Microsoft Windows 8 Will have New User Interface
A recent job ad for the Windows User Experience team promises that the next version of Windows will “reinvent how people interact with computers”. We take this to be a reference to the ‘Natural User Interface’ vision. The leaked slides talk about “less complexity in the Windows experience as a whole”.
That might fit with one recent rumour that there will be two user interfaces. There could be a tile-based interface called Mosh just for tablets – like a larger version of Windows Phone 7 -along with a rich 3D interface called Wind. This means we should expect Aero-style transparency and effects, rather than film-style stereoscopic 3D. It might also mean 3D gestures for more powerful 64-bit systems with GPUs. This is something AMD and Intel are delivering as part of their CPUs.
The 170MB of video memory this is supposed to take seems unlikely for the final release, because it would bump up system requirements. Wind would be a good place for Seadragon to show its teeth, too. It’s the technology behind Deep Zoom in Silverlight, which a Microsoft job advert said would be coming to Windows 8.
One MSR India project suggests skewed multiple desktops and a new flip interface for navigating through windows by touch, but it also says that these ideas are currently just suggestions for the Windows team. Other rumours suggest that the interface will adapt automatically based on what you do on your PC, creating shortcuts or changing the interface for different scenarios. Craig Mundie demonstrated an interface that aggregates interesting information like social network updates and travel details in areas on screen, highlighting things like flight delays and showing how your schedule would change if you took a different plane (all controlled by 3D gestures made with your phone). The Windows 7 Start menu already shows the apps you use most often, but when Office introduced personalised menus, users found them confusing. This is something that Sinofsky knows personally, because he was in charge of Office at the time. He sometimes jokes that he tends to be associated with Clippy and UAC – two of Microsoft’s least popular tools.
He didn’t give many clues about the user interface when he showed off Windows 8 in January, but he did say it’s more about what people need to get done than the technology. “User interface design has a set of challenges; it doesn’t matter whether it’s for touch, or a mouse, or camera, or stylus or anything. You start from the customer view of what you want to make easier, what you want to enable, and then work backwards and develop the design to do that. I don’t think there’s anything particularly uniquely challenging about developing a touch user interface. I think what we want to do is make sure that we do a great job of what we deliver for the form factors that we ultimately aim for with the work that we’re doing.”
Specific features in leaked screenshots cover only small details like the taskbar icons showing progress for more tasks, including device driver installs and based on Windows 7, the M2 build they’re from won’t have the final Windows 8 user interface. There will be a new look for Windows 8, but we don’t know what it will be yet.
A recent job ad for the Windows User Experience team promises that the next version of Windows will “reinvent how people interact with computers”. We take this to be a reference to the ‘Natural User Interface’ vision. The leaked slides talk about “less complexity in the Windows experience as a whole”.
That might fit with one recent rumour that there will be two user interfaces. There could be a tile-based interface called Mosh just for tablets – like a larger version of Windows Phone 7 -along with a rich 3D interface called Wind. This means we should expect Aero-style transparency and effects, rather than film-style stereoscopic 3D. It might also mean 3D gestures for more powerful 64-bit systems with GPUs. This is something AMD and Intel are delivering as part of their CPUs.
The 170MB of video memory this is supposed to take seems unlikely for the final release, because it would bump up system requirements. Wind would be a good place for Seadragon to show its teeth, too. It’s the technology behind Deep Zoom in Silverlight, which a Microsoft job advert said would be coming to Windows 8.
One MSR India project suggests skewed multiple desktops and a new flip interface for navigating through windows by touch, but it also says that these ideas are currently just suggestions for the Windows team. Other rumours suggest that the interface will adapt automatically based on what you do on your PC, creating shortcuts or changing the interface for different scenarios. Craig Mundie demonstrated an interface that aggregates interesting information like social network updates and travel details in areas on screen, highlighting things like flight delays and showing how your schedule would change if you took a different plane (all controlled by 3D gestures made with your phone). The Windows 7 Start menu already shows the apps you use most often, but when Office introduced personalised menus, users found them confusing. This is something that Sinofsky knows personally, because he was in charge of Office at the time. He sometimes jokes that he tends to be associated with Clippy and UAC – two of Microsoft’s least popular tools.
He didn’t give many clues about the user interface when he showed off Windows 8 in January, but he did say it’s more about what people need to get done than the technology. “User interface design has a set of challenges; it doesn’t matter whether it’s for touch, or a mouse, or camera, or stylus or anything. You start from the customer view of what you want to make easier, what you want to enable, and then work backwards and develop the design to do that. I don’t think there’s anything particularly uniquely challenging about developing a touch user interface. I think what we want to do is make sure that we do a great job of what we deliver for the form factors that we ultimately aim for with the work that we’re doing.”
Specific features in leaked screenshots cover only small details like the taskbar icons showing progress for more tasks, including device driver installs and based on Windows 7, the M2 build they’re from won’t have the final Windows 8 user interface. There will be a new look for Windows 8, but we don’t know what it will be yet.
