Next week I’ll start my first week working for Microsoft, so this week I will tell you what I know about Windows 8 and how I currently feel about the progress that has been made in building the newest version of the most used operating system worldwide.
Last week at the //BUILD/ conference Microsoft announced a lot of extra news about Windows 8. The conference was filled with a lot of sessions which you can now all watch at the channel 9 website. This is a ton of information and I have watched a few of the sessions already to try and make sense of it all. The goal of this post is to give a technical overview as wel as an overview from the users perspective about using Windows 8, sprinkled with some personal notes across the post.
User experience
The user experience for Windows 8 has changed completely compared to Windows 7. You can now look at the Windows 7 desktop as a ‘the desktop application’ in Windows 8. You need the desktop when you want to get some real work done at work and can still do all the stuff you were used to doing on the desktop.
However, for most of the tasks you do at home a new experience has been created. Think of these kind of tasks like chatting, emailing, browsing the web, watching movies and photos, sharing experiences and so on. This compared to the ‘work’ tasks like writing and compiling code, writing a long report, movie editing… Another way to compaire the two is thinking about ‘consuming content’ and ‘creating content’ although that separation might be too strict.
The new way uses a new kind of apps called Metro Style Apps. They are full screen applications running edge to edge on your computer. They are optimized for use with keyboard/mouse AND touch compared to the regular desktop which only really works well with a keyboard because of the smaller hit targets
Metro style apps have a lot of benefits for the user of those apps:
You never have to close them. Windows takes care of closing apps in the background, and apps can safe state to open back up to the right place when you come back to them.
They sync your settings and state to multiple Windows 8 devices. If you pause a video on your desktop and head over to your tablet you can keep watching from the point you left of.
You never have to login to an application if you log in to Windows 8 with a Live ID (this can be associated with any email address which is verifiable). So no need to remember all your accounts for all the different apps you use!
They have Live Tiles just like Windows Phone applications. Replacing icons with Live Tiles helps put more information at the users’ fingertips without the need of the app running in the background! It gives the illusion an application is always running and removes the need to boot an application just to get information at a glance (like knowing if you have any new email messages)
They integrate with Windows Charms (pictured above) , available in the new start menu or by swiping from the left of the screen. Charms provide easy access to ‘Search’ ,’ Share’ , ‘Devices’ and ‘Settings’ from within any application.
Search by default searches for applications just like the Windows Start menu used to do. But it provides one click links to application that implement the ‘Search’ Charm. For example, hitting the search button and typing ‘Windows’ and then selecting a twitter of facebook application will search twitter or facebook for ‘Windows’ showing you results in an instance!
Share enables you to share anything you see on your screen. Selecting a picture, link or text block will automatically put the picture, link or text in a field and enable you to share it. You can share it via email or use another application to share your selection on twitter, facebook or where that application shares stuff (flickr , skydrive , … )
Devices enables printing and other device focused actions while Settings provides a standard way to show current application settings in place with the other system settings.
All these experiences are provided by API’s in the WinRT framework for developers (read ahaid), thus to work the creator of the application must implement this functionality. Luckily WinRT made that very simple.
In addition the users of Windows 8 will have a great experience finding these applications. Windows 8 will include a Windows Store featuring all the Metro Style apps and legacy desktop applications. Metro applications will be able to be bought/tried, downloaded, installed and updated via the Windows Store and only via the Windows Store. Legacy desktop applications like Photoshop or Notepad++ will still be featured in the store but will provide a link to the applications website to be downloaded from there. The windows store will be a great way to explore applications.
Thoughts about the User Experience
Both the user interfaces (Regular Desktop and Metro) are very good at what they are designed for, Metro for touch and consumption and Desktop for productivity and creation. Yet every Windows 8 device will ship with both experiences enabled and users will sometimes have to jump back and forth between the two applications.
For example, picking the Word2010 application from the start screen opens up the regular desktop and opens up word switching the user from a full screen experience to a desktop one. This can be jarring. Similarly pressing the start button on the desktop does not open the old start menu but launches a full screen start menu with bold colors and animated tiles.
In addition some applications like the Control Panel , Internet Explorer and others have two different UI’s present. Launching the Control Panel or IE from the metro start menu gives you a metro experience, while the desktop gives you the old experience. Yet there is nothing to visually show these are the same.
To limit this jarring affect a I have a few suggestions that might work.
Use the same icons for metro and desktop style versions of an application. Why does the desktop control panel have a different icon than the metro one? An feature the icons on a more prominent place!
Second, launching the start screen from the desktop just to search for another desktop application and launching it is very jarring. I can understand introducing the regular start menu again would cause even more confusion, but a more subtle way to search for and launch applications starting from the desktop interface is required.
Having the background of the start screen be the same as the desktop background and just hiding the task bar and desktop icons when hitting the start button on the desktop will feel less jarring. It is still a full screen application but it will feel less like a ‘context switch’.
Windows 8 also has a few different touch input keyboards, or soft keyboards. One is a split keyboard and another a redesigned pen input keyboard. I would recommend putting the pen input keyboard in the middle of the split keyboard instead of in a separate keyboard option. It would fill the unused space from the split keyboard and make correcting pen input much easier. (more on pen input: at winrumors )
As a final remark I would like to add a way Microsoft could boost the Metro style application catalog by about 30,000 from day one. Metro style applications are clearly inspired by the Windows Phone design language which makes Windows Phone Applications fit right in with the new Windows style. Since you can snap Metro style applications to only take up about a fourth of the screen that would be an ideal size to run Windows Phone applications. If Microsoft would enable running Windows Phone Applications on Windows 8 (albeit only in the snapped form) it would add 30,000 application to the Windows Store from day one. Developers could then update the application so a filled and full screen view is available later, but it would give the Metro ecosystem more time to grow.
Developer Experience
The biggest change for developers in Windows 8 is the addition of something called the WinRT or Windows Runtime. The Windows runtime is a stack of native Windows API’s which are exposed to windows developers. Just like up until now you had Win32 API’s and COM API’s which were exposed to application developers.
But those old COM style API’s had a lot of disadvantages. When first release they are only really accessible from the unmanaged C++ language dealing with ref values and HRESULTs to deal with error handling. Wrappers were required to have a clean interface into these API’s from within Managed code. These wrappers would take a while to be released, contain a lot of ‘ugly’ code and sometimes removed functionality because the native COM API was not wrapped completely.
Now with WinRT those days are over. The WinRT API’s are exposed to managed and unmanaged languages as you can see in the slide below. All WinRT components are accessible in C++ , C# , VB and HTML/CSS by default , including the WinRT components you create yourself.
The developer experience has clearly been thought out from the very beginning of Windows 8 development and it shows in the way the API’s present themselves. A theme of convergence jumps to mind. A single namespace called Windows to interact with any functionality the windows operating system exposes makes a lot of sense. Having the WinRT as a native part of Windows will also help boost performance.
Another point of convergence in the .NET framework is the addition of something called Portable Class Library which enables you to create a single DLL which can be reference from regular .NET application , Phone Applications, Metro applications and XNA 4.0 application (XBOX). The .NET framework has started to scatter all around leaving each team with a different ‘profile’ and set of API’s you can use during development of a specific application. Metro applications have their own profile (collection of .NET api’s) compared to SilverLight , Windows Phone or WPF. The Portable Class Library is a first step to solve this problem and make porting code between different kind of applications easier requiring less precompiler directives in the code.
Data access for Metro Style applications has also changed. Using a local database like SQLCompact is not supported since the System.Data namespace has been greatly reduces in the Metro style profile of the .NET framework. Instead Microsoft wants you to use the new WinRT API’s so Windows can take care of roaming your settings to other machines. Applications also have the concept of IsolatedStorage similar to Windows Phone applications and can still access the File system, but stuff like SQLCompact and the Entity Framework is not available for Metro Style applications.
Microsoft released a two new preview versions of Visual Studio at the //BUILD/ conference running a preview of .NET Framework 4.5. The next update to the C# programming language mainly introduces a better programming model to handle asynchronous actions without callback methods.
Visual Studio 11 developer preview, which runs on all Windows Machines and gives a look at the next version of Visual Studio.
Visual Studio Express for Windows Developer Preview, which only runs on Windows 8 and gives you the chance to create Metro Style applications and interact with WinRT.
Metro style applications can use C++, C#, VB and JavaScript to create the core business logic and use XAML for UI markup with C++, C# and VB or HTML and CSS for UI markup with JavaScript. Adding HTML en JavaScript to the languages enabled to build applications for Windows opens up Windows Development to a huge new world of programmers.
Communication
As a final note a lot can be said about the way Microsoft handled communication around Windows 8. From the first demo at the D8 conference in may telling us HTML would be used for Metro Style apps until the //BUILD/ conference itself nobody knew for sure what the plan would be and a lot of fuss had been created in the developer community about Microsoft shifting strategy all the time. Microsoft choose to stay quite make a lot of developers unsure of their current ways of doing stuff would translate to Windows 8. Luckily all was well when WinRT was introduced on the first day of //BUILD/.
Second, WinRT is a huge new undertakes which has been in development for over two years now within the walls of Microsoft. It contains a lot of stuff and it is very hard to convey the message in a streamlined way, let alone in a 2 hour keynote. The more sessions you watch the more you get a feeling what WinRT is all about, a bit like people felt trying to wrap their heads around the .NET Framework and C# when it was first introduced.
Yet it is clear a lot of the decisions about WinRT have not been made yet. //BUILD/ focused almost exclusively on the new Metro Style application and it was clear Microsoft wants to push Metro development forward. WinRT is presented as a way to get ride of COM interop, yet it is unknown of regular desktop applications (created in SilverLight, WPF, Windows) will be able to use the new WinRT API’s or will still have to write the ugly COM interop code. For now it seems this will not be enabled because the WinRT API’s have focused on Metro applications and their development was based on a lot of Metro style presumptions regular Desktop apps can’t guarantee.
The slide below includes the hope regular desktop application on Windows 8 will be able to use WinRT. Yet this is unclear for now.
The slide also gives my current view of Windows 8 compatibility compared to current Windows 7 desktop applications above the white line. It is important to note that Windows 8 will also run on a new kind of processor called the ARM chip. This is a completely new architecture compared to the usual Intel based x86 chips we have been using in Windows machines up until now. This means all applications and games compiled for a previous version of Windows will not work on a Windows 8 machine running on an ARM processor.
This means users need to be aware when they buy a Windows 8 pc or tablet what kind of processor it has because i might not run their old games or hardware (because no ARM drivers are available) ! This will create fragmentation within the Windows 8 platform which I am very scared about.
Yes, huge application vendors like Office , Photoshop, Adobe Flash and others will probably recompile their applications to make sure an ARM compatible version is available. And hardware vendors will make sure ARM compatible drivers are available for their new hardware. But what about old hardware and games? It would be a real shame if a game labeled ‘Games for Windows’ would not work on all Windows machines.
Wrap-up
This has probably been the longest blog post I have ever posted. Windows 8 is clearly big news and a big change. I am looking forward the living the Metro style life and roaming all my settings (desktop, email settings, documents) between my different Windows 8 machines. Windows 8 is truly a re-imagination of Windows. Yet I can’t help but be afraid the games and hardware ecosystem will not be ready when Windows 8 ships on an ARM processor, creating fragmentation and a bad reputation for Windows 8.
I’m moving to the other side of the world in just a few days. With this post I hope to teach my friends a handy way to keep up with other time zones, because it can be a mess sometimes. Especially since daylight savings time and winter time in Europe do not change on the same dates.
So what time zone will I be in?Pacific Time (UCT-08:00)
However to make stuff confusing PT has two variants. Pacific Daylight Time (PDT) used in the summer to save ‘daylight’ (DST – Daylight Savings Time) and Pacific Standard Time (PST) used in the winter. This year PST time will start on Sunday November 6th 2011 at 02:00 at night. However a PC keeps track of all these things, so set up your pc ones and be done.
Showing multiple time zones in Windows:
Firstly you could use search engines to give you an answer, but I would like to recommend the setup below. You can add an extra clock to your windows calendar. Clicking the date/time indicator in the lower right corner of your screen will pop up the local times.
To set this up:
Click the time/date indicator on the windows taskbar
Select ‘settings for date and time’
Select the second tab labeled ‘Extra Clocks’
Enable an extra clock set to Pacific Time
Click Apply
If you are using gadgets or widgets you can always add one to your desktop, but this is clean and out of the way, yet always within reach by single click!
It’s been a while since the last update for Windows Live Messenger got released. You might have noticed it seems to take a very long time to add new friends. It used to take only second between somebody adding you to Messenger and a notification popping up to ask you if you want to add this friend. The new version takes a really long time showing the notification or even never shows it, making it almost impossible to add new friend.
Is this a bug in the new release? Nope, it’s a privacy feature gone wrong. When you first start Windows Live Messenger 2011 it asked you to set the new privacy settings for your online profile (http//profile.live.com) which has been consolidated to match your Windows Live Messenger picture and status.
Choosing the private option prevents other people from adding you to their Messenger friends list, even if they have your email address. To fix this you need to change the privacy settings, from any Windows Live website (Hotmail, Profile, SkyDrive, Home , Calendar ..) click you name in the top right corner and select Privacy settings.
Next you can pick one of the other two predefined settings Public or Limited to enable this feature again. Or if you are like me, and want to know exactly what settings you have and want to only tweak the setting about people being able to add you, select the Advanced option at the bottom of the page next to the save button.
This brings you to a page full of sliders giving you very detailed control over what you want to share on Windows Live. Scroll to the bottom of that page and you will find the “Who can contact me” section and this is where you want to set the ‘”Friends and group invitations” to everyone.
Changing this will enable adding friends to Messenger again with the same speed you were used to. Notifications of new friends who want to add you to their Messenger contact list appear in a yellow bar at the bottom of the main Windows Live Messenger application.
The Zune brand is not that popular in Belgium and neither is the Windows Phone brand yet for that matter. But still I would like to encourage all Windows Phone owners to update there Zune desktop software as soon as possible.
The latest updated rectifies the bug which made the Windows Phone Marketplace (The App Store but Apple Inc. trademarked that term) unavailable to most users in Belgium from the desktop software. The marketplace was still available from the phone itself to install applications, but now you can browse , search and install applications to your phone from the comfort of your computer!
Just like Facebook it seems it is still very hard to get the language right for the Zune software. Facebook shows you a French sign in page, Zune shows you a French description even if the application is clearly in Dutch! But still , it’s a nice update.
What you see about is the new “start screen” for the next version of Windows codenamed “Windows 8”. It is the first screen you will see after you have logged in to your account. As you can notice it’s quite different from the the normal desktop with start button and taskbar we have been experiencing since Windows 95.
When I last blogged about Windows 8 it was all about the hardware and new chipsets it will support. The new ARM chipset will enable more CPU architectures (x86 , x64 and now ARM) and will hopefully provide windows machines with a better battery life. It might also help reduce the cost of hardware since more manufactures will be able to deliver running on NVidea Tegra or Texas Instrument chips instead of Intel based ones.
Yesterday Microsoft gave the first demo of the new user interface of Windows 8. I’m happy to provide my insights into it.
Touch Friendly
It’s no secret Microsoft wants a part of the tablet market currently dominated by the iPad and some Android based tablets. The new interface has been designed with touch in mind and can be navigated more easily. Even of you don’t have a touchscreen the keyboard and mouse can be used to navigate this view. It might feel strange at first but this new start screen even makes sense without a touchscreen.
The first thing you do when you log into your pc? For most people it’s checking your email, facebook, twitter and favorite blogs. If you always start your computer session like that why would you not like to be presented with this information right away after login. These live tiles provide extra information showing you the most recent information right away helping you to decide if it is worth it to open up the app or browser to chick that information.
New applications will have to be written for Windows 8 to provide a touche optimized experience. Applications using the new ‘metro’ design will really put a new face onto the windows we have know. Just like the iPad and Andriod tablets the power is in providing a vast collection of ‘tablet optimized’ applications to the user. More about developing these application can be found beneath the video’s.
The main difference is Microsoft is using the main regular Windows operating system and extending the shell/desktop environment for a better touch experience. Both Google and Apple have used their mobile operating system and respectively change it or scaled it up to fit a bigger form factor allowing Mobile Apps to be run ‘scaled up’ on the tablets and providing the power to developers to change their app to make better use of the bigger screen real-estate . Google has struggled to get many tablet optimized applications while Apple has build most common tablet optimized apps itself to provide a good experience.
Normal Windows Shell
The new Windows 8 start screen is clearly inspired by the Live tiles and Metro UI used in Windows Phones today (www.windowsphone.com) but is an extension to the regular windows shell. You don’t loose the Windows application like Excel , Word, Movie Maker or any business application just because you are running Windows 8 on a tablet device.
One of the newest features announced for Android tablets include USB host capabilities (being able to connect a camera , keyboards or other USB devices to it). Connecting to a printer from both an Android tablet or iPad is still something which is hard to do. Trying to get the Apple iPad to play nice with other devices is a nightmare. Using Windows as a backbone for the Microsoft tablet strategy means all drivers and hardware which work with a Windows pc today will work with a tablet running Windows. A huge advantage leaping ahead of competition.
Imagine the “tablet” not being a new device category like Apple wants to call it but just a more mobile version of a laptop. Today a lot of people have a laptop and dock it in a docking station at their desk to use a standalone keyboard and some additional screens. When you need to have meeting they take their laptop with them and take some notes on it or use it to demo something. Back at their desk they plug it into the docking station enabling a better experience.
Image the same scenario with an iPad or Android tablet. When a meeting starts you leave your laptop where it is and take along your tablet. Hoping you don’t need to take to much notes and not demonstrate something you have build on your pc because you won’t have it with you. The tablet is easier to handle an show around and browse the web but is in no way integrated with the work on you laptop at your desk.
Again, imagine you are using a tablet using Windows 8. It’s capable of running external monitors and connect to keyboards and mice in the office. A meeting starts you disconnect the tablet an take it to the meeting. You can take notes on the split keyboard or use a stylus to write notes in a tablet optimized version of OneNote. If you want to you can demo what you were just working on because you have your complete computer with you. Every change you make during a meeting to a report or code will be available when you get back to your desk. This experience is one I would love.
Prepare because this is the part where Microsoft missed the ball (again) in my opinion. The PDC conference held in September has been renamed to the BUILD conference (www.buildwindows.com) and will be the place where developer info about the new Windows release will be provided in detail. And that’s the only thing they should have said yesterday, but they decided to add this remark.
Today, we also talked a bit about how developers will build apps for the new system. Windows 8 apps use the power of HTML5, tapping into the native capabilities of Windows using standard JavaScript and HTML to deliver new kinds of experiences. These new Windows 8 apps are full-screen and touch-optimized, and they easily integrate with the capabilities of the new Windows user interface. There’s much more to the platform, capabilities and tools than we showed today.
A remark that has gone trough the flesh and bones of every current Windows Developer. They know regular Windows 7 is underneath the new shell and thus is will run .NET including Silverlight. But the above statement clearly states if you want to create an modern ‘touch friendly’ app which integrates into the new shell you well use the power of HTML5. Developers hate HTML5, it’s a great improvement over HTML4 and thus is a welcome change in web development, but compared to the richness of Silverlight it is a pain in the ***.
Developers have been very vocal about it and the feeling of “Silverlight is dead” which was vibrant after the PDC of 2010 and made Microsoft pre-announce the Silverlight 5 event in December has made it’s comeback. Just look at the comments in the following developer forum threads.
Nelson: Don’t tell me to go all in with Silverlight for Windows Phone, then royally screw me over with Windows. You’re going to foster app development on Windows 8 with what is possibly the most frustrating incoherent mess of technologies the world has ever seen? SERIOUSLY? JavaScript?
Bitdisaster: While I like the UI/UX, I don’t lile that we are supposed to write Windows 8 apps in html/js. Wow, thats the stupids thing I ever heard. Microsoft has first class cross-platform application framework calles Silverlight and they want us to right fureaking javascript. Really!? Probably the next version of WindowsPhone will run HTML5 as well. C’mon, I’m really disappointed.
SleepyDaddySoftware: what a lot of people are really asking is not if you can still run Silverlight apps in w8. We are asking if we will be able to write silverlight/wpf apps that run in the tiled/touch experience shown in the demo
RWalrond: Microsoft, developers want to know about our investment in Silverlight/XNA applications, we want a first class seat on the Windows 8 train. You need to say something before September. I loved the new look of Windows 8 but my heart sank each time they said HTML/Javascript.
Yes it’s the internet and it has changed a mouse into an eliphant once again. But cleary Microsoft will have to (again) pre announce stuff they wanted to hold on to untill their BUILD conference just to get developpers at their side again. Because we all know they will need them to deliver a competitive Windows 8 store at launch.
It has been a few very exciting days for the smartphone world. On Friday Nokia and Microsoft officially announced a strategic alliance concerning Nokia Windows Phones. Today Nokia game more details about this alliance at their Mobile World Congress keynote in Barcelona. And tomorrow Microsoft will give more details about the future of Windows Phone 7 as an operating system.
It’s such a huge announcement I could not resist writing a blog post about it. Even tough there have been a very good and brought media coverage already. Here are some bullet points to summaries, feel free to check the sources below to get full coverage.
No definite agreement has been reached yet concerning all assets (Nokia & Microsoft) involved.
Nokia will use Windows Phone 7 as their primary smartphone operating system replacing Symbian completely within the next to years.
Nokia will use the MeeGo operating system as a learning experience and will bring one MeeGo product to market this year. (Probably a tablet of some sorts). The MeeGo team will be focused on Nokia R&D and future mobile breakthroughs one there product has shipped.
Nokia will innovate on Windows Phone hardware. Examples coming to mind are the wonderful Carle Zeiss camera’s they have been using and the stunning E7 hardware. A concept has leaked already and shows there might be higher resolution screens coming. (Rumor has it Microsoft will announce the update specifications for Windows Phone 7 during there keynote tomorrow)
One of the highest priorities is to bring the price of Windows Phone devices down and bring Windows Phone to worldwide coverage faster.
Nokia will be able to change the WP7 OS completely but will likely not.
Nokia will integrate into the existing Windows Phone Marketplace and use the same Visual Studio Tools everybody else uses. Qt will not be a developer language on WP7. There might be an “Ovi Store” category in the Marketplace like there are for carriers mike AT&T and T-mobile.
Nokia will provide Ovi Maps (NAVTEQ) solutions to Bing. (not sure if this will be for Nokia devices only)
Nokia will deliver Nokia Windows Phones in 2011 (or try to)
Nokia and Microsoft are sure this agreement makes the Smartphone world a “three horse race” including Android , iOS (Apple) and Windows Phone. The first priority for Nokia is to beat Android (the current number one in sales).
Woohoo! Finally ! A new feature has just arrived to Windows Live Messenger 2011 in Belgium. You can now chat with friends on Facebook. Click the Facebook ‘plus’ button in the bottom right corner of messenger and you will be able to add Chat to Windows Live Messenger.
More and more people don’t go ‘online’ with Messenger anymore. When they say they are online they mean they are visiting Facebook and you can chat with them on Facebook.
Some of us however (like me) hate chatting on Facebook and don’t find a browser to be the most convenient way to organize chat windows. I also hate having to keep my browser open all the time, listen to the stupid Facebook sounds. When you now enable the new chat feature and give permission to the Windows Live Messenger app to access people’s status, you will notice the people in the Facebook group on messenger will now also have a status.
Clicking on them will open up a regular Messenger window, but will open up a chat windows on Facebook on there side. The chat functions are automatically limited to text and simple emoticons. When you have the same people on Messenger and on Facebook those will show up as one contact in your list.
For those loving the “Appear offline” option on there messenger, be sure to check that option on Facebook as well or people will know you are available via Facebook.
However, for most of the tasks you do at home a new experience has been created. Think of these kind of tasks like chatting, emailing, browsing the web, watching movies and photos, sharing experiences and so on. This compared to the ‘work’ tasks like writing and compiling code, writing a long report, movie editing… Another way to compaire the two is thinking about ‘consuming content’ and ‘creating content’ although that separation might be too strict.
![1home30rock0531[1]](http://blog.callemin.be/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/1home30rock05311.png "1home30rock0531[1]")
![mwc201120110213082[1]](http://blog.callemin.be/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/11x0211nokiaconcept1.jpg "mwc201120110213082[1]")
@C_Kurt