Everything to Everyone

Needing to test a component in Internet Explorer 10, I spent some time with Windows 8 today, and boy, oh boy.

I have very little to say about IE10; it seems a capable browser, though that's what we said about every iteration of that accursed line of software for well over a decade. There's some sort of high brow Dante's Inferno reference with IE1-9 lining up with the nine circles of hell. For a moment I thought perhaps we had made it through to the other side, then I noticed the compatibility mode icon in IE10 and decided that we probably just found the secret level...

Whatever the case, what really bears mentioning is Metro, because, well, it's much worse than I thought.

I've long been a fan of Metro (it's great to see a genuinly original take on a new interface; right Android? Right?), but aside from the occasional stark design element feeling not so much modern as unstyled, the clash between Metro and the so-called desktop mode is like continually submerging your body in a nice warm bubble bath, only to immediately get up and jump into a tub of ice water, only to then get up and get back in the warm bubble bath, ad nauseum. You may prefer warm or cold, that's really irrelevant, the point is that you don't get to pick which one to stay in, which makes for a schizophrenic user experience at best, and at worst one of complete disoriention. Metro feels like a foreign concept on the desktop, having clearly been designed for touch only to be brutally Frankenstein'd on top of Windows, a mash-up which makes if nothing else is echoed very clearly in the newly announced Surface: Everything to everybody

And because Metro simply feels wrong on a desktop computer, I intuitively switch to desktop mode, only to find nothing where I would expect it. No Start button, no control panel, no nothing. I can't do anything! It took me a while to figure out that I had to press the Windows key, except that sends me back to Metro...

Now if Metro and desktop-mode had some sort of kinship, but there is no spill over, no shared DNA at all in fact. And that's half of the reason the switch is so jarring, with one stark, typographical and modern (for now), the other glass, blur, curves and traditional UI. Both are actually quite nice in their own right, but it simply doesn't feel like an OS, because really it's two.

This paralysis of choice is deeply endemic of Microsoft's design culture (or lack thereof), and doubly ironic because Microsoft's mantra for Windows 8 has been 'no compromises', which is exactly what Windows 8 is full of! It's reflected again in how applications like Internet Explorer 10 (and other, though not all of course) has two different clients that are as far from one another as night and day. And paralyzed by the very notion of drawing a line in the sand on behalf of its users, Microsoft has left it up to the user to figure out which is the best choice at any given moment, because hey, what if it's everything to everyone, all the time!?

It would, unfortunately it looks very much as if it'll be half of the thing to half of the people, half of the time.

Clusterfuck'd

You think imitation leather is the biggest problem facing interface design today? Think again.

It doesn’t even make sense to break down what’s wrong with it, because it’s basically everything[1], and reveals a baffling lack of insight into how users interact with their computers.

But at least the post gives us some interesting telemetry data from the Explorer. Data that is theoretically as applicable to any file-based OS – say OS X – as it is to Windows.

Now we don’t get much data about the data[2], but it’s still extremely interesting, and what’s so striking to me, is that Cut, Copy and Paste are in fact some of the most used commands, ~~and they’re not even available in the Finder on OS X. It always seemed weird, but~~ for all I knew, most people never cut and pasted files. It seems they do.

Of course the Finder couldn’t merge folders until Lion, so perhaps it’s simply a matter of it not getting enough attention at Apple, or perhaps there is a genuine reason behind this decision. I don’t know.

Another thing that strikes me, is the Refresh command. Yes kids, there was once when we would have to manually refresh the Explorer to see changes to our file system. And as you can see, it is still in wide use.

No major surprises there, but it’s always nice to know what the market looks like today in terms of resolution.

Anyway.

What the hell is going on at Microsoft? How did this clusterfuck come out of the same team that did this?:

Updated: Cut, copy and paste are indeed available through keyboard shortcuts in the Finder; I must have tested wrong when I wrote this post. Thank you Karl for pointing out my error.

Microsoft has had a history of letting Office set the direction of their interface design, which tells you everything you need to know about why the interface is getting more and more complicated. I think Paris Lemon said it best. ↩

“This data is pretty solid and given the hundreds of millions of data points, it gives us a very clear picture of average usage across the population as a whole” is all it says, though it seems likely from later comments that it’s exclusive to Windows 7, though it doesn’t say how many users, what the demographical breakdown is or over how much time the data was collected. ↩

A Day in the Life...

In an attempt to halt the furry-fication of my workstation wallpaper, I have my screensaver kick in early and leave any assailants at a login screen. Today I returned from a meeting, only to find that as I tried logging in, Vista, as a part of our network policy, persisted in asking me to change my password. Now. Not tomorrow, not five minutes from now. Now.

How do you change your password you ask? Choose ‘Change User’, which automatically logs you out, only for you to then log back in so that you can change your password. “But won’t that cause any open applications to close?” you ask. Yes, it will. “But isn’t that like extending the middle finger to the user, rather than protecting his data?” you ask. Yes, yes it is. And I may be mistaken, but I swear I heard a gleeful cackling as it did so.

Of course, when Vista was done hurling my sacred and precious user data into the sun, it promptly changed the resolution to 640×480, asking me for a new password. I relinquished one, and was reinserted into the hell that is Vista. I immediately tried changing the resolution and setting my primary/secondary monitors back to their original order, but couldn’t. Blink. Blinketi-blink. 2×24” at 640×480; live with it.

So I restarted. Again.

Thanks Microsoft.

PS: And this isn’t mentioning the times the login screen has been black with a cursor on top. Vista loves playing ‘guess a course of action, fucker’ with me. I wish the feeling was mutual, that would really raise my quality of life.

PPS: “Windows 7 is coming, it’ll make everything better.” Dude, I doubt it. I really do.

The OS & Fluid Designs

In laying down this new design—Kalamari—I decided to try and go with a fluid-width layout for once. Traditionally I haven’t held it in particularly high regard; but I experiemented with it for a few hours, and ended up somehow finding it a natural fit alongside the ‘book-like’ typography.

What’s interesting about fluid-width designs, is that for me, they actually only make sense under OS X. After all, under OS X, no window can be maximized and locked to the screen. Quite the contrary in fact. Not only are windows rarely sized to fit the full size of the screenThe lack of a maximize button in OS X has been known to drive some people to the brink of madness., but all windows are movable at any time. And the ace in the hole, is that you cannot move the upper edge of a window above the lower edge of the menu bar, and you cannot resize a window to be bigger than the size of your screen.

Combined, these factors are very significant, as they directly influence the way you work your windows.

Contrary, on Windows, un-maximized windows most often differ in size and vertical position from window to window. And without the menu bar blocking vertical movement and the screen-size dictating the size of windows, it isn’t quite that easy to quickly move and resize a window, while retaining a tidy workspace; and so I most often simply maximize all windows.

Hang on, I’m approaching the point.

Because of this, I work much better with OS X’s windows paradigm. Much better. My work environment simply remains more fluid than when I’m working on Windows, and I often find myself resizing windows to fit whatever content they contain.

In turn, because I do thatWell, and because Baskerville looks amazing in Safari on OS X, and Georgia looks like shit in Firefox on Windows, Kalamari felt more natural on OS X, since I find myself resizing the width of the window to where it feels ‘right’. But at work, on Windows, the window was maximized, and… well, it looked almost grotesque actually, because of the vast wasteland of whitespace on either side of the column in a maximized window.

So I have to come up with some way of countering that I suppose.

Yay.

A View on Vista

Dear God, the worst headline ever! But yeah, I promised Christoffer Alm I would tell him in no unsure terms why I think Windows Vista likes goats, and by golly here we go (screenshots from Thurrott’s Supersite for Windows, where you will find not only more screenshots, but also Paul’s insightful commentary on the status of Windows Vista Beta 2):

First of all, I don’t hate the transparent windows as much as some people; I do think they make the feel of the UI a bit lighter. That said, I can also understand why they need to add a hefty dropshadow to outline the window… But the sight of an almost fully transparent pane of glass with such a strong dropshadow just feels off. Also, check out the accessibility icon… Ehm… Not very accessible, is it?

Bonjour much? (Fair enough, it’s about damn time the Windows crowd gets a taste of the sweet nectar of zero-config networking, but then hey, buy a Mac and you won’t have to wait for Vista).

No, the media player button needs to be MORE like OS X’s aqua interface. No, no you’re right, we can’t just rip it off… Alright, make it tastelessly blue. I mean supernaturally so! Great! Oh, and add sharing support to your library, cuz iTunes also has that…

Now I know all of this is beta and all, but holy Christ on a skateboard going downhill in San Francisco, that is one fugly Start Menu.

Forget about the transparent windows for a minute, this is a usability travesty! Not only is this an ExposÃ© rip-off (come on, it’s SO a rip-off), but it’s called (help me now!) Flip 3D!... Flip… 3-fucking-D… Not to evangelize, but I do think Steve Jobs said it best. Either way, here’s a pretty crappy video of Flip 3D, it was the best I could do just now.

So what’s wrong with Flip 3D then? Well, I’ll tell you. the brilliance of OS X’s ExposÃ© is that when you activate it, all your windows slide away from each other, revealing not only their entire content, but also showing you the absolute number of open windows. What Flip 3D does is pile up all you windows into a stack, which you’re then shown in an orthogonal view where each window is slightly offset from the other and you can then scroll back and forward through the strack.

There are two major problems with this, in comparison with ExposÃ© and a single advantage. First of all the windows, despite being spaced out a bit, do cover up each other quite a bit, so you’re reliant on recognizing your windows either by a fraction of its surface or by scrolling it to the front, which of course takes time. Secondly, and this is much much worse, the on-screen stack contains only a certain number of windows at any given time, maybe 15 or so. So say you have 30 windows open, you have to scroll through the first 15 to get to the other 15. Bang, you just lost your overview. And to add insult to injury, the stack scrolls infinitely, so you alsbo just lost your spacial awareness.

Dang.

There is one advantage though, as Joen recently pointed out to me, Flip 3D does allow you to have 4000 windows open and still cope with it… Sorta.

It’s still in beta, but do you think it’ll turn around? I sure as hell don’t. In fact I think Microsoft is shooting itself in the foot big time, and despite having eagerly followed the progress of Vista, it seems they just can’t catch a break.

Update: Following Paul Thurrott’s outburst about me having ‘stolen’ his screenshots (and the ensuing discussion), he was kind enough to clarify some of my points on his ‘Internet Nexus‘ site, and I would like to just take the chance to respond in full here.

[...] he has the balls to rip off my screenshots, describe them as being “supplied” by me (as if worked together on this project), and then spells my name wrong. Grr.

An unfortunate choice of word(s) and a stupid error on my part. Both have been rectified.

2. People Near Me is not Bonjour, sorry. It’s about setting up ad-hoc wireless meetings without a nearby wireless network, using just the wireless cards in your laptops.

From what you’re saying and what the text in the screenshot says, it’s basically an amalgamation of OS X’s Create Network and Bonjour, yes?

3. WMP 11’s visual display is far nicer than anything in iTunes’ dBASE III-era UI.

By visual display I’m guessing you mean interface? I’ll grant you as much as WMP11’s interface uses album covers in its browser, which is something iTunes should have had a looong time ago. Mind you, I used WMP for a few years up until iTunes was released for Windows (back when I was still on PC), and by and large it works pretty well. Among other things it has a nice little feature where, if you seperate multiple artists with commas, it will recognize them as being different artists. Take heed Apple!

4. The new Start Menu is far more usable than that of XP, sorry. And if you want, you can configure it to your heart’s content.

I wasn’t talking usability, I was talking fugliness. Big difference. As I said to Blake:

Don’t mistake layout for ugliness factor. I do think the XP start menu was a step up from 9x, but the current beta start menu (which I don’t think they will ship with) is just plain ugly. The colors or bad, the spacing is bad, the portrait which sticks out and is glass-like… It’s just bad. #

Back to Paul.

5. Flip3D is absolutely not an Expose rip-off. Flip3D and Expose do two completely different things. If anything, Flip3D is far more limited. It’s just a more graphical way of switching apps (used to be ALT-TAB). That’s it. Nothing more.

Two different things, eh? Damn, I must be using ExposÃ© wrong, I could have sworn it was pretty good at being a graphical way of switching apps…

6. Oh, and you ripped off my screenshots and had the gall to add them to your Flickr site. Please remove them, thanks. —Paul

The above text was also copied and pasted from your site with a credited link telling readers where I got it… Tell me, is that also ripping you off? Or is there a distinction between the text and the images you publish? I’ll just go right ahead and steal some content from myself then:

Since you have no permalinks to the individual images, the only other option I have is linking directly to the individual image, but then you’d be over here talking about bandwidth theft. #

Maybe I should have just taken a screenshot of the screenshot in the browser window, then where would we be?

It's all about the Bling Bling

Blatant desktop plugging when it’s worst.