
Windows 8's Achilles' heel: Metro applications - mariuz
http://www.osnews.com/story/26180/Windows_8_s_Achilles_heel_Metro_applications
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meanguy
Historically Microsoft has flown by the seat of its pants with a lot of this
stuff. You wouldn't believe how horrible the Windows 95 or Windows XP
interfaces were right up to the last possible minute.

As might be expected with anything "flashy" or "cool" in a company not exactly
defined by those adjectives, there was a shortage of skill and an overage of
opinions. Only after true "ship it" crush set in did the less qualified people
seem to scurry away and worry about little details like, oh, an entire laptop
product line that didn't boot.

For example: kernel dev Mark Lucovsky got some perverse thrill by checking in
the startup bitmap. In his mind, this granted him some sort of final authority
over the branding of a product that sells a half billion copies. We'd let him
yell at the testers and people providing feedback that it looked like shit --
then we'd giggle while Dave Cutler punched holes in the walls in the build
lab. Then with egg on their faces and casts on their hands, they'd go do
something they were good at while the designers and a few hand-picked nerds
possessing the barest hint of aesthetic capability tried to save face at the
last minute.

The variable now is Sinofksy who unfortunately seems to think he really knows
design. This is the guy who thought that removing items from menus "based on
the user's work habits!" was a great simplifying metaphor in Office 2000.
You'd look at a menu for months gradually building familiarity with the
product. Then that one day when you finally needed to insert a friggin' table,
the damn option wouldn't be there any more.

I'm sure he has all sorts of data proving how great everything is. I can't
tell you how much data we had "proving" that the original Xbox controllers
were way better than the Nintendo or Sony controllers, too.

~~~
ak217
XP's interface was horrible after the last possible minute, too. Aero is great
though, but, hilariously, from what I understand it's being thrown out in
Windows 8.

~~~
PJones
My understanding is that it's only Aero Glass that's being canned, that being
the smoked glass effect transparency on everything. Presumably it's a battery
life thing, since even bargain basement onboard GPUs can handle it performance
wise these days.

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joshka
Having spent the better part of the last couple of months on a commercial
windows 8 xaml app, the number of WTF moments per day was phenomenal. If the
devs writing the OOTB software were anything like us, it's pretty easy to see
why they're turned out crap. WinRT takes the best parts of .Net, XAML etc from
the last 5 years and just ignores that it ever existed. The problem is that it
tries oh so hard to present as if it's just an incremental change. It's not.
Small things changed all over the place, no documentation on why, no
progressively better software, because it's a totally new implementation of a
bunch of things.

I recommend that people should treat Windows 8 metro as a 1.0 product (maybe
do the standard wait for the service pack). It's worrying that it will RTM in
2 weeks time.

~~~
mickeyp
I haven't yet developed for Windows 8 and RT yet but having developed apps for
the Windows scene since the 90s I have seen a lot of technologies come and go,
and invariably -- and not having done the work you've done I may well be
completely wrong here -- people will say it's not like the preceding
technology stack and _ipso facto_ is crap.

For instance: MFC/Straight-up GDI devs moving to VB/Delphi/Powerbuilder;
Delphi users moving to .NET; .NET Winforms developers having to relearn
everything when WPF came out; etc.

Is it anything like that or is it truly busted?

~~~
bkjelden
There are many places where it's really busted. For example, in WPF, you could
pass a ListView a predicate to filter the visible items in it. That is
mysteriously gone in WinRT. System.Xml.XPath is mysteriously gone. The list of
omissions I've found is full of things like that. It's a very similar
development model to WPF, there's just lots of pieces missing.

That being said, I would encourage anyone looking at developing a windows 8
app to strongly look at the html/javascript API for building apps. There's
some oddities there too, but in my experience (which is admittedly limited)
they are easier to deal with.

~~~
mickeyp
XPath functionality's gone? Hmm.. pretty massive oversight. Microsoft's not
one to rest on their laurels when it concerns their cash cow though. I expect
this'll all make a reappearance very soon enough.

Also, C# (and .NET) were lacking quite a bit in the early days as well.. now
C# is pretty much a kitchen sink language.

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PommeDeTerre
Anyone who has been in the software industry for a while now will have noticed
the recent influx of people who I will refer to as "the Creatives".

Most of them are decent people, and I'll go for a beer with them any time. But
what they bring to the software they're working on usually isn't beneficial.

Put bluntly, they care more about the look and aesthetics of software, rather
than its usability and practicality. As these people have become more and more
involved with software development over the past 5 to 7 years, we've started
to see more and more problems arise.

Long-time Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox users will know what I mean. Each round of
"improvements" to the UI by these creative types has in fact made it much
worse. The usability has suffered greatly. Unfortunately, these people also
apparently have great influence at Google and Apple, so alternate browsers
like Chrome and Safari have UIs that are just as bad, if not worse in some
ways.

My suspicion is that the same thing has happened at Microsoft, and Windows 8
and Metro are just this problem becoming extremely obvious on a wide scale. If
Windows 8 and Metro are huge failures, as they very well may be, it will
probably become clear that we need to ditch these UIs that focus on being
pretty above all else.

The industry as a whole will need to return to simpler UIs and that are
usable, functional and practical. We'll need to leave this dark period behind
us, but hopefully we can learn from these mistakes to ensure future
applications do not fall victim to the problems we are witnessing today.

~~~
kiba
_The industry as a whole will need to return to simpler UIs and that are
usable, functional and practical. We'll need to leave this dark period behind
us, but hopefully we can learn from these mistakes to ensure future
applications do not fall victim to the problems we are witnessing today._

Well, you have to qualify why Chrome's UI sucks, otherwise it's just an
opinion. As far as I am concerned, it is useful plenty.

~~~
jaems33
Indeed. Years ago, they took a bold choice to use one input box for both
searching and url's and now it's one major reason why I use Chrome over
Firefox and Safari.

~~~
cdr
Firefox's bar works exactly the same as Chrome's now. And even long before FF
started letting you search from the address bar without search keywords, you
could use search keywords.

I prefer the in-bar history searching in FF too.

~~~
Silhouette
_Firefox's bar works exactly the same as Chrome's now._

Is it exactly the same? In Firefox, AFAIK you don't get every URL you type
sent off to Google for logging as part of the instant search system; that only
happens with things you type in the separate search box. In Chrome, I'm not
sure whether it's the default for a new installation at the moment, but that
capability is definitely there for anything you type in the (only) box.

~~~
cdr
I meant exactly the same as far as an average user is concerned - you never
have to use the search box (I remove it), you can just put search terms in the
main box and it'll use the configured provider.

I will admit FF is a little worse at confusing search terms for a URL on
occasion, but that's a minor annoyance at best.

~~~
Silhouette
It wasn't the annoyance I was commenting on, but rather the privacy
implications of combining the two bars when what you would type in one of them
is typically sent off to some search engine somewhere in real time.

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pixie_
Man.. Metro/Windows 8 is like watching a train wreck in very slow motion.
Everyone knows the hybrid desktop/tablet UI is a disaster and Microsoft out of
a middle-management positive reinforcement loop of putting their heads in the
sand keeps chugging along down the rails. Everyone who has used it and
reviewed it so far has said it's a disjointed experience to have the start
button go to a completely different UI with its own app ecosystem. It sucks
more because personally I think the windows desktop OS is much better than Mac
and Linux for a number of reasons (I spend time in each Mac/Linux daily for
development.) Have you been to a computer store lately? There are tons of
desktops with touch enabled displays, but they have only been gimmicks.
There's no real demand for them because the usability cases aren't practical
when you already have you hands on a mouse/keyboard. Touch = tablet UI.
Mouse/keyboard = Desktop UI, and which UI is the majority of windows users?
Anyways.. god dammit Microsoft, get off your high horse and fix windows 8
before you really start pissing people off with another ME/Vista release.

~~~
Metrop0218
They're not going for upgrades on already existing windows customers
computers, the main goal is to sell new tablets and touch enabled laptops and
all in ones. There was a section of WPC 2012 where they showed off some of the
new OEM devices and guess what, the majority of them were touch enabled.

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suresk
I'm still not quite sure what to think about Windows 8 and the new Metro-style
apps. My first (and somewhat lasting) reaction was that I didn't like the
design, but I wasn't sure if it was because it was actually bad or if it was
just new.

I think part of it is that the Metro style apps seem heavily slanted toward
consumer/social apps, designed with a tablet in mind first. Utility/business
apps don't seem to fit the Metro style as well, and now that I've seen some
examples of such apps built with Metro, I feel inclined to hold off on porting
my Mac app to it.

I hope I'm wrong, but it feels like in some ways, Microsoft is making the
opposite (but similar) mistake they made with tablets in the past - this time,
they are forcing a tablet paradigm onto the desktop.

~~~
RivieraKid
I love the design (more than OS X's), but it's simply less usable than Windows
7.

------
nextstep
I can't remember the last time I had to reboot my MacBook due to an
unresponsive program. And I am by no means using the latest Apple hardware or
software.

I am not an Apple fanboy (I used windows only up to a year ago), but the Apple
user experience is orders ofagnitude greater than Windows' latest attempt. I
suspect that the main difference stems from each company's design process.
Apple has slowly built up all of their products and OSes, incrementally adding
features only when they are rocksolid. Microsoft, especially lately with
Windows 8, has sought entry into a new market (tablets/touch interfaces) and
has hoped to skip all the intermidiate steps. This method is clearly inferior,
and I won't be surprised when Windows 8 falls flat.

~~~
pooriaazimi
Just a little note, dear NeXTSTEP:

Please refrain from saying you're not an Apple fanboy, and in the next
sentence stating that you're new to the Mac. You can be using Apple products
for a week and be a fanboy. You can be a windows user (planning to buy Macs)
and be a fanboy. Being a fanboy (= mindlessly defending the platform, no
matter what) has nothing to do with longevity of which you're using that
platform.

It always reminds me of this:
<http://daringfireball.net/linked/2007/09/17/cuban>

I'm an Apple user and love both platforms, and agree with what you said
completely. I just think you're couple sentence are not appropriate.

:)

~~~
nextstep
My HN username is unrelated to the company NeXTSTEP.

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Metrop0218
Pretty much everything the article complained about were clearly bugs. Yes,
its buggy. Welcome to the world of pre-release software, the world I live in
on a daily basis. Things tend to suck. But that's expected. The release
preview was released quite a while ago, and as you can expect, applications
weren't a main priority when they were ramping up to release these previews.
Hence one of the reasons it says "App preview" when you open any of these
apps.

The thing is, these applications can be updated ad-hoc through the stores
application process (as many people may have seen with some of the first party
apps). If I were you, I wouldn't expect them to be really polished and up to
quality until soon before general availability.

But yeah I will agree with you on the fact that they're buggy, but complaining
about bugs when you're doing a beta seems like a really stupid thing to do to
me.

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ender7
I can't emphasize enough how important it is for the OS vendor to "set a good
example" when designing their own apps for the OS.

Like it or not, devs will look to the built-in apps for guidance on what to
make theirs look like -- this is also true for how buggy or unresponsive an
app can get before it is deemed "unacceptable".

Put another way, think of first-party apps as a form of enforced competition.
If do don't do better than the level we, the OS vendor, are competing on, then
users will be disappointed in you.

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ams6110
Since the Mail app is the protagonist in this piece, I will say that Apple's
own Mail application was for a long time (and may still be for all I know)
similarly dreadful.

 _In general, they tend to be slow, contain artefacts, crash, hang, lose
responsiveness, or just flat-out refuse to do any networking operations._

This exactly describes (to the best of my recollection, I gave it one final
chance in Tiger I think) Mail.app on Mac OS X.

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IanDrake
We are talking about pre-release software on a pre-release OS, but yeah, time
is quickly running out and there are a lot of improvements to be made.

On another note, I don't expect the mail app to be that awesome. They still
need to sell you Outlook :-P

~~~
joshka
Unfortunately we're also talking about a company who many are used to seeing
as implementing incremental change, with a backwards compatible slant. Windows
8 is pretty far from this ideal for the dev experience.

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brudgers
_"the current state of Metro's applications do not bode well."_

Metro apps run great on WP7. The problems with a pre-release version of
Windows 8, are not inherent in Metro and probably not in Windows 8.

Instead they come with the territory of volunteering to be a beta tester.

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MatthewPhillips
Not my experience. I've had crashes, but only in desktop mode.

They're not accepting marketplace submissions yet, accept to invited
developers.

