Kam Vedbrat - Looking at Windows Vista's user interface (AERO)

Posted By: scobleizer | Sep 13th, 2005 @ 11:39 AM

Kam Vedbrat is a lead program manager on the AERO team which redesigned the User Interface of Windows Vista (the next version of Windows). We spend half an hour looking at the user interface.

Tags: Internet Explorer, MS Personalities, PDC05, Windows Media, Windows Vista, WinFX

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creamhackered
Beta Addict

Great video Kam, keep up the great stuff in the UX team Smiley

Wells

Excellent video.

intelman

You know, when watching videos and you scroll the page, the video tears and it is like all over the webpage. And switching videos on the main page, sometimes the old video leaves a few bits behind...that needs to be fixed like now. Nice video btw though!

Also when you switch videos while another is playing, that old one keeps playing....

Larsenal
ready to give an answer

The average windows user has 4 windows open at the same time... that's funny. I honestly thought it would be more than that.

dotnetjunkie

Yeah, makes you wonder how geeky we must be!!!

I have around 30 windows open on average...

//edit: I should probably add to this that I just tend to keep all the apps open that I use more or less regularly. I never reboot my system, it is on 24/7, really the only time I reboot is when a critical patch requires it.

It happens many times that instead of bookmarking an interesting webpage, I just keep the Internet Explorer window open for several weeks or even longer! (yeah, I'm not exaggerating, even now there are 2 IE windows sitting minimized on my taskbar that I opened nearly 2 months ago).

Also right now, there are 5 instances of Visual Studio .NET open, 3x VS2003 and 2x VS2005.

Outlook is another app that's always open for weeks on end without ever closing.

About the only time that I close a few windows (IE or shell windows) is when I once again get the message that windows is out or memory (or actually: most of the time you don't get that message but see funny things like menu bars or other window parts not showing)
=> is this something that will be impoved in Vista?
Because I'm sure that it's not due to the amount of RAM.

Come to talk about it, this is one of few things (or maybe even the ONLY important thing) that bothers me in Windows.
However, I must say that Windows 2003 never crashes, even all those times that memory is exhausted, it just DOESN'T CRASH! Smiley You only see the missing window parts or new windows refusing to open, but you close a few windows and everything is fine again.

It must be my choice of hardware components for sure, because I have seen other Windows XP or 2003 systems crash, but never my own system. I have still to witness the first fatal exception from my Windows 2003 systems in all these years, and yet I push my PC to the limit constantly!

staceyw
Before C# there was darkness...

Thanks Robert. Couldn't you just create a script or something to put up the download videos automatically? Does not bother me at all, but you should be able to automate it to save you some steps.

--wjs

moofish
Living in Scotland, UK

I love icons (xicons.com Big Smile

), I would like to know is how vista will represent icons, at the moment they come in fixed sizes e.g. 32x32, 48x48, 96x96 but all this analogue/dynamic resizing leads me to believe that Vista will use actual vectors.

So what icon format will vista use and Is it finalised?

SO is this the new customisation standpoint for Vista. Back when it was known as Longhorn I read that everything was going to be customizable, not so. Hmm well I would like to warn that although MS think their default skin for XP is great I have to use TGT's StyleXP/Toothpaste Theme to make XP look good, and have to use Cursor XP/3D cursor to make the cursor look good and then Microangelo’s ‘On Display’ to make the icons on the desktop behave like .ANI files (i.e. animate)

Can Vista do all of that, because if not its a step back for me.

P.S. I have more than 4 windows open right now

pusher robot
We are here to protect you

One thing I'm really curious about - since all the windows are textures, that means that the main "finder" should also be a texture, which means that the desktop should itself be a textured quad, right? Will there be any developer API for drawing on or overriding the desktop/wallpaper surface directly? For example, to create XAML-based animated wallpapers?

JChung2006

I believe that the average Windows user has 4 windows open. In fact, I would be willing to bet that most Windows users open their primary window maximized or full screen.

I joke that Microsoft should have named the product "Window" for that reason.

I have only two windows open: this one and the video.