Comments on: Windows 8–Three proposed UI improvements

By: TreizFaction

TreizFaction — Sun, 25 Sep 2011 04:09:00 +0000

these ideas look good to me, keep them coming

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sat, 24 Sep 2011 09:33:00 +0000

Well, since they have the whole swipe-up thing in IE for the tabs anyway, confusion would be lesser like this, wouldnt it?*. For consistency, one might want to have the “app tabs” up top though. I really dont know… I wouldnt want it that way, but im not the “dumb user” either.

Clearly though, we need a better way to navigate between apps than swiping through a big stack. I mean, that works fine if you’re running 5 of them, but what if you have 50?**

* ok, there could of course be confusion then regarding whether or not the whole Metro start page is “internet”, but… not sure if this really matters, or if its even a bad thing in the end. WTF is “internet” anyway these days :- )

** Swipe is in ways like alt-tab. This would mimic the wonderful W7 taskbar.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sat, 24 Sep 2011 09:27:00 +0000

As for scrolling, i think MSFT is betting on touchpads and mouse-equivalents (Apples magic mouse etc.) These would render the scrolling issue a non-issue. You would just swipe your way through the information space.

That said, the suggestion is still worth implementing, at least as an optional choice.

As for the other two suggestions, they seemed to make some sense… however, as i have no idea of how W8 handles these things currently i really cant tell.

By: Willem Evenhuis

Willem Evenhuis — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 17:15:00 +0000

3 Tiles of improvement:

1. Touch tab that appears on touch for opening the charms menu
2. Have not been able to test this properly, but if the case, an ” search all” function in the search charm, to have a windows 7 like indexed search experience.
3. A Live Tile group file option in the Metro UI.

By: J A

J A — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 14:51:00 +0000

This is not the best suggestion. Microsoft’s execution is just fine. It provides full productivity on the desktop and the only capability of tablets on the metro UI. Keep in mind that any system that is fully tablet just like every tablet currently in the market is does not provide any avenue for productivity. By this, I mean being able to create the same documents, web development, programming, etc that we all can do on dekstops. This is why the Win8 tablets win over anything else; you get the tablet UI for content consumption and can dock it with a dekstop UI for productivity. Just as MS speakers mentioned at Build, develope your Metro apps on the desktop and test it on the tabelt UI and go back and debug it in Visual Studio back on the desktop UI on the same tablet. Nothing else has such power and flexibility.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 08:34:00 +0000

Yep, pretty much exactly what I want…

As a huge Microsoft fan for about 10 years now (god I feel old) I feel like they have dropped the ball slightly.

One other point though… if I could have my way they’d make OEMs have to include a stylus- the handwriting recognition on Windows 8 is so good it’s unbelievable.

By: Christoffer Lundberg

Christoffer Lundberg — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 05:34:00 +0000

F’ck yeah! I agree with all points, especially the task-switcher. It is very tedious having to drag and drop from the left to get to my xth in line app and so on.. very tedious.

Metro Explorer was a great idea. I hope Microsoft can be inspired by this

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 05:24:00 +0000

the ribbon is actually very powerful, it brings out features that you had to dig deep in menus and dialog boxes to find. click and go. its smarter now. if its in the way, just minimise it till its required.

don’t live in the past, its time to move on.

By: Sergey Durnov

Sergey Durnov — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 05:02:00 +0000

fast app switching is must-have! some other features are interesting too

By: WixosTrix

WixosTrix — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 04:36:00 +0000

The little hand is cute, but I do think it the Metro UI should emulate a touch point with the cursor. I love the fast app switcher, they should just make the App Bar come up when the Charms menu is wiped in. It does make more sense to have just the one single Charm menu on the side if they want people to get used to it being over there. It’s also consistant and wouldn’t be hard for the average consumer to learn and navigate quickly.

The Desktop and Metro UI should not be merged. They should remain seperate for their concepts are designed for different experiences. The Explorer thing does not follow the Metro concept could potentially be a bad association. If someone needs to do advanced file system tasks, they can simply jump into the Desktop UI. The Ribbon actually makes many common selections easier to touch, though the UI itself is not part of the touch first experience. People are capable of understanding the two different use cases. As long as there is never a point when the user is immersed in the Metro experience and are forced to go to the Desktop UI to complete something that started off in the Metro UI, unless specifically designed that way.