Introduction
Windows 8 has been released in what they call a final state, but even
with that, there are many things that can be changed and added to make
this OS feel more finished and polished than it is right now. I’ve been
living with the OS for nearly 8 months, and I’m already feeling the
pain, and missing Windows 7. From what I’ve read of the upcoming
Windows 8.1, it looks like it will ease this pain somewhat with some
very sensible upgrades to the operating system. Even with the named
upgrades, I do believe that there are still a number of areas where it
can be improved to achieve parity or move ahead of the competition.
Windows RT/8
If you’re using Windows 8 right now, the main screen that Microsoft
wants us to use is the Start screen. That’s nice, but there’s no
date/time, battery, wireless/internet connection icon, or volume
indicator, as we get on the Windows 7 desktop or for that matter, the
Windows 8 desktop. This shouldn’t be terribly difficult to add, and
place right next to our account pictures. That would add to the
‘glance-and-go’ ability of this OS, which is the direction Microsoft
says they want to go, whereas now, I have to swipe the charms in to get
the time/date overlay.
Current start screen, where you have to swipe in from the right to get the date/time, battery, and Wi-Fi indicators.
In addition, tapping the account menu and getting a ‘sleep’, ‘shut
down’, and ‘restart’ option to show there in addition to what shows now,
instead of hiding it in the charms > settings > power. That
would solve the complaint of power users. (Please excuse the poor MS
Paint Copy/Paste job here):
How
easy is this? You have the date, time, day of the week, as well as the
sleep, shut down, and restart options, all right there within 2 taps.
Paul Thurrott’s version of the account menu with multiple users for quick account switch as well.
Paul Thurrot mentioned another
useful ability: to pin the start screen itself, while using the
desktop. This makes perfect sense, for power users and regular users.
We get our Live Tiles, while also being able to launch programs easily.
A useful feature would be to snap the start screen to one side while using the Desktop.
Mr. Thurrott also mentioned adding in-place tile folders similar to
how iOS has folders that open and collapse in-place on iOS. I would
agree with this, as it could allow you to clean up clutter on the Start
Screen, and organize a group of programs or even files together for easy
access from here. There was a concept of this a while back on YouTube, and I could imagine this working in a similar way.
Additionally, it would be great to add ‘Print’ to the app bars of
Microsoft’s apps so I don’t have to swipe to charms > devices >
printer > print > OK. Twenty years of Windows have had a print
button right there, one click. Why do we suddenly need to swipe all
over the place in the name of simplistic interfaces? Or better than 2
clicks, have it be a setting that the print button is either a 1-click
print, print preview, or offers the choice. Better than digging through
a menu, right?
A simple addition of a print icon.
When on an app, and you have a 1/3 app and another app open 2/3 of
the screen, swipe to full-screen the app. You’ll see how it just snaps
over. It would look more fluid if the app pulled over to full screen,
in a form of animation instead of just popping there. Try it out and
you’ll see what I mean. Truthfully, a 1/2 screen view is more useful to
me since I do quite a bit of document side-by-side. This is something
that is reported to be fixed in the new Windows 8.1, which is good to
hear. Does the transition look better? And if you close a 2/3 app,
does that part of the screen remain blank or will the start screen fill
in that gap, or will the 1/3 app fill the entire screen?
Another useful tool from Windows Phone is voice control, either
built-in or the Ask Ziggy app. Reminiscent of the TellMe advertisement,
this is something that should be built-in for Windows 8 so that it can
recognize your commands by voice as well as touch.
When in any app provided from MS, I would like to have the option to pin the app bars onto the screen. Mr. Thurott suggests this
as well, explaining that hiding these means that most apps hide
important functionality. I would say it makes the apps look either
non-functional or broken, a mystery to people like my parents, and is
easily fixed by adding a ‘pin’ button, or even better, pinning app bars
to the screen permanently.
Just
add ‘pin’ to all app bars, and have it turned on by default for all
those currently using Windows 7 to be able to get used to the new
system. If they decide, let them chose to unpin app bars.
Having to swipe all the time is irritating, and my parents, who are
in their 60s, don’t understand why they can’t see the app bars, and now
regret having bought new computers with Windows 8. On Surface, closing
applications is also a bit iffy. It would be nice to have this behavior
improved, and have a close button added to all apps. I understand
Microsoft wants you to drag the app down to close, but on a
non-touchscreen that’s more mouse movement then simply clicking the X;
if I could just tap the X to close an app rather than drag it down, that
would be a big improvement in my eyes, and again, my parents don’t want
to drag down an app when they can just click X to close on regular
desktop apps.
A behavior that would help Surface and Windows 8 be more useful would
be taken from Windows Phone 7/8. In Windows Phone, you turn on the
screen while listening to music, and playback controls are there on the
Lock Screen. That’s not currently the case for Windows 8/RT and would
be an incredibly useful feature.
For any app I purchase, I would like the option to send feedback to
the app’s author, above and beyond the ‘rate and review’ option already
there. That would be a great way to give feedback to the author for
customer questions and feature requests.
For Surface itself, it needs GPS so we can make the Maps app more
useful and geotag pictures, and make use of Local Scout. In addition, a
5 MP or better rear camera and 1.2 or 2 MP front-facing camera would
make it more useful for pictures. NFC should be included on all future
models as well.
One feature that still doesn’t exist is the ability to use my own
wallpaper on the Start Screen. This is being corrected in Windows 8.1,
but there are a few add-ons to this that I would like to see. I make
large panoramas using Image Composite Editor (from Microsoft), so
hopefully those images would be usable here. What I would like to see
in addition is a bit of eye-candy in relation to this. We’ve seen the
iOS7 parallax shifting, where if you tilt your device, the wallpaper
seems to move slightly as the device does. Zune HD did this as well,
and I think it would be a very nice little touch to add to Windows 8.2
as well. To go a step further, I would like to see parallax scrolling
added on the background. You saw this way back in Super Mario World or
Donkey Kong Country, where three or four layers of background were used
to simulate motion on the screen, and I believe Microsoft could come up
with some special backgrounds that could replicate this effect.
Motion backgrounds are apparently coming to the Start Screen, and I
would hope to see the ability to create and add more, similar to what we
had in Vista, with the pond and rippling water, and even some
backgrounds like you can find on YouTube,
both on the Start Screen, the desktop background, and the Lock screen.
The lock screen will apparently be some kind of photo collage, which is
nice. How about an image of a rippling pond? Or take the motion
images created in everyone’s Nokia Lumia devices and set those as
backgrounds?
Something else pointed out in Paul Thurrott’s blog
is the state of Play To with Windows 8, which is a sad thing to talk
about. I would have expected with Windows 8′s focus on simplicity and
“just working” that I could just play to any device, or write a program
to play to any device or have another Windows 8 computer play to mine.
That would make sense, so long as it’s a licensed copy of Windows 8, or a
device that’s marketed as Play To. Not so for Windows 8. Microsoft
has made it so only certified Play To devices work in Windows 8, and
there’s apparently only 1 at the moment from Western Digital. As a
commenter on that post notes, this needs to change. He posits the
ability to simply attach network storage to your home network, and then
have that show within Windows 8 as a source automatically based on type
(music, video, etc), and even a Surface TV unit that would simply use
Windows RT, and work with an eHome remote of any type (X-Box remote, WMC
remote, etc.) to control media. With such a device drawing from
Network Attached Storage, you have a potentially limitless source of
media for a Surface TV, as well as having a built-in tuner (OTA,
CableCard and DLNA DTCP) for what could be a killer set-top box.
Whether such a thing happens is another story, but it would be amazing.
Internet Explorer Metro version
I continually find myself asking “where’s the print button? ” or
“where is the favorites menu?” and “where is the history?” when using
this. I would like icons added to the address bar so I can access them
more easily, not hidden in the settings menu where most users would not
think to look. In addition, the option to pin the address bar to the
screen so I don’t have to continually swipe up to get to it would be
great. This confuses older people who are not technically-savvy, like
my own father, who has taken to using my mother’s Windows 7 laptop
because he can see the app bar in IE consistently, and it has a close
button.
Additionally, how do I see what I’ve downloaded in the Metro
interface? I see no way to see my list of downloads, nor do I have the
ability to see the progress of multiple downloads, or tap on them to
open individually. When a download finishes, I see “Your download has
completed” but I can’t see
which download completed. Why?
Also, where are RSS feeds in this version of IE? And why is there no built-in RSS App beyond the News app?
Another annoyance is web advertisements. I muted the surface by
pressing volume down until the display showed zero. THEN, a web ad
popped up at the original volume. Why? If I turned the system volume
down, why do I still hear ads?
Animations in the OS as a whole and in apps
Take a second to view the Live Labs
Pivot video.
When viewing information in Metro apps, wouldn’t this make sense as an
animated way to view collections of data, such as books, magazines,
comics, movies, TV shows, music, music videos, pictures, and especially
tagged pictures of friends (by place, date, topic, and person)? One
person even used Pivot to
sort/view his Facebook friends. Why not add that into the official Facebook app, or to the Contacts/People app?
Apps go Pro
Mr. Thurott writes up an entire article on
how Metro apps are currently simplistic and don’t offer much in the way
of functionality, like the Photos app, which offers only viewing, and
no simple editing functionality. I would make a very easy and
reasonable request of Microsoft: Anything a desktop app can do on
Windows 7, the Metro app in Windows 8 should be able to do, and more.
The picture viewer can launch Windows Live Photo Gallery, where you can
geotag, people tag, add regular tags (which aid in searching for those
same pictures later), and do editing and cropping. In Metro? Not a
chance.
Every feature found in Windows Live’s series of Apps should be ported
into the Metro apps. That’s not a difficult idea to grasp, and is not
an unreasonable request from regular users. Just because I use a tablet
doesn’t mean I shouldn’t be able to geotag a picture, add filters, crop
& rotate, blog in Win-Live Writer, or edit movies using a simple
timeline like Movie Maker used to have before its update (which still
makes no sense).
Bing
The biggest omission so far is the lack of Local Scout. This was
surprising and is sorely missed from my Windows Phone. How about Bing
Vision? And what about the new Bing Features added to Windows Phone 8,
like movie times, sport scores, and such? Can we save favorite places
and see similar, or see places our friends liked or checked in?
Calendar
There should be an option to pin the application bar so I don’t have
to swipe up so much. In addition, semantic zoom would be useful so that
I can zoom out and tap another month, or zoom out again to choose
another year, or again to choose a decade. This is already possible in
the Windows 7 desktop. In addition, some birthdays appear on the wrong
day on the calendar – showing a day earlier than they should.
Desktop
I know Microsoft wants us to use the new Start Screen, but for veterans, the option to boot to the desktop, and perhaps snap the start screen to
the left of the desktop would make great feature enhancements, and ease
the transition to the “Modern UI.” This is reported to be fixed in
Windows 8.1, which is good to hear.
Currently, the Start Screen cannot be snapped. If I have an app
snapped on the side, and close my main app, that 2/3 remains blank and
blue, and doesn’t show the Start screen like I would expect it to. It
just looks odd, and unfinished. This “feature” in action:
- When viewing two apps in snapped view, the system works as expected.
- Having closed the ‘main’ app, by swiping down, the majority of the screen is now blank, showing nothing. Why?
Hub Integration
The picture hub is more integrated with Windows Phone, and now with
Windows 8/RT, there are the beginnings of that same integration in the
desktop, but the implementation seems to be only partly there.
There is a photo app in the desktop, but it could give me a friend feed
to see what pictures my friends are posting where, similar to on the
phone, and give the opportunity to like, comment, and share those
posts. Given the larger size of the desktop / tablet over the phone,
another good idea would be to see a timeline view of your pictures, so
you can see them in order of when you took them, possibly using the Pivot View from Live Labs as the viewing metaphor.
Also, a map view for any pictures I have that are geotagged would
also be great, so I can see where I took which picture (similar to
Facebook’s Maps view), and finally, a ‘breadcrumb’ view or a ‘journey’
view, showing me in time when/where I took which picture, so if I went
to England, show me on the map at Heathrow, the Tower of London, the
Museum, Buckingham Palace, moving around using Bing Maps, integrated
into the shell of the OS.
People tags should allow me to sort by who’s in which picture, and
pictures of people should show in the People hub under each person’s
profile/card, and on the Bing Map of my friends – that would be a great
way to discover ‘hey, my friend from school also went to London!’ When
I’m viewing my pictures on a map, show me something like “14 friends
have also visited the Tower of London” and show me those pictures also.
I could then comment on those pictures, and ‘like’ them. The Windows
Live Photo Gallery had people tagging, which is lacking currently in
Windows 8 / RT.
The Music hub within Windows should be inspired by at a minimum, or
at best, replaced by Zune, as I describe later in this article. I don’t
see a need to separate out music and videos like was done. Since they
are hubs now, though, I would say that social feeds should be integrated
into both apps if they remain separate, or even if they are combined in
the future, so that we can see what friends are watching or listening
to, and then like/comment/share that, and also be able to tap on it to
go into the Store to purchase that media.
Internet Explorer
How do I view my favorites or history, or clear them out? I can’t do
that unless I go to the Desktop, or open a new tab, and THEN I see my
favorites. There needs to be a button on the metro version of IE for
favorites and for history. How do I subscribe to RSS Feeds, much less
read them? How do I print? How do I view downloads?
Additionally, IE Metro seems to experience a number of crashes and
odd behavior on certain common websites which will crash the program
that don’t affect the desktop version.
Libraries
A useful metaphor on the desktop that could be extended is the use of
libraries. There are music, picture, document, and video libraries in
Windows 7, but I believe Windows 8 and beyond would benefit from having:
podcasts, audiobooks, television, movies, and music videos as
libraries. If I purchase TV shows from the X-Box Video Store, they
would get saved into the television library. A video file I place in
there myself would be assumed by the X-Box Video application to be a TV
show, and would be found there by default. Likewise items I place in
movies, music videos, or podcasts. This makes sense, and makes
organization beneficial for the user. Unfortunately, Windows 8.1 seems
to be removing this useful organizational tool. I would suggest not
removing it at all, and creating an actual Library app so I can view my
libraries in the metro interface, and see all my own TV shows (or files
I’ve marked and tagged as TV shows) organized common-sense (as in, if I
have 3 videos from Smallville, I would see “Smallville” as a DVD cover,
not a square, tap that icon, and then be presented with 1 season DVD
cover, tap that, then be presented with 3 square icons representing the 3
episodes I have), and allow me the opportunity to tag video files,
music files, documents, and picture files with metadata to aid sorting.
Lock Screen Backgrounds
Now in Windows 8.1, we can have our device act like a live picture
frame, pulling in our pictures from various sources. Can we determine
specifically which sources, or is it everything? It would be a bit
embarrassing for pictures of an old girlfriend to show up when you’re
with your current girlfriend, fiancée, or wife, that’s for sure. Does
the device have situational or locational awareness? Imagine being able
to choose pictures based on location, so if you’re in Paris, show only
your pictures you took in Paris, or if you’re in the mountains of North
Carolina, only seeing those pictures in rotation. The device could also
be set to show only pictures taken on today (so June 5th pictures would
show on June 5th, June 6th on June 6th, and so on), or only pictures
tagged with certain people (showing all pictures of just you, you and
your wife/husband, just your kids, just your friends, etc.). Another
option for the Lock Screen, would be similar to how the Zune screensaver
worked, with its different sized album covers that routinely flipped
over to change to new album covers. Here, have different-sized pictures
you took flip over at certain intervals, showing you new pictures you
may have forgotten you took.
Additionally, since we can have motion Start Screen backgrounds, why not motion backgrounds on the lock screen? Imagine
this Earth scene from space as a lock screen. Or motion pictures from Nokia’s Lumias.
Mail
How do I download all attachments at once? It looks now that I have
to do this one at a time. Imagine having 20 pictures from your
brother’s vacation to download…that’ll take a good while! In addition,
it doesn’t appear that I can create Junk Mail or ‘move to folder’ rules,
which I would expect by tap+hold or selecting the message itself.
Maybe when Outlook RT is released?
Maps
There can be room for improvement here. How about bringing in my
Bing Scrapbook containing all my check-ins from Facebook (which
mysteriously stopped working when I moved from WinPhone 7 to WinPhone
8)? From the start screen of the maps, we need a way to store our own
‘places’ – places we’ve been, places we want to go. Anywhere I’ve
checked in on Facebook should be available in maps, and even better
would be to mark down places I’ve been (and when) without making it
public to everyone via Facebook. Also, any places I’ve been that match
pictures in my picture library, should show an indicator “12 pictures
taken here” so I can see “Oh, wait, I did eat at Hard Rock in London!”
back when I was in town there.
Another great idea here would be to have a list of places and have
this app check them off my list as I visit them, or offer to check them
off the list of places I want to visit. After that, the option to view
statistics of “which states have I seen?” “which cities have I seen?”
and “which countries have I seen?” would be a great thing.
If I tap-hold, I would like to see ‘What’s Here?’ like on the
website, with the option to get directions and save it to my places.
Again, the option to pin the menu so it doesn’t disappear would be
great.
When ‘finding’ a place, it should auto-correct to show local
businesses near me, and for the results, offer to save those places so I
can get back to them easily at a later time. The search results box in
the upper left corner should also have a ‘clear search’ button. That
would make more sense than swiping up and clicking ‘clear map.’ One tap
instead of swipe-tap. Much more efficient.
In addition, pictures I took anywhere with geotags and without should
be viewable on the map where I took them, with the option to geotag
more pictures onto the map, along with tagging people in the pictures on
the map, viewing my places in a timeline so I can see in order, where
I’ve been.
How do I have the app show me where restaurants, shopping, museums,
hotels/motels, churches, parks, etc are? I see no option to just show
me where the shops, restaurants, and other places are so I can get a
feel for a place, especially on a trip. Just add a menu item for
“show…” with checkboxes for restaurants, churches, hotels/motels, etc.
so that I can see little icon indicators so I know where certain types
of places are.
Another useful feature would be to grab a few places together and
save them as a ‘trip’ and have maps plot the shortest route between
them, suggest a starting place, and offer me restaurants nearby within a
price range, cuisine type, noting their hours as well, along with
hotels/motels within a price range and rating. It would note when I
want to leave and return from the trip, and also factor in average
travel time, as well as offer other sights to see based on type (museum,
park, etc) and price (free only, cheap, etc) so I can maximize my
vacations. Wouldn’t this make you
want to use the Maps app? Also, where is Local Scout from Windows Phone? That would be useful for Win8RT.
In addition, tap+hold should have an option “what’s here?” to find
out what’s there, and an option to pin the menu onto the screen so I
don’t have to keep swiping up to get it back.
Marketplace
When downloading updates to any application, how do I know what
changed? Where is the changelog for all these updates? Additionally,
how many times do I need to tap on “try again” to get it to recognize
that I tapped it? And updates? When selecting multiple apps for
update, why not show the information button so I can see a collated list
of what changed per app?
In
this revision of the store, you can simply swipe over or tap to see any
of the details for apps. This is one possible way to do this.
Media Playback
One user has complained that it seems Windows 8 cannot have apps read
files from Network Attached Storage, which would remove a huge
capability from media playback apps to have a leg up on the
competition. Additionally, any media app should have the ability to set
a ‘file watcher’ to watch for new files or changed files to update the
app’s databases.
I would echo the users’ comments here, as they make sense and would
be a great idea. Create a Surface TV to access HomeGroup media running
Windows RT with as many built-in codecs as they can stuff into it. VLC
Media player is free and can play any file you throw at it. If they can
do that, so can Microsoft. Surface TV would play files with multiple
audio tracks and multiple embedded and separate subtitle files, and work
with an eHome-compatible remote control. In addition, a Surface Cube
‘headless server’ would be created, just like Windows Home Server was.
It would have slots for hard drives to be simply plugged in and ready to
use for media storage so that it’s expandable as your needs change.
You could purchase your own OTA, CableCard and DLNA DTCP tuners for it
at around $50 a piece so you could record as many live shows as you have
cards. This Cube would download guide data automatically for you, and
allow live TV recording. Microsoft would then recode Windows Media
Center to run as a metro app for Windows RT to provide the big-screen
interface for live TV and TV guide apps with recording scheduling that
will auto-detect a ‘Surface Cube’ and just ask for a ZIP code and TV
provider to download guide data. Surface TV would be completely
plug-and-play: all you do is plug it in, attach network cable, sign in
with your MS Account, and you’re done. It would be a complete media
solution with Windows RT, full DVR functionality like Windows Media
Center has provided for years, with remote control functionality. This
would head off Apple TV at the pass. Even better would be to allow TV
manufacturers who meet a certain set of specifications to integrate with
the exact same interface, so that TV manufacturers become part of the
Surface family, accessing the Cube, and accessing X-Box Music/Video so
all your movies, TV shows, pictures, and music are just there. With
that stroke, Apple TV won’t have a chance. The X-Box One is touted to
have Live TV abilities, but in reality, they are nothing like this and
it would be misleading to market is as such.
Messaging
This client is pretty spartan, and could use some work. Again, the
option to pin the app bar onto the screen for those who want it would be
very welcome. I’m tired of constantly swiping to get those options to
show.
The desktop version of this app has a lot more options available that
are missing here, including video/voice chat, file attachments, web
sharing, video messages, and starting games with friends are missing and
restoring those options would be very welcome. Also, how do I view or
archive my older messages? If I’ve IM’ed a person 2 years ago, does
this app archive that so that I can see those messages?
Microsoft Account
I created a Live account using a non-Microsoft e-mail, and I also
have an outlook.com e-mail address. I would like to have the ability to
merge the two accounts together, and have the outlook.com e-mail serve
as my main e-mail address for my account. Currently, there does not
appear any way to do this.
Multi-Monitor Support
According to one user on Paul Thurrott’s blog, you cannot have one
Metro app per screen in Windows 8, which makes no sense. What is
technically preventing this? Nothing. Why should I not be able to have
a main app and a 1/3 ‘snapped’ app on both monitors I use? Or if I
have three or four monitors on my desktop, why shouldn’t I be able to
have 4 apps and 4 ‘snapped’ apps up at once? I can do this on Windows 7
with normal desktop apps. There’s no need for any limitations if this
is indeed the case, on a desktop. Windows 8.1 does improve this
situation a bit allowing multiple apps on a single monitor, and allowing
the desktop on either monitor and the start screen on either.
News
This app has potential, but it did crash my surface to the point of
forcing me to re-boot the system. I would like to see the option to add
news in foreign languages, as I speak more than just English. I would
like to add welt.de to my feeds, but I can’t see a way to do that. What
about the RSS Feeds from other websites around the world? There’s no
way to subscribe to them. I would expect that if I’m visiting the
Guardian UK website, and there are RSS Feeds available, that IE Metro
would offer to show me that, make it easy to subscribe and view those
feeds in the News App.
Partners
One thing the iPhone and Android ecosystems have, but Windows doesn’t, is fitness partners. You have
Nike+, and now this new
wristband (Amiigo)
to track exercise that automatically synchronizes with your phone to
track your exercise routine, calories burned, and lets you compete with
your friends. Microsoft should absolutely bring in the fitness crowd
with some kind of sponsored fitness accessory for the Windows Phone and
Windows 8.
Play To features
If what has been said at Paul Thurrott’s blog is true, then Play To
has been crippled in Windows 8 so that you can only play to certified
devices, of which there is only 1…from Western Digital. Nothing against
them, but if you want to make Play To truly functional then it should
be opened up to app developers so that if I write an app with a Play To
Contract, then my app can play to the X-Box, with any transcoding
handled by the X-Box or operating system. My app would also be a valid
Play To target, so that if I have a set-top PC under my TV, and a
Surface Tablet, I can have my app on Surface play to my app on the
set-top PC so I can watch that movie I purchased from Zune on the TV in
full HD. This just makes sense.
Relaying what the blog poster indicated, it would be a big
improvement to make any Windows 8 computer a valid Play To and DLNA
target and source for media playback. Then, add in more built-in codec
support (Bitstreaming of TrueHD, DTS or DTS-Master audio; MKV, MPEG2
(without WMC pack), Ogg, Mov, DVD, Blu-Ray, and so on) without any
intervention on the part of the user. With the price of Windows 8,
there’s no reason some of that couldn’t go to paying for the licenses of
any codec requiring it. Additionally, add built-in support for
subtitles and multiple audio tracks for any video file that supports it,
and ISO files being valid media sources. I’ve backed up my DVDs to
prevent scratching from repeated playback, and I don’t see why my movies
shouldn’t show up in X-Box Video or any other app that plays videos.
People
How exactly do I enable people live tiles? I still can’t figure this
out, because it says they’re turned on on Surface, but the tiles are
static as a regular icon. On Windows Phone, if you pin a person to the
Start Screen, their tiles animate with status updates and
mail/IM/text/call notifications. In Windows 8 – nothing. Also, how do I
make sure my photos can be shared with the People App? My own
brother’s photos don’t show up there.
How do I add birthdays and anniversaries? There is no field for
either of them, whereas Outlook 2013 allows you to add that information,
as does People on Windows Phone 8. So, why the omission?
For ‘significant other’ I would recommend and suggest that if that
person exists in my contacts / people hub, it should link directly to
that person’s profile. In addition, it would be great to add places for
spouse, father, mother, brother, sister, aunt, uncle, and children,
linking to those people’s profiles if they exist.
Another oddity is any information I’ve added on my Windows Phone does
not automatically synch to the People on Outlook.com nor on Windows 8′s
people hub. I’ve got missing birthdays, and missing groups amongst all
3, when they should all be completely synchronized.
The people hub should look more like this:
Here
you see pivots at top, working like every other concept. You swipe or
tap, and they show you where you are in the Hub and let you easily
switch between functional areas of the system.
The pivots up top make more sense, in that in one simple glance, I
know that I will be able to see me, the what’s new feed, favorite
people, and all contacts, just like on Windows Phone. Currently it’s
just a 5-foot panoramic app that’s an utter mystery what I might find to
my right. Why? I have no idea who decided that was a good idea.
Adding pivots would clarify that omission.
Pictures
How can I see my pictures on a map if already geo-tagged, or geo-tag
them if not already? How do I tag friends in pictures? Neither of
these features are available. When I plug in a USB drive, does Photos
open, and offer to import pictures into an album with its own folder
like iPhotos does for Mac users already, and also upload to Skydrive as a
backup? No.
Can I see all the people I’ve tagged in the app and have it pull up
all that person’s pictures? No. Can I have it upload to Facebook an
entire album in full resolution? No. What about simple photo correction
like Windows Live Photo Gallery? No. Can I view all my pictures on a
timeline of when I took them? No.
As for geotagging, I do mean more than just the city/state it was
taken. I mean to say that if you know you took a picture at the foot of
the steps to the Lincoln Memorial, you should be able to tag it exactly
there, not just to “Lincoln Memorial” if you so choose.
Currently
you can geotag pictures in Windows Live with a City/State combination
for organizational purposes. You cannot do this in the Photo App.
To bring in the Semantic Zoom ability, I would reference the iOS7
Photos Collections, where if you zoom out you can see your pictures
sorted by date, and zoom out more, by collections like ‘Paris’ or
‘London.’
iOS7
version of Collections, showing location information being a basis for
sorting. Why again does Windows 8′s Photo app not do this already?
Here is my concept for an updated photo app for Windows 8. You’ll
notice that the background is different than the obscure wheel thing
that comes by default. I imagine the background should be a live
background whose rotation you can determine (every 30 seconds, every
day, every app launch, etc.) and the source (all pictures, specific
places, places where I am now, etc.). This first pivot is for
‘people.’ Any people tags in your pictures (FB, Twitter, on your PC,
Skydrive) are collected together. Any untagged pictures that might have
people in them, you can choose to tag them, much like the current
Windows Live Photo Gallery.
If
you have tagged people in your pictures, then this pivot would sort
your pictures from all sources by the people in them. All pictures of
your brother would show under his tile here, which is a live tile that
flips, slides, and fades across random pictures from his collection.
The Collections pivot shows your pictures you’ve put together into a
collection to share with friends and family. You can create them in a
number of ways, including rules, such as “All pictures in France” or
“All pictures from Winter Retreat 08 folder,” to “All pictures with me
and my brother from 2008.” The pictures are hosted on Skydrive, and you
can set sharing so that friends and family can view them on their
Windows 8-based computers, like, share, and comment on pictures all from
the comfort of their Photo apps too.
Collections
of pictures you put together that you can share with people via
Skydrive. You or your friends comment, share, like pictures.
The Places pivot organizes your pictures based on the geotag
information in the pictures themselves, much like iOS7 does currently.
You can also choose to geotag pictures yourself, but this would
theoretically be much more advanced than the simplistic Windows Live
Photo Gallery version of “Atlanta, GA” instead of something more
accurate like “World of Coke, Atlanta, GA.” When you tap into a place,
such as Hamburg, you will see pivots for All, and Locations, so it will
recognize things like “City Hall,” “Hard Rock Café,” and “Hamburg
Museum” as separate locations within the city.
This
gathers your geotagged pictures together so you can see your places
you’ve visited. The app bar containts a button ‘view on a map’ so that
you can see all your pictures on a map, choose to view them in a
timeline (using date taken), or see them in a pseudo-street view with
the map zooming in/out at each point in a form of a slide show.
The Trips pivot would be similar to the
Journal you
can create in iPhoto today. You can collect pictures, weather
snippets, place cards (locations of businesses you visited with notes on
what you ate or saw), notes from each day, maps of where you went, and
so on, in one place, on your Skydrive, which you can share with friends
and family, which would show on their Photo Apps as well, so they can
like, share, comment on your pictures as well.
This
view is for trips you’ve taken that you want to share with friends. You
put pictures in here, tag friends and places, add in other info, such
as the weather, places you visited, and it’ll show up online in Skydrive
in a Journal-like fashion so your family and friends can see all you
did on your trip.
It would be incredibly easy for the Pictures App to show me all my
pictures, and include pivots for ‘date,’ ‘people,’ ‘places,’ ‘tags,’
‘trips,’ and ‘collections.’ That way I can see my pictures grouped by
date, people in them, places I took them, and by the tags I added
myself. This makes a lot of sense, and would require the additional
ability for us to tap+hold and add tags to pictures if we haven’t
already. When viewing pictures, also add a button to the app bar for
‘properties’ so I can view and edit them, like on the desktop. I would
also make the back arrow permanent so I don’t have to swipe, then tap
back. One less step.
For geotagging, one possible option:
When
geotagging, have auto-complete suggest places that you can tap on, and
show a mini-map to confirm the place. If one of several pictures has a
map, show that as a suggested place. This is much more accurate than the
current Windows Live Photo Gallery which only allows City and State
instead of an exact place.
From what I’ve seen online, this app will be updated this year, but I
don’t believe my requests are too much for a company that owns a
mapping solution and provides picture software with these abilities
(Windows Live Photo Gallery).
This is what Facebook currently does with your pictures, placing them
on a map, so you can see how many pictures were tagged where.
Here you can see an overview of how many pictures were taken where.
And when you zoom in, such as to Berlin, you will see this:
Geotagged pictures in Facebook for the city of Berlin. Why can’t we see this in Pictures or in Maps?
Is this hard to do in Windows 8.1 or even 8.2? This would be a great
feature, not to mention an obvious feature. Imagine being able to
create a picture map, and clicking ‘play’ and going through your
vacation pictures with a map showing where they were taken, day by day,
perhaps even with map zoom-in-zoom-out in-between, or a map that moves
on the side, while the screen shows your pictures front and center. Or
even better, a Group Scrapbook, following on the new groups feature from
Windows Phone, where you and your friends can post your pictures to a
group scrapbook (expanding on the Bing Scrapbook, and updating it to
work with Windows Phone 8), where all of you can share your check-ins,
pictures, and further, post reviews of restaurants, and even little
comments on what you did. You could then package this scrapbook and
share it with family and friends, appearing under “Trips” in the hub.
With X-Box 360/One, you could then use the TV as a second screen, and
replay your vacation for your family on the TV, going through day-by-day
what you did on vacation. If you took panoramas or photosynth 3D
panoramic pictures, those would also be viewable in the playback.
Programming for Windows 8
The blog mentioned before states that you cannot program a Windows 8
app to accept input from a remote control. If true, then this is a sad
state of affairs for Windows, and would prevent a number of novel media
playback apps from being as fully functional as they could otherwise
be. I for one would love to create a metro app that accepts remote
control input to navigate the screen. Imagine creating a set-top PC,
opening this app, and using a remote control to navigate your purchased
TV shows and movies, and music from the comfort of your living room.
You can then navigate to your pictures and show off your vacation
pictures to guests from your couch…with a remote. That is what I would
pay for as included functionality in Windows 8 (Media Center, anyone?).
Unfortunately Media Center, the ideal place for this, is being
deprecated in this release. It deserves a massive upgrade, such as
support for mkv, mpg2, embedded subtitles, multiple audio tracks, ogg
formats, metadata editing and storage, podcast support, and content
purchase.
Search Improvements
The current experience is pretty spartan:
This is ok, but can be improved. Compare the Windows 7 Start Menu search:
As Joel Hodgson used to say on MST3K, “Do what I do: combine them.” Like so:
This shows being able to search everything you have, plus whatever you might’ve purchased online via XBM/XBV.
And swipe over to TV Shows to see:
If you’ve purchased TV Shows in the past, then why not be able to search for them as well?
Wouldn’t you think this makes much more organizational sense than what we have now?
This is the coming search experience in Windows 8.1:
This is context aware, so it knows when you’re searching for a
person, movie, etc. This is nice, but there aren’t any pivots at the
top to switch between categories, as in my concept, so when you’re
looking at the main screen above, how do you know that “related
searches” even exists? Or if you searched for ‘Marilyn Monroe’ like
their examples in the videos released, how do you know if there’s music,
movies, TV, etc in there when they’re off the screen? Just add search
pivots, and that problem is solved.
Example
Windows 8.1 Search. How do I know what’s all the way to the right? How
do I know it exists? If you added pivots to the top for the categories
of results, maybe people like my father, who is not tech-savvy, would
know that there are also TV Shows, Movies, music, and pictures with Ms.
Monroe in them. As is, this is better than current, but still not as
user-friendly as could be.
Skype
I’ve attempted to use Skype on Windows RT, and it seems incredibly
hit and miss. Windows Live Messenger was MUCH better at video calling.
For some reason, wi-fi calling to an iPhone on Verizon just results in a
lot of frustration. If you use Skype, it should just work. I should
be able to go to my People Hub, tab a button “Video Call” and have it
open a video call window, not spend 30 seconds opening the Skype app and
logging me in, then starting the call. This experience needs to be
improved a great deal before this can be recommended for people to use
it regularly.
Since Skype is replacing Live Messenger soon, a few Live Messenger
features I’ve come to enjoy and expect from an instant messaging client:
importing custom emoticons at will, rich text formatting
(bold/italic/underline, using any fancy fonts installed on my machine,
colors), sharing youtube videos in-line with my IMs, sharing files with
my friends through IM, remote desktop to view a friend’s desktop and
control it with their permission, saving my messaging history to a local
file on my computer, and playing games through the IM client. Without
these features, I will not be using Skype for IM. I’ll likely just text
and e-mail again.
Social Integration
Microsoft’s
Socl network
should be integrated into People and the rest of the Operating System
to encourage adoption. Facebook and Twitter require a dedicated app,
not just pinning the website. Posting albums from X-Box Music to
Facebook should work just like on the Zune HD, where the album art is
posted, with the album, artist, and song title, and a link back to the
Zune Marketplace. If you listen to songs, albums, artists, or
playlists, you should be able to post that to one or more social
networks so that people can like/comment and view/stream/download the
item in question from the People Hub, or from Facebook itself. A Media
tab should be integrated into the People Hub profile to display music
and videos listened to that match something within the Marketplace so
you can share, like, and comment on them.
Store (for Books, Comics, Magazines, and Newspapers)
Apple has their iBook app which puts in the ability to have newspaper
and magazine subscriptions in the tablet. Microsoft can do this and
better in a single app. Just sign up for electronic subscriptions to
your favorite comics, magazines, and newspapers, and now with Nook being
bought by Microsoft, books also. Every time a book series, like Percy
Jackson, has a new release, you would get a notification, giving you the
opportunity to purchase the new book, or your favorite author, say, Dan
Brown or someone else, has a new book out. When a new issue of your
favorite comic comes out, if you don’t have a subscription, you can
check it out and see if you want to buy it, perhaps with a 1-/2- page
preview. Likewise with newspapers and magazines. You can browse
through, buy individual issues, or get subscriptions delivered
electronically, with notifications telling you of new issues, or special
editions. This would be a driver of sales to the Windows 8 platform.
Include here textbooks, so you can have interactive textbooks, and with
Surface Pro, you can write notes in your texts also.
Additionally, you could mark down books you’ve bought before, along
with comics you bought, and magazines, so you can let the system start
predicting comics, books, and magazines you might like based on what
you’ve bought in the past, and allow you to share your ‘collection’ with
friends so they can like/comment, and you can see ’4 friends have read
this book also. See what else you might like based on this book.’ A
sensible extension of the Windows Store I would think.
Store (for Books)
Given the rise in e-Books, along with electronic magazine and
newspaper subscriptions, and textbooks, it would be great to have a
built-in Windows 8 bookstore, perhaps a partnership with Amazon for
deeper OS integration, so that I could subscribe to my favorite
newspapers, magazines, and comics, and have a live-tile notice of when
new issues arrive. Additionally, your audiobooks could appear in the
e-Book app as well. To make it even more personal, a social feed could
be added like the People and Pictures hubs in Windows Phone, so I can
see when friends have started reading or finished books, and I can
like/comment on those books to get recommendations, and if I like the
book, tap the book cover to go purchase it myself from Kindle or the
e-Book marketplace. If privacy concerns are warranted, the user can
have a Facebook button to decide to post to FB that they’re reading
something.
An additional feature for this more integrated bookstore would be to
include a “Zune-iversity” or “X-Box U” section for educational books,
textbooks, and podcasts, so that teachers can post their textbooks,
students can purchase them at a discount to the print version, and
include much richer content than a plain book could have.
Store (for Music, TV Shows, and Movies)
The X-Box Music and Video apps should be recombined and renamed to
Zune. It was much easier that way. But, barring that, the purchase
experience for Music should include the ability to see what friends are
listening to through XBM so that I can get recommendations, and
recommendations based on stuff in my current collection. Picks in Zune
did this already, but I don’t see that currently in XBM. The same goes
for TV Shows and Movies. How can I see recommendations for me, based on
my collections, based on what people bought who bought a particular
movie, or based on what my friends are watching? Why not show me, based
on me looking at “Supernatural” for example, that “18 friends have
watched this series” or “23 people who watched Supernatural also like
Smallville and Charmed” or something to that effect? Additionally, we
should have the option to request shows so that if we search and don’t
see a show, like “Get Smart” or “Star Trek: Voyager” or “Viper” then we
can request those shows, and see how many requests those shows have
gotten to be added to the marketplace.
Visually, I would prefer to see my albums as square tiles, while my
TV shows and Movies should be vertical rectangles that look like DVD
covers. That’s how we’re used to seeing them in real life, so the
digital should reflect that as well.
Store (for Apps)
For the app itself, I would like to see pivots at top that swipe as
they do on the Zune HD, where you could logically tell where you were,
and where else you could go by the pivots up top. It would make the
entire store more discoverable rather than just one large panorama.
Here you can see the pivots up top, with a dropdown next to store to jump directly to any point in the store simply.
Here
you can see that if you swipe the Surface Picks pivot to the left, or
tap it, the entire row of pivots will shift over. This mimics the Zune
HD behavior when browsing music or videos, and looks more appealing and
informative than not showing all the pivots available.
Additionally, Paul Thurott
makes a good point that Semantic Zoom should be improved in the Windows 8 store, something like this:
Travel
This is a nice app showing me lots of destinations with blurbs about
them, but it’s not easily discoverable what the point of it is. How
about adding some pivots so that I can see what I can do?
After
adding pivots, I still get the nice image, but I can see at a glance
which options there are in the app. How hard was that?
The search flights, search hotels options should be front page, and
again, the option to pin the app bars to the screen so that I can always
see them would be great. This would be a place where Local Scout could
integrate to show me restaurants, sites, and local events to make the
most of my trip.
For this app, it would be great to be able to enter a timeframe, say
Nov 4-10, and a few destinations, and have the app find the shortest
route, recommend a few places to stay, and have the option to see
restaurants (filtered by ‘chain,’ ‘local only,’ ‘cheapest,’ etc.) and
sights (‘free’ ‘cheap’ etc.) that might be of interest so that I can
make the most of my trip. Then have it calculate the cost for me so
that I can see what the trip will run, my travel times between
destinations, and how much time I’ll have at each place.
Trip
Planner page. You can add destinations, a budget, route type, lodging,
conveyance, date range, and people you travel with. The app would also
offer to send the trip to those people’s Windows 8 PCs so they can see
the same information and make any edits as well.
The
summary of your planned trip, with a background taken from your main
destination, which here is Atlanta, GA. It shows where you’re planning
on going, when, your budget, where you stay, with whom you’re going.
When you’re done, if you take any pictures, they’re automatically
uploaded to your skydrive in a trip folder, such as “Vacation 2013″ and
automatically shared with the people you went with. How simple is that?
When finished planning, you see the overall trip route mini-map, and a map underneath of the sites you will see in each city.
When I finish, it should also allow me to save that trip, along with
any pictures I mark as having been taken on that vacation and check-ins,
into a Skydrive folder so that I can send the vacation to friends and
family, and they can virtually walk through the vacation I took. That
would make for a great app experience.
Addendum: Now that I’ve looked, I can see the Frommer’s content, but
it’s far to the right, where no one would find it. This needs to be
front page so I can see attractions, nightlife, shopping, etc. from the
front page, not 5 swipes to the right as it currently is. The ability
to get reservations from within the app for hotels, flights,
restaurants, and purchasing tickets for any museums or tours would be a
great feature for this app. Again, adding pivots to the top of this app
would aid in discoverability, rather than the spartan and
non-discoverable interface it has today.
Viewing the hotels, it would be great to click on the neighborhood
and have it bring up a map so I can see where it is, and what’s nearby
regarding restaurants, museums, churches, etc.
Windows Phone 8
If you have a Windows Phone 8 device, the sync software for Windows
8/RT is the most worthless piece of code in existence for it. There’s
no way around that. Zune had wireless (wi-fi) synchronizing of
playlists so that if the playlist changed, your playlist on the phone
was always up to date without you ever having to do anything. There are
no conversion options to save mobile storage space (like Zune had).
Seriously, you have to go back to Windows Media Player from 2009 to set
up a sync relationship for this. How do you think that looks to a
current Apple or Android user, Microsoft? Do you think that this will
make that person want to switch? And with the “other storage” on the
phone taking up several gigabytes on a 16 GB, why is there no option to
see what’s taking up how much space, and to delete file by file, or app
by app?
Windows Update
I am going to have to agree a bit with
this article from
ZDNet concerning Windows Update. It’s time Windows Update got some
feature improvements. This article shows one glaring problem: I
actually have to save what I don’t want to lose manually. The
technology is already here to auto-incrementally save my documents so I
don’t need to do it myself. OS X does this in its most current
iteration, so I don’t think it would be that difficult to do it in
Windows.
X-Box Music and Video
If you’ve used X-Box Music or Video, you will know what I’m talking
about. They are incredibly and sorely lacking in features and their
user interfaces are way too focused on the marketplace over my
collection, and the way they arrange items is very wasteful of limited
screen real estate.
Compare this (TV Library Media Center Plugin):
- JackLuminous’ TV Library plugin for Windows 7 Media Center
- X-Box Video purchased TV Series listed by season
You can see in the first, how JackLuminous’
TV Library plugin
for Windows 7 Media Center makes much more efficient use of space than
X-Box Video does on your Surface Tablet. It uses DVD covers to tell you
which show is which, and this makes perfect sense. It also has pivots
so you can resort your shows the way you want to – by title, genre,
airdate, decade, rating, person (actors), and favorites. Why doesn’t
X-Box video do the same? How about showing us JUST the DVD covers, and
have a tap-hold right-click menu to ‘play series’, ‘edit metadata’, and
‘explore series’ and have the default tap be ‘explore series’ to view
the series detail page? Wouldn’t that make sense? Instead of using
pivots, X-Box Video (XBV) makes us swipe over and over to the right,
whereas Windows 7 Media Center gives us pivots. Tap, done. Zune HD
even had this one better. You tap or swipe and all your media was
resorted, like pages. Zune on desktop did this for sorting TV shows and
Movies from each other. So why doesn’t XBV do this same thing?
When you want to see the seasons, you tap into the series to see them:
- TV Library season view
To get to something remotely sensible in Video, you have to tap
“Explore Series” to get a pop-up, then you have to click View Seasons to
get into the TV show page, then swipe to the right to even get to the
seasons, at which point the episodes within that season still show in a
pop-up.
- Explore a series from the Collection screen
- X-Box video’s view of a series page. No seasons, just a huge image
This takes too long to get to. Two taps whereas JackLuminous figured
out how to do this with one tap. Come on, X-box video, you’re better
than that.
- X-Box Video Series List of Seasons
The above two views can be combined to stop wasting space. Have the
graphical background from the season page, seasons listed right, tap to
expand to a season page listing out all the episodes like Media Center’s
TV Library plug-in. Much more logical than the current layout. Plex
figured this out. Zune Desktop figured this out. One single page makes
more sense than forcing me to continually swipe to the right to see my
own TV shows I purchased on such a dull, gray, lifeless background.
- Season view of episodes, still a pop-up, still tiny.
You can see here that the list of episodes comes up in a tiny little
popup, where I can’t see all the episodes, or at least more than just a
few at a time. Even worse, my own videos that I spent time in
categorizing in Zune cannot be categorized in X-Box Video. But compare
the TV Library view of episodes:
- TV Library episode view, more graphical, and better use of screen space.
Much more graphical, with a nice background, episode synopsis, title,
airdate, and thumbnail. X-Box video can keep the list, but how about a
list if episodes to the right, with airdate, run-time, and a synopsis
along the bottom and a graphical background for the season? This kind
of metadata is readily available at thetvdb.com, so this isn’t too
terribly difficult to do. This interface would work in the “Modern UI”
style exactly as it is, or you can even have seasons as pivots,
scrolling up on each ‘page’ to see that season’s episodes, then pivot
right to see season 2, 3, and so on. How much more sense does that
make, and ease of discovery over X-Box video’s current design decisions?
What JackLuminous does that would be useful in X-Box Video would be
to have the TV Shows sortable with pivots for title, genre, year,
airdate, and cast. That way, I can see what aired today in my library,
along with what sci-fi shows I have, or what shows David Boreanaz has
been in that I own or are available on the X-Box store.
Now, about Movies. When you look in X-Box Video:
- Movie Library in X-Box video. Notice the wasted space to the right of all the DVD covers.
Now, check out the same thing in Media Center:
- Movie Library in Windows 7 Media Center. Larger, more graphical, better use of space.
Media Center has this much better with pivots at the top so you can
resort your way, and tap to view details about the movie you select.
X-Box Video would do well to copy this interface. How about this: show a
grid of movies like Win7 Media Center, tap to view the detail view,
where you see the widescreen graphic movie poster from the movie,
synopsis right, cast and crew pivots also, and a play button to start
the film, and an ‘add to playlist’ option as well. Take a queue from
Zune’s Marketplace view of movies for this.
Movie collection with pivots like Media Center to make it easy to resort your movies.
Check the above theoretical X-Box Video Movie collection. Wouldn’t
this be easier to navigate? Doesn’t this make better use of screen
space? Am I the only person to think about this? I would stretch this
interface a little more, and allow multi-select for movie marathons.
Everyone does it.
Moving to the next, X-Box Music. Again, the Marketplace is given
center stage, when I don’t really care. I want MY MUSIC FIRST. Not a
setting change, by default.
- X-Box Music halfway between my music and the now playing main screen. Note the wasted space next to the albums for text. Why?
Why can’t X-Box Music show just the album covers and just have pop-up
Live-Tile text for the album title? That would save space. Make the
albums 500×500 or 400×400 so they’re large enough for tap targets and
titles.
Now when looking at my music:
- X-Box Music Collection. Notice the wasted space, and how long it
would take to get to “The Who” or “Third Day” without jumplists. The
album covers are tiny, and don’t make use of the nice artwork the
artists put there, whereas Media Center:
- Music Library in Media Center. Notice how it looks more graphical, and does not waste space to the right of the album covers.
Three albums high, much more efficient use of space. Tap and you get
the album pop-up. Pivot to artist and you get an artist page with
albums on the front page. Not with X-Box Music. You again have to tap
“explore artist” then swipe far far to the right to get close to your
albums. Again, a cue from Media Center would be very useful for X-Box
Music. Or take my suggestion for Video, and do this: make the front
page contain all the albums (like Zune), show ALL ALBUMS so you can
scroll through without having to tap ‘view all albums’ – that should be
allowable by default. You would do well to take your visual cues from
the Zune software and Zune HD here, X-Box team.
Artist view that’s graphical, not gray, and contains pivots like Zune. This solves the problems of the current XBM artist view.
From the blog post on Paul Thurrott’s site, I can’t verify this since
I have a Zune subscription, but apparently the app displays ads while
playing your own music, and stops every hour to ask you if you’re still
there, even while typing, a prompt that will only stop if you
subscribe. Again, I can’t verify this, but if this is true, why would
anyone in his or her right mind think this is a good design decision to
nag a paid customer of your operating system just to play his own
music? Windows Media Player never did this. It just played. Zune
never did this. It just played. So why would X-Box Music do this?
Additionally, where are podcasts? I see no way to view them or add
new ones or subscribe, nor do I see any way to separate out my
audiobooks, which now take up space inside my music collection. That’s
sloppy handling, and should certainly be corrected.
If you decide to purchase a Windows Phone 8, XBM and XBV don’t really
do much for you, as Zune once did. You cannot set a playlist to synch
with the phone so that whenever the playlist changes on the computer, it
synchronizes automatically with the phone without your intervention.
Zune did that. XBM doesn’t. Zune even had Wi-Fi sync with the WP7
devices, something that oddly, WP8 and XBM cannot manage to do. This is
pretty poor coding to lose such an ability. Windows Media Player can
set auto-playlists based on certain criteria,
as shown here,
but for some reason, X-Box Music can’t do that exact same thing. Why
must we lose functionality as we “progress” up an operating system?
Microsoft, you really really need to make music sync and library
management a priority (amongst the other things listed in this post), so
that choosing your ecosystem over Apple will make the transition easy
and painless and make current users utterly happy, and Apple users
question why they ever went Apple in the first place.
Aside from the usability, how about TV Shows? There’s no way to have
a season pass to a show automatically download a file to your Surface
so that it’s ready for you when you open the app, no way to set a
notification to say “You have 3 new episodes ready to watch” and go see
which shows just downloaded for you. The main screen of this app should
allow you to set it to show your collection first, with a set
notification to see the new shows since you last opened the app, and
then a link to the marketplace to see what else is new. Additionally,
there is no way to ‘follow’ a show or ‘request’ a show to indicate to
Microsoft that that one show you like, say, “Get Smart” or “Star Trek”
or something else, is something you would like to see and would
purchase.
When purchasing in XBV, there is no way to set the download to always
occur in SD or HD, and takes 3 or 4 screens to complete, which takes
too long in my opinion.
The Television Store doesn’t have any alphabetical list of all TV
shows. I don’t know the genre of some TV shows, and having an
alphabetical list makes more sense to me than going through 15 genres,
which are also not alphabetized, to find the one show I want. Is it
seriously that difficult to alphabetize your wares? And release date is
not terribly useful, in my opinion. What about airdate? If I’m
looking for 80′s cartoons, why not show the series by genre (animation)
and then by airdate? That way I can get shows from around the same
timeframe and see possibly related items; speaking of that, why not show
‘people who bought this series also purchased xyz’ on a TV series page?
There’s no easy way to return to my collection’s home screen
overview. I have to keep pressing back, which often times looks
incredibly unresponsive. Media Center had a persistent home button on
it. Also, posting to Facebook what I’m listening to is a bit
difficult. From the Now Playing screen, if I do Share > Facebook, it
shares the Artist I’m listening to, not the song. I would assume that I
am sharing the song I’m listening to first off, and second, if not
that, I would like the option to also share the album, artist, and
playlist I’m listening to so that my friends can see the music as well.
Doesn’t that make sense? Also, why does the share function send a
generic graphic to Facebook instead of the album art for that specific
MP3?
For those who have large collections, such as myself, if I happen to
move my music from one hard drive to a completely new hard drive, Zune
never understood this, and I had to manually delete the old entries from
the library and manually re-add them, and manually recreate every
single playlist. Windows Media Player at the least would offer to
remove items no longer found from the library. X-Box music from what
I’ve seen, continues the behavior of Zune and does not know that you’ve
moved your music, refused to play, and refuses to scan your hard drive
to find your music after you’ve moved it, and if you re-add your music
back, it won’t recognize that it’s the same file and remove the
duplicate entry and update your playlists with the same file’s new
location. This would be a very welcome feature for those of us who add
larger hard drives to our computers as time goes on and we acquire more
digital files.
Another sticking point is when opening a file from the Desktop (since
managing a library in X-Box music is utterly impossible, especially
given the utter lack of podcast support for some mysterious reason), and
I turn off the screen, after a while, the volume-based play controls
and the play controls on X-Box music turn unresponsive and do not
actually pause the music or podcast I’m listening to. Zune didn’t have
this problem. Windows Media Player didn’t have this problem. But X-Box
Music does. X-Box Music is not ready for mainstream use. Will this
get updated in Windows 8.1 or before?
For the 1/3 snapped view for X-Box Music, it should ideally look just
like the Zune HD’s home screen did, and when playing, just like the
Zune HD’s now playing screen. That way, I can swipe through album
covers, tap the song list to get to the list of songs, play/pause
easily, and just play all My Music by pressing the nice play button
sitting next to music. How easy would that be?
This would be a great way to fashion the snap view of XBM while playing music. (Not my music, btw).
This is a (fair) version of how it could look:
The
changes I would make while pinned would be to show the song list as it
does on Zune HD, and show the album art, which I can swipe left/right to
change tracks.
This is how the music app should operate when not playing music. Simple and elegant and useful.
Here’s my version of this, with a slightly more colorful background, inspired by the Zune now playing screen:
A
version based on Zune, so that I can see music, TV, movies, pictures,
podcasts, and Smart DJ/Radio in one interface. The albums in the
background shift and change based on album art in my own collection,
just like Zune currently does.
From Now Playing, the song list should
just appear on the right-hand side like it already does in Zune and on
X-Box. I shouldn’t have to tap to get it to appear. That’s extra work I
shouldn’t have to do.
This
is how the Zune Now Playing appears on the PC. Very nice, and the
colors subtly shift across the screen while album covers rotate
occasionally.
Again I ask: Who allowed this and X-Box Video to be released in such unfinished states?
Other Things
How do I subscribe to RSS feeds? I see no way to do this built in to
the OS. This would be a great news reader and showcase for live tiles,
as well as showing off synchronization of the feeds between my phone,
PC, and tablet. I know we can subscribe in the News App, but a number
of RSS feeds aren’t ‘news’ but rather entertainment or just serialized
stories.
Where are the Facebook and Twitter applications? If/when they do
arrive, I would hope they’re based on the Metro versions from Windows
Phone currently, and not the Beta app that’s essentially the iPhone
version, with no Metro influences in it.
Where can I purchase audiobooks from X-Box Music? And can we get a
built-in magazine, newspaper, comic book subscription app from
Microsoft, with deals from publishers so that I can get my NY Times,
Florida Times Union, Wall Street Journal, Time magazine, Scientific
American, Discover, Game Pro, Electronic Gaming Monthly, X-Men, Batman,
etc. all in one app? This would be a great place for live tiles to show
me how many new issues I have of a comic or magazine. But, then again,
if this app were created by the same people who created X-Box Music and
X-Box Video, I’m not sure I’d want it.
I can continue listing how I would change and improve Windows 8, but I
think you get the idea. Make more options available on the screen, pin
the app bars, and use pivots more in addition to the panoramas, so that
we actually know what is available in the apps.
Concluding this short post, I would say that Microsoft needs to
update all the apps and Windows RT to make sure that its core features
and app features are at the very least on par with what is found NOW on
the iPad 4/iOS7 to compete reasonably with that product, and to succeed
in the marketplace and take marketshare from Apple and Google, Microsoft
will need to innovate RAPIDLY with this OS and their apps, provide well
constructed first and third party apps, and keep pace with the changes
the competition makes so that it doesn’t fall behind. The question is,
will Surface, Windows RT, and Windows 8 and their apps be a Zune, or
will they be an X-Box / Windows 7 story?
