Microsoft Reveals Slick Windows 8 User Interface
Microsoft’s Steven Sinofsky and Julie Larson-Green showed off the much anticipated Windows 8 operating system for the first time at the AllThingsD9 conference on Wednesday.
New Apps and Seamless Experience
Windows 8 will support two application types: Classic ‘legacy’ applications that are backwards compatible and a new form of HTML5/Javascript app that takes full advantage of the fullscreen UI and touch capabilities. Both types of apps can run simultaneously side-by-side and snap and resize into place. This means the consumer will be given the freedom to cater their experience based on what device they use and how they use Windows. Do they want an immersive tablet experience, a slate-based experience for the enterprise or both?
Reimagining of Windows
“We’ve brought all the things you know and love about Windows Phone into Windows 8”
The design is based mainly on Windows Phone with it’s clean tile-based Metro UI but also draws inspiration from previous products such as Zune and Media Center. Windows 8 features a sleek hidden menubar called ‘EdgeUI’ on the right containing shortcuts to what seem to be global functions. Other features include the ability to swipe seamlessly across the screen to navigate through running applications (this approach seems much more fluid than your average task/app switcher) and an on-screen keyboard as seen on Windows Phone but surprisingly can also display a split-keyboard for thumb typing on a tablet or slate device.
In terms of what they have shown us so far, there is still a lot that has gone unanswered but they said all will be revealed in September at Microsoft’s developer conference named ‘BUILD’.
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Edit: More information surfaced at the Computex conference in Taipei (video here) that the two swipe functions (EdgeUI and the app switcher) were designed for tablets and slates in mind so the user could navigate and control most things with just their thumbs.
