If I'm reading this right, Gruber's effectively saying, "Metro, and Metro alone (i.e., no desktop), is a good competitor to the iPad." That's wonderful; a real iPad competitor.
But what about all the rest of the computers? You know, those big things on your desktop? We all know just how smart most users are when it comes to figuring out how to use stuff on a computer. Its taken years to get to the point where your typical "user" can use a computer without too much difficulty. Part of this is due to the consistency of the Windows UI; folder windows, mouse motions, menubars, etc. Suddenly, we're going to throw something completely new at them, something which:
1) Has been shown to be difficult to do well for everyday use (touchscreen desktops)
2) Has a moderately non-intuitive interface (hidden UI elements until I swipe from a particular side, or maybe tap over here and here and here)
3) Has questionable benefits in a desktop computing environment where a keyboard is a perfectly appropriate device
And, once they learn all that, our user realizes that he still has to use the original UI for many programs! That's right, photoshop isn't going to be going Metro anytime soon, and neither is Matlab, or Autocad, or Excel, or video editing software, or any "Pro" program (for lack of a better word). Metro may be wonderful for tablets and other mobile devices, but it sure looks like it's going to be a drag in being forcibly married to the traditional Windows UI.
I suspect we'll be seeing a more and more pronounced split in computing and, therefore, interfaces. On one side (the majority) will be "consumers": web, email, Facebook, maybe some light photo editing. On the other side will be the "producers": people who use Photoshop, or Matlab, or AutoCAD. Office falls somewhere in the middle... Office itself may eventually be divided along those lines, with a lightweight, tablet-friendly spinoff.
So in many cases I think you're actually talking about different users: the majority of people may eventually not need anything beyond a tablet. I also suspect the rest of us will be annoyed and inconvenienced by this trend, since it won't be aimed at us.
It won't be long before most people have only one computing device: a very powerful smartphone. When used as a mobile device, the interface looks like iPhone/Metro. When you are at your desk, you dock it and the interface that pops up on your 30 inch monitor is like Windows 7 (WIMP). And you can also dock it in a range of shells (for lack of a better word) from a 7-inch tablet (touchscreen UI) to a 17-inch laptop (WIMP UI). All these devices you are docking to are just relatively cheap shells. All your data and processing power is on the smartphone. In fact, even the smartphone will be just a shell, and the computer will be like a large SD card.
That's right, photoshop isn't going to be going Metro anytime soon, and neither is Matlab, or Autocad, or Excel, or video editing software, or any "Pro" program (for lack of a better word).
I'd actually be surprised if there isn't a fully staffed team working on a Metro version of the Office suite.
Thinking about it, isn’t window an odd word choice for what we call movable, stackable, resizeable content regions in a user interface? Other than being rectangular they’re not like real-world windows at all.
I can remember my high school computer studies teacher explaining they're called windows because they're split into panes. Microsoft Windows versions 1 and 2 didn't actually have stackable overlapping windows (you'd split the screen up into as many panes as you needed) so I suspect the name made sense then and has since stuck.
Good point - though I believe they were called windows on previous GUI systems.
EDIT: Though now that I think about it and, IIRC, Xerox's stuff didn't have overlapping windows either. Apple's Lisa and Mac did. I think Englebart's demo had windows but I'm not sure if they overlapped.
Finally a Gruber post I haven't felt forced to flag. A pretty good analysis, excellent (as usual writing), interesting testable predictions plus just enough Apple flag-waving so you don't forget which religion he follows.
edit reading through the comments shows a commensurate level of better discussion than the usual Gruber response as well.
Err, he's wrong on ARM PCs not running desktop Windows, I don't see why this wrong post needs to be on top of HN. It's like there's like zombies that seem to have a need to auto upvote any post by Gruber. Maybe they're similarly misinformed.
Metro is really nice. It's great to see Gruber praising it like this: it is very praiseworthy. Also, it's easy to forget that Gruber is first-and-foremost a design geek.
"you can’t give iOS apps even the option to run continuously in the background without sacrificing battery life and foreground app performance. But that’s how Microsoft has positioned Metro for tablets — a modern touch interface that carries the full CPU and RAM consumption of Windows as we know it. That have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too attitude is what I didn’t get with Microsoft’s positioning Metro as its answer to the iPad."
"discarded applications will continue to stay open as a background application, having all of their memory pages intact but unable to schedule CPU time so long as they’re a background application. They’ll remain in this state until the OS decides to evict them, at which point they need to be able to gracefully shut down and resume when the user re-launches the application. Internally Microsoft calls this freezing and rehydrating an application."
Metro's approach sounds very similar to that of iOS and Android. Presumably this behavior will be adjustable so that background processes can be allowed on desktops without mobile power constraints. This is actually a really smart way to do things. Make how the OS handles background apps a setting rather than hard-coded architecture. e.g. If you're out and about using your tablet background apps get quashed so that you get decent battery life. When you go home and plug it into a dock you can leave a torrent downloading in the background while you browse the web or play games. Best of both worlds.
To me, "you can’t give iOS apps even the option to run continuously" is precisely the same as "discarded applications will continue to stay open [...] but unable to schedule CPU time" indeed.
At no point the article says Metro would not have such a feature. The point is merely that you can't have outstanding energy management with runaway background processes, which is the way desktop apps work today, so having a full-blown desktop running legacy apps on a mobile experience is compromising power management.
Side note regarding "you can leave a torrent downloading in the background": see task completion API on iOS, which fills the use case while eliminating undue battery use.
Which proves he didn't even bother to watch the keynote. There was even a piece of hardware that showed the power consumption during sleep. They also showed the new task manager and specifically pointed out how the Metro apps have been suspended (using 0% CPU, but still loaded in RAM).
Metro to me, and I hate to say it, reminds me of MS Bob, and frankly of the original Windows 3.1 except where in that case it was a layer on DOS, this seems like a gloss on Windows 7. I hope for the sake of innovation I'm wrong, but it is frankly more bizarre than Launchpad (and that's saying something).
"like a gloss on Windows 7" - From what I've read[1] so far this is not the case. The APIs that 'Metro style' apps use are built deep into Windows. In fact it seems more like the opposite - legacy Windows is treated more like another app that you can switch to, if you're on x86/x64 machine.
Hitting the windows key brings up the start screen. It's supposed to do that, kind of like how the iPhone always takes you to the first page of apps.
Task switching is done by swiping on from the left or hitting Win+Tab. I just tried it, Windows+Tab brings you right back in the control panel where you left.
It could probably be clearer, but the Windows button takes you to the Windows front page, it's not a toggle between desktop and metro.
I think the act of flipping between them is not meant to be a common event. But I do agree they do need to clean up the edges, although I don't think its "critical" for v1 of Metro.
The desktop mode doesn't seem to immediately respond to touch like Metro. It will be interesting to see the final product and how well Windows 8 performs on an ARM processor in desktop mode.
> Tradeoffs. Mutually exclusive tradeoffs. Separate devices are required. ... And you can’t give iOS apps even the option to run continuously in the background without sacrificing battery life and foreground app performance
This is a typical Gruberism of false logic. He starts with the notion that all Apple's decisions are holy and right. He then derives conclusions by extrapolating from that.
There is no reason that tablets cannot achieve fantastic battery life while running background processes. They certainly need to be designed to achieve it. Existing Android tablets support background processes and multitasking and get comparable battery life to the iPad - typically we're talking a sacrifice of < 10% battery life to achieve an incredible expansion of utility. And this is not taking into account the fact that Android is a less efficient OS overall (utilizing less hardware acceleration, running most tasks inside a Dalvik VM instead of native, etc.) Even the iPad itself evidently does background processing as you can have it play music, give you calendar reminders and all kinds of other things happen in the background even when it is in sleep state.
Compared to desktop operating systems Android does very limited multitasking or, to put it in another way, it is cleverer about multitasking (iOS, too).
Remaining backwards compatible while picking up such a new model of multitasking is hard. Very hard. Apple made parts of it opt-in with Lion but that’s not the same as requiring everyone to adhere to the model and today hardly any app supports it.
Gruber simply sees this as a hard challenge that is, at least currently, not solvable if Windows is to stay backwards compatible. That’s all. He might be wrong but I think that position is quite sensible.
I think metro is very minimal and very clean. But it's also... cold. A bit too austere. The goal for an interface isn't to impress--it's to connect. Somehow, I've never felt a sense of connection with the Metro interfaces. It feels like design borrowed from the annual report of a faceless international corporation. All design; no personality. I like simple and clean. And I like minimalism. But I also think you have to be careful with it or you'll end up with something soulless. That, I think, is what has always subtly bothered me about Metro.
Metro is actually meant to be "soulless" by design. It's supposed to be distinctly digital. The idea is that your "connections" come from your actual social web, not from rendered wood textured bookshelves. At least, that's the idea.
This is why Metro will make or break Windows. This is where the line is drawn in the sand. Since ARM is the future together with touch based devices, Microsoft will have to move over to ARM. The problem is they are very vulnerable on ARM, because they have no apps there, and wanting millions of apps on a tablet was kind of the whole reason you'd want Windows on a tablet.
But it won't work, because those apps won't be available on ARM, and even if they were, they wouldn't be designed for touch. So Microsoft is starting from scratch, and this time they have strong competition from both iOS and Android.
In this market, their Windows dominance doesn't matter as much, so they are on equal footing with the others. And I find that very exciting. If you notice, Microsoft is innovating only when it's the underdog in some way, not really when it dominates.
So I hope 5 years from now we'll get to see iOS, Android and Windows with about equal market share each for "personal computing devices", whatever that means 5 years from now.
Keep in mind a lot of .net applications will run on x86 or arm with no effort by the developer, ie no "simply recompile your application" either, it will just run on either platform.
But you're right that they're exposed with no applications, which is why they're basically giving windows 8 beta/vs11express away to any and all who are prepared to download it, they need to catch up, and quickly
There will be ARM laptops, not just tablets, and they will run Microsoft Office in classic mode or nobody will buy them. Office on ARM has already been demoed on stage.
Contra-Gruber I'm betting ARM Windows 8 devices will have some mode that looks and feels just like Windows desktop. It may not be the default and it may be a dumbed down version of it but I can't imagine them shipping without it.
>You can ask Mac apps to behave like iOS apps, which is what Lion’s Automatic Termination feature does, but it has to be opt-in.
Virtualization could enable you to run a legacy app, stop its processing instantly, bring up a new app, and save the 'background app' state to storage when it's convenient.
This seems to be where they are heading. I don't know how it would translate to ARM tablets, but intel wants in on tablets anyway.
I had been reading statements like this as meaning that they wouldn’t be doing Rosetta-style emulation of x86 software on ARM...but that developers would be able to recompile traditional Windows apps for ARM. Now I’m thinking what they mean is more profound: that on ARM, Metro will be the only Windows interface.
I think that's a very black and white way of looking at it. Sure maybe MS will rule out C++ x86 apps targeting winforms apis, but there's no reason to assume that they will also exclude C# apps targeting WPF.
>I’m hung up on the question of how any OS that lets you do everything Windows does could compete with the iPad, because the iPad’s appeal and success is largely forged by the advantages that come from not allowing you to do so many of the things Mac OS X can do.
So you're saying the iPad is successful because it can't do stuff OS X can do? Sorry I don't understand -- that sounds a bit silly to me. I thought it was the portability and size and ease of access to apps (the ecosystem around the device) that makes the iPad successful. If we could have the hardware power of a desktop system on an iPad, while keeping the simplicity of use, I'm fairly sure we would all like that.
With every step Apple is moving OS X closer to iOS, and iOS closer to OS X. Will they ever combine the two? I see no reason why they couldn't eventually with the amazingly quick progression of the relevant technologies that we're seeing.
Now whether MS is doing the right thing by combining them now -- I'm OK with saying I have no idea until I actually play with the device. Maybe they can pull it off, maybe not.
I don't know why everyone (well, ok, I know why Gruber does that) focuses on Apple and iPad after seeing Windows 8. IOS is an established system, with a healthy ecosystem of developers and apps. IPhone and iPad dominate the mobile market with ease. That won't change anytime soon. Besides, Apple had showed in the past that they can survive living as a Microsoft competitor.
They will do just fine.
Who should be worried about Windows 8 is Google.
Android tablets didn't set the world on fire, Chrome OS from the very beginning looks like a low-profile project.
And here comes Windows 8 which offers the same thing as Chrome OS (cloud, HTML5/JS apps, etc.) and does that in a better fashion than Honeycomb. Plus, it will run Windows software. Apple users learned to live without Windows software, Google users - didn't. Considering the fact that Microsoft will offer an integration with Bing, Skype, Hotmail and your latest Nokia phone by default even the great Google services could be in trouble.
I feel like one of the few who sees the emperor with no clothes.
Let me first start by stating that I do believe that touchscreen devices will continue to revolutionize industries, as they already have. But, why in God's name are Microsoft and Apple trying to shoehorn the touch-screen onto the desktop?
Mac OS X Lion is probably the last OS X version that we'll see. With each version it's gotten closer and closer to behaving like iOS. It seems that Microsoft is doing the same with Windows 8. Think about this, the human-device interface with touchscreen devices and desktop is different. The whole paradigm is different. With touch, you have your finger. The other, you have mouse/keyboard. The user interfaces that cater to one don't cater to other very well. Why force it?
I believe mobile is the future. But, I'm not sure this is the best evolution for desktop interfaces.
TL;DR: Metro UI looks nice, but merging touchscreen UI with desktop UI is a mistake... a la same Windows 8 for all devices.
Have you ever experienced coworkers discussing something in front of the computer and touching the monitor screen time and again to point out things? It is not the most popular use case, but it does show that touching a screen to interact with a desktop is a natural inclination. Even with a desktop.
I don't think Microsoft is merging both UIs at all. I think MS wants to pretend that Metro is something you'll use with keyboard and mouse, but I bet you won't, and they know that.
My thinking is that MS wants to sell you a hybrid tablet device. By day, you have it docked, and you spend most of your time in Desktop with mouse and keyboard. When it's going home time, you pull it out the dock, and it becomes a touchscreen tablet where you spend most of your time in Metro.
Have you actually used a touch screen on a Desktop? I'm not being snarky here; I genuinely believe that you should actively try to use a touch screen with a Win8 desktop before deciding one way or the other. I do it every day, and while it is not great for everything, there are some places where it is really nice.
For example, I love having a touch monitor when I'm reading a long Word document. Why hold a mouse and use the scroll wheel as I read a 35 page spec when I can sit there casually and flip through the document as I read? Or, if I have two hands on they keyboard typing and need to switch to another window, it can be nice to just tap the screen, rather than grab the mouse, navigate to the correct place on the screen and then click the button. Touch isn't perfect for everything, and I use the mouse plenty, but it's nice to have both. The key for me, however, was that I initially had to force myself to use the touch screen - I just wasn't used to it. Once I got in the habit of using it, however, I've found it has it's place and can be nice.
I'm not sure how Apple is trying to shoehorn touchscreens in Lion. They have made a very clear distinction between OSX and iOS, and instead added more gestures to the touchpads instead of trying to make a Mac with a touch screen.
I agree though, that trying to mix both is a mistake (one that's been tried for 10 years without much success).
Would his opinion have been any different if metro was the only mode available while undocked and classic PC mode was only available while docked?
Metro looks like it competes with iPad and the rest seems to be a version of Win7 under the hood. It feels to me like cmd is to windows as windows is to metro; something under the hood for power users.
I can imagine taking my computer on the bus and reading hacker news in metro and then when I get to work I plug into a dock and open visual studio. That seems to be the vision and I think I like it.
I'd have to control what was going on in the background of my computer when I was undocked, but if I'm enough of a user to set up background server like processes then I should be clever enough to understand that heavy background processing will eat my battery if I don't act responsibly when I unplug it.
The new more powerful ways to do diagnostics are exactly the type of tools I'd want to be able to control power; so it really feels like MS has a similar vision.
It will only be a matter of time before mobile phones start replacing laptops for desktop-like use cases. People will likely use their phones as if they were laptops with wirelessly-connected keyboard, mouse, and screen. I can totally see businesses start buying Windows-ready phones for their employees than the alternatives.
I think the more likely interpretation is that they're "betting on the future"; i.e. that tablet and other "portable" devices will continually get more powerful and that letting services and applications run in the background will continually become less and less of a problem. Seems like a pretty safe bet to me.
[+] [-] eykanal|14 years ago|reply
But what about all the rest of the computers? You know, those big things on your desktop? We all know just how smart most users are when it comes to figuring out how to use stuff on a computer. Its taken years to get to the point where your typical "user" can use a computer without too much difficulty. Part of this is due to the consistency of the Windows UI; folder windows, mouse motions, menubars, etc. Suddenly, we're going to throw something completely new at them, something which:
1) Has been shown to be difficult to do well for everyday use (touchscreen desktops)
2) Has a moderately non-intuitive interface (hidden UI elements until I swipe from a particular side, or maybe tap over here and here and here)
3) Has questionable benefits in a desktop computing environment where a keyboard is a perfectly appropriate device
And, once they learn all that, our user realizes that he still has to use the original UI for many programs! That's right, photoshop isn't going to be going Metro anytime soon, and neither is Matlab, or Autocad, or Excel, or video editing software, or any "Pro" program (for lack of a better word). Metro may be wonderful for tablets and other mobile devices, but it sure looks like it's going to be a drag in being forcibly married to the traditional Windows UI.
[+] [-] alex_c|14 years ago|reply
So in many cases I think you're actually talking about different users: the majority of people may eventually not need anything beyond a tablet. I also suspect the rest of us will be annoyed and inconvenienced by this trend, since it won't be aimed at us.
[+] [-] ericdschmidt|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] crenshaw|14 years ago|reply
I'd actually be surprised if there isn't a fully staffed team working on a Metro version of the Office suite.
[+] [-] mahrain|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brianwillis|14 years ago|reply
I can remember my high school computer studies teacher explaining they're called windows because they're split into panes. Microsoft Windows versions 1 and 2 didn't actually have stackable overlapping windows (you'd split the screen up into as many panes as you needed) so I suspect the name made sense then and has since stuck.
[+] [-] glhaynes|14 years ago|reply
EDIT: Though now that I think about it and, IIRC, Xerox's stuff didn't have overlapping windows either. Apple's Lisa and Mac did. I think Englebart's demo had windows but I'm not sure if they overlapped.
[+] [-] jrockway|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] libraryatnight|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] skeletonjelly|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bane|14 years ago|reply
edit reading through the comments shows a commensurate level of better discussion than the usual Gruber response as well.
[+] [-] cooldeal|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sambeau|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] steele|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] beloch|14 years ago|reply
"you can’t give iOS apps even the option to run continuously in the background without sacrificing battery life and foreground app performance. But that’s how Microsoft has positioned Metro for tablets — a modern touch interface that carries the full CPU and RAM consumption of Windows as we know it. That have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too attitude is what I didn’t get with Microsoft’s positioning Metro as its answer to the iPad."
This is wrong. From Anandtech: (http://www.anandtech.com/show/4771/microsoft-build-windows-8...)
"discarded applications will continue to stay open as a background application, having all of their memory pages intact but unable to schedule CPU time so long as they’re a background application. They’ll remain in this state until the OS decides to evict them, at which point they need to be able to gracefully shut down and resume when the user re-launches the application. Internally Microsoft calls this freezing and rehydrating an application."
Metro's approach sounds very similar to that of iOS and Android. Presumably this behavior will be adjustable so that background processes can be allowed on desktops without mobile power constraints. This is actually a really smart way to do things. Make how the OS handles background apps a setting rather than hard-coded architecture. e.g. If you're out and about using your tablet background apps get quashed so that you get decent battery life. When you go home and plug it into a dock you can leave a torrent downloading in the background while you browse the web or play games. Best of both worlds.
[+] [-] lloeki|14 years ago|reply
At no point the article says Metro would not have such a feature. The point is merely that you can't have outstanding energy management with runaway background processes, which is the way desktop apps work today, so having a full-blown desktop running legacy apps on a mobile experience is compromising power management.
Side note regarding "you can leave a torrent downloading in the background": see task completion API on iOS, which fills the use case while eliminating undue battery use.
[+] [-] pbz|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ugh|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ethank|14 years ago|reply
Let me show: https://skitch.com/ethank/f3drj/windows-8-x64-preview
then https://skitch.com/ethank/f3drc/windows-8-x64-preview
and... https://skitch.com/ethank/f3dr1/windows-8-x64-preview
after you go back to metro: https://skitch.com/ethank/f3dri/windows-8-x64-preview
dumped back into Metro with no context how you got out.
Thus: feels like a skin or window manager, not the OS.
[+] [-] eddiegroves|14 years ago|reply
[1] http://www.winsupersite.com/article/windows8/windows-8-devel...
[+] [-] PJones|14 years ago|reply
Task switching is done by swiping on from the left or hitting Win+Tab. I just tried it, Windows+Tab brings you right back in the control panel where you left.
It could probably be clearer, but the Windows button takes you to the Windows front page, it's not a toggle between desktop and metro.
[+] [-] crenshaw|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] technoslut|14 years ago|reply
It seems there will be a desktop mode for ARM tablets if you look 1:40 into the video here:
http://thisismynext.com/2011/09/14/nvidia-kal-el-windows-8-t...
The desktop mode doesn't seem to immediately respond to touch like Metro. It will be interesting to see the final product and how well Windows 8 performs on an ARM processor in desktop mode.
[+] [-] roadnottaken|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zmmmmm|14 years ago|reply
This is a typical Gruberism of false logic. He starts with the notion that all Apple's decisions are holy and right. He then derives conclusions by extrapolating from that.
There is no reason that tablets cannot achieve fantastic battery life while running background processes. They certainly need to be designed to achieve it. Existing Android tablets support background processes and multitasking and get comparable battery life to the iPad - typically we're talking a sacrifice of < 10% battery life to achieve an incredible expansion of utility. And this is not taking into account the fact that Android is a less efficient OS overall (utilizing less hardware acceleration, running most tasks inside a Dalvik VM instead of native, etc.) Even the iPad itself evidently does background processing as you can have it play music, give you calendar reminders and all kinds of other things happen in the background even when it is in sleep state.
[+] [-] ugh|14 years ago|reply
Remaining backwards compatible while picking up such a new model of multitasking is hard. Very hard. Apple made parts of it opt-in with Lion but that’s not the same as requiring everyone to adhere to the model and today hardly any app supports it.
Gruber simply sees this as a hard challenge that is, at least currently, not solvable if Windows is to stay backwards compatible. That’s all. He might be wrong but I think that position is quite sensible.
[+] [-] toddmorey|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] crenshaw|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ashr|14 years ago|reply
One would think that the live tiles with continuously updated information show more "connection" with the user.
[+] [-] nextparadigms|14 years ago|reply
But it won't work, because those apps won't be available on ARM, and even if they were, they wouldn't be designed for touch. So Microsoft is starting from scratch, and this time they have strong competition from both iOS and Android.
In this market, their Windows dominance doesn't matter as much, so they are on equal footing with the others. And I find that very exciting. If you notice, Microsoft is innovating only when it's the underdog in some way, not really when it dominates.
So I hope 5 years from now we'll get to see iOS, Android and Windows with about equal market share each for "personal computing devices", whatever that means 5 years from now.
[+] [-] malbs|14 years ago|reply
But you're right that they're exposed with no applications, which is why they're basically giving windows 8 beta/vs11express away to any and all who are prepared to download it, they need to catch up, and quickly
[+] [-] bane|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] modeless|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Steko|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xpaulbettsx|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] indrax|14 years ago|reply
Virtualization could enable you to run a legacy app, stop its processing instantly, bring up a new app, and save the 'background app' state to storage when it's convenient.
This seems to be where they are heading. I don't know how it would translate to ARM tablets, but intel wants in on tablets anyway.
http://thenextweb.com/microsoft/2011/08/03/windows-8-to-have...
[+] [-] dpark|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wmf|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] seanalltogether|14 years ago|reply
I think that's a very black and white way of looking at it. Sure maybe MS will rule out C++ x86 apps targeting winforms apis, but there's no reason to assume that they will also exclude C# apps targeting WPF.
[+] [-] aik|14 years ago|reply
So you're saying the iPad is successful because it can't do stuff OS X can do? Sorry I don't understand -- that sounds a bit silly to me. I thought it was the portability and size and ease of access to apps (the ecosystem around the device) that makes the iPad successful. If we could have the hardware power of a desktop system on an iPad, while keeping the simplicity of use, I'm fairly sure we would all like that.
With every step Apple is moving OS X closer to iOS, and iOS closer to OS X. Will they ever combine the two? I see no reason why they couldn't eventually with the amazingly quick progression of the relevant technologies that we're seeing.
Now whether MS is doing the right thing by combining them now -- I'm OK with saying I have no idea until I actually play with the device. Maybe they can pull it off, maybe not.
[+] [-] statictype|14 years ago|reply
All of these things are possible because of the restrictions in iOS.
For example, the lack of a filesystem forces apps to have a more simplified data access mechanism[1].
The good battery life and response time comes from the fact that the OS puts severe limits on what each app can do.
[1] - There's an escape hatch of course, with something like Dropbox
[+] [-] bgarbiak|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jonpaul|14 years ago|reply
Let me first start by stating that I do believe that touchscreen devices will continue to revolutionize industries, as they already have. But, why in God's name are Microsoft and Apple trying to shoehorn the touch-screen onto the desktop?
Mac OS X Lion is probably the last OS X version that we'll see. With each version it's gotten closer and closer to behaving like iOS. It seems that Microsoft is doing the same with Windows 8. Think about this, the human-device interface with touchscreen devices and desktop is different. The whole paradigm is different. With touch, you have your finger. The other, you have mouse/keyboard. The user interfaces that cater to one don't cater to other very well. Why force it?
I believe mobile is the future. But, I'm not sure this is the best evolution for desktop interfaces.
TL;DR: Metro UI looks nice, but merging touchscreen UI with desktop UI is a mistake... a la same Windows 8 for all devices.
EDIT: Please share your thoughts.
[+] [-] ashr|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Lewisham|14 years ago|reply
My thinking is that MS wants to sell you a hybrid tablet device. By day, you have it docked, and you spend most of your time in Desktop with mouse and keyboard. When it's going home time, you pull it out the dock, and it becomes a touchscreen tablet where you spend most of your time in Metro.
[+] [-] DaveMebs|14 years ago|reply
For example, I love having a touch monitor when I'm reading a long Word document. Why hold a mouse and use the scroll wheel as I read a 35 page spec when I can sit there casually and flip through the document as I read? Or, if I have two hands on they keyboard typing and need to switch to another window, it can be nice to just tap the screen, rather than grab the mouse, navigate to the correct place on the screen and then click the button. Touch isn't perfect for everything, and I use the mouse plenty, but it's nice to have both. The key for me, however, was that I initially had to force myself to use the touch screen - I just wasn't used to it. Once I got in the habit of using it, however, I've found it has it's place and can be nice.
[+] [-] spa942|14 years ago|reply
I agree though, that trying to mix both is a mistake (one that's been tried for 10 years without much success).
[+] [-] 12390ut90|14 years ago|reply
Metro looks like it competes with iPad and the rest seems to be a version of Win7 under the hood. It feels to me like cmd is to windows as windows is to metro; something under the hood for power users.
I can imagine taking my computer on the bus and reading hacker news in metro and then when I get to work I plug into a dock and open visual studio. That seems to be the vision and I think I like it.
I'd have to control what was going on in the background of my computer when I was undocked, but if I'm enough of a user to set up background server like processes then I should be clever enough to understand that heavy background processing will eat my battery if I don't act responsibly when I unplug it.
The new more powerful ways to do diagnostics are exactly the type of tools I'd want to be able to control power; so it really feels like MS has a similar vision.
[+] [-] buddydvd|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bradwestness|14 years ago|reply