Why do I have the impression that if they go flat, they'll be hailed as geniuses and Microsoft will be forgotten forever?
(This comment guaranteed 100% conspirationist and crazy)
Possibly because they'll do it right and not have the amorphous mess that is Windows 8?
There's sparks of brilliance in Metro, but it's too goddamn flat. It's not obvious what parts of the UI can be clicked and manipulated.
Apple is also hailed as genius for "inventing the tablet" even though Microsoft tried to make tablets happen for a decade before the iPad. It's just an example of execution having more impact than conceptualization.
>Apple is also hailed as genius for "inventing the tablet" even though Microsoft tried to make tablets happen for a decade before the iPad
The iPad has more in common with the Newton, which came years before the Tablet PC.
Tablet PCs, while great (I liked them anyway, especially with OneNote) might have been called a tablet, but it had little in common with the tablet concepts as presented in the iPad. Tablet PCs didn't even get capacitive touch until after iOS devices came out. They were wholly stylus-based until then -- no pinches or swipes.
>Tablet PCs didn't even get capacitive touch until after iOS devices came out.
That's not true, I own a HP Tx2 which was released before the iPad and it has a capacitive touch screen it works great and before it there was the dell XT2 too.
Yeah you're right, The dell XT with capacitive touch was released in december of 2007 with a capacitive screen, the iPhone was released on june of 2007, I thought the op meant the iPad.
Well I did have a capacitive touch screen "tablet PC" (Panasonic Toughbook). But that's pretty much irrelevant since the UI didn't have pinches and swipes and wasn't designed primarily for use with fingers.
There still were Tablet PCs with capacitive display before though, for example the ThinkPad X60 Tablet had an optional MultiTouch display and it came out in 2006.
Dismissing Microsoft's metro design by calling Windows 8 is a typical example of a straw man that you get to see here on HN. Flat design as it is done in the Metro UI on Windows 8 is gorgeous particularly on touch based machines. The fact that there also exists an older UI is because of the legacy that Microsoft has to support It's the price you have to pay for being in business for 30 years. I clearly see the need to go to non-metro UI diminishing as new updates and apps come along. Command line UI lingered on for a while after windows 3.1 came and the legacy UI will probably have the same lifeline.
I'm talking about Metro. It's very pretty, but it's not all that functional. It uses space poorly and it's hard to distinguish what is manipulable and what is not. It's particularly problematic on WP8, because at least on a larger screen the physical separation of the UI elements gives some clue to what does what. E.g. the "people" app on WP8 is quite a mess. It's not at all clear how to get around in it.
E.g. the "people" app on WP8 is quite a mess. It's not at all clear how to get around in it.
I just looked at the People app. I don't find anything confusing in it at all. Virtually everything in there is tapable. I didn't see a single thing in there that I thought someone would be confused about (at least with respect to the UI -- it's a bit confusing as to what content gets streamed in, but that has nothing to do with Metro).
Its not a price anyone has to pay, its a choice made. Plenty of companies have been around a while and choose not to support old stuff - cutting or keeping the ties is part of the design.
Why do you think Microsoft invented flat UI design?
I for one will miss the current iOS design. I'm 1 year into Android and I'm still way faster on iOS. There is a clear distinction between what is interaction vs. what is not and my eye instantly maps out the interactive elements on the screen.
Each to their own, I am the complete opposite. I came from an iPhone and switched to Android. I am much faster on Android, task switching is worlds apart, animations are faster and smoother, the apps I use follow Holo design language (this is by choice) meaning the UI is consistent and beautiful. I'm not saying it's perfect, there are some things I miss from iOS like unread badges (easy to get back with Nova Launcher however) and I did like Airplay, Android certainly has plenty of room to refine and improve, but it would take some massive and fundamental changes for me to consider switching back to iOS.
Citation please? Cannot seems like an unreasonably strong claim.
Given the way older iOS devices are often sluggish on newer OS releases, it seems entirely possible that the animations on the switched-from device were slower and less smooth than the animations on the switched-to device.
I can see how my comment could be interpreted as hinting that Microsoft invented flat UI design, yet it wasn't the point I was trying to make as it is most likely untrue :)
What I was going for here is that even though they didn't CREATE the movement of flat UI design, they most certainly helped its most recent resurgence in the "collective mind" by placing it back on the map with their Metro interface (which I think is actually pretty sweet yet still bears the marks of the older OS UI designs of the XP/Vista/7 era).
And I somehow feel that there's a difference in treatment between Microsoft and Apple (case in point is Microsoft brilliant technology for on-the-fly translations in video conferences which blew my mind). Just to be clear about my intentions with this here comment, I dislike Windows as an OS, switched to Linux about 10 years ago and I am currently and happily running OS X, this is not fanboy-ism.
Using my Dad's iPhone tonight was absolutely infuriating. I finally gave it back and told him to figure it out himself. That interface, the lack of a back button, it's so damn frustrating.
The IM button with my old email address magically taking me to Facebook was one thing, still no freaking clue why it took me to Facebook. And then I couldn't go "Back", because there is no "Back". I tried the in-app back button - no, that was a huge mistake. So I double-tapped the home key and choose Phone or Contacts or whatever it is... and guess what? It was a completely different contact. What the hell? How am I supposed to get back to where I just was?
Don't even get me started on the Android "back button". I am still regularly baffled by its behaviour. Especially when combined with the "app within an app" you get when one app launches into another. Except not really.
Android Police has a great writeup on Android design weirdness with a section titled 'The Back Button - Let's Just Rename It "Shuffle" '
It goes backward. It goes wherever you just were, unless it takes you up a level, and if you just press it again, it takes you back to the app you were in. It's really not hard.
Contact app -> app an email address -> Gmail Compose window -BACK-> Contact app on the contact you were just on.
It takes you backward, it is what makes intents and app interaction work. I can understand why its confusing to an Apple user because there is no equivalent functionality in iOS.
Here, pretend there is no back button, yay! Android works like iOS and I'd go freaking insane. It sure as hell beats what happened to me in iOS tonight, who on Earth finds that usable? Every time one app invokes another I'm expected to go back to the homescreen and drill back down into the original app? Just shoot me.
> It goes backward. It goes wherever you just were, unless it takes you up a level, and if you just press it again, it takes you back to the app you were in. It's really not hard.
And there's no way to tell if you're at the first "point" of the current application(in which case it will switch you to the previous one), or if it will go back to another place within the app.
And the Android OS doesn't determine what the back button does. Individual applications do. So you're dealing with an OS control button that's extremely context sensitive and application specific. You don't know what the button's going to do until you use it in any app.
That's not quite the whole story. Some apps can inject extra state - so when I get an email, pull down and click, read the email and hit "back" it takes me to the inbox. Back again takes me right back where I was.
I mean, come on, someone give me an example of going app->app and the back button not getting you back to where you came from.
I don't think this is exactly what you are referring to, but there are apps, like feedly, where the back button brings you back to the home screen, and not back one screen. I don't know if this is because these apps are "ports" from iOS, or the devs are ignoring Android specific features to make it easier for themselves, or something else.
It's not Android's fault but it does frustrate me that different apps treat the hard button differently. FWIW I would rather have it this way than the way Apple handles it.
>Here, pretend there is no back button, yay! Android works like iOS and I'd go freaking insane.
That's not really true. The vast majority of iOS apps with nested pages will have breadcrumb navigation at the top, with a big button either saying "Back" or telling you exactly where you will be going back to.
When you launch from one app into another, that's a different matter. I agree that can be annoying/confusing. But no more annoying/confusing than I've found with Android, where I've had some apps go back to the calling app and others going back up their internal chain (to what would normally be the parent screen of the one that you've landed on).
I don't think you have to worry about it. They aren't going to make radical changes for the sake of tech geeks who are bored if the rest of the customer base likes things the way they are.
Android exasperates the problem by occasionally having interactive elements which look exactly identical to non-interactive elements. In "Settings>About>Phone Identity" I see 6 cells in a table. None of them look interactive. I would be 83% correct. One of them is. What is its behaviour? Tap to find out! Tapping "Phone name" results in a dialog with keyboard entry.
Also, in some menus the cells have a switch on the right side. Tapping the switch of course toggles it. But for some of them, tapping the cell that contains the switch will toggle the switch and for others, there's an entirely other context hidden behind that cell! Tapping the cell brings you to another screen, instead of toggling the switch. How are these discoverable? This is insane.
I doubt they'll go as flat as Microsoft did, it would create a mess of designs on iDevices. I think it will mostly be like Apple's new update to the Podcasts app - remove all the gimmicks, but keep the shadows and gradients on the same level as on OS X (outside of iCloud apps).
Apple can really do no wrong. It's impossible to think of any proposal Apple could have which would not receive this response, unless it was inoculating orphans with polio or something.
Not only does Apple get criticized all the time, they get criticized the most by their own fans, as five minutes spent on any popular Apple forum would illustrate. Anyone who thinks that they get a pass for everything is intentionally ignoring both the media and the users.
One of the biggest Mac writers even has a blog and defunct podcast called Hypercritical to talk about what Apple does wrong. There's a lot of loyalty, and some blinded by it, but it's often tempered with the realisation they aren't perfect.
Antennae gate, flash not on iOS, maps, no new Power Mac, new magsafe plug, new smaller idevice plug, making a bigger iphone when they said they wouldn't, making a smaller ipad when they said they wouldn't, introducing reading list in the face of instapaper-like services, the crappy icloud service, crappy mobileme service, the gizomodo raid, the lack of blocks on children buying in app stuff, blocking 3rd parties if they don't give 30% of in app purchase price to Apple, taking 30% of app price, imessage bugs, email search, ITUNES (all of it).
Apple has done some things that infuriate me -- for example, I still haven't upgraded to iOS 6 due to the whole Maps thing. However, I think I speak for even the most jaded Apple users when I say that I trust Jony Ive's design sense implicitly.
Apple has been known to get a lot of things wrong, sometimes really important things, but never anything along these lines. I expect to be blown away.
John Gruber has already declared that Apple is at the forefront of flat design. I think he dismissively mention Microsoft once in his post on the topic.
Wow, I've been using the new update all day and never noticed that they changed the look until just now after reading your comment and looking directly at it.
