Microsoft opines: Vista was 'cheesy'; drops Aero | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft opines: Vista was 'cheesy'; drops Aero

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21 pointsevo_934 comments

> "[We are] flattening surfaces, removing reflections, and scaling back distracting gradients."

That sounds nice. I think the Mac OS is a little bit too shiny as well. And I never liked the fat+rounded style Ubuntu has. I don't use Windows, but if the theming is any good, hopefully other systems will take cues from it.

>"There is no evidence that people want to use [mice]" (John C. Dvorak, San Francisco Examiner, February 19, 1984).

I didn't realise this guy had been making terrible predictions for so long!

I don't want to use a mouse. It takes up space and destroys my tendons. It's just that focus-follows-brain doesn't work very well yet.

Use a trackball if you have problems with mice destroying your tendons.

Actually, using a mouse doesn't hurt me at all. It might have something to do with the fact that I can twist my arm around one time completely, or the fact that I can't sit still long enough to do any real damage. I was mostly speaking for other people :)

>I think the Mac OS is a little bit too shiny as well

What's shiny about OS X anymore? The only thing I can think of is a glass panel in iTunes and the stoplight window controls. It's a very subdued, minimal, content-focused GUI.

The dock has that reflective surface.

"Shiny" could be metaphorical, here. Ever since Lion, OSX has been far too eager to show the world that it exists. Too many gimmicky interfaces, too many half-baked UI structures.... I don't care. Let me do what I want and get the fuck out of my way.

I have a limited number of pixels available to me. If you're a GUI designer who thinks I should give those pixels to you, then you are mistaken. Apple seems to have forgotten that recently (although Snow Leopard is pretty great).

Last week they made a post to Building Windows 8 and deleted it shortly after. It had a few caps of the new style in it. Here's one I dug out of my cache: http://imgur.com/hvvQZ

It looks sort of like a hybrid of Whistler and Aero styles. It's nice enough (though I've always liked the Whistler style) but not exactly a massive improvement over Aero.

>>> Harris has relatively little to say beyond describing the Aero as having the "appearance of highly rendered glass, light sources, reflections, and other graphically complex textures." But he does add this: "This style of simulating faux-realistic materials...looks dated and cheesy now, but at the time, it was very much en vogue."<<<

To be honest I didn't think Aero had dated all that badly. Is this just a way of framing Apple software (which is known for that stuff) as dated and cheesy? Or is he making a valid point here?

Looks like Imgur is over capacity. Could you rehost the images somewhere like Minus ?

Sure.

http://min.us/m4bajqk5V

Jeez those toolbars are ridiculous. When the content part of your UI is 60% of the window, something has gone very, very wrong.

Maybe, maybe not. If the past is any indicator, they are targeted at casual users who need the help, and can be turned off.

The biggest icons in that UI are 'Move To...' and 'Copy To...'.

Casual users do not want to think about raw files, let alone how to move them around the filesystem. That is why all modern operating system don't expose these concepts.

You don't fix this kind of problem by making the buttons bigger.

Probably not worth complaining about, though... Once you've minimised the ribbons Explorer won't have any more chrome than it did in Windows 7.

The ribbon in Windows Explorer is minimized by default.

Agreed.

Add these on to Web interfaces, which are increasingly (hullo, Google?) trending toward persistent, non-scrollable header/footer elements, and I'll find myself on websites in which perhaps 25% of my screen is available for my present task.

And that's using an interface which already minimizes browser and desktop GUI intrusions (Firefox/Vimperator and WindowMaker).

Most people also use laptops. Being able to only look at the bottom 60% is especially frustrating.

I wish I could move Xcode4's "iTunes-style" header to the bottom of the window when coding on 13".

Am I the only person who liked Vista? Seriously, it blew XP out of the water, I never had a single problem with stability and it looked and worked much, much better. I even had a win 7 free license (MSDNAA) but I never bothered installing it because Vista was just fine for that particular machine - FWIW i'm a mactard now.

I think most of the Vista hate is just bandwagoning. The XP love? I have no explanation for that

You're missing out. Win7 destroys Vista

"So we evolved Snap for Windows 8. This feature lets you run any two WinRT-based apps side-by-side"

If this tongue in cheek? Since when is software evolved? I prefer to design my software, and not let it progress randomly. And am I supposed to be impressed with two windows? A whole two? How much extra for three?

Windows 7 already has this feature too - if you drag a window to the edge of the screen, it snaps to take up half of it.

>And am I supposed to be impressed with two windows? A whole two? How much extra for three?

Can you have two windows side by side on an iPad? Android?

Didn't think so. You can on a Windows RT tablet. So it's definitely a feature worth mentioning.

It says windows 8 - isn't that a desktop OS? I remember reading about how people were complaining about the new interface of window 8 how it has classic mode and some kind of tablet mode where you can only have one window at a time.

Maybe I'm mixing up their desktop/tablet/phone OS's. Clearly I'm going to have to find out more, but I'm waiting for it to be released.

With Cornerstone on Android tablets, you can have 3 apps on screen simultaneously. One main app and two smaller apps on the side. It's really cool because apps that have a tablet and smartphone mode use the appropriate version depending on the size of the window. I quite often have Google Voice in one small window, YouTube in another small one and my browser in the main window surfing.

What the Windows ecosystem needs isn't a focus on UI, what it needs is a new set of APIs that obliterate older software and removes this insistence on backwards compatibility. I think that such a move could potentially be leveraged by Microsoft towards a massive development gold rush for new applications.

You really think that the Windows API is the main thing holding back app developers?

Re-vamping the API and removing the insistence on backwards compatibility are just the start. The bigger picture is that Microsoft needs to influence a revolution with their OS by allowing developers to bring human culture into the OS, much the same way Apple does. What I mean by "culture" is a melding of art and technology: it's cool to use a Macbook Pro (AND you can get shit done with it), but it's merely utilitarian to use any of the faceless PC laptops out there. Microsoft seems to think that they can accomplish a such change by applying different makeup to their OS, or by mimicking the Apple store. No, the real change will come when the tool makers can bridge the gap between the need to get something done and getting something done beautifully. This is a task that is beyond the larger development shops but is well within reach of the smaller developers. Perhaps Microsoft has a bias towards enabling larger developers, but this is clearly 80s/90s thinking.

At best what they've done since Windows XP is change the rat maze for their users by forcing them into a different cognitive "map" of how their PC is to function (ever try using the ironically named "ribbon" in Office?).

WinRT on ARM seems to be what you want. The Windows 8 store will certainly cause a gold rush as well.

But are you honestly arguing for forced obsolescence here? The most agile app developers would have a chance at a quick buck. The Windows team could kick out ugly code. And then?

I am most definitely arguing for forced obsolescence. The prime motivating factor being the fact that it is perfectly acceptable and "normal" to go through all of the hoops and ladders of inoculating your computer against viruses. And then when those programs fail, users have to go to take their computer to get their digital machine to be cleaned out as though it was a poorly built car in need of maintenance.

I'm not advocating that the API is cleaned out merely on the technical level, I'm advocating (with a lack of clarity on my behalf) that Microsoft needs to encourage an ecosystem of development creativity. Instead, we get a UI that is abstractly "optimized" for usage but is far removed from providing a pleasant experience for their users.

Apple is adding optional sandboxing to their system without intentionally breaking backwards compatibility in their APIs. Why wouldn't this work for Microsoft?

And isn't Metro exactly what you want?

I'll miss it. I thought the glass was a nice touch that wasn't too gaudy.

Seems like Windows should just include both. The flat look as a default if the prefer, and an option to change to the aero look.

That's going to be straining on the eyes if you prefer to work in dark environments.

I see an inch and a half of useless buttons in that screenshot that they'll have to ditch before their WM becomes useful.

Seriously? Cut/copy/paste buttons? Why?

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