looks gay.

Matty, I'm just super grumpy today, but I'm sure you're right about great chunks of that - particularly in highlighting iOS' shortfalls with respect to dropbox (I disagree about file access generally - I like the idea of not having files access, but iOS is too restrictive regarding file creation, you're right).

I really hope you're right in fact - because I want more tablets done right. iPads are undoubtedly the best thing available now, but there's a lot of room for improvement and good competition will allow everyone to steal each others' ideas, sue each other, then get along fine all the more. I just worry that if anyone is left to just throw desktop programs at a tablet (fingers crossed MS actually do keep that tight control which I heartily endorse) without bothering to sort the touch stuff out it'll be a slippery slope to crapville.

Wholeheartedly disagree. It looks different, and it's good.

Yeah, I loves me some Metro. I think it'll make a great tablet interface, and it makes sense when you look at the MS stuff already using it (WP7, Zune, and Media Center).

This is exactly what I've always wanted a tablet UI to frigging work like. It's clean, professional looking (ie none of the moronic huge plastic gradiant buttons from XP, 7 was a big step in the right direction), seems to have intuitive motions and contextual organization. I've used the KDE netbook UI for a year or so and this has a lot of the same feel (especially the opening screen with email, news, &c which is rather reminiscent of "Page One"). In summary, there's a refreshing minimum of bull**** in the GUI.

CHANGE IS THE WORK OF SATAN.

It's about time that MS put an ounce of effort in to the UI. I think this is the most excited that I've ever been about a MS OS. I'm looking forward to trying it out.

I wonder what the file structure looks like, specifically when doing things like sharing photos between apps. I've always been partial to keeping my folders organized myself because traditionally the operating system likes to dump files into one big folder.

Wait until windows 9.

Yeah that would make organizing your porn really difficult.

I don't mind the one-big-folder library system if they make a slick way of tagging media.

All that work sorting it by actress and it's all gone... WHY DID YOU HAVE TO BRING THIS UP?!