
Unnoficial design concept for Windows 9 - yurylifshits
http://eiskis.net/windows9
======
LoneWolf
"Manual window management is awful. Windows 8 ditched windows in favor of
fullscreen apps. Traditional desktop window paradigms are powerful but
obsolete."

Just NO NO AND NO, I can't be the only one who hates the new Windows
interface, I want to be able to place my windows where I want them not be
forced to use full screen for everything, or rely on some automated way to
place them, I know better than the OS how and where I want my windows.

Sorry but I had to get that out of my chest, I can't deal with the new Windows
interface, it annoys me.

Microsoft please stop trying to force a tablet/touch interface into a desktop
computer it just doesn't make any sense.

~~~
RivieraKid
I wholeheartedly agree with you. This "reinvent the classical desktop" trend
really annoys me. Traditional desktop environments like Win 95 up to 7 or
Gnome 2 are imho closest to the ideal, they have many many years of evolution
behind them.

Mistakes that are being made:

1) Thinking that touch is superior to mouse, that touch is the future. That's
simply untrue, mouse is quicker and more productive.

2) Focusing on first-time users too much, forgetting experienced users.
Example - animations - nice at first, but get annoying quickly.

3) Trying to unify the tablet and the desktop interface. The optimal interface
for tablets and for desktops are different.

For me the ideal desktop environment would be:

\- take the classical desktop concept

\- do a design update (Gnome 2 or Win 7 aren't especially pretty, the design
looks outdated)

\- add some nice features without changing the whole concept, e.g. some tiling
support, useful keyboard shortcuts etc.

~~~
jonnydark
I am reminded of the Henry Ford quote "If I had asked people what they wanted,
they would have said faster horses."

The design idioms seen in Gnome 2 and Windows 7 are essentially highly refined
versions of what existed on the Apple II OS. Personal computers and what we
use them for have come a long way since then and it makes sense to redesign
the UI to reflect this. Often this means getting your hands dirty and trying
new things. Also - first time users are going to be around for longer than
experienced users ;)

~~~
RivieraKid
Yes, this Steve-Jobsian reasoning is exactly what leads to bad UI designs:
"People don't know what they want and if they don't like our UI, it's in some
way their fault."

I don't have anything against designers trying new things - unless they are
trying them on me. For me, Win 8 or Gnome 3 is clearly a downgrade in terms of
user experience.

------
jzzskijj
"Manual window management is awful. Windows 8 ditched windows in favor of
fullscreen apps."

Wrong. Manual windows management is just what a professional needs. The window
manager will never know what is the best position and size for your
programming editor/environment. It will never know where is the best position
and size for your preferred debug window. And how to place and size your
browser windows for API documentation.

Sure, a typical computer user needs only a full-screen browser window. But
when you're really trying to get work done, Microsoft's "new" concepts are
just wrong.

~~~
aw3c2
Manual window management on Windows can be awful. With decent window managers
one can hold keys (alt in my case) and then drag or resize windows easily by
dragging the mouse. They snap. And you can have more key combos for things
like snap to left/right, maximise, minimise, always in front, etc.

Ever since getting used to this (in XFCE), using windows in Windows feels
incredibly annoying and infuriating.

~~~
72deluxe
Windows 7 onwards has keyboard shortcuts - WinKey + cursors moves the windows
to snap to half of the screen (top, bottom, left, right) and learn the Alt-
Space-then X to maximise and Alt-Space then R to restore. If you happy using
the mouse, Windows snap to the edges of the screen. There is also a utility
you can get for shortcuts very similar to the Mac OSX ShiftIt tool but I can't
remember the name of it!

~~~
skriticos2
I like the Ubuntu version where Alt-Space-X does maximize and restore
(depending on current state). One shortcut less to learn.

~~~
ygra
Well, that'd be Win+↑ for maximize and Win+↓ for restore/minimize on Windows
(contrary to what your parent writes, there is no built-in shortcut of making
a window take up the top half of a screen).

------
spdy
Am i the only one who does not like "touch" on a desktop/laptop. It is not the
revolutionary input method that makes everything magical. I want to think in
boxes (desktops) not a fluid streams of desktop space.

We need something else for the desktop.

~~~
arethuza
It is even less appropriate on a server OS - I have no idea what they were
thinking making Windows Server 2012 use the same touch oriented start menu
replacement nightmare....

[Having to use a demo VM that has 2012 installed at the moment and I'm finding
it _incredibly_ annoying].

~~~
Freaky
Been using 8 for about a year and have no problem with the start screen
without a touch interface - the workflow is pretty much identical to 7: Press
the Windows key and type part of the name of what you want, with the bonus
that it's significantly faster at giving results.

If you do end up having to select something in the menu, you now have more
space to see what's available and modifying the layout to match your usage is
a lot more accessible.

~~~
gabemart
> Been using 8 for about a year and have no problem with the start screen
> without a touch interface - the workflow is pretty much identical to 7:
> Press the Windows key and type part of the name of what you want, with the
> bonus that it's significantly faster at giving results.

A full-screen menu appearing on top of whatever I am working on completely
breaks my flow. It's immensely distracting to me. As a result, I literally
never use it. Instead I use Launchy [1] which is well behaved and keeps within
the confines of a very small dialogue box.

That doesn't completely fix Windows 8, though - there's still a bunch of
touch-orientated stuff that there's no native way to deactivate.

[1] [http://www.launchy.net/](http://www.launchy.net/)

~~~
lttlrck
I find Gnome 3 suffers the same issue. When I'm searching I know what I'm
looking for 99% of the time, it's just a glorified accelerator combo, I don't
need a full screen full of distractions.

------
PaulJoslin
Am I right in thinking with this design you can only have one app as a point
of focus at a time? So assuming I'm doing development, I can't be in my IDE,
with a browser open on a particular stack overflow question, while having the
app I'm debugging open in front of it all and some other app also in view
showing diagnostics?

Instead, I'd have to flick back and forth between the apps like a headless
chicken?

[Edit] Actually, take his example apps as a suggestion. He's running VLC to
watch star trek, but can't watch it at the same time as say using the browser.
In a traditional window set-up, you can just set VLC to stay on top and
overlay a portion of the screen while you can continue doing something else
(like using the browser).

Although the concept looks pretty, it almost seems to be a step backwards in
available functionality.

~~~
RivieraKid
All of the new desktop environments I know of (Win 8, Gnome 3, Unity) are
steps backwards. The classical desktop concept (taskbar + floating windows)
has tens of years of evolution behind it. If there was a better concept, it
would have been invented before.

~~~
Maascamp
I'm sorry, but that's just a terrible way of thinking about things. If we
assume things that have been around for a while have reached their apex by
virtue of them having been around for a while we'd never make any progress.

~~~
eksith
Let's forget computers for a while and think about good ol' pen and paper. Ask
yourself these questions:

    
    
      Do you use a desk?
      Do you use paper?
      Do you use folders?
      How big is your desk? 
      How do you keep the papers on your desk?
      Do you hold up one sheet to read and one sheet exclusively?
      Do you keep a bunch of sheets side-by-side and compare them to each other?
      Do you like to open folders repeatedly or open a few papers from each folder?
    

No amount of design innovation can suppress the quirks and foibles of human
nature. Quite often, aesthetic engineering survives an encounter with a user
just as well as a battle plan does while encountering the enemy.

------
warcode
_Manual window management is awful. Windows 8 ditched windows in favor of
fullscreen apps. Traditional desktop window paradigms are powerful but
obsolete._

In any multi-monitor situation living without manual window management is
awful. What they need to do is to offer a choice instead of forcing users down
a specific path.

~~~
skriticos2
Fullscreen apps are especially fun on 27" 4k displays!

------
alkonaut
Manual window management isn't the perfect UI paradigm for anyone, regardless
of input method. Being able to overlap by a few pixels isn't necessary for me.

A simple way to see where window management _should_ have gone is to look how
it has changed within applications, where the resistance to change is lower.
15 years ago it was all MDI applications, where the idea that a doc has a
window . Soon people realized that noone really needs to overlap their word
documents windows, or move their photoshop tool dialog by 3 pixels, so more
modern applications used docking managers to snap and tile their workspace
together to use as much of the available area as possible.

As usual in the demos and mockups of both Win8 and this concept, the
applications demonstrated happen to be simple communication apps, media
players and so on. I'd like to see Photoshop, Visual Studio, AutoCad etc. that
actually have a large workspace with several confgurable areas. I don't think
it would be horrible to lose the movable windows, but I'd want something as
powerful in return: Windows should manage the desktop the way a good desktop
application manages its different areas.

~~~
Raphael
Exactly. People need resizable panes, not overlapping windows.

------
Swinx43
Although this is a much better looking concept than what is currently
available in Windows 8 I still do not understand how it solves anything for
people who actually need to do development on these machines. I would hate to
have to do development in an IDE such as Visual Studio or Eclipse while being
restricted to this sort of interface.

Trying to force a tablet interface on a desktop machine is simply not
acceptable. It makes matters even worse when you look at a server operating
system such as Windows Server 2012. That is simply the biggest FAIL for an
interface on a server OS I have ever seen.

~~~
kbart
Reminds me of [http://www.datamation.com/news/tech-comics-
windows-8-1.html](http://www.datamation.com/news/tech-comics-windows-8-1.html)

I'm starting to get feeling, that Microsoft consciously abandons PC as a
workstation with a fully functional OS model and moving towards dumb browser-
only tablet-like terminal. And I bet that some cloud based, .NET like IDE for
Windows developers is on their plans.

..and I'm sooo happy that I can do all my development work on Linux machine.

~~~
Swinx43
That sounds extremely likely if you look at the way they are going. I
completely agree that I have never looked back since I started using Linux
instead. If I truly need a Windows machine I will spin up a virtual machine.

------
pstack
The best thing that could ever happen for Linux is for Microsoft to follow in
the footsteps of Windows 8, with their design for Windows 9.

------
ethana
I like it. I think the 2+ decades old idea of resizable and draggable windows
is becoming a nuisance. With 5+ windows overlaying each others, the desktop
becomes a chaotic mess.

People who say they need to be able to have multiple windows on screen should
really be having multiple monitors if they don't already. Because even with
high-res monitors, most productivity applications (IDEs,Excel,etc) are
unusable anyway when not in full screen.

The drag&drop can be easily solved by dragging content from one app to another
by dropping on their desired app icon on the taskbar. Or have dedicated share
button to other apps like how Android does it.

~~~
LoneWolf
I disagree, first of all I already have multiple monitors, and while my IDE is
maximized on my main monitor, the secondary monitor has multiple windows with
documentation, file manager and logs, or other stuff depending on what I am
working on.

About the drag&drop I have a problem with that, supose the application
supports more than one place to drop with different functionality, how do you
solve that?

~~~
ethana
I used to do this too actually. Throwing a bunch of windows to my secondary
screen. But over time, I realized I don't use them at all over time. Sticky
notes are all over it and it was just a mess.

Now I try to have only two things open at once to streamline my work flow.
Everything in excess, I try to have it my IDE when possible using plugins.

------
josteink
It looks fancy and pretty and all that, but I would probably hate using it for
the same reason I hate using Windows 8 right now.

Yes. Manual window-management is tedious and in an ideal world _should_ be
obsolete, but I don't think this is the solution either.

Basically, I hate this automatic window-management more than I hate manual
window-management and then we've not really gone anywhere useful.

For reference, I use tiling WMs in Linux and I'm happy with that, but I can
see how that's _not_ a solution for most people. We need to reach a middle-
ground somehow.

------
Zigurd
Not too surprising to see lots of people here who would prefer a gradual
evolution of Windows toward a touch interface. Bouncing back and forth between
legacy Windows and "Modern" UI is obviously unsatisfactory. But, remember that
Microsoft tried a gradual, familiar evolutionary approach three times
previously and failed. Where were you then?

Now Microsoft has a new kind of failure. Is evolving it in this proposed
direction or any other going to succeed? I think this proposal is good. It
helps the "bouncing back and forth" problem. One problem is that Microsoft has
different security models for "Modern" and legacy apps. (Never mind what kind
of sense it makes to have a stronger and weaker app security model in the same
OS.)

Here is a potential irony: Ubuntu Touch is an evolutionary approach to
bringing a conventional implementation of the desktop metaphor to touch. I
could see using an Ubuntu tablet. It probably won't be widely popular since it
will have some touch-unfriendly legacy in it. But it might end up being a
better evolutionary path than what Microsoft chose. But I'd know what I'm
getting and probably be comfortable with it.

------
pedalpete
I did my own design idea on the next version of windows, but didn't go so far
as calling it "Windows 9"
[http://pedalpete.github.io/windows_idea/](http://pedalpete.github.io/windows_idea/)

This design is much 'nicer' than mine, and probably more progressive. I would
have liked to have seen what was returned in the search, and the layout of a
search.

------
JasonSage
As far as touchscreen-compatible window management goes, I'm not sure it gets
better than ChromeOS.

For example, the keyboard shortcuts for snapping a window left or right let
you customize how wide the window is after the snap. So for example, alt + ]
snaps the window to the right half of the screen. The same shortcut again
grows the window to 90% wide, then 80%, then 60%, and finally back to 50%. So
if I want whatever I'm reading to be decently wide at the cost of letting my
SSH window take up slightly less than half the screen, I can make that happen
without a mouse. Or for a good responsive site, 20% or 30% of my screen is all
the site needs.

In addition, when I have two windows each taking up 50%, hovering on the
window edges they share them brings up an additional handle that lets me
adjust the width of both windows simultaneously (if I want). Why can't Windows
do that?

Finally, there's a keyboard shortcut for centering a window on the screen,
which I am a total sucker for.

------
lb0
I don't agree with Microsoft.. but i also don't agree with statements like
"Just NO NO AND NO...I want to be able to place my windows where I want...I
know better than the OS how and where I want my windows" and "Wrong. Manual
windows management is just what a professional needs." At least, it is not
true for me. Manually placing and resizing windows, lowering and raising them,
that is sooo much mouse work which reduces my productivity, i'm happy that in
99% of my workflow i do not need to do that kind of stuff anymore, but when i
want the freedom i can just fall back to that ..

I think Microsoft got the point with their tablet-orientation fullscreen-only-
apps, driven by touchscreen interfaces, but agreed, forcing everyone into that
(currently coupled with the dual-old-desktop-mess) is ridiculous, user-hostile
and typically Microsoft. This inofficial Windows 9 concept does not really
help either.. IMHO they are looking for what tiling window managers
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiling_window_manager](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiling_window_manager))
have implemented since a long time (without being driven by the touchy-
concepts), without taking away any freedom like Microsoft always does it,
because MS thinks they know what's best for their users? :

• Provide automatic placement for windows, fullscreen, halfscreen, spiraled,
any layout which makes sense for you. • Have the nice side-effect that they
are much more controllable by keyboard only, increasing productivity even more
(at least for developer's kind of work) • Provide the freedom, that if you
want to, you can just take windows and resize them freely like default window
managers

Introducing and playing with new concepts still is the right, however i think
MS should stop forcing users into every new concept, but leave the freedom for
the advanced user to customize to their style... if i have ever to go back to
windows i hope there is a tiling window manager with the features i am
accustomed to ;)

------
ximpathy
My one complaint about Windows 8 is that I can't use Win+# to switch to the
fullscreen apps. I wouldn't even mind the fact that they took up the entire
screen if I was able to navigate to and from them with ease. The way to
navigate between the full screen apps is with Win+tab which forces me to use
two paradigms for task switching. I'm sure this irks alt-tabbers as well.

------
TeddyLondon
I was wondering what the difference is between the hatred for the win 8 change
compared to the change from win 3.x to 95 (nt 4)?

Was it just because not so many people used win 3.x and so ms could change it
without so much moaning?

If metro was developed instead of the windows 95 start menu, would it have
been hated as much??

------
nextstep
It's optimistic to think VLC will be available for Windows 9. It's still not
out for Windows 8.

~~~
klausjensen
My Windows 8 laptop next to me is playing a video using VLC.

What you meant to say was that VLC does not exist for the MetroUI (I forget
what that POS is called these days).

~~~
manojlds
Here you go - VLC doesn't have a Windows Store App.

------
GBiT
Windows had to give us choice to use old windows 7 style, or windows 8 style
for touch. Right now for enterprise I see, that for companies it is no
difference to teach how to use Ubuntu or new windows 8. Windows 8 put OS from
leader position on PC to mobile OS for touch devices.

------
w_t_payne
Here is what I want from an OS UI:

[http://williamtpayne.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/gui-ng-
desiderat...](http://williamtpayne.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/gui-ng-
desiderata.html)

Perhaps not to everyone's taste, but hey-ho.

------
cJ0th
<useless>

"Personalization

Users are given control over the desktop background that gives personality to
the user experience."

\--

What the fuck???!

If they advertise like that then why don't they just sell Windows 95 again?

</useless>

------
pibi
This is almost done with Rainmeter and
[http://omnimo.info/](http://omnimo.info/). Pretty useful on my B121 tablet.

------
krsunny
Not a fan of this design. Its hard to distinguish what UIs go with what and
everything generally seems all thrown together in one UI with no demarcation.

------
Sommer717
This is somewhat like the 10/GUI concept from 2009:
[http://10gui.com/](http://10gui.com/)

------
mcot2
I want more desktops not less. Not having native support for multiple desktops
is a shame in 2013.

------
nr0mx
I fail to understand how this is any different from a skinned Android tablet
interface.

------
cpursley
This would be interesting to see as a linux distro, and more realistic to boot
(zing).

------
ChrisAntaki
Please make this for Ubuntu.

~~~
TheHydroImpulse
I think Linux would be the perfect place to test these assumptions, or
concepts. There have been some distros that implement new looks
(ElementaryOS). It would be an interesting idea to implement these concepts
on-top of Linux.

------
contextual
There's also a more intuitive eavesdropping functionality for NSA agents in
the new Windows OS.

