Windows Metro – The Lowest Common Denominator
The title is to get your attention. The fact is that Windows Metro will not necessarily be the Lowest Common Denominator anymore than other devices supporting tablet/smart phone style manipulations, primarily touch screens. Many good hardware devices are designed around the Android OS, which the Metro look and feel appears to emulate in my opinion.
Many people use a tablet to do more serious work by plugging it into a dock or adding peripheral input devices such as a keyboard or a mouse. Adding these devices makes the table much more useable when generating content instead of playing games or searching the web.
By design the OS on which they operate have to have a different way of handling things…no more apple key or windows button. Applications are much smarter with how they manage state…applications save state because they can be terminated for any number of reasons. The state is necessary to restore the application to the previous operating state.
State management is a good thing that Windows has frequently had difficulty handling. Plugging or un-plugging devices is a nice way to see that wonderful blue screen of death so common to some of the current Windows ancestors, and still seen even today after decades of work.
So, there will be some good things to come out of the Metro principles of software development. I don’t like the fact that Microsoft has in a very real way generated extreme pressure on software developers for applications not intended for portable devices to write applications as if they were. For example, the visual studio express version for Visual Studio 2011 will only write Metro Style applications or web sites (more on that tomorrow).
Tom:
I have to agree with your post about Metro Style Apps but would extend that to tablets, etc. As another reader stated, I have been using PC’s since the early 1980’s and always loved each new operating system as it made me more productive. I used the Apple and Appleworks early on.
I bought an iPad a few months ago and used it two weeks and returned it. I tried to do my work efficiently but failed. Dealing with the whole app world was frustrating and it seemed like I was trying to find apps all the time in order to do simple work.
By going to apps on tablets/phones, etc., we have went back 30 years in tool capability just so that we are now using a fancy iOS/Android system that 95 percent of the work being done is pleasure, not business.
I like the handiness of a tablet but why not just add a few capabilities into Windows and not start over from scratch! Can’t we add gestures and touch screens more mainstream into Windows and call it a day? Let’s improve and not just do change for change sake!
Christian:
The interface you use must sense/adapt to the device you’re using it on. A touchscreen interface isn’t much use on a device that doesn’t have a touchscreen. There’ll have to be a "Classic View" interface (cf. when you use Control Panel) when working on desktop/laptop/device that’s not touch-screen.
William:
I wouldn’t say that folks who came up with the Metro guidelines never had to do anything significant, only that they obviously never had to do it 437 times 10 minutes before a just-announced emergency meeting to discuss how to fix 437 accounts that were accidentally deleted.
Maurice:
I love to have keyboard shortcuts. When most of my work has to be done through the keyboard, I hate to leave the keyboard to grab the mouse and constantly move between both. That slows me down. I agree with you that a good GUI is having the choice between different input methods for the same thing. May be a reduced set of input methods help to learn new apps, but once the learning curve is no more a problem, reduced set of input methods become a problem.
Paul:
GUI UI #1 rule of thumb has always been stated in 3 points:
- Moving the hand from mouse to keyboard is a huge time waster.
- When the users hand is on the mouse, let them keep it on the mouse as long as possible.
- When the users hand is on the keyboard, let them keep it on the keyboard as long as possible.
Metro UI guidelines moves away from that rule.
It is a mistake, in my opinion.
Apple always defined everything in “gestures”, i.e. how many buttons, strokes, etc, to accomplish a task.
Apple programmers always were proud of how good their interface was.
Yet it took far more gestures to resize a window towards the upper left corner, because older versions of the OS only supported window sizing from the bottom right corner. (I’ll let your imagination come up with “gestures” for that).
Now, with Lion, Apple supports edge and corner sizing, as windows has for decades, a vast improvement in GUI productivity.
So, Apple is improving their UI experience (finally, yay!), while Microsoft is de-improving? deproving? devolving? destroying? theirs.
My 1/12.5 of two bits.
Adam:
I completely agree – the great thing with Windows is I could get almost anything done on the keyboard except of course UI stuff.
On my mac (recently purchased to learn a bit more about it) I can’t even move between browser windows efficiently that I can see as menu items can’t be accessed via hot keys (alt-w for example)
In the sample you provided theres a minor workaround in excel,
alt-w then w then 1,2,3,4,5
Yes it sucks, as I use alt w 2 all the time in visual studio to go back and forth between two files, so im dreading some of these changes.
I’ve had unix guys say ‘You use Windows like a unix command line’ thats because we could, I sure hope that isn’t taken completely away from the power users.
Joseph:
If what you describe is accurate then I hope they don’t take off. As a user I’m always looking for keyboard shortcuts. Nothing against meece, just my personal preference and it’s less stressful on the wrist too. As a developer I also endeavor to provide to the users of my applications multiple ways of accomplishing the same task. Unless you’re developing for robots it’s a diverse user base out there and if you want to increase acceptance of your custom apps then, in my opinion, it’s a best practice to provide the multi approach. There’s enough dumb things in the world – please don’t add any more, Microsoft.
So, is Metro the lowest common denominator, or an extension to the current world? Perhaps not completely so. Share your opinion through email to btaylor@sswug.org.
Cheers,
Ben
$$SWYNK$$
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