All of the new design changes to Windows 10 are demonstrated in a new video from Microsoft. It’s a good showcase of how subtle the changes are, but it doesn’t tease much for the future. Microsoft’s Fluent Design System is designed to be the true successor to Microsoft’s Metro design, and will appear across apps and services on Windows, iOS, and Android. Microsoft is focusing on light, depth, motion, material, and scale for its Fluent Design, with animations that make the design feel like it’s moving during interactions in Windows.
Like Metro applications before them, these Fluent applications look really nice, but it’s all for naught. Microsoft showed off its redesigned Outlook application for Windows (and macOS), and guess what? It’s a Win32 application.
If not even Microsoft itself is interested in making Metro/Fluent applications, why should anyone else?
Microsoft’s approach to Metro/Fluent has been baffling from day one, and it doesn’t seem like anything’s changing any time soon. They made really great Metro Office applications, but then proceed to hide them from the Windows Store behind the “mobile” tag, and artificially cripple them by not allowing you to open more than one document per Office application.
Even when Microsoft does make great Metro/Fluent applications, they artificially cripple them.
I have no idea what Microsoft is doing, and I don’t blame developers for giving them the finger. They are telling an unreliable, unfocused, unclear, and chaotic developer story, and any developer worth her salt wouldn’t touch the Windows Store/Metro/Fluent with a ten-foot pole.
I bet the MS Office Team is still at war with the Windows team, and this is their middle finger to the windows team.
Or, it takes a lot to convert an existing, complex, decades old code base into Metro…..
Or… Metro just isn’t worth doing because it’s awful, perhaps, especially when even Microsoft’s own teams have zero idea what to do or where to go with it. I think Thom’s got the right idea here: I wouldn’t touch it for development not only because Microsoft can’t make up their minds where they’re going with it, but also because half the reason to consider it (Windows-based mobile devices) has been completely put to rest.
On a positive note its been a boon to PC shop guys as people pay to get rid of that fugly UI and either install Windows Shell (or if you can find drivers for the hardware) go back to Windows 7.
The only positive I can say about Win 10 itself is it made me appreciate Windows 8, at least that only takes 10 minutes and a shell swap to make it into a decent OS. With Win 10 you spend an hour flipping switches and editing the reg to turn off all the phone home crap that slows the network to a crawl only for it all to come back if you allow the OS to update, what a PITA.
Bingo on both, but the second is less compelling. It can be done with out too much effort. And would be done if Office devs were buying what MS was selling, but they’re not.
seriously, you really think rewriting the entirety of Office’s UI can be done “without too much effort”? what are you smoking?
Well, he probably think about framework and dynamically generated UI, hence once you set the basis, everything follows according to simple (ergonomic, design) rules. I hope no one create a UI from placing widgets by hand. We’re in 2017 now.
Obviously you don’t know how much history is in the Office Codebase. When you have large legacy applications like Office, chances are you’re still using the methodologies from 10+ years ago for building your UI, not the new stuff.
Same goes for most applications coming out of Microsoft, and anything MFC-based from any vendor. If they moved to .NET then there’s a chance they’re on the XML-dynamic UI generation functionality, but most Windows applications are Win32 Native (not .NET) and for good reason too – they’re all legacy application that have a long history, and they’re not going to get re-written into a new framework without considerable though and business need.
Dynamic UI’s isn’t a sufficient business need; that only comes from complete rewrites or major refactors for all those legacy applications.
Well, I hope Microsoft do have enough people to assure the transition away from the win32 legacy they so wants to dig the grave. If it is just a matter of skinning win32 applications, then shame to them. But if you are into responsive user interface that adapt to desktop, mobile or web form factor, you’d better using dynamic interface layout.
Not every application can or should adapt to all form factors. Office is probably one of them, and the fact that Microsoft Office Team has essentially pushed O365 as the answer to non-Desktop form factors speaks worlds to that as well.
Microsoft Office on Android/iOS is basically a wrapper around the O365 functionality.
Good stuff. Its MS, they don’t lack for resources. The code base I hear is pretty modular. The UI layer is very well separated from the business logic. Like the only real thing they do from version to version is update the UI to something completely bonkers. They have a lot of experience updating it.
For decades their bottom line depended on changing the colors and locations of options in the menu and increasing the resources needed to run it. Make Office look different, and suddenly people want to upgrade to get the new look and be “current”. They upgrade, discover they need more ram/cpu/diskspace whatever. Discover to get more performance they have to get a new computer. They get a new computer… and pay again for windows in the process. Obviously licensing has changed and they don’t necessarily get as big a direct boost as they may have at one point. But getting upgrades that you paid for as part of contract makes you more likely to continue with a yearly licencing scheme.
Its not rocket science, its Microsoft business science.
Interesting how everyone still calls it Metro years after they scrapped that name. Maybe because nobody knows what today’s name is…
You sure they didn’t mean Effluent design?
… so why would anyone bother with this Metro stuff now?
UWP is still the future UI for desktop, HoloLens, IoT and XBox ONE.
Sure it is, just as soon as it can actually be efficient on the desktop. Until then, forget it.
You forgot the part of currently there isn’t any other path for the new APIs.
Eventually Windows 7 will stop working, and I haven’t seen any exodus from Windows XP to GNU/Linux as it was prophesied.
Nor an exodus to OpenGL, due to DirectX 10 being Vista only.
If true, then why haven’t any of MS own applications updated. Its stupid to do it before MS does.
The next release of Office will be store only.
As for the rest, maybe management should take care people actually follow orders.
Never worked on a company where engineering was able to disregard what upper management wants.
Edited 2017-10-16 15:02 UTC
[q]The next release of Office will be store only.[/q
Citation needed.
Sure, you could have bothered to google for it, but here it is.
https://www.neowin.net/news/moving-forward-the-store-will-be-the-way…
Provide a Microsoft Source, not some journalist.
Apparently you lack reading skills, on top of not being able to use Google.
The article states:
So thanks to Google,
https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Build/2017/B8011
At 26:00 you get enough information directly from Microsoft.
Coming to the Windows Store doesn’t mean they’ll be Metro apps.
They’ll be the same Win32 apps, but delivered through the Store.
Better learn to program on Windows Thom, Fluent Design APIs are only available to UWP apps.
Office – even when on the Store – will not be Fluent Design in the way you think of it. Office 2019’s apps (or whatever they end up calling it) are indeed moving to the Store, but they’ll exist alongside the Metro Office apps that Microsoft is actively hiding from and crippling on the desktop, and they will continue to be Win32.
So you know better than Windows developers.
Try to find anything Win32 related here, besides porting guides to UWP.
https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Windows/Windows-Developer-Day-Fall-…
Office will use Centennial:
“The Desktop Bridge is the infrastructure that we’ve built into the platform that lets you distribute your Windows Forms, WPF, or Win32 desktop app or game efficiently by using a modern Windows App package.”
As a psuedo windows dev, that was my understanding as well. Not an expert. Just hack on windows when needed for small simple utils.
Again, do yourself a favour and learn to program on Windows.
Desktop brige apps require UWP APIs to use Fluent Design.
https://blogs.windows.com/buildingapps/2017/06/22/sweet-ui-made-poss…
https://github.com/Microsoft/WindowsUIDevLabs
What does this have to do with Office being Win32? It’s not using Fluent Design!
I don’t know what else I can say here. Microsoft Office, even when in the Store, IS NOT A MODERN/METRO/FLUENT/WHATEVER APP. It’s the plain old Win32 Office in a UWP wrapper. Fluent Design being UWP has NOTHING to do with this. At all.
Edited 2017-10-16 20:14 UTC
Don’t say anything, after all you know better than any Windows developer about how the APIs work.
After all, the reference that Office is migrating parts of their codebase to C++/WinRT done at CppCon 2017 by Microsoft, also did not take place.
Take the trophee home if that makes you happy.
Same thing could be said for you.
Considering that the Office for Android/iOS is a wrapper around O365 and not the same thing as the Win32 Office Applications…yeah…I can see why they’d still want to push the Win32 version for Windows Desktop and hide the O365 wrappers from there.
I could have used Google, but if you are providing a statement of absolute fact then it is up to you, who are making the statement, to provide evidence for it.
You read your own source wrong! From that source: “Microsoft confirmed that all Office 2016 apps will be coming to the Windows Store”
So yes, all off the 2016 apps will be available from the store, but that doesn’t mean they will not be available as an MSI or ISO from outside the store either. It even says so from your own source: “But while Windows 10 users will be expected to get Office from the Windows Store, that doesn’t mean that regular desktop Office is going away. Naturally, it must continue to be supported on older versions of Windows.”
So on Windows 7 you can get it as an MSI/ISO or as a C2R from Office.com
On Windows 10 you can get it as an MSI/ISO as well, but not as a C2R from Office.com anymore but as individually packaged apps through the store (there is going to be a bundled package as well)
And all of these store packages will be Win32, but packaged for the store with centennial so they can also run on Windows 10 S, but they will not be UWP.
You keep saying “learn to program for Windows”, but you seem to have a hard time learning about delivery mechanisms
Maybe it would be helpful to understand that Microsoft has been integrating UWP and Win32, including improving the experience to package legacy Win32 apps into the store.
Including calling UWP applications from desktop apps on Windows 10.
The next version of Office for Windows 10 will be store only, regardless how much Win32 and UWP is part of it.
This was presented at BUILD 2017.
Office was also one of the teams mentioned at CppCon 2017, as being early adopters of the C++ runtime for UWP, C++/WinRT.
Videos to those talks are available.
Some developers already “ported” their code to Windows Store (Paint.net, IrfanView).
They are actual reiteration of the same win32 app but deployed under Windows Store logo.
Besides this, indeed there was never any cohesive view between product teams inside Microsoft.
Just look at how Skype is implemented on Windows, Android and iOS.. This will follow the same trend unfortunately.
Paint.Net is not a Win32 app. It’s written using the DotNet framework. I just decompiled it under Telerik Decompile to take a look at the internals. I didn’t look to far, so I don’t actually now which toolkit it uses for the UI (but it has models, so possibly WPF.) The think here is, the .Net framework is missing a common UI toolkit implementation. I guess if it had one, this would have a good chance of running on Mono, possibly .Net core and maybe other OS supported by them.
A lot of this “Win32” hysteria is a bit more complicated. I’m not talking about Office or any specififc app. I mean, going forward – in general – things are going to get a bit fuzzy, even after UWP becomes the default target.
This is the thing – you can compile a 32-bit target in ,Net easily. In fact there are 3 targets under Windows:
1) x86
2) x64
3) AnyCPU
If you compile for AnyCPU, (god help you) it will be up tot he runtime to decide how to run it. But if you compile for x86, it *will* run as a 32bit process. But that has little to do with Win32.
The framework you use has P/Invokes in to the OS. A P/Invoke is like JNI on Java or an extern function in C that links to an external dynamic/shared library. The OS level P/Invoke decides how to work. So in the Windows versions of .Net there will be some P/Invokes in to Win32. There will also be code calling directly in to Win32 because that was how the framework was written. I think we need to separate these calls from the notion that something targets a specific API.
With the UWP frameworks, all of the linking is done behind the interface, and is opaque tot he user of the API. But a UWP app can still be calling in to a Win32 API. Nothing stops the library from being written that way on Windows.
Edited 2017-10-16 14:21 UTC
It’s definitely not a win32 app. I have Pinta installed on my Mac
That doesn’t mean that it doesn’t use the Win32 API on Windows.
And if i want to use KOffice on Haiku, it’ll use the BeAPI. That doesn’t mean there isn’t a layer in between the two called Qt.
I was curious, so I looked. Paint.NET uses Winforms.
WinForms FTW! Hahaha!
Her salt? What is it with this recent trend of intentionally using “she” or “her” when referring to a generic profession/specialty/etc.? It always looks and sounds sooo artificial and forced that I smile each time, imagining some “super not-sexist” trying to become “ultra-mega super not sexist”. Just saying…
The problem is on your side. Approximately 50% of the human population are women. Deal with it.
…and 50% of the population are male.
I have to agree that concocting an “Abstract/Generic She” feels strange and artificial when Singular They has been around for something on the order of 500 years.
(It coexisted with gender-neutral use of He until grammarians in the 19th and early 20th century made a concerted push to get everyone standardizing on gender-neutral use of “he”.)
“Any programmer worth their salt” is perfectly good and the only way it’s inferior to Abstract/Generic She is that using Singular They doesn’t give us guys the chance to experience some measure of the unease women must have felt with gender-neutral “he”.
None of you would’ve complained had I used “he”.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Only because I’d have come across needlessly sounding like a jerk. While I don’t mention it, I usually notice and I always use Singular They in what I say and write.
(Though I’m almost certainly an anomaly, given that I’m a language nerd with a side interest in gender’s relationship to society and psychology.)
Edited 2017-10-16 21:01 UTC
Goddamn political correctness bullshit. We should all be referred to as ‘Its’. That way no one can assume gender bias.
In British English, “they” is generally promoted in schools now over a gender specific term. I certainly remember being gently turned towards using it in the 1980/1990’s.
Yes, because it’s perfectly natural, does not sound forced and does not feel like a lame attempt of being “at the avantgarde” of political correctness.
Or, as someone already mentioned, you could have used “they”, which solves both problems: you can feel warm and fuzzy about being ultra-politically correct and it does not sound artificial, either. Instead, now you’re implying that only women can be developers, and men are second-class citizens when it comes to programming.
You have many things to learn about language, Thom.
…you may have just actually uncovered why all software sucks so much. When women were still programmers, we put man on the moon. Now that it’s just men, they can barely build a text editor that doesn’t take up 1GB of RAM and crashes three times a day.
Maybe men just really suck at programming.
It does not justify your sexism, though. Being sexist against men is still sexist. Same as being racist against whites is still racist.
Ahh yes, in the old times things were always better… ;P
But yet you’re completely ok with implying that women are second class citizens when it comes to programming.
Edited 2017-10-21 03:04 UTC
Well, with all of the politically correct snowflakes out there, you can’t simply write anything anymore. You have to scour your text to ensure gender neutrality and to make sure you didn’t use any “triggers” that will cause the snowflakes to go running for their safe spaces.
And yet, it’s people like you who are posting comments about being offended.
Who’s the snowflakes?
Edited 2017-10-18 10:23 UTC
If you insist on using gender specific pronouns to virtue signal when it makes zero grammatical sense? That would be YOU Thom.
Sorry, but I don’t get your point. What does this have to do with anything I said? Even if the population actually was 50/50 men and women (which is not true), how is using “she” instead of “he” fair? It’s completely sexist, only this time men are being mistreated.
Edited 2017-10-17 06:23 UTC
What percentage of programmers are women?
I have bad news for you.
No response to my question can I conceive of as being bad news… it’s a simple query of proportions…
There. No one needs to get offended.
Hi,
I’m offended by the idea that anyone can be worth as little as salt. Around here we rely on some water desalination, where salt/brine is a useless waste product.
– Brendan
Speak to the Romans. They paid an allowance to their legionaries to buy salt (Latin: sal), which is ultimately where the word “salary” comes from. So, being “worth your salt” has some origin in that term. Salt was a very important commodity in mediaeval times. Being worth your salt really did mean something and it is still used as an idiomatic phrase today. There you go, no need to be offended.
I’d just like to congratulate anybody who downvoted your comment. It was perfectly fine question with certainly no more bias than the commented part of the article, yet it was downvoted because it didn’t match somebody’s point of view.
You people don’t need internet. You need pitchforks and torches.
Well, that’s the world we live in now. I already got used to be “banished” from discussions and being virtually spat on just for pointing out the obvious. People think that to fix the mistakes of previous generations, such as sexism, racism, homophobia etc. we need to do a sharp 180 degree turn… Unfortunately, this causes exactly the same issues, only on the opposite extreme end. And they just keep swinging this pendulum back and forth between the two extremes, never finding a solution.
Anyone capable of exercising common sense knows that the answer to these issues lies NOT at the opposite extreme of 180 degree turn, but more likely to be found in the direction of 90 degrees where the two extremes are balanced out.
Edited 2017-10-17 07:33 UTC
It’s one of the most efficient ways of triggering anti-sjw clowns, and much cheaper than making a sequel to an eighties science fiction movie with a female cast.
I’m stealing that one…
Which movie?
Yes, it’s so forced and artificial that I didn’t even notice it until you mentioned it.
Does Metro or UWP or Fluent even exclude Win32?
Not>fake>news: The new Office is in fact Fluent and i bet Win32 at the same time!
Déjà vu — I’m pretty sure this is not the first time I’ve read that Microsoft is “focusing” on five things. (It might just be a verbal tic from their PR.)
“Like Metro applications before them, these Fluent applications look really niceâ€
I might have “looked†really nice. But when it came time for “normal†users to figure out Windows 8.x through 10, the very nicest words/phrases that come to mind are:
* Schizophrenic (not knowing which version of Windows any program might try to run as)
* A half assed mess of complication and confusion.
Those are the nicest things I’ve heard from normal users. Then comments started getting rude but I’ll leave them off of here.
Microsoft needs to learn why cracks are forming in desktop Windows. The more of a pain in the ass that Windows is, the more people are going to look at other OSs such as Mac OS and Linux and realize that they are easier to use than Windows.
No they aren’t perfect. Yes they have their own issues. But there is no forced buy-in anymore. Actually there never was but people felt that there was.
If Microsoft doesn’t start understanding that ALL the departments with customer facing apps need to walk the same walk or people will get more and more frustrated and started looking at how iPhones and iPads and Android phones (not so much Android pads) are easy to use and that there are other options out there. They will start losing more and more business. And once you lose customers it is MUCH harder to get them back.
The question is, has Microsoft learned its lesson? Or is this another design failure that will push more users away from Windows? Will this be another Vista?
Another Vista? You mean the OS which still had more users than all OSX versions combined? Or do you mean how people love Vista SE? (aka Win7)
I just read that Microsoft is going to make all Outlook versions look like the iPad version and I just had to laugh.
Why?
Why is the latest design being brought out on iPads first and then rolled out on their own OS?
I can think of reasons. Like the code base for the iPad/iPhone version being much newer. But I still find it funny.
Speaking for myself, if Outlook for Windows becomes as limited as its iPad version, I won’t be using it anymore. No support for reminders or tasks, limited support for calendar, view-only support for contacts (I mean, seriously!), no shared mailbox support… Forget it. Even iOS’ native Exchange support does much better; still doesn’t support shared mailboxes, but fully supports all the other things I listed.
Shared mailboxes aren’t supported by activesync, which is the protocol mobile devices use to talk to exchange. So that’s actually microsoft’s fault rather than apple.
I’m well aware of that but, are you seriously telling me Microsoft couldn’t have used EWS in their own version of Outlook mobile? I wasn’t actually blaming Apple and it seems we agree that it’s Microsoft’s fault. It’s simply compounded by them not using their own EWS protocol in Outlook to fully support everything the Desktop version can, especially when it is completely within their power to do so and make Outlook mobile stand out.
Developers developers developers developers!
He was onto something.
Well, he was at least ON something
It is pretty bland. Colour wise. It’s not pleasant to the eyes.
They should just go back to XP. Update the drivers and stuff and we have a halfway decent OS.
I hope that “and stuff” includes the security hardening that’s been done since then. They haven’t done nearly as well as they should have on that front, but it sure beats what XP had. As far as the UI goes, I wouldn’t mind them bringing the UI back to Windows 2000, though they can keep the search box from Windows 7 in there.
… it’s a nice clean SDK with all the .Net APIs.
I don’t get why people complain about it so much.
Sure, apps are in the transition period; between win32 and porting to something more modern looking. It will take time.
I mean, take a look at Linux. There is so much choice on UI SDKs and that’s great. But, it does leave one app looking totally different (and behaving different) than the next.
I had to port a bunch of stuff from old Win32/MFC/WTL code to Metro and the process was not that bad. What we got back was a modern looking app, fast (hardware accelerated UI), and came with a rich set of APIs that made my life as a coder a lot easier.
Running Metro apps is also fine. They scale nice to high resolution and strange dimension monitors… like web pages.