Vista Shell Team now Blogging

davevr writes "Have you ever wanted to ask the people behind the Vista UI exactly what they were thinking when they did things like Flip 3D or the windows that turn black when maximized? Want a last chance to complain directly to the source about your favorite Vista UI glitch before it is foisted on you and the rest of the world? Just wondering what sort of people work on Windows all day? Well, look no further. The Windows Shell team now has a blog site for your reading pleasure. Head over to Shell Revealed and check it out. "

Just forget it

My complaint to scrap the eye candy would be ignored of course, just like myspace ignoring my reccomendation to stop letting people make profiles that look like AOL hometown pages from 1997.

Re:Just forget it

Its impossible to speak about something like this in any sort of definitive, because in essence, it all comes down to opinion. But there are alot of definatives that surround the issue of the XP theme.

One thing that more of us might agree on is that it's definately an interface designed to appeal to a wider audience. Microsoft likes its bright colors because those appeal to the older generation who are still of the mindset: "more colors = better." There are two problems with this. First, here in a slashdot context, we are not the general population. Most of us found this new "candy" style pretty condesending. Second, the "more colors style" goes starkly agains conventional wisdom of almost a full cenury of futurism and the expected styles that are contianed therein. People generally don't see bright colors as a sign of "futuristic high tech," a trait that our society would see as a positive when they're dropping money in a computer store.

Another big problem with the XP theme is that it added very little, if anything at all, to the actual unsability of the the user interface. It was just an ugly coat of paint, like that one fucia house two blocks over. (You know the one.) All functionality was still in the same place, at best just rearanged within the same window.

Definatives aside, if we do come back to nothing more than opinion, we can only turn to experts in that particular field to find some sort of authority. This again turns out of favor of the older interface over the XP one. In my 6 years working in various design houses, I've yet to see a designer, web or otherwise, that prefered the "candy" interface over the clean greys of the old Win2K style. Outside of my personal experience, we can turn to the design comunity as a whole. While I can't ask for their opinion personally, their works reinforce my point. Clean lines and muted colors abound, curved edges are easily found but large swatches of garish primary colors are not.

Now none of this is about Vista, (which from the couple of screenshots I've seen apears to at least be a step in the right direction), but I just had to point out that while an argument like this might seem based in only opinion, anyone with a little art training will realize that that there are definative "rights" and "wrongs" in the art community, and even more so in the design world. The XP style is mostly "wrong." It's the result of an ill-advised corporated campaign to make computers seem less indimedating to Grandma, and we ended up with very little aestetic value.

Shell...

This is a shell like the Great Wall of China is simply a wall.

I little bit bigger than it needs to be?

Yes.

A little bit cool and worthy of inspection and use?

Yes.

Cool?

I guess that remains to be seen.

It is however, not like any other shell.

My Internal Struggle

I'm a firm believer that most people act in the best intrests of others. I think this is something that geeks hold especially true, so when I see some sort of error with a computer system, I try to figure out what the developers were thinking when they put the thing together.

But when it comes to some windows issues... I'm at a loss. I actually have to ask myself how, in good faith, a developer implemented something that either works poorly or not at all. Why keep that "feature" in there (espeically when talking about a GUI) when it doesn't work as adertised?

I think my answer lies somewhere in management.

Re:My Internal Struggle

I'm a firm believer that most people act in the best intrests of others.

Most people action in what they, perhaps subconciously, perceive to be the best interests of themselves. It just happens that being a dick to people is usually not in a person's best interests. BOCTAOE [boctaoe.com]

Re:My Internal Struggle

I'm at a loss. I actually have to ask myself how, in good faith, a developer implemented something that either works poorly or not at all.

Man, if you have this much existential angst over unreleased software (have you even used a beta of Vista?), I sure hope you never get near Lotus Notes!

A 1990s answer...

...I have no idea what goes on at Microsoft in 2006 but let me tell you what went on circa 1990 at a (now-defunct) Fortune 500 minicomputer company, in the days of so-called "CHUI" interfaces (GUI-like interfaces implemented via line-drawing and X-Y character addressing on 80x24 green-screen terminals). I think I've told this story before on Slashdot, so apologies if you've heard it.

A developer was proudly showing off his spiffy new application. I started playing with it, and discovered that there were _three consecutive screens_ each containing the same field, into which the user was required to type the same entry, manually, three consecutive times. And there were no "copy" or "paste" functions. You actually needed to type your phone number or your SSN whatever it was three times in a row.

When I asked about this, he pulled a 150-page functional spec out of a drawer and showed me that he had implemented that the spec called for. It had slipped by. It's not that easy to previsualize how a UI will work based on a paper description.

When I suggested he change it, he said "No way. It took nine months to get that spec approved. Any change would require a review cycle and several meetings to get it approved. And if I change it without getting the spec changed, it won't pass SQA. This project is already behind schedule. I'm implementing it exactly the way this piece of paper says."

Another source of UI weirdness at another company I worked at was a CEO who fancied himself a UI expert. Or at least felt entitled to have the UI tailored to his personal tastes. He was always dictating changes in details of UIs. Unfortunately, he sometimes didn't previsualize how that change would interact with other details, and if you wanted to ask him "Say, now that we've done this thing here hadn't we better change this other thing there so that thus-and-such-bad thing won't happen," his secretary would schedule the appointment for a date a couple weeks from today.

I don't say this is how incomprehensibly strange UI happens at Microsoft. I say these are two ways in which it can happen.

Bad name

"Shell Revealed"? I think "Shell Shocked" would have been a much more apt name :-/

Eye Candy Good, Need for super computer bad

I don't mind all the eye candy. Some if it's new, some not. But the thing that baffles me is that Microsoft needs the equivalent of a super computer's worth in graphics processing to make the stuff work. I haven;t seen anyting that I feel warrant that kind of power. Have you seen OpenGL? All the eye candy, and it runs on my old laptop.

___________________________

Free iPods? Its legit [wired.com]. 5 of my friends got theirs. Get yours here! [freepay.com]

100% correct

Have you seen OpenGL? All the eye candy, and it runs on my old laptop.

I think you mean Xgl [wikipedia.org], but your point is still valid. For anyone who has not seen Xgl in action, head over to YouTube and search up some videos.

I have Xgl running on my Xp1800 computer with a Geforce2MX video card from 2000 in it, and it is *smoking fast*, and the effects are far beyond anything that Vista does. The parent is really 100% correct - why does Microsoft need this much CPU power to do it's (relatively simple) GFX in Vista? Seems like they are a bit behind the times in terms of software here.

Re:100% correct

I think you mean Xgl, but your point is still valid. For anyone who has not seen Xgl in action, head over to YouTube and search up some videos.

Yes, I have seen Xgl in action, I have even used Xgl for a while on my box. While the spinning cube and the wobbling windows are nice and all, it is simply hell when you try to simply resize a window. I don't know the inner-workings of Xgl, but how can they make such 3D stuff and wobbling windows so efficient, while totally killing the actual usefulness of managing windows by resizing them? They don't show *that* in the videos.

I'll use Xgl again when I see a video of a window being resized as fast as it is with a regular 2D desktop.

Kitchen Computer?

http://shellrevealed.com/photos/blog_images/images /584/original.aspx [shellrevealed.com]

Everytime I see this I can't help but chuckle. I can just imagine a family with their Kitchen, Bathroom and Basement Computers. I can just see the kitchen computer sending a message to the bathroom computer telling the person in there that their microwave burrito is ready...

Delays

What they don't have anything else to do?
Finished everything have we?
or is this a marketing ploy?

Remember folks - make sure any idea you pass on is either patented by you (possibly evil) or that there is a little prior art out there. :)

- Having a bad day -

If...

If I can get aero's under the hood benifits (graphic card rendering of windows, graphic card ram virtualization)) with the "classic" gui, I might think about buying vista. Time and time again I run into problems where it's not my program, but the display that causes me problems.

When I pay for it, just MAKE IT WORK!!!

Somebody who generously gives their time freely to develop an operating system or an application that I find useful deserves my support and feedback - equally the case if that free application runs on Windows. They might even deserve a charitable donation from me, because that is my choice.

However, somebody who *sells* me a product for my hard-earned money is duty-bound, under numerous trade description acts in various countries, to deliver the product as stated on the packaging and within the marketing of that product. If I do not receive that product as described, then they are obligated to either fix the problem or give me my money back. End of story.

Sorry, I am not giving over my valuable time and commentary freely just to fatten the profits of any global megacorp...

WOW!

A new blog on the Internets.

Slow news day?

OK, what were ya thinkin?

I see you have one of those web sites with the dark brown backgrounds with off-white, off-off-white, salmon and off-salmon text in little bitty fonts. Trying to read it makes me squint and my head hurt.

What was that about eye-candy?

My Question

I haven't really seen a lot of Vista that impressed me enough that I remember it now...but I have one question. What the heck _were_ they thinking when they made that Expose knock-off (I don't know what it's called) that puts the windows _behind_ one another?! I mean, the whole point of Expose is that it arranges windows so that they _don't_ overlap, so you can see everything at once.

random response

Have you ever wanted to ask the people behind the Vista UI exactly what they were thinking when they did things like Flip 3D or the windows that turn black when maximized?

No.

Interviews

This should go under the "Interviews" section...

"We'll send the top 10 highest moderated questions directly to their blog."

Excessive Requirements

Why can my video card play most of the best games and some of the latest just fine but it isn't adequate for the Vista Aero Interface? What is Microsoft doing to ensure that cards such as the gforce4 ti cards which are 128mb of ram run the AERO interface being that nVidia doesn't provide modern drivers any more? Why is the interface the main selling point behind Vista (along with alleged security that has no promise from Microsoft actually about security) the Aero interface? How can this OS be anything more than just a pig with lipstick? Why try to pull the wool over everyone's eyes with security most commonly found in most other OSes with the AERO interface where the requirements are far too high? How come it seems the programmers don't seem to be writing optimized code to reduce the requirements? Why can't we be allowed for force the AERO interface on and live with the performance issues to our own detriment, if we so choose? Why can't we adjust features to allow us to run portions of the interface?

Vista is just XP with a new interface and security that could have been added to XP with a service pack. Why was XP not good enough? If it is security, what are you going to do for the next two years for XP users? What are you going to do, get the Department of Homeland Security to warn the American public to buy and upgrade to Vista?

As Trojan's for DRM go

Vista sure is pretty.

The site is indicative

First off, when I (and many other /.ers) think shell, we think command line. This site obviously isn't about Monad (or even DOS). Windows doesn't have anything that resembles a typical shell. Call it desktoprevealed.com or something.

Then I go there, and get greeted with a masthead image that fills 2/3 of my window. I don't want to see a picture of where they smoke their crack. That and the light text on dark backgrounds design (harder to read) exemplifies the UI team's (subconscious?) philosophy: screw the user, we'll make them do things our way. I'm certain that AeroGlass will be the default visual style, so Vista's reason for existence ("ooh, shiny") will be obvious to all.

When MS finally realizes that all design (phisical or virtual) must adhere to "form follows function", rather than "function follows form", "function follows corporate strategy", or "form follows corporate strategy" then they will produce a natural, usable interface. They also need to get their act together with regard to consistency. Apple knows how to do these things. Even Gnome and KDE have picked up on them.

As long as the face that Windows presents to the user is guided by marketshare maintenance and implemented haphazardly, people will complain, no matter how shiny and transparent and whiz-bang visual effects they pile up on it. MS has to spout "it'll be easier for the user" on random topics because they make other random topics confusing on purpose.

Dear Win32 developers, why is the API so ugly?

Dear Win32 developers, why is your API so ugly?

Here is a short temp list of problems:

1) why did you force an object-oriented system on your window system? why each window has to be an object? why didn't you separate the windowing system from the widgets library? the OO system you have adds an additional overhead for languages that want to have their own OO system.

2) why only one message queue? why not multiple message queues? why each windows message can not have an arbitrary amount of data?

3) why do I have to register a windows class? the API could have been much simpler if I simply passed a set of attributes in the creation routine.

4) why the return value of WindowProc is so strange? sometimes the valid return value is 0, sometimes it is 1.

5) why the function GetMessage returns a BOOL which actually has 3 values (TRUE, FALSE and -1)?

6) why your widgets are not autosizing? I have to manually resize each widget when its content changes (for example text or font). Why there isn't geometry negotiation as in MOTIF?

7) why every window has to have a frame? why didn't you separated window frames from windows? all the messages like WM_PAINT, etc are duplicated as WM_NCPAINT etc.

8) why didn't you use a property system for windows and you had to use the problematic 'set values' interface?

9) why the text resources of a GUI app can not be changed on the fly? why text is not a separate file?

There is no doubt that the Windows Shell is and has always been eye-catching...but to program it, one needs to use an API on top of it that abstracts its ugly details. And don't tell me it is because system-level programming of GUIs is difficult, because there are many window systems around that prove you wrong.

Time Better Spent?

Shouldn't these guys/gals be spending their time, uh, finishing up with the code rather than blogging? I mean it's not like Vista is ahead of schedule or anything.

Blogging platform

You know, the Sharepoint team has been blogging [msdn.com] for quite some time [msdn.com], and they've got a product that quite usable. Hell, why not use their own blogs.msdn.com? And when it comes down to it, why not use one of the millions of free blogging services or apps already available?

Instead they're running off Community Server [communityserver.org]. Just look at their prices [telligent.com].

I'm just saying it's interesting that they've got in-house products they're not using, there are free services they're not using, and there are free packages they could run that they're not using. Instead they go for a most-likely limited commercial something.

Vista - On a clear day you can see forever

Enough obscure Steisand references...

Could Microsoft finally be edging towards a more open-to-the-customer development process?

I'll be interested to see if any suggested actions make it into a service pack.

Back in the day, if you could chat or email a Microsoft coder, they would respond to cogent suggestions...

UI as important as stability and security???

I couldn't believe when I read that...

"Some folks I talk to say that the UI is just as important as performance and system stability. Others say performance, stability and security come first.

For me - the UI is just as important as performance, stability, security and everything else."

http://shellrevealed.com/blogs/externalnews/archiv e/2006/09/19/So-just-how-important-is-the-UI_3F00_ .aspx [shellrevealed.com]

http://www.mstechtoday.com/2006/09/18/so-just-how- important-is-the-ui/ [mstechtoday.com]

That explains *many* things.

Headline is wrong... again...

From TFA:

shell:revealed isn't about Windows Vista, it's about Windows. Many of the people on the Windows Client team have been here a very long time and have plenty of knowledge to share with the world. This is the place to find out what we're doing, how we're doing it, and why. This site is dedicated to all Windows users.

I realize that is probably where their efforts are but it is not dedicated to Vista as the headline states.

qz

The team has something to show.

I am much more a Ubuntu guy, but I have checked some MSDN pages about the Dont's and Do about the new UI shell.

Imho, the new shell changes adds tons of stuff new. Is a jump bigger than 2000 to XP for good. Because this people are tryiing to remove the ilogic from the dialogs, and creating tools so the applications become easyer to use, even for newbies.

Seems that maybe the core will not be a huge change for Vista, but the Shell will be a revolution. A good one. I am happy about that because I become bored withouth refreshing stuff on the computing scene :D

CONGRATULATIONS MICROSOFT!!

And, while I am at it. Can somehome at Microsoft send me a working CD-KEY for XP Pro? this dawn FCKW key.. my email is [e-mail]

FLAME & SHAME

This whole discussion on this article is absolutely appalling, I've not read one modded up comment in which the author seemed like he had a clue about the subject matter in the article.

It's always been the case on here that technical articles about Microsoft ccontain quite a bit of offtopic general slagging of Microsoft, however there's usually one or two comments modded up that genuinely shed some intelligent light on the topic, this is probably the worst discussion I've seen on here. Why are moderators modding up offtopic crap !?

I'm actually genuinely interested in this topic and came to read the comments hoping someone might have some further insight or information on the subject. This seems to be getting worse, it seems slashdot is just not the place to find such information.

Perhaps it would be better for slashdot to stop posting articles such as these relating to MS technology with no apparent Open Source or Linux spin. I mean this just makes Slashdot look bad.

No thanks

I already skip ads when watching movies. Why would I now deliberately go out of my way to watch one?

I think I know why

Microsoft is intending to make Vista an impulse purchase. They are banking on people seeing it run on new high end PCs and thinking "that looks better than what I have" and buying an upgrade. They hope people don't notice until they buy it that it provides crappy performance on their old high end graphics chip. MS needs to learn from Apples mistakes, pretty doesn't sell. The Mac GUI is prettier than XP, but it tends to do obnoxious things with eye candy and people like the familiar windows feel. Perhaps linux has learned from this, as most of their desktop environments like KDE and Gnome do plenty well on resonable hardware, and you have Xgl and Looking Glass for those that just want eye candy.

Don't blog, CODE

Stop blogging, listening to your iPods, and buzzing over 'Web 2.0'. CODE THE FARKING SHELL TO BE USEFUL. What do we pay you for?

No pressure here

...before it is foisted on you and the rest of the world

That's strange, I certainly don't feel as if I am being coerced into buying Vista when it is released. Last time I checked, business in this country was still conducted on an "at will" basis. Windows XP does everything I want it to do, and has been fully stable since SP1. The release of a new version does not automatically render all previous versions useless. XP will continue to be a viable option for at least three more years, by which time the majority of bugs will be ironed out of Vista.

Keep on grasping at threads Apple fanboys, maybe one day you'll actually come up with a criticism of Microsoft that holds water.

Re:Not a bad idea, but...

Why do you believe that? Blog comments have influenced VS2005, MSbuild, etc. Why would Vista be different?