Windows 8 Wish List 2 of 2

[javajolt]

15. A Gesture Interface That Make Sense

This Xbox fitness game would be a fun way to get rid of your spam and relieve tension
but a real PC gesture interface has to be efficient.

Want to wave at your PC to wake it up in the morning? Pause a video when the doorbell rings by putting your hand up in a ‘stop!’ signal, turn the music down by pushing down in midair. How about deleting a file by crumpling up a virtual piece of paper and throwing it into your garbage can? You can do all that by putting Kinect onto a PC and we’re sure Microsoft is going to do that – but it has to be done right.

The problem with Minority Report style interfaces is how tired your arms are going to get if you’re reaching across to a screen or gesturing in front of it all the time. Gestures have to be easy to learn, easy to remember, hard to confuse with something else (whether that’s scratching your head or the gesture that puts your PC to sleep). When you’re playing a Kinect game, you're playing a game; on your PC you might be writing email, checking Facebook, listening to music and playing a game all at the same time. And 3D gestures are great for upper body strength, not so good for fine manipulation like drawing a mask in Photoshop. They need to be just part of a next-generation ‘natural’ interface that lets you touch, talk, gesture and turn away from your PC (if I turn to look out of the window or I walk out of the room, Windows can go ahead and pause my video, turn off the screen to save power or start doing an AV scan as long as it’s ready to go as soon as I get back with my coffee). 

The Microsoft Research pen you could use as different tools depending
on how you grip it.

It has to be natural to switch between different ways of interacting, and it would be nice to use the features built into modern PCs instead of expensive peripherals. Instead of a pricey drawing tablet with a special pen, how about using the Webcam to automatically capture a sketch if I hold a pencil up in front of the screen and then draw on a piece of paper on my desk? Microsoft Research just demonstrated a pen with a capacitive surface and an orientation so it even knows whether you’re using it as a pen, a paintbrush or a pair of compasses.

Tilt your phone to pick which area of the screen you want to focus on in this Microsoft demo.

And how about using a phone as a remote? Microsoft chief research and strategy officer Craig Mundie recently demonstrated an interface for a big screen on the wall that lets you choose what you want to see in more detail by tipping your phone down towards the matching corner (think of those tilting maze games you can play on smartphones with accelerometers). If Windows 8 can make these sort of experiences part of the way you use a PC, it’s going to be a lot more natural.

14. A Real Touch Interface - For Everything

Some of the Media Center interface works well for touch, but you can’t swipe through photos with a finger.

There are ways to make the current Windows interface better for touch (and we’ve got a detailed guide to tweaking the settings available) but that’s not enough to make an interface designed for the mouse really finger friendly. Even the ‘big button’ Windows Media Center interface falls down in a few places (you can’t swipe between photos in the picture view or pan through the wide lists of albums in the music area – instead you have buttons to click).

That’s one obvious place to improve. There are rumors that Windows 8 will have an interface for tablets that uses the ‘live tiles’ from Windows Phone 7 and that would work well as a launcher - and the panorama design of the Windows Phone ‘hubs’ is a development of the Windows Media Center interface, so something that brings together those principles is a great start.

The Windows Phone interface does a great job with touch control; Microsoft could bring that to Windows.

But the touch interface has to cover not just Windows but Windows software – and not just new Windows software, but apps I already have. Maybe Microsoft can’t automatically make the tiny buttons and menus in old apps fit my fingers, but how about a gesture that brings up an easy-to-use magnifier when I put my finger near the menus and toolbars? Or a voice control widget that sits on screen reminding me of the names of buttons so I can tell Windows what I want to do instead of pointing? And for new apps, Windows needs a dual interface that gives you big, friendly buttons and controls that switches the look of your software automatically when you use it with your finger instead of a mouse. It might hide features you use less often, or ones that don’t make sense unless you have a mouse and keyboard, or just make all the controls bigger and have them scroll on and off screen. Whatever it does, it needs to make developers want to rebuild their apps to work well with touch but let me use all those apps I want Windows for already. And for PCs that aren’t tablets, we need even more.

13. Web Apps

Today a ‘rich’ app is either a Windows app or a ‘rich Internet app’ built in Flash or Silverlight like this, but Web browsers are catching up.

The reason that IE 9 supports so many of the latest Web standards, and the reason it lets you pin sites to your task bar as if they were Windows applications is that Web apps are going to be a big part of your future. The average PC user already spends half their time on the PC in a browser according to Microsoft’s statistics (we don’t know if that includes leaving the browser open while you use another app, but you wouldn’t do that if you didn’t expect to need it again in a few minutes).

But an icon, a jump list and a customizable thumbnail preview do not make Web pages into full Windows apps; they make you realize that if Web apps are going to be ‘real’ apps we need to be able to do more than launch them like Windows programs; we need to be able to control them.

Pinning a Web site is a good first step, but the Twitter Web page isn’t an app – whatever Twitter says.

click to enlarge

I want YouTube and Hulu to have the sound on so I can hear what I'm playing, but I don’t want Twitter to beep every time someone replies to my tweet, so we need per-Web app volume controls. I want to be able to put Web apps in my startup group like any other app. I want to be able to ‘pause’ a Web app while I’m offline or hibernated and choose whether I start back in the same place or see anything that’s new. And I have to be able to use them when I’m not online and have the work I do sync back up to the Web seamlessly as soon as I do get back online, without dealing with a separate offline and sync system for every Web app I use (and again, that should get taken care of by the operating system so it can work even if I want to use different browsers for different Web apps).

12. Better Battery Life

Even with a big battery, the amount of power that a big-screen notebook like this 15.6” Dell XPS uses keeps you tethered to the outlet.

We want Windows 8 to run all day on a notebook – and right into the evening as well. Just as creating hardware is harder than writing software, chemistry is harder than physics; it’s a lot easier to cram more transistors onto a chip than it is to make the messy chemicals inside batteries more efficient. Technologies like phase change memory and memristors could make PCs need much less energy for storage and memory (and just switching to SSD can help), but we’re not going to get a better battery chemistry or a huge change in the power needed to run key system components. To get better battery life, Windows needs to be much stricter with the hardware makers – and it needs to move to a much lower power processor.

You can tell Windows to use less power but it’s not enough to get to all day use.

The screen in your laptop uses most of the power; the CPU, Wi-Fi and other system hardware uses the next largest amount. A discrete GPU uses more power than integrated graphics; but using that to run code that the CPU would run more slowly actually saves power because you can turn it off sooner. Peripherals you plug in use power too and although there are some settings you can tweak, to make hardware really power efficient, the manufacturers have to build power saving in and support it in their drivers. Microsoft needs to push the manufacturers and Windows needs to make enforcing power policies easy.

A Snapdragon ARM chip in a prototype Windows laptop, running early Windows 8 code

Microsoft announced at CES this year that Windows 8 will run on the same ARM chips that are inside the iPad and Android tablets (as well as most smartphones) as well as on Intel chips that integrate more of the external chipset into the CPU package (called ‘system on a chip’). System on a chip processors use less power than the usual combination of CPU, GPU and extra chipsets, but still more than the ARM processor. Even with a graphics processor like Tegra 2, an ARM tablet should be able to work for ten hours; the final figure is going to depend on how many apps you run at once, how much you use the network – the same factors that govern the battery life of your smartphone. Windows needs to tell you how those choice affect battery life more clearly than by just showing you how much power you have left; maybe Task Manager should show power usage for apps as well as the memory they’re using.

11. Real Restore

When things go wrong, which of these recovery tools in Windows do you need?

If you're smart, you have backup software or you use a cloud backup service (or both), because hard drives die and we all make mistakes. Windows takes periodic snapshots of your system when you run updates or install new software. PC makers put their drivers, apps and key Windows files into a recovery partition that you can use to reset your PC. Windows has a recovery environment that lets you revert to a previous set of drivers and settings if you can’t boot. And when something goes wrong, you have to work out which of those tools is the best way to get back to where things were working and what order to use the tools in.

Windows needs a unified system for dealing with everything from getting back yesterday's photo that you deleted to files when your hard drives dies to the driver that worked last week to the way Windows was when you bought it so you can pass it along to a friend when you buy a new PC. It all needs to work automatically, with whatever backup software and cloud service you choose, and it needs to be encrypted so that more of your backup can go on the cloud. If you switch to a new PC, shouldn’t you still be able to undelete the photo you accidentally deleted on the old PC as long as you’ve transferred your information across?

A lot of this needs to work with the synchronization features we want to see, and we’d like to see it use the Drive Extender technology that Microsoft just killed in Windows Home Server, perhaps through libraries. If I have a 500GB hard drive a 250GB hard drive and a 1TB hard drive in my desktop; should I be choosing where to put specific files? Shouldn’t Windows be deciding the right place to store files and the right place to back them up – and making it easy for me to find the file wherever that turns out to be?

How the Windows 8 recovery options might let you reset your PC without losing your account and information.

10. Bring Me My Apps

You can only pin so many apps to the task bar and the Start menu is a small space with a lot of icons to scroll through.

The Start menu is a very small space for navigating the long list of apps that most of us have on our PCs (and the fact that it searches files as well is great when you want a file and not quite so great when you really want to find where that odd little utility you used last year is). Far too many times, you end up clicking on All Programs and scrolling and expanding to explore what you have installed, and it’s too easy for the expanded folders to fold themselves away again if your mouse finger slips.

Windows Phone 7 uses panoramas to show more than you can see on screen at once; the problem the Windows Start menu needs to solve too.

If Microsoft does an interface for tablets that makes it easy to launch programs from big, friendly buttons, it could do a version of the same interface for getting at apps you don’t use as often. The panoramas that the Windows Phone 7 Metro interfaces use to present more information than fits on the small phone screen would be an ideal way of doing this because it naturally expands levels of information out as you move across to the next layer. We bet you could make a beautiful replacement for Windows Explorer from these concepts too.

The Flickr Windows 7 touch app uses a lot of the idea of Windows Phone, like showing parts of collapsed areas so you know what they are.

We’d like to see the option to search the Web back on the Start menu; this was in the original version of Windows Vista and disappeared in SP1 (we’ve never found any proof for rumors that other search engine companies complained about it and it’s more likely that it confused people or just didn’t get used enough; in that case, make it an option for advanced users).

9. Find Files Fast and Easily

What we want to see in Windows 8: Sync, speed, security, simplicity, search and super battery life.

It’s too hard to make sense of what’s where in some File dialogs.

It’s easier to find a Web page on Google than a document on your own PC most of the time. The search in Windows 7 is a start, and libraries are a great idea but too often you’re still digging through folders. Part of that is the dreadful File Open and Save dialogs in many apps – and the fact that they’re so different between Office, the apps that come with Windows and third-party apps. Some apps add great extra features to the file dialogs, but most end up with a clunky, out-of-date dialog that makes it hard to navigate inside libraries. And even the better Windows dialogs – and Explorer – don’t take you straight to libraries, just to My Computer.

Libraries bring files together logically, wherever they’re stored, but the interface could be easier.

As soon as we tell Windows we want to
look at a picture in this folder, Photo Gallery
adds the folder to the Pictures library for us;
Windows should do that too. click to enlarge

In the beta of Windows 7, libraries were emphasized a lot more, but the early adopters and admins who were a large portion of the beta testers argued that they wanted to see drive and folders. For the rest of us, a friendly layer that shows files grouped by what they are rather than where they physically live is a much better way of doing things. If you open a picture in the latest version of Windows Live Photo Gallery, it automatically adds the folder the picture is in to the pictures library – because there’s a picture there you care enough to look at, and you might want it again.

That’s how Windows 8 should handle all types of files; documents, videos, downloads, music – if you open a file of a type you have a library for, the folder it’s in should be added to the library for you. Libraries should be the standard way you work with files, and search should be so fast that you don’t have to care how many folders that ends up being because as you start typing the name or keyword for the file, it should just appear.

8. Real Virtualization

If you have an Atom your PC can’t do hardware virtualization and even some Core processors don’t turn it on by default, so virtualizing all of Windows could cause performance issues.

From sync to seamless updates to smarter startup to real security; a lot of what we want to see in Windows means breaking the system up into pieces that can run in different layers of virtualization. Instead of one version of Windows that runs your hardware, runs your apps and stores all your settings, bringing the Windows Server hypervisor to Windows would split that up into logical pieces. The hypervisor deals with the hardware and it can tell Windows that it’s saving your files on the desktop or in My Documents when it’s really putting them into a special folder that won’t be changed if you reinstall Windows. It can run Windows and a special Media Center version of Windows at the same time and pass information between them, but not let one slow down the other. And Windows can tell IE 9 that it’s the only browser you have, but also let you run IE 6 if your banking site really won’t work with anything else, or tell an app that it’s installed on your PC when you’re actually running it from a Web site without the app having to be written specially.

To run an XP app in Windows 7 you need to run the whole XP operating system; you just can’t see it. Real virtualization would let you break the operating system up to run just the pieces an app needs.

A lot of CPUs have Intel’s hardware virtualization technology which makes it much more efficient to run an operating system virtually (or the AMD equivalent); Intel will be putting that into versions of the Atom chip designed for servers by 2012 and it might move from there into netbooks, but the ARM chip will probably never have the same features so the Windows team have to be careful how they virtualize parts of Windows. Some of this isolation and separation might only be on ‘full power’ Windows systems, because if you did it in software rather than with hardware support it could slow the system down. And the spaghetti code that makes up the internals of Windows has been cleaned up a lot by putting in the MinWIn layer in Windows 7, but really separating it out is a huge. Nevertheless, at some point Windows needs to grasp the bull by the horns.