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Microsoft Announces Windows 10

We got word from insiders (was reported on NeoWin as well iirc) when that recycle bin icon was leaked a week or two back that it had already been replaced, but that icon would be in the subsequent build. We'll probably see something close to final icons in another build or two after this.
 

kruis

Exposing the sinister cartel of retailers who allow companies to pay for advertising space.
The icons look they were taken from a below-average WindowBlinds customization theme... Not impressed.
 

kruis

Exposing the sinister cartel of retailers who allow companies to pay for advertising space.
The same story as always: If you don't have a new build yet, it's because you don't want any of the builds out there.

Just....trust me on that one.

</bitter>

Last week we had a MS engineer on premise who was installing/configuring BootXRay for us. He was running the latest Win10 build on his laptop. He told the same thing: current builds are not stable.
 

MrChom

Member
Man, those shots are just going in the super fugly direction. I mean, XP was ugly out of the box, 7 looked nice, 8 was a bit of a step back....but this is....well it's pretty bad, from the window decoration on down, really.
 
as a person that wanted the vista icons to disappear a long, long time ago these shots/icons are the epitome of 'not like this'. they look like something you'd see in south park.
i mean, why are most of them flat and then you have this horrid my computer icon that is at a jaunty angle. whyyyyyy.

anyway, here's hoping they're placeholder. i remember saying that a lot during windows 8's development though...
 

Alpha_eX

Member
I can't get over how bad the icons are, the my computer thing is horrific and the recycle bin, did the entire art department quit before making it? Jeez.
 

Mr_Zombie

Member
The Vista icons were great.

I know they're still trying to finally fully shift over to Metro (which sure is taking way too long, the Zune's been released and dead for like a decade now) but why make stuff like the folder icons flat and minimal crap as well?
The semi-realistic Vista icons worked well with photo and video previews and were generally pretty aesthetically pleasing.
Metro looks nice when used sparingly but you don't have to have cartoony icons to pull that off.
 
It's like they got the interns to make icons in MS Paint.

The Downloads and Music folder icons paradoxically get thicker as they get smaller. What a mess. Even as placeholders you have to wonder what they were thinking.
 
Just adding my voice to the choir of "damn son that is ugly as fuck". I know beauty is in the eye of the beholder but the guy(s) that designed those icons need to go to Specsavers.

I am all for a change in the look of the icons though. I love the look of win7 but I would like something good and new. But damn those icons seriously no thank you. I can only hope those doing the beta testing raise enough of a stink about the icons to get Microsoft to hire someone that isn't so visually impaired.
 

Raide

Member
Cortana integration in Spartan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fj9QAMVmdbM&hd=1

Nicely done.

Becoming quite hopeful that Spartan will be a viable alternative. Really hope that the tablet mode is decent too, Modern IE is good and I'd be upset if they fuck that up.

Pretty neat.

Really not bothered about all the icon noise people are throwing about. People will probably be able to mod them and I am personally more interested in stability of the OS and features, not just what recycle bin icon options they give me. :D
 

Coreda

Member
Microsoft STILL hasn't addressed window titles being invisible if you make your window color black. Is there any 3rd party fix to this?

You would think someone would have picked up on this while testing. It should automatically change text color to light when it detects too dark a background, like any sane color scheme changer.

I added a glow back to compensate but I believe it's possible to change the color of the text if you know the correct ID in the default .msstyles. Couldn't find it using MSStyler, but afaik Vista Style Builder is a commercial tool that can more easily do this.
 

efyu_lemonardo

May I have a cookie?
No they weren't. Those icons were nice looking, detailed and colorful. They might not exactly fit with the whole flat theme, bold black borders and strong colors of metro elements, but on desktop they looked fine.

I just did a bit of reading on what is apparently called the "flat design philosophy" which is the Metro look and the "skeuomorphic design philosophy", which means making a virtual window look like a physical glass window, a notepad app having a leather cover, etc. In general it seems to mean that a new device borrows from the design language of the device it is meant to replace.

For some reason designers looked at this and came to the conclusion that it was a bad thing...
Just goes to show how fucking clueless designers are, I guess. They should have put engineers in charge of UI.
 

DaveH

Member
If you have a strong sense of spatial reasoning those icons are jarring because they're all floating in space at different angles... that would drive me nuts.
 

Mr_Zombie

Member
For some reason designers looked at this and came to the conclusion that it was a bad thing...
Just goes to show how fucking clueless designers are, I guess. They should have put engineers in charge of UI.

Not a bad thing... just unnecessary. "Skeuomorphic design philosophy" was needed when computers just entered everyday usage and were gaining popularity. The design was meant to make the transition from real-life objects to virtual ones easier to handle. For example, for someone who hold an ebook for the first time in his life it was easier to understand how to use it if it looked and acted like a real book.

Nowadays you don't need that, because people generally are familiar enough with computers, tablets etc. to know how things work. Flat design allows you to focus on the important UI elements while making everything else (background, less important UI elements) just be a background - simple and minimalistic. For example, for an ebook collection you don't need an image of a shelf hanging on a wall, filled with virtual books (like in the old version of iOS Newsstand app). A collection of book covers floating above an abstract background is enough. It allows users to easily focus on the interactive elements. It also allows designers to easy prepare applications that will fit devices with various screen sizes or to give apps an universal look.
 

Doffen

Member
weird. It was a perfectly good look.

You said it yourself. Was.
Time to move on.

LYHhhh0.jpg
 

Milchjon

Member
I just did a bit of reading on what is apparently called the "flat design philosophy" which is the Metro look and the "skeuomorphic design philosophy", which means making a virtual window look like a physical glass window, a notepad app having a leather cover, etc. In general it seems to mean that a new device borrows from the design language of the device it is meant to replace.

For some reason designers looked at this and came to the conclusion that it was a bad thing...
Just goes to show how fucking clueless designers are, I guess. They should have put engineers in charge of UI.

:lol
 

Drifters

Junior Member
quick question about the people who update to windows 10 through windows 8.1, if I choose to update can I burn a disk of windows 10 and use my 8.1 key to install on the same computer? I would like to do a clean install

You talking about upgrading from 8.1 to the beta or are you talking about the final release?
 

spwolf

Member
problem with icons isnt that they look bad (recycle one does, other dont really), but that many built in apps are not updated with same look... so I hope they update all of the apps like Windows Explorer, or else it looks really weird all together.
 

efyu_lemonardo

May I have a cookie?
Not a bad thing... just unnecessary. "Skeuomorphic design philosophy" was needed when computers just entered everyday usage and were gaining popularity. The design was meant to make the transition from real-life objects to virtual ones easier to handle. For example, for someone who hold an ebook for the first time in his life it was easier to understand how to use it if it looked and acted like a real book.

Nowadays you don't need that, because people generally are familiar enough with computers, tablets etc. to know how things work. Flat design allows you to focus on the important UI elements while making everything else (background, less important UI elements) just be a background - simple and minimalistic. For example, for an ebook collection you don't need an image of a shelf hanging on a wall, filled with virtual books (like in the old version of iOS Newsstand app). A collection of book covers floating above an abstract background is enough. It allows users to easily focus on the interactive elements. It also allows designers to easy prepare applications that will fit devices with various screen sizes or to give apps an universal look.


That kind of attitude toward design is based on a pretty flawed interpretation of the very purpose of design, which is why I find it surprising that so many designers are behind it.

Skeumorphism as a trend didn't begin with the computer age, it's as old as the very first human cultures, and for good reason.

It's not just about making it easier for luddites to transition from old to new tech. It's also about acknowledging that the focal point of good design shouldn't be maximizing bare information, it should be presenting information formatted in whatever way that makes it most effective for human brains to process and integrate.

In order to do so it's necessary to take into account how we perceive the world through all our senses in parallel and how we rely on subtle physical cues to create an internal functional representation of that world which is ideally uniformly spread out across different methods of cognitive processing in a way that minimizes the workload on our brains. That's what makes an interface feel seamless.

And just as importantly a good designer should understand that this seamlessness usually comes from generations of trial and error. That's not to say a more seamless interface doesn't exist, in particular one that takes into account the changes made to a device since it's previous incarnation, but that arriving at this new form is going to be a long process, dependant on feedback from millions and millions of hours of use by tens of thousands of people.

Once you realize that, it makes very little sense to have as your starting point a design that was quickly put together in a lab over the course if a year and tried out by at most a few hundred people.
 

kharma45

Member
But what about other icons? Recycle icon is bad, but it is not the only one that's ugly. Even folder icons in the current Windows build aren't really lookers; especially icons for folders with previews of images and videos.

If it applies to one it'll apply to all.
 

efyu_lemonardo

May I have a cookie?
To add to my above post, as said earlier the popularity of design philosophies like Metro is that they are much more easily scalable to different form factors and across different functionalities. This is an approach you'd expect a software engineer to champion because it no doubt makes their job a hell of a lot easier.

But from the point of view of a designer with any experience working in the physical world (which is the world our brains evolved to operating in) the idea of a device's form being divorced from it's intended natural use and specific purpose is ridiculous even to a child.

Which is precisely why the best approach is to integrate elements of both philosophies.
 

Drifters

Junior Member
Honestly the icons are probably easter egg place holders. I'm guessing they have a scale of upto 1024x1024 in size to deal with 4k monitors.... hell maybe even higher. Either way, I doubt they are final.
 

Pooya

Member
Stardock is probably very happy with those icons, people will want tools to make Windows not look like vomit again. It's been like 10+ years since the last time I had windows blind and similar installed.
 
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