Submitted by Metro is beautiful and elegant. It works wonders on my HTC HD7, and I’m pretty darn sure it’s going to work just many wonders on tablets later this year. However, Microsoft also expects us to use Windows 8’s Metro on our desktops with mice and keyboards – and in that scenario, I can’t really see it work any wonders. The Verge user Sputnik8 decided to see what Metro would look like applied to a more regular desktop. The results are… Stunning.
First a correction: technically, these mockups don’t follow the Metro design guidelines to the letter – there’s definitely a lot of the Zune application in there. Still, what you’re looking at is the more traditional Windows desktop, in a more Metro-ish design. The way I see it, this mockup (or something similar) is a far better alternative next to the touch Metro interface than the old-fashioned Aero desktop Microsoft will include instead.
“This is a desktop concept that I’ve recently put together for fun,” Sputnik8 writes, “I thought I’d post a few screens to see what people here think. The screens include variations of explorer, IE (with a quick redesign of windows.com and Bing), media center/player, and Skype. Note that I didn’t aim for the design to be completely consistent with what MS calls ‘Metro’ (for instance, I specifically didn’t want loops around icons, among other things).”
I’ve articulated my concerns about Metro on the desktop before. The most pressing issue is that while lobotomising window management may make sense on tablets and other relatively small touch screen devices, it doesn’t make sense on regular devices with larger screens and mouse and keyboard. I need to get work done, and in Metro, I cannot. Sure, there’s a legacy desktop now, but as the word legacy implies, it has no future.
I like Microsoft’s approach of unifying devices – why not use a tablet as a regular PC when docked – but trying to shove a limiting tablet interface down my throat is not the way to get there. I’d much rather switch between something like this mockup when using the device as a regular PC, and Metro-proper when using it as a tablet.
Microsoft’s developer tools are designed so that you can create multiple different user interfaces for the same application, so this should not be a hard thing to do. You’re already supposed to deliver both a full-screen and a 1/4 screen interface for Metro anyway – why not add a full desktop interface as well?
It’s probably too late for Windows 8 (unless Microsoft has something up its sleeve come MWC), but they should hire this man or woman. Failing that – Gtk+ and Qt themers, work your magic!
Did you see the Explorer interface? Yes, beautiful, but not very nice in practice: no tree view or tabs or other way to navigate your directory tree, no means to copy or delete files, just a nice-to-look-at dumbed-down interface. I guess that is the future of computing; the Gnome guys would love it too.
With such GUIs you are driven back to CLI.
I didn’t mean a literal copy of this. This just shows us WHAT even a one-man army can do. Can you imagine what Microsoft can do, with all the detailed statistics they have on how people use their computers?
It’s not this specific implementation that is a good idea – it’s the concept in and of itself that’s a good idea and would squash the fears I – and many others – have about using a tablet interface on a desktop.
Well, no discussion about the looks – I liked it very much. But there is only so much you can offer on a small touch-screen, and that shows in this example. The lack of many controls is a good thing for small screens, but not for my big screen. I still don’t believe that GUIs designed for small screens and finger-figgling translate well to big screens with keyboards and mouses.
Add more ribbons?
Hahaha… that’s exactly what I thought, too. A desktop machine with huge ugly tiles, Explorer with an incomprehensible toolbar and Visual Studio with monochrome icons, that’s what Microsoft is busy imagining. These mockups look too clean and consistent.
“Where don’t you want to go today?” and “The ow starts now.” apparently to be the Win8 ad slogans. :/
One-man armies can do quite a lot, actually. Visit Pixelf*ckers or DigitalVanity and you’ll see a host of bling-bling Windows screenshots.
Edited 2012-02-26 20:07 UTC
But that is assuming corporate culture don’t choke the life out of it. take the “Tiny” Windows for an example, one little hacker has released versions of Windows since Win2K that frankly stomps both Windows Embedded AND WinFLP while having more application support AND a nicer UI, why doesn’t MSFT simply learn from this guy?
Simple because as we saw with the discussion over the start button EVERYTHING goes through committees and meetings and gets fed up and down the chain with everyone getting their two cents in until its all a watered down mess.
Look while we all know Metro COULD be great what most likely will happen is the exact opposite of what they have been doing for a decade. Whereas before they put the desktop on the cell phone, complete with teeny tiny start button, well now they are gonna put the cell phone on the desktop. What’s that you say? that’s stupid? It makes no sense? Welcome to corporate culture where things have to have “synergy” and “Vertical integration potential” and the Peter principle is practically a way of life. mark my words, Win 8 is gonna finally kill those WinME jokes as it’ll make Vista look like Win95, its gonna be a mess. The corporate culture there is simply too ingrained for anything truly innovative not to be choked to death.
While, I generally agree with your design sense, here you are quite wrong. Its a crappy design, with a pretty veneer over it. Good design is form and function working together seamlessly.
Actually I like it like that.
I very seldom use the tree view, preferring to use multiple windows like the original Mac did.
This is the problem I have with a lot of the changes Gnome3, Unity, etc. I’ll be honest I haven’t looked much at win8 or metro but as you pointed out there is a big loss of functionality and efficiency. I must be in the minority but for me I still need to get work done efficiently on my computer. It is more tool than artwork for me something that seems to be lost on lots of GUI designers these days.
I don’t mind change as long as it doesn’t decrease efficiency but just to have a new look with zing is not enough for me. When they make it more useful then I will be wowed. I’ve already been away from the windows world long enough to have trouble finding what I need and to be honest I see no increase in functionality for all the shuffling of icons they’ve done.
Why not use the cinnamon desktop environment?
http://img190.imageshack.us/img190/4118/explorer4.jpg
The mockup has buttons to copy and move files, they are merely hidden away by default.
Looks like a combination of the Elegant Brit theme with the old Whistler theme.
Very nice mockup, a shame that we will never see it in action.
Heh yes, particularly the Explorer shot with the orange scrollbar/handle made me think directly of Elegant Brit.
Anyway, very nice concept although too much whitespace for my preference, that said how it would be considered ‘mindblowing’ is beyond me. I’ve seen tons of similarly minimalistic gui mockups over the years.
Also there’s an entire deviant art group dedicated to making mockups of apps in ‘metro’ style: http://metro-design.deviantart.com/
Should be enough mockups there for Thom to have his mind blown over and over again.
…And I’ll think it again: TILING WINDOW MANAGER.
Really, Microsoft should just get over themselves and make a full-blown tiling window manager already. They’ve pretended to do something similar for two UI concepts now. Everything old is new again…
Yes, this is why I love Metro. It’s 2012 and we still use overlapping windows. Am I the only one who sees a problem with this? I would like a little more flexibility in size ratios and the possibility to have multiple stacked secondary windows, but overall I think Metro is heading in the right direction with window management (for regular users and power users alike).
Hm, -2 just for that …Metro (or simply just MS?) hate machine is strong, it seems.
Anyway, there were many similar reactionaries with DOS -> GUI, or with subsequent revisions of the latter …often probably defending, at next step, what they previously lamented.
Windows 1.0 was tiling and didn’t sell that well, maybe Microsoft still remembers that?
Seriously, am I the only one who can’t see it? I mean no disrespect to the author, but this reminds me of the Gnome High-Contrast theme without the contrast. The font looks like it’s meant for semi-blind people and every control is so big that you would be able to hit it while using the mouse through a triple layer of kitchen mittens. What’s up with this recent culture of wasting screen real estate?
Well, if you 25′ screens like some work colleges of mine, then there is lots of space to waste.
I don’t buy bigger monitors because I like bigger buttons and more padding. I buy bigger monitors with higher resolutions so that I can do and see more at one time. This whole attitude of wasting people’s monitor real-estate with big fluffy objects on the screen really is quite annoying for those of that use our computers for doing work. It’s not OK to waste my screen real-estate. It’s really that simple. If we wanted the space of 1024×768 then we’d still be running that resolution on our monitors.
For most people “doing work” (and much more), resolution probably isn’t about cramming maximum amount of information anymore (that actually can be easily harmful) – more about making it clean & clearly digestible (which includes even how nice the fonts look), this is the style & approach they prefer (and not only them – kinda related pic: http://www.kyon.pl/img/17243,powerpoint,Edward_Tufte,wallpaper,kitt… ; this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:VC10FlightDeck.jpg too wasn’t very optimal, modern glass cockpits are an improvement, also because one can see less at a time, what is needed)
Edited 2012-03-04 22:50 UTC
I do have a 27” monitor at work and I tile it up into sections where I have all the relevant windows group together. I also use virtual desktops when I run out of screen space, but I would love to be able to have a big 50” high-res screen across the wall to able to have all of my windows open and visible at the same time. With Win8’s Metro theme I’m stuffed – mighty Microsoft says “no more than 2 windows for you!”.
I have a 27″ screen! 🙂 I think if OS developers want to design their user interface for small touch tablets then they should mimic KDE and offer users a choice of interfaces. If you’re on a traditional desktop or laptop system with larger screens and want a traditional desktop, then that should be an available choice. If you want a space efficient touch capable cell phone style interface for a tablet or netbook, then that should be another available choice. Trying to design a one size fits all interface for all scenarios just makes everyone frustrated and few people happy.
Waste ? Or new place for the future advertising…
Nah, I can’t see what the big fuzz is about either.
With years of having the TV manufacturers feeding us useless HD screens (1080 vertical pixels, wtf?!) we now will also be force-fed UIs that wastes valuable screenspace.
\o/
Higher res screens didn’t exactly disappear …to a large degree they just remained very expensive, didn’t follow the massive uptake of the “useless” ones, where people are perfectly happy with vertical 1080.
Stop whining, expecting them to finance your whims; go and buy a larger expensive screen (or, if you don’t want to after all, wait a decade or two for the next step http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra_High_Definition_Television …unless of course you in turn plan to whine about it then)
Also, we can be pretty certain that at least MS puts lots of research into those new UIs; and it’s not hard to discover empirically that cramming maximum number of info is actually a very bad idea (so perhaps the designers want to use the space to improve the legibility; also, read Edward Tufte ideas)
Maybe I’m just grossly ignorant, but first thought on seeing those screenshots was, “Hey, isn’t that the Ubuntu Radiance theme?” I mean damn, it even looks like they have the overlay scrollbars. And usually I’m accusing Linux desktops of imitating Windows/OSX excessively!
That aside, it is quite pretty, and looks much more functional than the iOS Interface Clone Du Jour. I especially like that they have removed the huge fat Aero window borders, and still have a proper taskbar/dock instead of reducing everything to alt-tab.
Looks pretty nice, all in all… But not nice enough to make me want to buy it, given Microsoft’s decision to introduce an app store.
Edit: Oh wait that’s a mockup! I’m an idiot.
Edited 2012-02-26 14:05 UTC
The first thing I thought was Ubuntu as well. I guess those guys were ahead of their time with that color scheme.
I don’t know if I’d say that. As mentioned by Thom, these all look almost identical to the Zune software from 2009, including the scrollbars and fonts.
Not a bad look, but honestly I get tired of looking at it after a while.
Mmm? Some Googling for “zune theme” doesn’t show anything that really looks like that. Though to be fair it is actually a lot flatter and more minimal than Radiance.
It really sickens me to see this minimalism. So now we’re talking about shapeless UIs with text only that move slower, look and feel worse than my KDE 1 desktop on my 200MHz machine?
I really hoped I could see some beautiful UI work here. I don’t. They drop every ounce of originality and beauty ever since the smartphones came into main stream, and the UI is plain, boring and unimaginative. Here’s how my UI looked in 2005: http://dorinlazar.deviantart.com/gallery/?offset=0#/ddy0ux . If you ask me, it’s a lot better than whatever people consider mindblowing in that “FillRect(Window, BoringWhite);” UI they show.
Sorry, guys, I’m off the minimalism wagon.
With all due respect your screen shot looks awful. As a developer and a designer I like the new minimalism trend. But there are a couple of problems with the current state of things.
First of all, designers took over and axed a lot of features for the sake of design (“we can’t fit this or that feature into our beautiful minimal design, so it has to go …”). This brings us to our second problem: users like yourself who think that minimalism=fewer features and less capable applications.
I’m not blaming you the user for this second problem though, because you are just reacting. I blame the designers. Each of this dudes should be forced to fill the biggest blackboard they could find with the phrase “I will not cut features for design’s sake and I won’t make my users do an absurd amount of actions to get to a feature, just to have fewer buttons”.
In my work as an application developer I confess that I’m a minimalist. But instead of cutting features I try to think like my users and offer them all the tools they need at a certain moment in time, not everything all the time. I try to anticipate and study their workflows to see what they need and when. As for padding and empty space, they have their roles besides just looking nice sometimes – they help you make sense faster of what’s presented to you.
So, to sum it up – don’t blame minimalism, blame bad designers.
It may be that the screenshot has sentimental value and I over-value it.
No problem there.
On the other hand, as a developer, I know why I would prefer minimalism. But I don’t, and the reason is that it’s darn ugly – it’s not that I don’t like the lack of features, I got used to that. I don’t like the interface, plain and simple.
I know it’s easier to write HTML and not care about how it looks. Make it all white (white interfaces really really hurt the eyes, nobody got it yet?) and scrap some random text here and there. It’s easy to build UIs like that. Prototype easy, ship fast via http. The whole point is to make everything look like a dumb microsoft.com page from 15 years ago. And I do hate the designers – they are to be blamed, but they all adopt minimalism because they think we are idiots, and we need everything spaced out like we’re infants… Now, in a 1920×1080 resolution you get less information than on 640×480. AND FOR THAT I blame minimalism.
What would be an example of your ideal interface?
There’s nothing to blame. A 1080p res in 22” is useless because the major OSes don’t scale properly. On the other hand even if you have the space it doesn’t mean that you must fill it at all costs with tens of buttons and toolbars. I believe that a UI must be powerful enough to do everything you need, while having an almost 0 learning curve. It can be done, but not by anyone.
I agree with your comments, but your desktop looks terrible. The desktop pic doesn’t help.
I’m not contesting that my desktop looks terrible, I tend to agree with people that tell me when I’m drunk
. I probably like my desktop because of the sentimental value – but then again the best Linux distro for me is RH 6.3, so I must be a very sentimental guy.
I’m not a Windows user but that mockup really is beautiful and elegant not just a screen full of coloured squares that Windows 8 will be.
I’m switching to Mac because of this Metro.
Metro makes me want to puke too. I can promise you they would not be stupid enough not to let people switch to “windows 7 mode” in settings though.
The only thing I’ve seen metro bring to a desktop so far is loss of control, loss of capability, loss of efficient use of space, loss of productivity, and loss of interest. Hopefully that will all change but then again my opinion hasn’t been formed from first-hand experience with metro so, …….
Regardless, I fail to see why some people think this is an elegant ui for desktops.
If you don’t know yet they are releasing consumer preview of Win 8 free to all in 3 days, fire up a VM and try it yourself. I tried the Dev preview and showed it to over 200 customers and so far not a single one liked it, not one. they all say it looks like a cell phone shoehorned onto a desktop and I have to agree.
Me I’ll try Metro and consumer preview simply because I have no choice but keep current but I’ll be sticking with Win 7 until 2020. I have already thought ahead and bought me a new Win 7 netbook and maxed out my PC so I shouldn’t need to upgrade on account of hardware. Batten down the hatches folks and give Win 8 a try in 3 days and remember this is the “90% complete” version you WILL see on machines in Oct, yuck.
It’s nice, but I just have to laugh at the Skype one.
Idealism is great and all, but reality is why Skype doesn’t already look like that. Skype need to make money. Having an app that looks and works that simple is nice, but it doesn’t generate money; where in that interface is the adverts? Where is the Facebook integration and all the visual junk thrown in to justify the brand?
Microsoft bought skype. They can suck off windows revenues. At least they should, if its included as part of Windows. If they do it correctly ( and Apple is stupid enough to let them play on their platform, they could own the video chat platform. IF they add too many ads, well, then they end up as popular as Aol Instant Messenger.
Gorgeous.
If Microsoft implement this UI to Windows I’m going to throw my iMac to the garbage. 🙂 Seriously.
The desktop mode is not a legacy mode and not a second class citizen. It’s not going to phased out.
Earlier report on this was wrong, mainly by journo doomsayers.
MS has explained the importance of the Desktop mode for serious work.
http://www.slashgear.com/microsoft-explains-windows-8-dual-interfac…
Edited 2012-02-26 18:36 UTC
That is amazing. I usually hate Windows UI but that would be fun to use me thinks. If the next Windows looked like that I would have to definitely go back to Windows, at least part way
>Gtk+ and Qt themers, work your magic!
Yes please
I am loving the mockup. Very sleek and clean. Whoever he/she is should be hired by Microsoft already. I like clean design and this takes the cake. Would MS take notice of this? I hope they do.
I see windows with no titles, but with plenty of dead space in which a title could reside.
I see tabbed windows.
I see a taskbar/dock with little notches below the application icons (indicates running instances?).
I see 2D monochrome, high contrast icons.
I see applications without text menus, but with plenty of dead space in which a text menu could reside.
I see a 2D window border theme that looks like a bunch of Open Box and Pekwm themes, which appeared several years ago on box-look.org (I would provide a link to specific themes, but it’s too much work to sift through the roughly 27 zillion Open Box themes posted there).
I see a brownish-orange background, that suggests the default Ubuntu colors from years ago.
I see the layout rearranged from the default on some of the apps.
I don’t mean to be a party pooper, but what is so special and unique about this UI? It just looks like a lot of existing window-manager themes and icon sets with some basic features/widgets apparently disabled in the control-panel (or configuration-file).
The only thing possibly new and interesting are the little notches below the taskbar/dock icons, which apparently indicate running instances.
theme fetish
The look must be just right or f@#it
Edited 2012-02-26 21:49 UTC
I agree with all of your points but at the same time don’t forget that on many occasions, less information is more practical. Expensive sport’s cars are often critised for having too many buttons all over the place, particularly the steering wheel.
not stunning or mind blowing. stupid. next
Users are not happy with the new design basically.
Now of course I would not mind seeing that design implemented on Linux.
This is the thing Linux open it doors to anyone who wants to make there own interface.
Yeah, and the results of the generally tend to be… even less happy for users.
The fonts are nice, that’s about it. Too many boxes, too many colors. Make them start to blink and you have an epileptic’s vision of Hell. I’ll take Classic for me, thank you very much.
And of course a ‘one-man design army’ will be more productive than MS. Just like the most efficient form of government is a dictatorship. Designers at MS create and code based on committee and survey. They’re given a list of to-do’s, and thou-shalt-not’s by the suits, a budget and timeframe to do it in, and mediocrity ensues. Welcome to Software as a Business Model-101. If it wasn’t like that, it would be called Linux, everything would be free, and there would be 100 different products all doing exactly the same thing, in slightly different ways.
And don’t worry mac-boys, your days of languishing in the design doldrums of corporate misery are soon coming. Now that your messiah has ascended into his place in the tech-god pantheon, the rule of the One will now be replaced by the rule of the Many. My bet is that the first change will be Flash coming to the iOS sooner, rather than later.
Funny that so many people here think the design is nice… if this were an article about gnome shell everyone would be saying how crap it was
As a scren designer, and with a critical eye, I can see the flaws with this. I think a lot of people here if they new anything about screen design could too.
This looks like the kind of thing that people who come up with who some experience with photoshop/illustrator but don’t have much expereience in real world design. I’m sure MS had initial ideas similar to this but real world design constraints and the fact that non-computer nerds would have to use it got in the way…
Also I’m certain that people like Balmer had some say in the design of metro just because who he is in the company, not because he has any experience as a designer.
That this looks almost the same as Google?!?!
…I’m really starting to appreciate GNOME Shell.
I, for one, am not impressed. There is very little contrast, no window borders, no window divisions (little lines to separate contexts). This theme gives me a headache.
Text on a plain background with no other visual clues is just lame and uninspired.
…seriously it will, and I’ll draw an example as to why.
KDE4 running in “Desktop” mode works wonderfully on a desktop. And in “netbook” mode it provides a very nice touch screen display. However, the “netbook” mode is absolutely horrendous to use on a system without touch – it really should be called ‘touchscreen’ mode.
However, KDE4 in either mode still presents applications the same way. They got at least that right, which is more than I can say for Microsoft and Win8. And in that respect, KDE4 in either mode is an absolutely beautiful environment.
So, we can already see from a readily available and deployed platform that using the same exact management functionality does not work on different form factors – which is exactly what MS is trying to do with Win8.
KDE4 was designed with that in mind, and in that respect they have the different modes so that you can adjust to the best mode for your form factor.
Has Microsoft learned nothing?
The way KDE does things has hardly any impact on anything, the least on dynamics and uptake of Windows…
And anyway, it is a project which generally follows Windows UI (I don’t mean this in a “bad way”, that’s natural coming largely from places where Gnome-influencing MacOS was less popular, and not wanting to scare people away… too much), one which will probably continue ~failing much more than Windows, Metro or not.
Again I can see the Photoshop jockeys who sit around circle-jerking over designs on “template monster” cheering how wonderful this is…
But my question ends up why is it that every generation of UI since windows 98 has been LESS useful ‘out of box’ than what came before it… There’s a reason I consider win98 the pinnacle of UI design when it came to actually being USEFUL, and everything else since is just rubbish. Very PRETTY rubbish, but as another poster already pointed out, where’s the USEFUL parts of the UI like say, a tree? No matter how big a can of shellac you dump on a pile, it’s still a turd covered turd.
It all started with hiding extensions, then hiding the actual directory path, and it just gets further and further dumbed down to the point where it’s ultimately useless. It’s like websites where some artsy fartsy type vomited up a pretty picture in photoshop, barely bothered slicing it up and slapped it up online calling it a website. Sure, it’s very pretty, but what good is it?
You can see it in action in those screencaps — all the massive white-space putting less and less information on the screen, until there’s nothing useful there. I mean do we REALLY need the top 90 pixels of every window chewed up by the icon and program title area? I didn’t go out and buy a 24″ 1920×1200 display to fit less information on it than I did under windows 3.0 at 640×480!
But what do I know, I get pissed every time I open a directory and it’s not in “details” view and instead is filled with a five or six idiotic icons I can barely tell apart (or worse are all the same), with maybe six or seven files fitting in the window… it’s like with every Windows version I keep having to go through and turn off all the new idiotic ‘improvements’ to get back to what was actually useful.
Though at least with Windows I can dial back the clock, unlike say… linsux where if you want the latest version, you’re basically stuck with whatever goofy/pointless change the artsy fartsy types came up with to waste time on instead of fixing actual functionality issues.
Probably why IMHO the various Linux desktops are less useful than Windows 3.1 file manager was (apart from perhaps the long filename support).
Edited 2012-02-27 20:08 UTC