I find the list of Ryan Whitwam's blog posts on ExtremeTech (http://www.extremetech.com/author/rwhitwam) to be almost universally negative in tone. Maybe we should all just cheer up and see how this one goes. Microsoft have done some innovation here, and I'm happy to try it out either way.
what are the first questions people ask when they get a new smartphone? They don’t want to know the best way to expose data on the home screen; they want to know which apps to download.
Agreed, but if MS shares with the right 'limited audience', it could work out OK. If they have Facebook, Twitter, Instagram (still looks doubtful), a few more big names and a few major games, >80% of users will be fine. Us techies won't be, of course.
Don't get me wrong- this still seems like a weird move from MS. But I don't think it leaves them "teetering on the edge of failure".
I think it leaves MS comfortably in the valley of failure that they've been trying to climb out of for quite a while now.
"Teetering on the edge of failure" far from being overly pessimistic, is actually far too generous. By any reasonable business measure (marketshare, mindshare, profitability) WP7/7.5 has been a dramatic, obvious failure. If not for the enormous will (read: $$ reserves) of MS, it would have died a well-deserved (from a business perspective) death.
NOTE: I am not commenting on WP7/8's technical or aesthetic merits, nor on the overall consumer benefits of having a robust third competitor to iOS/Android. In all of those regards, WP8 should definitely stick around; but we could have said the same of WebOS (and many did).
Substitute "Linux on the desktop" for windowsphone in your argument and this is something we techies have been arguing forever. I would be fascinated if you could explain how the position of today's windowsphone is in any way different from the position of desktop Linux for the past 12 years.
Because desktop Linux has never had millions of dollars available to persuade companies to develop for their platform. Has Canonical ever offered to pay Adobe a ton of money to develop the Creative Suite for Linux? I suspect not.
I don't think that the two are in any way comparable. Linux has never had huge resources, marketing and dedicated developer outreach.
Well I think the fact that a big company is behind the product that would make a difference vs. Linux on desktop case. As a matter of fact, Linux on the desktop had gained much more popularity when a company (Canonical) focused on that niche market.
Phones need a much more limited set of apps than a desktop or laptop. Many(not all) people just use the phone functions plus Facebook, Maps, Twitter and a couple of other apps and other use cases are covered by web apps. Multiple studies have shown that most people use very few apps.
While with the PCs, if you don't have some applications(like say AAA games, Office, Autocad etc.), it cuts away more of the potential audience than on a phone.
Phones also have the need of "my friends are playing X, I want to play X too". Words with Friends and Draw Something being two fairly recent examples. Windows Phone doesn't have these, so when my friends want to play their social games with me, I have to use my Android tablet. Nokia has said the games will be released at some point with a two-month exclusivity deal for Lumia phones (which is ridiculous and hurts the ecosystem), but I don't think they've been released yet.
Definitely a click bait title. Since all of the WP7 apps will run on WP8, there really is not much risk in releasing the SDK with the phones. I agree that it's not ideal, but I think that they're doing it this way because they want to announce all of the new features at the same time as they release the SDK.
So many rippable quotes in this article. Here are just a few of my favorites:
"If you were expecting Windows Phone 8′s app ecosystem to be one of its main selling points, think again."
Windows app ecosystem has never been one of its strongest setlling points. At no time has its app store even come close to competing with Apple or Android. Its main selling point is the integration with its existing platform. Bing maps, Skydrive, Outlook, etc. I have no idea why this guy thought it should be a major selling point now.
"A multitude of pundits have weighed in, and the consensus from them is that Microsoft might just be buying time because the platform isn’t quite done yet."
After Apple completely bungled their recent release, I would've thought there was going to be some praise following this paragraph. The funny thing is, I'm wondering if this guy even reads the articles on his own site. Just last week this article was on their front page:
"Microsoft is letting marketing dictate the deployment of software instead of what’s really best for the product"
FALSE. I would instead give them credit for seeing the failures of Apple's release and the backlash which ensued. Can you fault them for making sure their product is ready when it hits the stores?
"Almost any other company on the planet would have washed its hands of Windows Phone after a second unsuccessful holiday season."
Yes, because supporting a handset manufacturer who just lost a multi-billion dollar patent infringement case is so much safer right?
There's more, but these are the ones that stuck out at me.
I thought the reasoning was that MS didn't wand devs tomstop developing for 7.x and since these apps would run on 8 anyway, why not wait a while before releasing the SDK.
Microsoft had already announced previously that the SDK will be out at WP8 launch, there will be 100K+ WP7 apps available in the store at launch. The API and dev tools went through a huge shift from Win CE as the kernel in WP7 to the NT kernel in WP8. It makes more sense to launch when it's ready instead of rushing it out to meet a deadline.
So the "two weeks away, still no SDK" is just trolling for page hits, and unfortunately getting them.
Actually, there has not really been a huge shift in the API or the dev tools.
Yes, there is a new native layer called "Windows Phone Runtime", which is a partial, semi-overlapping subset of the Windows Runtime found in Windows 8.
However, it's partial and incomplete, and mostly targeted at game developers - to access most of the features of Windows Phone 8, you need to write your apps in a managed language, accessing the .NET API for Windows Phone, which is pretty much the same as it's always been, with a few minor incompatibilities, even in so-called "compatibility mode" for WP7 apps.
EDIT: That was a hideous run-on sentence, but I kinda like it.
>Actually, there has not really been a huge shift in the API or the dev tools.
I had meant dev tools as in the API and SDK code written by Microsoft. There is no big change in the app developer facing dev tools, but internally the kernel has shifted, thus Microsoft developers needed to port the same API to a different kernel, so that's what I meant by a big change.
Ah, gotcha - I misunderstood what you meant there.
I've seen the current state of the SDK and API, and while I understand porting to a new kernel was probably a lot of work for them, it makes even less sense considering that most of the WinRT APIs available in Win8 are not there in WP8 - it leaves me wondering what, exactly, they hoped to gain; so far it doesn't seem like a win for developers, and you can't write a full-featured native app for WP8. Maybe you'll be able to for WP9 (if the platform survives that long).
Seriously? Metro (/Modern, whatever) has been almost universally praised by designers. You're entitled to your own opinion on it, but suggesting that no-one has read a design book is a bizarre statement.
Metro is interesting for its originality and almost complete lack of skeuomorphic flourishes. The problem with it though is that everything looks alike and nothing analogous. They've even eliminated drop shadows and depth-implying gradients from the interface. While those may be skeuomorphic in the broadest sense, because our vision expects depth, they provide the user by functional signifiers. Metro, in its deviant haste, went too far to the other aesthetic extreme.
I can't tell if you are serious or trolling. If I was setting up a phone for someone who was older and did not understand technology, Windows Phone would be the first platform I started with. Why? The target areas are large and easy to hit. The iconography is simple and easy to understand. And, you can pin actually stuff to the home screen. Son, how do I call you? Just click my face and hit call. Son, how do I get directions to your house? Just click on the map that I pinned. Etc., etc.
If the iconography was so easy to understand, apps wouldn't need that little "..." button at the bottom right to expand the icons at the bottom of the screen to show icon labels. Minimalism is wonderful, but hiding icon labels by default and forcing single color icons really kills usability.
(1) The color (or lack of) has nothing to do with the usability. In fact, if color does aid in use then you probably have a larger accessibility problem.
(2) I think you are biasing your opinion too much toward the first-use of an application. Yes, associating icons and labels does aid in learning and first-use, but has little effect on usability long term for regularly used applications. With that said, the in-app icons you are referring to are typically straight forward (add, search, remove, etc) and, in my opinion, are understandable on first use as well. There are occasionally poorly designed third party apps that do have obscure in-app icons. But, this is not typical of the platform.
Everything being the same color can easily lead to a feeling of being "in a maze of twisty passages, all alike". It's like gray dialog boxes that pop up more gray dialog boxes: technical users tend to have an ontological hierarchy in mind as they navigate so it's no big deal, but most people get quickly overwhelmed and feel lost/overwhelmed. [Not that I'm saying that simply coloring dialog boxes differently would necessarily help here! Just that them all being gray adds to the overwhelm.]
I strongly disagree that color aiding in use points to a larger accessibility problem — perhaps you just mean that if color is necessary for use you've got a problem (which I'd certainly agree with), but while I could get by in my everyday world with monochrome vision, I'm glad I have color cues all around me that aid me in distinguishing amongst objects quickly and with minimal effort.
Yes, you are right. Color when used appropriately can improve the use of a UI. But, he/she implied that it was unusable simply because the icons lacked color. That is completely wrong.
My wife has a win7 phone, very similar with the huge icons (part of the reason she bought it was she could see it without her glasses on). However, I hate using it. My android phone isn't what I'd call intuitive, but I do know exactly how to get where I want to go, ie: push the expanded apps button, scroll around for settings. Took about 4 times to find the right settings button for bluetooth on the win7 phone, I knew pretty much where to go immediately on my phone from the start.
So...I'd say ease of use is high as long as you only want what is on your home icons, but not so much after that.
It is just Settings > Bluetooth on WP7. Pretty easy. I do wish they would allow you to pin settings to the start screen. That would be nice for WI-FI. But, to your point, Android and iPhone seem unintuitive to me because I don't use them on a daily basis.
Recent Samsung Galaxy phone commercials have been mocking Apple for being parent-friendly--e.g., hipster man-child 30-something is just holding his parents' spot in line for an iPhone; they return, and mother asks "Is this the line for apps?"
It's a nauseating commercial IMO... which isn't to say it isn't effective.
Why? I don't see what makes it any more or less approachable than iOS, but I suppose it depends how you use skeuomorphism as a crutch. People had no problems adjusting to Windows (the Start button hardly has a real-life equivalent), I'm not sure why this would be any different.
iOS and Android have labeled icons in a predictable order. The windows phone assumes the user is familiar with common phone app functions based on icons.
That assumes a lot from non-technical users.
Not sure why you brought up skeuomorphism. It's poor aesthetic taste but it doesn't necessarily make the UI difficult to use.
Thing is, the user puts those icons there, not Microsoft. It comes with a few clearly labeled icons, and when you install an app you choose to put its live tile on the start screen if you wish. With that in mind, it should be fairly obvious to the user which tile does what.
I'd have to actually spend more time using one than a few minutes in a Verizon store to render a judgement, but I agree... To me, it appears neither usable nor attractive. Perhaps design critics like it, but such people aren't always so connected to the real world.
