From ActiveWin: Daniel C. Robbins is a 3D User Interface Designer working at Microsoft Research. His current projects include visual presentation of large information spaces and scenarios for intelligent environments. View and experience research prototypes that span back to the 1990s, yet may give a glimpse of what’s in store for future Microsoft products.
Microsoft Research: User Interface Prototypes
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
drag and pop was ok.
but the rest of the demos ? why bother ? we all knew all about these
Looks like a testing ground for interface tricks akin to expose. I suspect a lot of them are a bit impractical given current designs (which is why we haven’t seen any of them).
Drag and Pop was okayish, would have been interesting to see it working with multiple windows.
I wonder how many of them are patent pending though.
One or two of the designs were ok but its all eye candy. It might be enticing for the user for a day or two but after that it becomes destracting like “Clippy” the paper clip was. All in all its eye candy trying to dress up Windows (maybe they should call this project curtains?).
Oh and it will require users to buy expensive high end video cards so ATi and Nvidia do have something to gain in this.
Some very pretty ideas.
Nice to see them innovating. Nice to see them being able to put it on the web (which might mean it isn’t going to ever be used?).
What a fun job that guy must have! Hope he gets the satisfaction of seeing something he built getting used, for real, though.
(And nice to see the usual crowd being positive just because it is Microsoft. Imagine the stance if these were Linux demos…?)
there is nothing wrong with having to buy expensive video cards and do your home work there are other brands then nvida and ati =P Apple does the same thing they just make it look like you dont have to buy graphics cards because everything is prebuilt
Will Microsoft include these with the 3D software also?
Wow. I had to read this article twice. What the hell is drobbins (Gentoo’s founder) doing at Microsoft!?
Some of these are pretty nice ideas, such as the scale fabric one. Still I bet you’ll need extra horse power for this features :^/, reality sucks.
Gentoos’, Daniel Robbins (http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=1080), and Microsofts Daniel *C.* Robbins (http://research.microsoft.com/~dcr/). Two different guys.
No, we didn’t _all_ know about these.
One of the demos showed a window get transparent when it lost mouse focus. I often find myself having an editor window raised, keeping keyboard focus, while scrolling another window to read. The right timing with transparency would be usefull.
People are acting like these demos are something new to Microsoft’s development. They are OLD. Look at what the OS and Web pages they are using as examples on some of the demos. I remember seeing demos like this from Microsoft about 4-5 years ago! Hence: span back to the 1990s…
So – please don’t compare this to Microsoft trying to “copy” OS X. Because in relatity, it’s the other way around
You know it’s also very possible that several people come up with the same “original ideas” at pretty much the same time. It’s just that everyone doesn’t use them in any way.
From your point of view lots and lots of companies has been stealing ideas from me for many years now. But then again, they haven’t since I haven’t shared many of them with other people (except for the portable MP3-player which I tried to get in production in the 90’s, and we all know how terrible that idea was.).
Anyway, you get my point. I think this “stealing” crap is just insane. It doesn’t go anyware.
I really like the snap windows demo. It’s exactly what I want OS X to be doing. I’ve added the link to our Apple Mac OS X Wish List here:
http://www.daha.co.uk/daha/Apple_Mac_OS_X_Wish_List
So, Apple can get the idea. 😉
Add other ideas to the wish list if you wish. You never know…
Cheers Daniel
Some of these concepts are 5 years old. I hope some of them get implemented soon.
That does nothing but annoy and chew clocks for no REAL increase in productivity, especially the transparancy stuff.
If WinXP is good enough for my 80 year old grandmother to figure out on her own, the interface is DONE. Quit @#$5ing with it.
Cute new UI’s – Something for programmers not good enough to write a stable reliable OS to waste their time on.