Riagenic

The hardware seems excellent but the UI feels like another icon based copy-cat of the desktop UI metaphor like iOS and Android. Even WebOS had some new things going for it. For the sake of UI variety, I would pick WP7 to be in the top 3, atleast it offers an alternative form of UI radically different from the same old icon based desktop UI metaphor seen from almost 3 decades now in iOS/Android/Meego/WebOS. http://img.zdnet.com/techDirectory/_PROGMAN.GIF Principles of Metro UI Decoded. http://www.riagenic.com/archives/487

I read a few articles yesterday regarding WPF/Silverlight and politics inside Microsoft written by ex-Silverlight Product Manager: http://www.riagenic.com/ (Check the blog section) Hopefully that can give you some idea what the future will hold for WPF.

I wish Apple was the one that came up with Metro and not Microsoft. If it did, then many tech pundits with high readership like Gruber, Siegler et. al. would be posting endless analysis of how Apple shook up the UI paradigm to make a great new UI instead of going with the same old icons, toolbars and docks and how everyone else is copying them with sparse UI. That would've led tech minded folks to give Metro more credit than all this upvoted noise with link bait headlines on the tech blogs with flimsy analysis of only about how it sucks and nothing about the good parts like "content over chrome" or "authentically digital". I think Metro is in some ways becoming victim of tech partisanship, you can absolutely love your iPad, have an Android tablet with ICS(I do), but still recognize some good UI work being done by Microsoft. Edit: Something like the following post would've definitely made the HN front page if it was iMetro or even if it was Google that did it with Android. http://www.riagenic.com/archives/487

The graphical elements may look similar but Apple is smart enough to know that touch screens call for certain UIs/metaphors and that desktops call for others. The UI metaphors that work for PCs don't necessarily make sense on touch screens and the ease of use tablets afford due to their "touchability" is what Steve Jobs promised when he heralded this as the Post-PC era. Microsoft is simply not in a position to say "We agree with Apple". Doing so would betray Microsoft's current PC using customers. So its hand was forced to merge tablets (which have been killing PC sales for 2 straight years quarter after quarter, something even MS can't afford to deny) and the PCs that have brought MS this far. To make things worse MS made Metro which makes apps all look so similar that there is no way for developers to stand out driving some of them to other platforms. http://www.riagenic.com/archives/889

Looking at the link http://www.riagenic.com/archives/487 it shows they contrasted Metro with gaudy and awful chrome. I think it is a bit of a straw man in this case. Metro just took a idea and implemented the extreme of it. And extremes don't always work well there needs to be some compromise. This doesn't have to be all 0 or all 1 (all gaudy horrible chrome or completely flat polygons filled with color). "authentically digital" -- I am all for it except that most people already have some baggage or notions of how interfaces work (both in real world and digital). It also happens that those in digital world mimic those in the real world (buttons have shadows for ex) or some conventions have stuck that have been randomly chosen initially (links are underlined). Now maybe it is a noble goal to re-educate the user and I can see that. I remember hating Ubuntu's Unity. Now I like. It has re-educated me. But I also happened to like other aspects of Ubuntu and didn't want to switch to an alternative that why I stuck with it. But it seems a lot of people did and a lot of people will also do that to Windows.