Tag Archive for 'microsoft'

Wake Up and Ship!

Oct 27, '11 · Closed Tags: apple, interaction design, microsoft.

Not to start that whole thing again, but where Apple has had a knack for bringing progressive products to the consumer market, Microsoft has always had a knack for creating videos about the kinds of products it would like to be able to bring to market… but never does.

The latest is the Productivity Future Vision from the Office division, which like all their videos, looks great (and probably would interact horrible in a real-world scenario):

I suspect these videos are made not only by outside agencies (if you know different, let me know), but entirely by graphic designers who dream about interaction design, but never had to realize their ideas in the real world.

It’s a bit like having a great print-only designer design a website; it looks great, until it has to actually live inside a browser.

Dreams are for sleeping; it’s time to wake up.

Real artists ship.

Clusterfuck’d

Aug 30, '11 · Closed Tags: interface design, metro, microsoft, windows.

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. ↩

OnLive

Mar 25, '09 · 13 Comments Tags: apple, games, microsoft, onlive, sony.

If you don’t follow gaming news, this may have slipped by you, but trust me when I tell you that it’ll blow up everywhere in a day or two.

OnLive is basically a platform for playing a game that sits on a remote server, streaming the video to you over the internet. It sounds fantastic, awesome, revolutionary in a big way, and entirely implausible. At first I dismissed it, but the more I hear about it, the more I believe in it. Unless Sony and Microsoft manage to cock-block it, it’ll absolutely change the gaming industry.

If you’re even remotely interested in games, you owe it to yourself to check out the press conference video.

If this works — and that’s a big if, mind you — you’ll virtually never have to worry about upgrading your console again, because everything is run server-side. Games will be cheaper, faster delivered and you can’t lose or scratch the disc! As a developer, depending on how the OnLive business model will end up working, we also are no longer shackled by system specs. Piracy goes out the window. Noisy or defective components? Not a problem. And it works on your TV, your PC or your Mac! You can literally be playing on the TV, the wife comes in to watch Oprah, and you just flip up your MacBook and continue! The implications are absolutely mind boggling. And that’s just games; how about on-demand films and TV?

This is a game changer, pun and all.

What Microsoft Does Well

Mar 19, '09 · 15 Comments Tags: futurism, interface design, microsoft.

Dear Microsoft,
Fire you OS designers and have your visualization department do the OS interface instead.

… No, scratch that.

Dear Apple,
Hire Microsoft’s visualization department.

Don’t buy the Xbox 360. It’s noisy and it breaks.

Mar 7, '08 · Closed Tags: games, microsoft, xbox 360.

Dear Mr. Mattrick,

My 360 broke down with red ring of death a while back. Tragically, with the 360 having a 16.4% failure-rate, there’s nothing unusual about that.

What is unusual, is just how difficult it turns out to be to get my 360 repaired. Especially considering just how many millions of consoles that must be going through your system; I kind of thought you would’ve would have streamlined the process to help your users, since it is such an outspread problem.

Continue reading ‘Don’t buy the Xbox 360. It’s noisy and it breaks.’

The SS HD DVD is Going Down

Jan 10, '08 · Closed Tags: bill gates, blu-ray, hd dvd, indiana jones, michael bay, microsoft, movies, paramount.

Whether the Xbox 360 has a mere 3% failure rate or not, is irrelevant, according to Peter Moore. My personal estimate is about ten times that, but hey, what do I know? And besides, Bill Gates is promising more reliability, so… Stop snickering.

Now, what is relevant, whether Microsoft wants to stand by it or not, is them partaking in prolonging the HD format war. One thing is technically crippling the 360 by allowing people to buy it without a built-in HDD or even an optical HD drive. If you’ve played the stream-fest that is Mass Effect, you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about.

The horror. The horror.

Continue reading ‘The SS HD DVD is Going Down’

It’s Beta, People. Beta.

Jun 13, '07 · 16 Comments Tags: apple, browsers, Internet, microsoft, safari.

Slap me around and call me an opinionated buffoon, but media from on high and way down the long tail need to snap out of their Safari-hatin’ and at least pretend that they understand that the product they are faulting for security issues, instability and various other bugs is in fact, a beta.

I don’t know how many basement-analysts I’ve read since monday, that are ignorantly treating it as a finalized product, despite the fact that it’s a beta. And the first beta at that. Hell, it is the first time this thing has set foot on Windows!

Oblivious to the fact that beta’s are released, because they need testing, these keyboard-breathers haphazardly throw together misinformed opinions and lackluster ‘tests’ (for shame Wired, for shame).

Continue reading ‘It’s Beta, People. Beta.’

Microsoft Surface

May 30, '07 · 4 Comments Tags: interface design, microsoft, usability.

I want one… if it runs OS X that is (thanks Joen).