I decided to download Movie Maker so I went to Microsoft.com. They have a Downloads menu there. I clicked "All Windows Downloads". (The site is pretty fast, BTW). I selected "Windows 7", then scrolled down until I found Movie Maker. I clicked "Get it now" and it showed me the Movie Maker page. On that page I clicked Download Now, and it started downloading!
What I never really understood about that is that nothing happened after that. No heads rolling, no massive rehash of the process, it just limped on being an utterly lame duck for another decade. Until they are finally bringing out something like a first class app store now.
Just shows the lack of direction the product was getting when you hear the totally different results that Steve Jobs got. Admittedly BG was no longer CEO then.
The funny thing is that it's 4th result. The first one leads to some page with "Looking for Movie Maker?" text. The second and the third one lead to some irrelevant pages.
Microsoft now has, IMO, the most interesting design language of any of the big tech players. I guess it remains to be seen if there will be any reward for them in the market for this but, as a developer, I find this a lot more appealing than anything Google or Apple are doing and C# kicks the shit out of Java or Obj-C.
I totally agree about the design language. I work on a Mac most of the day and love my iPhone, but damn does Metro look nice. And it's great seeing that come across with their other products as well.
I fell in love with Metro the minute I saw it. I bought a Lumia 800 on day one. I'm all for chromeless interfaces. But I'm starting to think I was mistaken.
1. They followed design principles too well. Strong constraints: check. Simplicity: check. But Metro is too constrained, too systematical. App designers are left with too few breathing space. Apps look all the same and feel too cold. I want my gradients back.
2. It doesn't look that good on big screens. For instance, launch screens of Windows 8 apps : it's too minimalistic to have big white icons on a flat monochrome background.
I think the Design is good on first sight but doesn't carry over with time. It is the excitement in graphics but little in design philosophy. Compare to Android 4.0 and Apple.
I don't think that's a fair comparison though. Metro as a design language is very new. Compare iOS 5 with iOS 1. Or Android 4 with the pre-iPhone version. Or Mac OS X Lion with that pinstriped abomination that OS X used to be.
I think Metro has a lot of growing to do, but it seems like a language that could be very interesting down the road.
What do you mean by "design language"? A programming language, a programming language used for design (like HTML, CSS), a the style of language used in their websites (e.g. Lorem Ipsum), or something else?
From wikipedia: A design language or design vocabulary is an overarching scheme or style that guides the design of a complement of products.
In microsofts case it's the "metro" style, with lots of bright (almost cartoony) colors, big blocks filled with lots of light-weight, sans-serif fonts.
It's not full featured. It's a pretty small subset. The most powerful things in the .Net platform are the big chunks of code which take on large business cases and make them go away.
For example the following either don't exist or are half-baked:
WCF (WsHttpBinding in particular), WWF (entirely which we use for WCF correlation), EF (not a biggy but would be nice), WPF (the best part of .Net), MEF (buggy and missing bits).
I do agree with you : mono is a subset of .NET,
Cross platform compatibility is not the main reason for using Mono. I really like the C# and the .NET ecosystem.
I use a native UI for each platform, but the core code is the same. I'm not a big fan of those generic UI toolkit ...
Except one thing that bugs me most on these "responsive" sites. The images are still loaded at their full resolution. Even when I reloaded after I resized the tab. Tried private tab to avoid cache - result still the same - 1600px wide image loaded.
It's working really nice and all but I think the point of responsive sites is to make them usable on small, mostly mobile, devices. And we still live in a age when the mobile bandwidth is something to worry about. I'd imagine the battery life would suffer a bit too.
In case you didn't know, this is a pressing concern for developers that do care about performance of responsive websites. Take a look at http://www.w3.org/community/respimg/
Scott Jehl of Filament Group just delivered a talk at An Event Apart on Responsible Responsive Design, and released Southstreet, a suite of tools designed to make responsive design more performant. Check it out at https://github.com/filamentgroup/Southstreet
Setting `img { max-width: 100%; }` by default and scale it to `150%` when viewport reach certain threshold (for mobile). For the former, it will beautifully scale to the containing div size, for the latter, you can set outer div to `overflow: hidden` and left/right side will be cut off giving the image a square-ish feel.
That is an impressive adaptive site design update.
A couple of things I love about this is (1) the elegance of the menu toggle to top in the small (mobile-size) view and (2) the slideshow control appearance on small view and adaptation to breadcrumb implementation on large view. Quite elegant and appropriate for each environment.
Of course, it is sad that the experience is rarely consistent when you start digging deeper into the site.
We've all known it for a while, but this redesign (which I think is quite nice compared to Microsoft's previous efforts) throws their logo into stark relief. It looks outdated. It doesn't match.
I'm speculating that we'll see an across-the-board Microsoft rebrand within the next two years, including a new logo for the company. They've rebranded their core software offering, they're now changing directions on their hardware/software philosophy, and trying to gain some mindshare for their new aesthetic (and their new appreciation for aesthetics more generally) is going to be a core part of that movement.
I don't know, I just think you can take sparse so far it becomes soulless. Simple, clean design can still be emotive. This isn't. The stock art humans make this feel more like a Big Oil annual report. (And that Products menu is a little painful!) All that said, this is leaps and bounds beyond their current homepage.
Sorry I'm not understanding but really wanting to. What do you mean "more emotive"? What exactly could be done to this page to make it more "emotive"? What takes away from its "emotiveness"?
About the products page -- overall I think it looks pretty clean, but I mostly have a problem with the "More Products" category where they bunch together a big list of random products.
Oh man, I almost choked on my water. I've got some feedback: don't absolute position annoying and generic elements that distract me from your product(s).
.. that being said, it is pretty cute when it's shrunk down for mobile.
Given that the post is called "A DESIGN WITH ALL-CAPS" (yeah, the title is all-caps, funny thing), maybe, the real problem precisely that they are supporting their designers's view, over their user's feedback.
You know, trying to defend their "artistic integrity"...
I really don't like the use of big photos like here, the new airbnb, and Bing. They are busy, space wasting and bandwidth hogs. And to my eyes they don't add anything.
They only waste space when you've got space to waste. I really like the way the layout changes as the screen size changes and the images become more cropped.
Yeah the responsive design is really well executed.
But seriously, I can literally only see the nav and four images when I load this page on my desktop. Shocking usability.
Every time I see a new MS offering I feel more and more that they are investing in good-looking design rather than usable design.
I am completely underwhelmed beyond the responsiveness, which is nice. Feels very yesterday. One click thru to products page, and it's more underwhelming. Shows lack of vision for the company. "Managing home and homework just got easier." Really? This is the best their designers and copywriters can show us?
Beautiful and much better. A little cold and sterile from all the white space but it's a step in the right direction. They'll iron things out over time.
ONE thing. Where are the Previous & Next Arrows for the main slideshow?
Is this what we have to look forward to with Metro?
The design seems like a children's book combined with some ISP "landing page" from 1995. Everything is big and bold, yet the entire page is almost completely devoid of meaningful content. It's just a vast array of disorganised links, or more precisely, a whole bunch of vast arrays of disorganised links, with no sign of any rational information architecture or even basic scannability.
Sorry, but I just can't find anything nice to say about it. It has absolutely no redeeming features whatsoever AFAICS.
"It's just a vast array of disorganised links, or more precisely, a whole bunch of vast arrays of disorganised links, with no sign of any rational information architecture or even basic scannability."
What a ridiculous statement. Of course it's organised. Want to download something to extend a Microsoft product line? Click "Downloads" and choose the product line. Need Support? Click "Support". Want to buy a Microsoft product? Click "Store".
Which use cases exactly are you imagining are not supported by this "vast array of disorganised links"?
Go to the page. Open the first menu, "Products". They've grouped Windows stuff together and Office stuff together. On the next column, there is everything from Surface (which one?) to Hotmail. On the column after that, we have products like "Partner network" and "Microsoft in the enterprise". This column also has "Cloud services", but Azure is in the final column.
Let's try another menu, "Security". There are only four options on this menu. Let's assume I'm someone who doesn't know what every Microsoft brand means, but my friend told me I might have a virus on my Windows PC. Does that menu give me the slightest guidance about which option I need? The names are completely meaningless, unless you happen to know that Microsoft Security Essentials isn't actually a guide to the essentials of security, it's the product with anti-virus functionality.
Which use cases exactly are you imagining are not supported by this "vast array of disorganised links"?
I know what I want to do, but I don't know the name of the Microsoft product or service that will help me.
I know what I want to do, but I don't know whether Microsoft offer a product or service that can help me.
In fact, just about anything except "Tell me about Windows", "Tell me about Office", or "I already know exactly which product or service I want, by Microsoft Randomised Brand Name(TM), tell me about the thing I've already found".
There is no sense of priority. No sense of leading a visitor interested in a particular area through what Microsoft has to offer. It's just a catalogue, with a lot of spurious entries thrown in and no descriptions for anything. It is empty.
You seem to be blinded by some serious Microsoft hatred. "Microsoft Randomised Brand Name(TM)"? "Office" is "random"? I suppose you think "Apple" or "Linux" or "Ubuntu" or "Sun" or whatever it is you are a fan of is less random? Another ridiculous statement.
Your friend told you you have a virus? Well if you know that means "Security" click on there, and, logically being unfamiliar with the 4 choices you pick the first one, "Security Home". Bang, right there in front of you:
"Download Microsoft Security Essentials for free. Help shield your computer from viruses, spyware, and other malware."
If you're too scared to click twice, or if the word "Security" is unfamiliar in the context of viruses, type "virus" in the search box on the home page. First result:
"What is a Computer Virus | What Do Computer Viruses Do. Have you ever wondered what is a computer virus or what do computer viruses do? Learn how are computer viruses spread and how to prevent them."
Second and third results discuss virus removal.
That's the only specific use case you mentioned and I had zero problems finding the correct solution. There are plenty of legitimate reasons to criticize Microsoft (the 3 hours I wasted yesterday trying to get ASP.NET MVC 4 working is one of them). But you didn't list one valid criticism with a specific use case. The rest of your post is a vague rant.
I don't hate Microsoft. I am simply observing that their new design and information architecture are very poor in this specific case.
If you really can't understand that many of Microsoft's brand names are not literal/descriptive or why this creates a usability problem if much of the material on their home page is just links to such names without any explanation or context, there is little more I can say here.
However, straw man arguments about brand names in general or advice that boils down to "Just Google it" because the page doesn't contain any useful information don't exactly help your case.
It is bad enough that we're so obsessed with web apps today that some people actually consider tools like HTML, CSS and JavaScript to be good for application development. But if native applications are going to look even worse...
Fortunately, they won't, because real people still have real work to do, and user interfaces that look like (and have similar power to) a five year old's toys are going to suck for that. Microsoft will want everyone to move over to Metro, just as they wanted everyone to use their new shiny technology last year and the year before that, but they'll still support the stuff that people write real applications with, for the same reason that you can still write native apps in C++ instead of using .Net and C# for everything.
In fact, most of Microsoft's own big money spinners don't tend to use their shiny development technologies, and they never have. Like the incompetence of politicians, this is one of those universal constants that brings hope even when everyone is saying really stupid things. :-)
Looks like they're matching one of their main web properties' UI with their new OS IU.
In some ways that makes sense, they're going all out or bust, in other ways I'm not sure that searching thru Technet articles will be best experienced via this new UI --granted their previous IF to Technet was horrible.
Something else is that previously they had no uniform design. different teams had different designs for their domains. Once you entered a search term, all bets were off on what the page you got to would look like.
I think one thing conspicuously lacking here (besides rounded borders and gradiented buttons, both of which aren't part of Metro style) is icons. Nowadays most sites use icons to add visual interest to plain text. Microsoft's old designs didn't, and I think they suffered for the lack of them. The new design is refreshing and clean but would still benefit from having some similarly clean and functional graphical elements, i.e. icons.
The simplicity of the metro design style is a great direction. It's in a way a forced simplicity which can minimize the UI clutter we have come to know from Microsoft. But reducing elements means that the few that you have should be as refined as possible, and proportion, scale and white space become more important. I think this site would look 10 times better and balanced with better sizing and spacing of everything.
I don't see anything special about this new design. It's sparser than before, but I don't see anything "too Metro" about it. Just 3-4 images and text links. Is that supposed to mean it's Metro? Because there are a lot of similar sites like that on the web. Would Craiglist with bigger fonts, more space between links and 3 big images at the top become "Metro"?
So why didn't their Surface launch site look like that?? And will they be fixing search (other than including Google GSE which would be a vast improvement).
The problem is not just that it is flickery, it's actually often unusable.
There are so many sites that use on-hover to trigger a menu (often with sub-menus), so that if you misplace your pointer even slightly, the top-level menu option you selected disappears.
I've lost count of the number of times I have to play the game of selecting from the top level menu, back down to the item I actually want.
Here's one angle..MS has 2 large very different customer sets, the enterprise and the consumer and in the past it seemed that a lot of the UI was some sort of a compromise targeted to both.
The consumer tech group is definitely getting stronger at design .. and the enterprise tech arm can rely on its salesforce
I'm not particularly anti-Microsoft, but I absolutely hate this design. The text is so huge I find it painful to read, most of the page is taken up by a slideshow of what seem to be generic stock images, and I have to scroll before I can find anything useful.
I don't think that's it. That's what the UI on Windows Phone and Surface looks like, so I'm guessing it's intentional.
Personally, I am fucking sick of rounded corners, so seeing the right angles here really made me happy. I'm guessing their designers felt the same way.
Rounded corners are known to draw attention inward while angular edges "point" outward, which could make rounded corners a better choice for content containers from the usability perspective. An interesting discussion on the topic here: http://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/11150/how-do-rounded-c...
OTOH, I love the feel of Metro and wouldn't change to rounded corners for the world.
It's pretty nice, works well across desktop to mobile (the slide-down menus are a bit slow on mobile). My only issue is that I don't particularly care for the Sans-serif font on the section headers. It just doesn't look "right" to me.
Especially when an awesome fav seems easy for those guys. I guess they probably don't want to use the Windows one because it's only one of their products.
Not a very efficient solution to the "Google is getting too much attention" problem. I have to respect the people who did it, even if I don't the manager who decided to show it before it's ready.
Nice look, but, slow as hell to load. 15 seconds before anything appeared. Maybe because I'm in Australia. (my net connection is around 5mbit so its not that).
Really cool responsive design, works and resizes smoothly both on FF and Chrome, while I've seen some similar implementations being very slow on Chrome.
I grabbed the image and tossed it into Paint.NET; there does appear to be some artifact in the center of the laptop lid that could possibly (to my unskilled eye) be (mis)interpreted as the leaf on the top of the Apple logo. However, I don't know enough about this stuff to say anything more than that someone should take a look.
I like it but something about it (well, the entire metro design) feels... off. This is the sort of style I really enjoy so I maybe it might just be the feeling that's too forward for a company like Microsoft, but something about it that I can't put my finger on makes me second guess how much I like it.
It looks great actually! What kills ,e about Microsoft though is that, especially recently, they've done a great job in making their sites, OS, and software quite pretty but they still after all this time have absolutely horrendous font rendering in Windows which kills every design they come out with. I'm a developer who uses a Mac as my primary machine, Linux as a secondary machine and in the past month has been forced to use Windows at my new job. I wasn't happy about it but it turns out I've gotten just about as productive with it as any other platform. But the problem is that now, 4 weeks in, I get terrible eye strain and the whole system looks ugly because fonts are jagged except at really large sizes. It's ironic that this new site looks awesome on my iPad and Mac but not so much on their own OS, Windows. Why can't they fix that already?
This is intentional. Windows uses font hinting which attempts to align the anti-aliased font to whole pixels vertically and sub-pixels horizontally. This is done to maintain readability at small sizes. Apple doesn't use this type of font hinting and applies sub-pixel anti-aliasing proportionately.
AFAIK there is no way in Windows to control hinting, which in my opinion is the thing that makes Windows' font-rendering unbearable, especially on displays with a high PPI count.
There's hacks out there, but they're exactly that: hacks. And they don't always work that well.
