Recently, I’ve been looking closely at the interface of Windows7, partly because I’m preparing a theme that I want to to run on 7 as well as Vista.

The more I analyse the design decisions that Microsoft makes, the more I struggle to understand them. On a quick glance, Windows7 looks modern, fresh and refined, in many ways the equal of its old enemy, OS X. On closer examination, however, there are, as always, many rough edges lurking around every corner.

Let me just say, before getting off the ground on the individual elements in which I’m disappointed, 7 is a geometric improvement on Windows XP, and significantly more unified than Vista. Overall, it’s quite good. It simply frustrates me, as a lover of Windows generally, that a little more time, flair and inventiveness wasn’t put into it to raise it to ‘great’, rather than merely ‘good’.

1. Push Buttons

Photoshop makes it easy to have a pleasantly anti-aliased two or three pixel curve. Why therefore do 7’s buttons continue Vista’s disappointing trend? Is is a conscious design decision, and if it is, who made that decision? Compare Windows’ buttons to MobileMe, OS X or any number of other apps and see just how cheap and unfinished they look. Sadly, these will appear in almost every window and webpage you’ll see.

2. Text-based Shellstyle (Command Bar)

Again, you can see the logic. The command bar contains so many commands, changing depending on the folder that you’re in or the file that you select, that the user inevitably relies on reading the text rather than simply reacting to the icon (which is really the purpose of largely icon-driven GUIs). The problem with this approach is that, by pursuing visual simplicity (to be applauded), 7’s removal of the icons has instead removed a natural-seeming visual divider between each command. Now it looks like a long, poorly spaced sentence, and makes commands harder, not easier, to see.

3. Windowframes

Just like the push buttons, Microsoft’s designers seem to have completely eschewed the notion of anti-aliasing the corners of the aero windowframes. Rather than provide an attractive curve, using a slight bevel or 2px internal stroke, they have presented us with a stepped pixel affair, that could easily have been created in MS Paint. If, again, this is a conscious style decision (and I can’t imagine the justification) it is a poor one. OS X, older Longhorn concepts and many more manage to deliver rounded edges in a pleasant, unobtrusive way that looks natural and appealing, so it is a mystery why 7 cannot do the same.

4. Superbar Start Button (and superbar generally)

Most people seem to see the superbar as a significant improvement. I don’t really agree that it is, but I’m prepared to swept along in the tide of goodwill towards Windows 7 and not debate that. One problem this provides, however, is that there is very little visual difference between the start button and the task bar icons. I know that this isn’t really a usability problem, because everyone knows where to go to find Windows’ most famous menu. This aside, it just fails for me visually. It removes a focal point, and I would have imagined that it’s bad for branding.

 

5. Aero Basic

There is just no excuse for this horror anymore. Someone at MS must have ten spare minutes to tidy this up.

<end rant>

Many will say that this is the worst sort of visual nitpicking and that we should be happy that we finally have an OS that we can be happy with, even proud of. I understand that these ‘bugs’ aren’t show-stoppers and won’t stop me or anybody else from happily using 7. I just know that MS has some wonderful designers, and so every so often it would be nice to see a version of Windows with some wonderful design.

I should wish any remaining readers of this blog a Happy New Year! 2008 was a strange year for me in many respects, but I hope to be more active in 2009.

I'm typing this post in the Window Live Writer beta and must say that the program has improved geometrically since my last experience of it some 8 months ago.

I'm using a beta of Windows Se7en (something I have in common with half the planet it seems from visiting various desktop threads this month). I must say, without considering the UI too carefully, I've been very impressed thus far. Speed and performance are already superior to Vista, even on the very old hardware on which I have installed the beta.

Eyecandy aside, I'm not sure that the Superbar really represents much of and improvement over the old taskbar, if indeed it represents any at all.

I'm currently working on a theme for Se7en. I'm hopeful this one will even be released at some point, and I'll update this blog with a shot of it sometime in the coming week.

That's really it, but I'm hoping to post at least two or three days in the early part of this year. I'm working on designs for a prominent media player and for a calendar application, and once I have submitted them, I hope that the clients will permit me to show them here. I'm also preparing a concept for Firefox 3.1/4.0, unrequested I should add, that I'm quite excited about and I will probably be able to show the early design here shortly.

Firefox is one of my favourite applications, from its marketing to its feature set, and while I believe the current UI is satisfactory, I'm not alone in considering that it could benefit from significant refinement.

Until next time, then.

That great repository of information and home of many talented designers and programmers, AeroXperience ( http://www.aeroxp.org/board/ ), recently hosted some photos taken from a tablet PC UI demo. Thanks to Stephen for always getting great exclusive images by some mysterious means. What struck me was how simple and professional these images looked, and the manner in which they took the base elements from Vista, but presented them in a very non-Microsoft understated way. Really, I was left genuinely impressed, but also asking why, if these concepts had been on the board for at least a year, more of these visual cues didn't appear in Vista itself. One can only hope that the direction Vienna is taking has more in common with this style than it does with the glossy, brash and, in many places, clashing interface of Vista.

MS needs to have more faith in its UI teams and also in its userbase. Everyone is ready for a change.


 

For those interested, you can download Aero Redux on my deviantArt page. I'm fairly happy with the release. It's not strikingly original, but it is a good approximation of what I wanted to achieve, giving what I feel is a relatively accurate Longhorn look, but with many of the rough edges smoothed and loose ends tied up. I'm running out of cliches so...



Next up, I'm doing something more fun around Longhorn Percept, seen below. This time, I'd like to feature more of the Concept work in the theme, and looking at old screenshots and mockups, I really feel that there is something worth doing there. Over at aeroXP and JoeJoe, work continues on various projects to bring the Longhorn look to Vista and to implement it in other ways, but looking at some of the concepts, particularly the aero-slate material, around which old sites such as aerosoft were built, I'd really like to see something done with that.

On another note, I've partially moved over to Vista now, on the one system I have that can carry it with decent performance. Time for a new laptop I think. Overall, it's good. There's not much more to say because it's not remarkable, just satisfactory. Certainly not the ME some people were suggesting, but no revolution either. I think (read hope) that MS are holding out on the good stuff until R2, when they'll have a better handle on Leopard, and when the teething troubles Vista has now have been fully resolved. That Longhorn vision maybe closer than we think...

Anyway, Aero Redux. Enjoy!


 
 
 

Just a quick shot of the .psd for Percept 2.0.

This theme, an update of one I released previously, is based on the wonderful aveapps skins developed by stefanka, which in turn were based on the concept work of Microsoft's Longhorn OS, particularly that done by a variety of Mac artists to use as blog and app skins.

It's interesting that, even when the inspiration is an MS concept, somehow Mac designers manage to get it right where MS's designers fail. Whilst this particular skin maybe too wasteful and needlessly extravagant for some, the soft gradient on the glass, the subtly complimentary colours and the simplicity of the design show the direction MS should have taken with aero. Instead, whilst the PDC themes of old managed to capture some of this elegance, the Vista release features harsh glosses, clashing tones that fail to serve even a marketing purpose, and a confusion in the overall design that belies the time it has been in development.

Glass could have given an ephemeral aspect to open windows that lightened a user's desktop and focused attention on content, whilst offering a smooth, unbotrusive and modern feel. Instead it does the opposite by being overy heavy, overly defined and every bit as 'in your face' as Luna ever was. I'm a Windows fan at heart, amd I fundamentally believe that it offers a better platform for the majority of users, but I really wish the design department would stand by their convictions and force the acceptance of the notion that Windows users actually want revolution, not just evolution.

  

Just a quick set of Desktop shots, using a theme I developed using resources from my Longhorn Reloaded concepts. Just for fun...

 
 
  

A quick update for my Longhorn Reloaded (joejoe.org) concepts, this time featuring different colour-coded windows, following the original Longhorn and the Tjeer Hoek concepts previewed a couple of weeks previously, as well as a (very) quick mock of WMP11 running under Longhorn, with slighlty revised control elements.