I wish I had known this stuff earlier, so here you go with part 2. This will especially be interesting for people who think the Mac misses some features they like on Windows 7, or that you wonder why Apple didn’t build em in. Small side-note: I use A LOT of apps that modify global input, but it doesn’t cause any problems at all. There was one single incompatibility that KeyRemapForMacbook could fix for me.
The first tool I want to mention is BetterTouchTool which does all sorts of nice & crazy things. For example, it includes the Window Snapping behavior from Windows 7, where you can drag a window somewhere and it maximizes like this:
The tool is free, and does a lot more in this regard, and as you can see from this screenshot, you can configure the hell out of BTT (oh, and the window moving part on the other settings screen is also really nice, like “move the window under the cursor when I hold fn“):
I don’t use a mouse anymore, because BetterTouchTool does LOADs of stuff by configuring gestures for my touchpad. As an example what it can do, I show you the following screenshot with the Chrome settings for nicer tabbed browsing:
Swipe three fingers up to open a tab, down to close it, and tip-taps left and right to hit the shortcuts for switch to left or right tab. Nice right? How cool would it be if Finder had tabs and worked this way? Enter XtraFinder:
Yes, with the tabbed browsing in Finder, I defined the same stuff for the finder that I also defined above for the browser in BetterTouchTool, which looks like this:
XtraFinder is free too, and it also adds a lot of useful stuff freshly converted Windows users miss, like “Create new .txt here”, but also stuff very handy on the Mac like “Create Symlink”, “Open in Terminal” or “Copy Path (with various syntax modes like path, windows path, file-URL, etc…)”. See for yourself some examples as screenshots:
The only thing missing at this point is a fast way to jump to exactly the right folder or file that you need right now. On Windows, I used everything for that, on Mac my first choice was intuitively using Spotlight. Which is fine, it’s just that the last must-have app in this post – Alfred – is faster and better and more customizable. Just install and use it, you’ll see:
Alfred can do a lot of stuff, integrate 1Password (I’m not going to show you a screenshot, but that’s a must have app too), but generally it’s just a great search tool. Btw. the guys behind Alfred have just released the beta of the next major version, which is a complete rewrite that will support some fascinating things like a Google Instant search right on your desktop.
One more giant feature I need to post a screenshot for: Alfred includes a VERY good searchable clipboard history. In the next post of this series, I’ll likely write about automation of basically every thinkable workflow using Keyboard Maestro.
Waiting for an 21GB game to install, I found time for a short burst of blog posts about really cool stuff you can do to customize your Mac OS X experience. I wish I had known this stuff earlier, so here you go with part 1.
Let’s customize the Desktop with dynamic data. This is mine:
The calendar stuff in the middle are multiple “geeklets” that use the following commands to get the different parts of the calendar and that are styled slightly different:
date +%A(outputs “Friday” in my german localization)
date +%d.;(outputs “08.”)
date +%B(outputs “February”)
date '+%H:%M'(outputs “23:46″)
The resulting calendar then might look like this, if you’ve styled the geeklets like I did and positioned them in the same way (the borders will vanish, when GeekTool is not the frontmost app):
By the way, when you have so many strange apps installed (I have), your appbar gets icon creep. But if you saw my screenshots above, it wasn’t so bad, was it? May I introduce: Bartender. Look at this
Bartender lets you configure what you want to see, what you don’t want to see and what is only shown in the Bartender bar that opens when you click it.
Part 2 of this customizability posts will follow soon with a better finder and better touch input.
I’ve been to two Windows 8 trainings from Microsoft in the last few weeks, as we at Abelssoft build Windows software for consumers and Windows 8 will be a pretty big market, as it will ship with every new PC sold from Octobre on. I’m not sure how much I can tell about this, so I’m keeping out stuff where the speaker directly stated to not tell the public, but basically all I’m telling has already been leaked before or is directly stated on Microsofts MSDN pages at http://dev.windows.com or http://design.windows.com. Also I’m not from Microsoft, so take everything written here with a grain of salt.
Possibilities
It was presented that we now have about 600M Windows installations, and googling just found that half of them is on XP, 6% Vista and the rest Win7. I guess the Vista users, some of the XP users (XP support is over) and everyone buying a new PC will have Windows 8. Everyone of those people will see the windows market and everyone who tries to use the Metro interface will very early need to have a live ID, which enables them to enter the windows market. The tablet users will only have the Metro interface as the only desktop apps working will be the office products Microsoft preinstalls.
So the market will be big. Very big. For Metro apps at least. With Windows 8, every Metro app that Microsoft thinks to be a good design example for Metro will be shoved into a large amount of people’s eyes.
The Metro Design Language is nice, clean and minimalist. I like it. On design.windows.com everything needed is shown, including design decisions, metrics and what you need to design a Metro interface app.
Frameworks and the Market
Most of the other technological stuff that was mentioned is already known to everyone who looked at the Apple store concepts. For example it’s the same mechanic of declaring which permissions your app needs to work, if it needs to have access to your location, sensors, etc. Microsoft here copied from Apple where it made sense, which is basically everywhere.
Interesting differences include:
The Microsoft cut is 30% unless you app is very successful – as soon as it reaches a certain threshold in earnings (the number 25.000$ appeared somewhere), Microsofts cut lowers to 20%. This is a very nice move from Microsoft, although it won’t affect most of the apps it keeps the hopes of developers for getting rich high. As far as I know, this is counted on a per-app basis.
Trials. There’s a (feature-limited & time-based) trial mode, recurring payments (subscriptions), in app purchases – including a mock windows store for testing.
Not as strict as Apple. I questioned if we would be able to harvest the users email to give him an otherwise free app, I got no definitive answer but the basic message was that Microsoft won’t stop you from using the business models you’ve used so far. They only said that the windows store team will check your app, and if they cannot get in or see the functionality based on a trial version, they will likely reject it. From a user perspective, I don’t like it so much, but from a developer’s perspective, this is good news.
Synching is easier. Everyone who can buy stuff from the store automatically has the credentials to use Microsofts Dropbox Skydrive. An SDK for this is provided to work with it in code. This means that synching will be really easy AND cross-plattform (as you also have Skydrive for Mac, iOS, Android and such), which on Apple’s platform iCloud is designed to lock people in the Apple world.
The app sandbox will be one-sided. The Metro app has only access to a few places on disc, but from the “old” Windows apps you’ll be able to scan through the (hidden) app folders of the Metro apps and theoretically influence them. This has an impact on security considerations, as you cannot openly put private user data on disc, but it also means that you can use file-based communication to communicate with your “old” desktop apps and services. The implications of this could be manifold. For example, you could implement a way for Metro apps to recognize if there’s already a full version of the apps’ desktop equivalent is installed to automatically make the trial free for the user.
No system database will be provided. No core-data for Windows 8 now. You can use file-based databases in your app, but that’s it for now (SQLite and one other thing I’ve never heard from are supported).
.NET 4.5 is something I’m really looking forward to. .NET 4.0 already is a heavenly programming language from the future, and .NET 4.5 will be another evolutionary improvement. The asynch language feature automatically makes your synchronous spaghetti code asychronous. Which is not only big for your code, but should also make the whole framework faster, as Microsofts talented engineers provide you with asych representatives of usually blocking code.
In the developer and designer trainings is was oftentimes emphasized that you more or less automatically have a valid metro design when you use the new grid-based application template, as it scales and reformats contents automatically based on device and portrait/landscape orientation. I got the feeling that this was stressed a lot as Microsoft doesn’t think people design good UIs. If I look at the Windows world, this is mostly true.
The semantic zoom is another big paradigm that will be greatly supported by the grid. The idea is that you can zoom out and in on everything so you have only a single view in your application that shows different levels of detail,depending how far zoomed in you are. You can see with in the Windows 8 start screen, where you can zoom out to have an overview of all your icons, while zoomed in you see interactive tiles and program names.
One other interesting thing is that SVG graphics might be usable, which is a feature I wished for a long time ago. Sharp graphics without big file sizes should be good for everyone.
The Developer and Designer Trainings
Overall, I would have expected more.
First, I was expecting more non-official information. The non-official information I gathered was merely what everyone would expect to happen anyways.
MS’s own stance on details isn’t very universally consistent. The to trainers I met didn’t have the same knowledge about things, and some information was even contradictory.
The number of trainings and the overall low number of participants oftentimes let me think that Microsoft is desperate to train developers to make something else than the 10 year old windows forms that we all know and hate. In a non-representative questioning of the audience, only about 1/3 of the attendees knew about MVVM, which is the de-facto technical standard design pattern for modern Windows applications since about 2007-2008. This means that most of the Windows developers are about 5 years behind in knowledge. Maybe this is the reason why the trainings didn’t dive very deep.
The early beta-like release of code isn’t very good to test. While I like the idea of the semantic zoom, the code base is buggy so it can hardly be tested now. On a sidenote, of course it’s still better than not releasing stuff beforehand.
The User’s Point of View on Windows 8
Users will see Windows 8 very differently than developers. In my opinion, you need a desktop and different windows for real work, while having the minimalist full screen experience for tablet PCs will be the primary way to go.
Having seen Windows 8 weeks and having played with it a lot, in the developer trainings I learned a lot of hidden gestures that a user won’t understand. Asking for Microsofts plan to make the user understand the new interface, I didn’t get much more than “Yes, we’ll have to do something about that”. UPDATE: Windows 8 is out now, and they didn’t.
Therefore I guess that many will be puzzled, and that many will stick to the edition of Windows they currently have. In fact, I even think that Windows 8 will be Metro’s Vista – an unfinished product that lays the groundwork for a really great Windows 9. Sadly, no Microsoft representative was going to talk to be about Windows 9.
UPDATE: Microsoft screwed it
1.) Discoverability: While working with Windows 8, I noticed that there’s no indication if there’re options and if the charms work on this page of the app. In Microsoft-theory, every app should implement a way to share stuff, the search charm etc, but if this isn’t implemented or there is just nothing to share or search the charms don’t work. I would have expected that in the final implementation they’re greyed out, or hidden, if thats the case, but it isn’t.
In terms of discoverability, it would be better to have a visual indication that a search or a sharing charm is available, as when you want to share or search something, you don’t want to check if thats possible at the moment. Same problem with the lower options bar – you can never know if there are options unless you find out on every page of every app. This will lead to users testing out swipes and strokes all the time.
This makes Windows 8 a bad tablet OS.
2.) Touch on Desktop: Soon the Surface Pro will be the first real Windows 8 device where you might want to try to do some work on a touch device. Microsoft promised to make the old Windows Desktop more “touch-friendly”. This is necessary, because it’s where you’ll have to do work, because the Metro part of Windows 8 with it’s one-window open approach won’t work for most people. What happened? They increased the padding on the Ribbon interface. That’s it. Users who really try to do work in Office on a touch screen will often miss their touch targets.
3.) Two worlds: The distribution of settings you want to make in two different system settings are deeply frustrating, when you cannot find the setting you look for – because it’s in the other settings. When you wanted to drag a file in Mail, you can’t now. When you wanted to look at a Wikipedia page while writing something for reference, know you can’t. (Well, you can, but then you’ll try to have to ignore the Metro “Windows 8 – Sytle” part of Windows, which makes Windows 8 a worse operating system than Windows 7).
2. + 3. makes Windows 8 a bad Desktop OS.
Summary
TL;DR: Windows developers will finally have to learn something new, as the market will be big and I believe that the Windows AppStore will initiate a new gold rush. Windows 8 is technically a very nice concept, but the trainings were a bit shallow and Microsoft seems to be desperately hoping to find developers who will learn all the new stuff their brilliant engineers have been working on in the last 10 years, that nobody used because of Microsoft’s backwards compatibility (the old shit still runs), and devs who will look at MS’s style guides. Users will like Win8 for tablets, but not for PCs, where it will not be too successful before Windows 9.
I thought I’d drop you a notice that we at Abelssoft decided to give away FREE FULL VERSIONS of our browser-tool AntiBrowserSpy for new fans / likes of our german Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/Abelssoft … only till MONDAY.
When I switched from Windows to OSX, it bugged me a lot that my favourite browser had a serious problem on OSX: When I used the red X or a swipe gesture I had defined with “Better Touch Tool“, Firefox seemed to close but it didn’t reinstate all the tabs I had open when I restarted it. I found out the reason for this lies in the way that OSX handles closing of a program. It just closes the Window, but doesn’t close the program itself, I guess because it will restart faster if you activate it again then. Anyway, using the red X means to Firefox “close the window, but don’t close the program”, and therefore it doesn’t realize it needs to save the tabs for next start. Mozilla says this is no bug of Firefox, it’s just problematic how the Mac andles programs.
The workaround I use now is the Firefox Addon “Session Manager“. In it’s preferences, you can set “Close Firefox on close of the last Window” and “On close: save current session” and “On start: choose session: last session”. This let’s Firefox always open with the last session, that means with all the tabs you had open before you closed it. Happy Maccing, Mr Firefox. Also works with 4.0 btw.
