The folks over at WindowsMania.pl have gotten their hands on a new build of Windows 10 for phones; this latest build comes with a set of UI changes and enhancements; mainly a revamped multitasking screen. The new multitasking screen shown above displays open/recent apps in a card like manner, similar to how Meego or BB10 showed them, allowing you to quickly view all your open apps at once, while presumably still swiping them away (or simply pressing “x”) to close them.
Those screenshots remind me of this.
The pictures look terrible. The lack of colour to give some life to the screen and to draw eye to things of interest just makes it look not only unattractive and dull, but kind of repulsive.
I have said it before and I’ll say it now: adding some colour to draw attention to things of import and adding some shadows or shading to things to give them some visual depth or to separate things from one another are the kinds of things you should do, not avoid doing. Flat design and all that is all the rage now, but jesus christ; shadows and gradients and shadings and splashes of colour can really help make things easier to comprehend, even at a glance!
Colors and accessibility be damned!
I can barely discern and read the UI, even in good lighting conditions and sized bigger than a phone.
Are they going to try to save money by making the next gen with monochromatic screens?
When I heard “multitasking” I thought it was going to be “more than one application usable at once”.
Is any mobile operating system working on that yet?
Yep, it was called Symbian.
Cool. Is there a video showing multiple applications on the screen at the same time (while one of them has input)?
And then you’ll expect to have this feature on smartwatches too. Come on, if you want productivity, use a real computer. You’ll get a taskbar, could attach several monitors, have a hardware keyboard, etc.
I was just curious. I’m convinced there must be a better user interface for mobile devices than “fullscreen app -> home -> fullscreen app -> home…”.
…I’m just not smart enough to know what it would be.
Either use something like the Note 3/4 (multiwindow actually works much like your desktop, though I wish more apps would support it without having to use hacks)
Also, SailfishOS.
On my LG G2 you can swipe to the side with 3 fingers to “slide aside” the current app, ie. hide the app and try to keep its current state as-is and bring up whatever app you had running under it. Then, when you want to bring the stored app back you just swipe with 3 fingers in the opposite direction. This makes it easy to juggle between two apps quickly since the other app is just a swipe away.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDQVahF59AI showcases the feature with multiple apps and I recorded a short clip showing how it works when you’re only juggling with two: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/11811685/slideaside.mp4
I think it’s quite a handy feature at times.
Aside from Thom’s comment about reminding him of Win95 (which it reminds me too given the colorization), it also reminds me a lot of Android!
Nothing new in Windows yet again.
You do realize Android wasn’t the first to come up with that either, right? At this point, all of these platforms are doing so much poaching from each other (a good thing, IMO) that it’s idiotic to bicker about who stole who from what. Why can’t we just have the wholesale copying that’s currently going on without conversations devolving into the inevitable ‘Well, Apple stole the GUI from Xerox …’
Yes, I do.
I was just laughing because WinPhone10 photos went from the “Metro” Tile functionality – that was pretty exclusive to Microsoft’s WinPhone series in the recent systems – to something that looks an awful lot like Android.
I was under the impression that the whole material design ‘flat’ look was ripped straight from Metro. Then again, since I don’t really care about such things, I could be wrong …
Well, Metro was completely new, and perhaps the cleanest, sleekest UI in a long time…
…but the large majority of people was unable to appreciate it, and so Microsoft probably decided to go back to something more familiar and reassuring to many. After all, you can’t blame MS if the most part of smartphone users has unremediable bad taste, and favors kitsch bloat over elegant minimalism… 🙂
+100, when I saw WinPhone for the first time, I thought to have finally found a no-nonsense, very usable mobile UI, that would not completely change every release…..
How wrong I was
It’s a shame, because those tiles really made Windows stand out from the crowd.
I think the problem is that these companies are trying to find a UI to please everyone, which is NEVER going to happen. In fact, there’s always going to be at least a vocal minority who will scream about how hideous it is. So I’d say the best way to tackle this problem is to install a UI that most would consider plain/boring rather than flat-out offensive, like the UI equivalent of muzak), and allow people to install themes for widgets, icons, etc.
Edited 2015-04-13 16:57 UTC
New? perhaps.
Cleanest, sleekest? no.
In typical Microsoft fashion, they ignored what their customers and testers were telling them. They had a lot of feedback telling them that their UI was crap, that it wouldn’t be accepted, and they ignored it.
Of course, part of the issue is that Microsoft only views Corporations (Volume License customers) and OEMs as their customers, not the people that actually use their products.
Those screenshots remind me of this.
At least Windows 95 had a personality. Even stock Android looks better than those screenshots.
Well, they definitely remind me of my BlackBerry z30. Not quite as good looking though
http://s1.postimg.org/bxn73b2xr/IMG_20150410_234332.png
I still wander why Windows 3.1 couldn’t look as fancy as Windows 8 (all ingrediants are there and possible), because I always believed these guys would deliver best experience and functionality, unlike OSX candies that look outdated just year or two after release.
Edited 2015-04-10 22:09 UTC
*obligatory webOS mourning*
Already available on SailfishOS on Jolla phone
(https://jolla.com/jolla/)
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