It's 2am here (edit: I'm done writing, it's 2:38am now), and I really ought to be sleeping right about now, but for some stupid arbitrary reason, the D9 conference is held at honestly irresponsible hours for us Europeans (and we rock, damnit). So, here I am, MacBook Air on my lap, camomile tea (the Empress of Teas) in my cup, because Microsoft just had to show Windows 8's new interface for the first time at this ungodly hour. Oh, and they unveiled some more interesting stuff about Windows 8. Update: The videos from D9 are up. Mossberg talking to Steve Sinofsky, and the Windows 8 demonstration by Larson-Green.
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Member since:2010-06-24
I thought the exact same thing and that's really interesting.
I'm usually not a big fan of Microsoft, but I really like the graphic design of this new interface (I liked the Window Phone 7 design as well). It's just gorgeous and way better than OSX or anything I've seen on Linux.
I'm a bit more skeptical about the "works well with mouse" stuff. Doing drag and other touch-like gestures with a mouse is possible but painful, so I'd like to see what they'll come up with there.
So I would say it looks like a nice tablet UI to me. Not so sure if the whole tablet-desktop-same-os is a good idea though.
Member since:2005-11-02
I was kind of thinking that, but I believe this is a truly new twist on multiple desktops instead.
All of those "tile" applications are actually running maximized (full screen). You can see it in the video when Excel is running: You have an entire normal Windows desktop with a maximized Excel and a task bar plus a floating window. Another "desktop" is dragged in and a frame is created to contain it, the application running on that desktop resizing to fit automatically.
If such frames are dynamically creatable and can be put anywhere (top, bottom, left, right) and further subdivided and if you can put either individual windows or whole desktops in to them, then I think you've really got something.
I think you'd also have to add focus-follows-mouse, at least at the frame level. Once inside a frame there may or may not be floating, overlapping windows. if there are you'd want to revert to the classic windows focus model while the pointer remains in the frame.
I like that you can tile and untile windows, resize the tile area and create new layouts all without editing any config files or remembering any keybindings. This is good.
Member since:2010-06-19
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Member since:
2011-05-12
Looks like a tiling window manager imo.