Building Windows 8

Updating Windows 8 for General Availability

Steven Sinofsky — Tue, 09 Oct 2012 16:30:00 GMT

We are pleased to be releasing a set of improvements to Windows 8 in broad areas of performance, power management and battery efficiency, media playback, and compatibility. These improvements are available starting today via Windows Update. We wanted to briefly talk about our improvements to the engineering system and in particular the speed at which we were able to deliver these updates to you.

With every release of Windows we have had approximately 8-12 weeks from when we released the code to OEMs and manufacturing and when the product was available on new PCs and for retail customers. This time has historically been used to match newly developed PCs, which can include a variety of new or enhanced components, drivers, and companion software, with the final code for Windows. Because these hardware and software components are brand new, it could be the case that they uncover the need for changes and improvements to Windows in the areas of fundamentals.

We would often create dozens of changes for each OEM for these new PCs. Those changes would be deployed during manufacturing of those PCs and thus would be invisible to customers. While those changes could potentially apply to a broader range of PCs, we did not have in place the testing and certification to broadly distribute these updates. As a result, customers would have to wait until the first service pack to see these enhancements. We know many folks would spend time working to uncover these OEM enhancements in a desire to have the most up to date Windows.

During the final months of Windows 8 we challenged ourselves to create the tools and processes to be able to deliver these “post-RTM” updates sooner than a service pack. By developing better test automation and test coverage tools we are happy to say that Windows 8 will be totally up to date for all customers starting at General Availability. If you are an MSDN or enterprise customer, these updates will be available for your Windows 8 PCs via Windows Update as of today (October 9), following our standard cadence for Windows Updates on the second Tuesday of each month at about 10:00am.

As we have always done, any updates will have a knowledge base (KB) article and documentation. Documentation for these updates are documented here, and the text is reproduced below. We will of course continue to issue and publish changes and enhancements from this point forward, just as we have done with Windows 7.

We think this new pace of delivering high quality updates to Windows will be a welcome enhancement for all of our customers.

--Steven

KB article title:

“Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012 General Availability Cumulative Update”

Description:

Windows 8 Client and Windows Server 2012 General Availability Cumulative Update is available. This cumulative update package provides a collection of performance and reliability improvements that are designed to improve the Windows 8 experience. We recommend that you apply this cumulative update as part of your regular maintenance routines.

Improvements:

Increased power efficiency to extend battery life
Performance improvements in Windows 8 applications and Start screen
Improved audio and video playback in many scenarios
Improved application and driver compatibility with Windows 8

Known issues:

When you turn a Windows feature on or off, the computer may require a restart. For example, this action may be necessary when you turn Remote Access on or off.

Updating our built-in apps for Windows 8

Steven Sinofsky — Thu, 04 Oct 2012 22:30:00 GMT

We’re super excited to be approaching general availability (GA) of Windows 8 and Windows RT. With thousands of new apps in the Store, there are a lot to choose from and tens of thousands of developers have been very busy around the world creating new apps. Across Microsoft we’ve been busy since August adding new features and improving the apps that come with Windows and will be updating these apps before GA. We’ll introduce new features, improve performance, and increase reliability. This post is authored by Gabriel Aul on our program management team and details some of the updates you will see starting in the next day or so as the updates enter the Store.
--Steven

As we get close to the general availability (GA) of Windows 8, there are many things that the Windows team and other teams at Microsoft have been doing to get ready. Of course, the most important thing has been working with PC makers to help them ready the wave of amazing Windows 8 PCs that will soon be available. Some of these have been announced already and more announcements are to come. With Windows 8, we also introduced a new Store for Windows 8 apps, as well as a number of new apps that are included with Windows. We already have thousands of apps in the Windows Store, even before GA, and we’re working with developers from around the world to bring more in every day. The Windows Store represents an unprecedented opportunity for developers to reach hundreds of millions of customers, and we’re very pleased to see the exciting things that are showing up every day.

Of course, we are also taking advantage of the integrated way that we can deliver updates to apps through the Windows Store. Leading up to GA for Windows 8, we will be releasing updates for many of the apps that were included with the release to manufacturing (RTM) build of Windows 8 that was delivered to PC makers and to MSDN and TechNet subscribers in August. Naturally, these app updates will also be available to PC makers to include by default with their PCs shipping in the future, but for those of you who have already installed Windows 8 RTM, it is super easy to get the updates from the Store app. The Store tile will notify you when updates are available, and you can open it and click the updates link in the top right corner to see the list and install the ones you want.

The Bing app will be the first one out, available tomorrow, and more updates will roll out up until Oct 26^th. You will be notified of Windows Store updates just as you have come to expect, with a count of available updates on the Store tile. You can easily choose to install the updates at a convenient time:

Across the board, you’ll see performance and reliability improvements in the apps, but there are some great new capabilities as well. Here are some highlights of the changes you’ll see:

	SkyDrive Search within SkyDrive Rename and move folders and files New first-run experience Custom sort order
	Mail, Calendar, People, and Messaging Conversation view of your inbox Complete IMAP account support Accepting and declining invitations in email Capturing and updating your account picture Improved search Search for a contact within the Messaging app
	Photos Crop and rotate photos New auto-curated collage slideshows View photos and videos on network locations in your Pictures Library such as Windows Home Server, network shares, and HomeGroups Move through photos in your Pictures Library even when you open them from the desktop
	Maps Bird's eye view 3,000+ indoor venue maps Driving directions hints Improved navigation and layout Improved customization, including custom pushpins and roaming options Integration with Bing and Travel apps
	Bing Richer search results for local content and images Bing rewards integration Use zoom on your search results to see related queries Use the file picker to select an image from Bing to use on your lock screen or in your other apps
	Finance Additional news and magazine content More market exchanges enabled Finance videos
	News Additional news content from partners such as The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal Enhanced article reader, including font customization, zoom, pagination, and more Improved offline reading experience News videos Slideshows
	Sports Additional news and magazine content Sports videos Slideshows New soccer leagues, including MLS, J. League, and Brazilian League
	Travel Additional news and magazine content Improved flight search and new flight progress indicator Improved hotel listing page Interactive 360-degree panoramas (gyroscope supported)
	Weather Improved default location usability Hourly weather forecasts, up to 10 days Day & evening high/low temperatures
	Video Purchasing in local currencies Closed captioning Search by actor or director
	Music Expanded music services Rich "Now Playing" experience Discover more music with SmartDJ
	Games Exciting new games In-game purchasing Invites and turn notifications

We are excited to get these updated apps out to all of the people who have been using Windows 8 so far, and to have them ready for the Windows 8 launch for people buying new PCs or upgrading their existing PCs.

-- Gabriel Aul

Collaborating to deliver Windows RT PCs

Steven Sinofsky — Mon, 13 Aug 2012 16:00:00 GMT

Since RTM on August 1, PC manufacturers have been using the released software to ready new PCs designed for Windows 8. Collectively, we are all very excited by the innovation and creativity that will arrive in market this October. Our engineering collaboration has been better than ever as we work to bring better performance, reliability, and battery life to new PCs designed for Windows 8. We also know many are interested in how we extended this process to a new generation of PCs built on the ARM platform. This post details how we have collaborated on the development of Windows RT and new PCs designed for the operating system. Mike Angiulo, the vice president of our Ecosystem and Planning team, authored this post.
–Steven

Windows 8 and Windows RT each reached the RTM milestone, and we are hard at work in collaboration with ecosystem partners, including PC manufacturers, Silicon partners, and other component suppliers, to complete high quality Windows RT and Windows 8 PCs that we think you’ll love. We’re very excited about the designs PC manufacturing partners have built on the foundation of Windows 8 and Windows RT.

The breadth of Windows 8 Intel- and AMD-based designs from our PC manufacturing partners will continue to push the envelope with powerful computing and innovative design. You can expect to see everything from ultra-thin sleek designs with stunning high-resolution displays, to beautifully designed All-In-One PCs with large immersive displays complete with touch, to high-power towers rocking multiple graphics cards and high-performance storage arrays. In addition, this broad range of PCs will provide price and feature combinations that allow every customer to find a PC that fits their needs and lifestyle perfectly.

We are particularly excited about the new low power x86 Windows 8 PCs that will take advantage of Intel’s SoC platform innovations to provide an always on and always connected experience (known as connected standby). Just recently, Lenovo announced the ThinkPad Tablet 2, which offers an outstanding combination of new features built on the latest Intel ATOM® processor. We’ll cover the benefits of this scenario later in the post.

Microsoft has worked very hard with this release to provide the tools and support to contribute to new PCs that are more reliable, faster, use fewer system resources, and have improved software loads than comparable Windows 7 PCs. From the newest Ultrabook™ to the most powerful and extensible workstations, Windows 8 PCs are on the way.

Windows RT begins a new era of ARM-based PCs, where we are working with our Silicon and PC manufacturing partners to bring a whole new set of innovations to market. In an earlier post, Building Windows for the ARM processor architecture, we focused on the detailed engineering work required to create Windows RT. In the remainder of this blog I would like to provide an update on our efforts to collaborate across the ecosystem in bringing new Windows RT PCs to market. But first, let’s briefly recap the key points from the previous post:

Windows RT shares significant code with Windows 8 and has been developed for and will be sold and supported as a part of the largest computing ecosystem in the world.
We have achieved our goal of one Windows binary for all Windows RT SoC platforms from NVIDIA, Qualcomm, and Texas Instruments, each of which has developed innovative ARM CPUs that form the basis of a complete system.
Delivering Windows RT PCs has been about building out a new system for the first time—a completely new ecosystem of PCs providing opportunities for PC makers to bring to life a new generation of PCs with new capabilities, starting with ARM-based processors.
Windows RT PCs are thin and light in industrial design, and have long battery life and integrated quality. These PCs have all been designed and manufactured expressly for Windows RT.
PC makers will provide Windows RT PCs as integrated, end-to-end products that include hardware, firmware, and Windows RT software. Windows RT software will not be sold or distributed independent of a new Windows RT PC, just as you would expect from a consumer electronics device that relies on unique and integrated pairings of hardware and software. Over the useful lifetime of the PC, the provided software will be serviced and improved.

If you are following Windows RT, perhaps you have taken note of the Asus Tablet 600 (Windows RT) announcement or Microsoft’s own Surface RT™ news. Along with Asus, we are excited to share that there will be ARM-based PC designs from Dell, Lenovo, and Samsung running Windows RT.

You will need to stay tuned for more details; PC manufacturers will be unveiling their products as we approach the Windows 8 and Windows RT launch. What I can say is the spectrum of form factors and peripherals being developed to meet each unique customer’s computing needs is unique in the industry.

“Dell’s tablet for Windows RT is going to take advantage of the capabilities the new ecosystem offers to help customers do more at work and home. We’re excited to be Microsoft’s strategic partner, and look forward to sharing more soon.”

- Sam Burd, Vice President, Dell PC Product Group

The uniqueness of our approach starts with a new way of working across partners to engineer a PC—a collaboration that brings the best of all parties together to deliver end-to-end experiences that are integrated and optimized from the chipset to the experience.

It’s also worth taking a moment to describe how our collaboration on these PC efforts has been different than in any other Windows release. Our engineering collaboration on these Windows RT PCs has been strong, collaborating with the PC manufacturers, Silicon partners, and Operators to focus on hardware, software and services integration. Each respective partner was committed to sharing early iterations of their products, whether it was a SoC bring-up board, early builds of Windows RT, firmware and drivers, or hundreds of pre-release PC hardware samples (such as the ones featured in earlier demonstrations and videos). Product designs were informed and revised by our collective efforts through development and testing. As a result, all of these Windows RT PCs will have consistent fast and fluid touch interactions, long battery life, connected standby, and are beautiful, thin, and light designs. All of these are designed to make the most of the capabilities of Windows RT.

This is a snapshot of an actual pre-release Windows RT PC, showing a very early engineering prototype and the evolution to its current form.

Windows helped achieve these goals by focusing on optimizing key scenarios. Taken together, these scenarios drive a new level of mobile experience and performance not possible without new technology and engineering collaboration. So let’s dig into to some of the specifics.

Connected standby is the scenario of having your PC be always on and always connected in the new connected standby state without excessively draining your battery, so that you have access to your important and up-to-date information whenever you need it. When your Windows RT PC is not in use, it will move into a new low-power mode that allows it to keep your data fresh and current while also not requiring a battery charge for days. And when you need your system, it will turn on in less than a second at the touch of a button, which is a mobile phone experience but in a full PC. Additionally, we focused on an aggressive whole system power modeling scenario that has allowed us to better inform battery capacities to deliver all-day battery life with days of connected standby in thin and light designs.

The following chart shows some of the measurement ranges we are seeing as we test early production PCs for the connected standby and power scenarios.

The measurements are based on firmware still undergoing final optimizations, and the just released Windows RT RTM code, and will only improve as the PCs move towards manufacture. To provide context on the significance of the measurement, it is important to understand how the scenario was measured. In this case, the PC was playing back in full screen a local HD video at full resolution with a screen brightness of 200 nits. It was also configured for one email account using the Microsoft network. Finally, these numbers are also influenced by the different PC form factors themselves, which include both tablets and laptops, screen sizes that vary from 10.1” to 11.6”, and battery sizes spanning 25 Whr to 42 Whr.

Scenario	Early production range
HD Video Playback	8 hours to 13 hours of scenario run time
Connected Standby	320 hours to 409 hours of scenario run time

During development, further power modeling analysis at the component level allowed us to better understand where we needed to invest in design optimizations. For example, typical touch controller solutions were based on multi-chip solutions. By reducing those solutions to single-chip designs, we achieved lower power usage and reduced thermals, which translated to smaller battery sizes and thinner and lighter designs. The table below provides an overview of the typical weight and thicknesses we have been able to achieve with our partners across the different models representing different form factors based on ARM SoCs.

System characteristics	Measurement range
Weight (g)	520g to 1200g
Length (mm)	263mm to 298mm
Width (mm)	168.5mm to 204mm
Height (mm)	8.35mm to 15.6mm

These single-chip solutions not only reduce power requirements, but they also provide performance optimizations that result in fast and fluid touch usage. The Windows RT PCs that our partners will be delivering for the upcoming launch provide sampling rates of 100Hz per finger. This not only allows for fast and fluid response, but also incredible industry-leading accuracy.

Our graphics core has also gone through extensive optimization. Besides the optimizations around power-efficient HD video playback, the core Windows RT UI animations achieve 60fps, which was our design goal.

We didn’t stop at optimizing power, thickness, and weight. We also focused on enabling exciting new scenarios in these Windows RT PCs, such as sharing information intuitively and easily. You will see NFC integration in some of our Windows RT launch PCs that open up fun and interesting things like tap to share. By simply tapping two NFC-enabled Windows RT PCs together, users can easily share photos, URLs, map directions, and anything else that our software partners have designed into their Windows apps. And of course Windows RT natively supports a broad range of device scenarios such as USB mass storage, printing, audio/video peripherals, and more, along with connectivity through WWAN, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and USB. These build on the common foundation of Windows 8 and Windows RT, and were previously shown as early as the //BUILD/ conference.

Windows RT is not just for tablet form factors. Some of our Windows RT PCs come with full keyboard and touchpad solutions, whether removable/dockable or a traditional clamshell. Not only do these solutions provide additional battery capacity, but they also provide a new touchpad experience that incorporates intuitive Windows 8 gestures. By working closely with our touchpad component vendors, we have incorporated native support in firmware to deliver incredibly fast gesture recognition that makes interacting with Windows a breeze. The touch gestures that will be natively supported are described in these two tables:

Single-finger slide	Single/two-finger tap, double tap	Two-finger slide

Mouse cursor manipulation	Primary/secondary button click, double-click at cursor location	Horizontal or vertical scroll (mouse wheel)

Two-finger pinch	Swipe in from the right edge	Swipe down from the top edge	Swipe in from the left edge

Zoom (Ctrl + mouse wheel)	Toggle the charms (Windows logo key + C)	Toggle the app commands (Windows logo key + Z)	Switch to last app (Windows logo key + Ctrl + Backspace)

Finally, the wealth of hardware components and optimizations is only as rich as the applications that take advantage of them. As an ecosystem, Windows, the PC manufacturers, and the Silicon partners have been engaged with developers around the world to design application experiences that will light up the capabilities of this new PC hardware. We’ve purposely built thousands of reference design hardware systems to develop and test the OS and apps, collectively seeding over 1500 Windows RT reference systems to ISV and IHV companies in preparation for launch. The results are starting to show, as we’ve seen over 90% of the RTM applications in the Windows Store support Windows RT, as well as the Windows Hardware Certification requirements working to ensure every Windows RT PC is indeed compatible with a broad set of peripheral devices such as printers, webcams, and mobile broadband modules.

Windows RT represents a significant re-imagining of not only Windows, but Windows PCs and how we partner together to engineer them. The deep engineering collaborations from the Silicon and component manufacturers through to our PC partners and Windows engineering team have provided a compelling suite of exciting new Windows PCs that deliver on the promise of fast and fluid, always on and always connected, thin and light, and all-day battery life. We are looking forward to the exciting announcements ahead from Dell, Lenovo, and Samsung.

--Mike

Releasing Windows 8 - August 1, 2012

Steven Sinofsky — Wed, 01 Aug 2012 16:00:00 GMT

Today marks an important milestone in the Windows 8 project. The Windows 8 team is proud to share with you that a short while ago we started releasing Windows 8 to PC OEM and manufacturing partners. This means our next milestone will be the availability of exciting new models of PCs loaded with Windows 8 and online availability of Windows 8 on October 26, 2012.

Back when we first demonstrated Windows 8 in May 2011, we described it as “reimagining Windows, from the chipset to the experience,” and that is what Windows 8 (and Windows RT) represents for both Microsoft and partners. The collective work: from the silicon, to the user experience, to new apps, has been an incredibly collaborative effort. Together we are bringing to customers a new PC experience that readies Windows PCs for a new world of scenarios and experiences, while also preserving an industry-wide 25-year investment in Windows software.

We continue to be sincerely humbled by the breadth of participation in our pre-release testing. The previews of Windows 8 (Developer, Consumer, Release) have been the most widely and deeply used test releases of any product we have ever done. Over 16 million PCs actively participated in these programs, including approximately 7 million on the Release Preview that started 8 weeks ago. The depth and breadth of testing validate the readiness of Windows 8 for the market.

The openness of the previews presents a unique perspective on product development, and we’re deeply committed to the transparency of the preview process. No product used by so many people in so many different ways is developed “out in the open” like Windows 8 has been. This blog, the forums, and the preview releases form an important part of the development process. Major changes have been made at each milestone and as we promised, the final release (build 9200, for those tracking) contains many promised refinements. We are humbled by the responsibility of meeting the needs of such a diverse set of customers and enthused by the deep level of participation in the pre-release process.

While we have reached our RTM milestone, no software project is ever really “done.” We will continue to monitor and act on your real world experiences with Windows 8—we’ve used the preview process to test out our servicing and we have every intent of doing a great job on this next important phase of the product. Hardware partners will continue to provide new devices and improve support for existing devices. PC makers no doubt have quite a bit in store for all of us as they begin to show off PCs specifically designed for Windows 8.

With improvements in fundamentals, enhanced storage and connectivity, newly architected subsystems, the “fast and fluid” user experience, and the WinRT platform (to name a few), Windows 8 has literally thousands of new features. We did a record number of blogs posts (and videos) and did not even come close to covering the full breadth of Windows 8. There’s much left to learn about and discover in the product.

Some of the most exciting innovations with Windows 8 are yet to come—the innovations from developers building apps on the new WinRT platform. Today, the Store is open for business and we’ll rapidly expand to over 200 markets around the world. The opportunity for developers around the world to deliver innovative (and profitable) apps is unique with Windows 8. We’re excited to see the work developers will be bringing to Windows 8. We’ll also have a chance to talk more about the Windows 8 platform at the next BUILD conference recently announced.

We know there are lots of questions about how to get Windows 8 and when, and of course more questions to come about exploring and using the full set of thousands of Windows 8 features. Our Windows Team Blog today has posted a lot of new information and gathered up some important details that we hope will answer your questions. Please check our blog and stay in touch on the in-market developments of Windows 8 there.

On behalf of the Windows 8 engineering team, we want to thank you very much for your contributions throughout development and your contributions yet to come to Windows 8. THANK YOU!

Next stop, October 26, 2012 and General Availability!

--The Windows 8 team

Simplifying printing in Windows 8

Steven Sinofsky — Wed, 25 Jul 2012 17:30:00 GMT

Printing is one of the most common things we do with our PCs even as we read and work with more online resources. We set out to simplify and improve this common operation--working with partners across the ecosystem to deliver these improvements in Windows 8. This blog post was authored by Adrian Lannin, a lead program manager on the Printing team.

--Steven

Of all the peripheral devices that you can connect to your Windows PC, printers are one of the most popular, and have been supported for the longest time. In fact, Windows 1.0 (shipped in 1985) supported “a number of printers and plotters” and included a “Print Spooler [which] allows the user to work on one file while printing on another” according to the Windows 1.0 Press Kit. The screenshot of Windows 1.0 below shows the files included with that version of Windows – Epson.drv, lots of font files, and the print spooler process. Some parts of the print system are older than the people who work on it. :-)

Over the years, the print system has evolved into a complex architecture that supports printing to a huge variety of printers, and can scale from a simple $50 inkjet at home to a high-availability print server hosting thousands of print queues for hundreds of thousands of users, driving printers that cost tens of thousands of dollars each.

The print system touches many layers and facets of Windows. It shows UI, and it hosts drivers that also show UI. It performs intensive graphics operations, since printing is essentially re-drawing your on-screen content onto paper. It encompasses lower-level communications, mainly USB or network (the majority of printers bought in the US today are network-capable, but our telemetry data tells us that over 75% of the printers installed with the Windows 8 Consumer Preview are plugged into a USB port). The print system needs to scale to very large, mission-critical deployments in large businesses but also run efficiently on small systems.

In this blog post I’m going to talk about the work that we've done in Windows 8 to re-imagine how the print system can best provide good device support to our customers. I'll show you how it works on ARM-based PCs and in Metro style apps. And I'll talk about what we've done to ensure that the maximum number of existing printers "just work"—whether you're accessing them from the desktop, from a Metro style app, or on a device running Windows RT.

Reimagining the print system for Windows 8

In Windows 8 we've introduced a new printer driver architecture, which we call version 4, or v4. The v4 architecture produces smaller, faster printer drivers, and it supports the idea of a print class driver framework--a system that allows people to install their printers without having to locate a driver for that device, in many cases.

As you've probably guessed, V4 is the fourth iteration of the printer driver architecture in Windows. V3 was the architecture used from Windows 2000 to Windows 7, and it’s actually still fully supported in Windows 8 for device compatibility reasons. So if you only have an existing driver available for your current printer, then it should still work in Windows 8. Versions 1 and 2 were the driver architectures for Windows 1.0 through Windows ME.

Before I explain how the print system works, I’d like to talk about some of the requirements that we worked to address with the Windows 8 print system.

Printing from Metro style apps

One of the things that we needed to figure out was how to give Metro app developers the ability to print. Printing from win32 applications requires knowledge of graphics programming, either GDI (Graphics Device Interface) or XPS (XML Paper Specification). When we looked at how we could make printing possible from Windows 8 apps, we completely reinvented how we enable printing from the Windows Runtime, and we made printing very easy to use from HTML5/JavaScript and XAML/C# apps.

Integrating printing into Metro style apps

Printing from a Metro style app should naturally be a Metro style experience. I’m sure that when most of you have printed something, you've seen a little applet pop up to tell you that the printer is out of paper, or to offer you the opportunity to purchase ink.

These pop-ups are very common with inkjet printers. Some pop up only when relevant (you have low ink), while others pop up every time you print. These pop-ups come from the printer driver software itself, and they are all desktop UI, of course. But when printing from the Metro style Photos app, for example, we don’t want you to have to switch over to the desktop just to see UI that tells you that printing is in progress.

Printing in Windows RT

Printer drivers have evolved over time to include a lot of functionality— some install services, some install numerous little applications, and many are now quite large. The v3 printer driver model in use since Windows 2000 evolved into a highly complex and highly extensible model, which allowed printer manufacturers a lot of freedom in what is installed with their driver software. When we thought about how this would work on some of the devices that are going to run Windows RT, we knew that we had to make some significant architectural changes. We really wanted to ensure that we didn’t negatively impact ARM systems by running unnecessary services, and we wanted to reduce system resource usage, while still providing support for as many devices as possible.

Lots of printers supported, far fewer drivers

There's a huge diversity in printer capabilities, and Windows supports a vast range of printers. In Windows 7 and earlier versions of Windows, each of these printers required a specific driver in order to work (there are some exceptions, such as universal printer drivers, but these tend to be large and resource hungry). This meant that the number of drivers that we included with Windows (we call these in-box drivers) was very large so as to provide good support. Of course, we have many more drivers on Windows Update, but we believe that it’s important to have a core set of in-box drivers that support popular devices, so we can still provide a good printing experience for people who can’t or won’t download a driver from Windows Update. In-box drivers are essential for Windows RT—in fact, it uses only in-box printer drivers. The challenge here is to get a relevant set of printers supported, but to also reduce the resources required to accomplish this.

Another interesting challenge in supporting lots of printers is that the support gets stale over time. The set of drivers included in Windows 7, for example, provided excellent support for devices released in 2008 and 2009, but as new devices were released over the years, and time went by, the set of drivers in Windows 7 became less relevant. One big challenge in Windows 8 then, is to ensure that Windows provides a high level of support for lots of printers, including ones that haven’t even been released yet.

Printer sharing

Anyone who has administered a print server can tell you that getting the correct drivers installed to support sharing is the most time-consuming part of managing a print server. Some of these difficulties you might encounter when you're trying to share a printer at home too, especially if you have both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows. This becomes tricky because the print “server” (which just means the PC that the printer is connected to – not actually Windows Server) has to provide the drivers to the clients that want to print to the shared printer. In Windows 7, we used HomeGroup to address this problem, and it works well much of the time. However, the requirement to load drivers for each Windows architecture becomes more problematic when you think about printing from Windows RT.

Although we expect that most people who print from Windows RT devices are likely to print to wireless printers, we didn’t want to totally exclude the possibility of printing to a USB printer. On the other hand, we didn’t want to increase the complexity of printer sharing by requiring people to add drivers for 32-bit clients, 64-bit clients, and Windows RT clients! So, with the v4 model in Windows 8, we developed a new way to share printers that doesn't rely on putting client drivers onto the print server.

The print system in Windows 8

Applications enable you to create and view content. The purpose of the print system is to provide these apps with the means to print your content to any installed printer without having to worry about what particular device is installed. I’m going to talk a little about how the app prints, and go into more detail about how we get the content onto a printed page.

Creating printable content

For apps, adding printing support is quite straightforward. The content that you want to print from an app is in a format that the app specifies. For Metro style apps, this will often be HTML5 or XAML, but for Win32 apps such as Word or Photoshop, the content is in a format specific to each particular app.

So when you want to print from an app to your printer, one of the things that the print system needs to do is to translate the content from the app's format to the format that the printer understands. Unfortunately, printers don’t all understand the same formats (not even close!) so this turns into quite a bit of work.

To give a real example, an app such as Word uses the GDI graphics system to draw the content both to the screen and to the printer. When possible, the print system uses a high quality intermediate format called XPS (XML Paper Specification) as its internal content format; we convert the content from Word into XPS. We chose to use XPS as the foundation of our print system because it is a very flexible format and is just like electronic paper. It supports high-fidelity color, and since it’s an XML-based description with no executable code embedded, it’s great for archival purposes and it is secure compared to other options. In addition, Microsoft has worked with ECMA International (European Computer Manufacturers Association) to make it an open standard (ECMA standard TC46, OpenXPS). Both the desktop viewer and the Reader app can display OpenXPS. I “print” all my receipts from online purchases as XPS files.

Once the content is being managed by the print system, it is then converted to the format that the printer understands (if necessary; there are lots of printers that understand XPS directly) and the print system sends this to the printer with the correct options set, and the job prints.

In Windows 8, we have a distinct improvement to this story because all Metro style apps use Direct2D as their basic drawing format, and Direct2D and XPS share the same XML-based graphics “language.” So in another real-world example, the Reader app uses Direct2D to render its content onto the screen. It also uses Direct2D to render the same content to the print system. Reader’s content can easily be submitted to the print system as XPS, without any costly conversion from GDI.

If the app requires a print layout that is different from the screen layout, then it can do this using style sheets or XAML. This means that you don’t have to “click here for a printer-friendly version of this page.” If you have a printer that supports XPS, then the path from the app to the printer involves no conversions at all, and printing is extremely fast!

Now that you understand in broad terms how an app sends print information to the print system, I’m going to talk about what the system does with that, the services it provides, and what else has changed in Windows 8.

Supporting lots of printers

One of the big benefits that Windows provides to apps is that it abstracts the specific printer from the app, so that the app's programmer doesn’t have to worry about what printer you've installed. Windows supports tens of thousands of printer models in total, including printers that are supported by drivers available via Windows Update or the manufacturer’s website. When we see printers that don’t work, this is often because the manufacturer has chosen to block the installation if they don’t recognize the version of Windows that their software is being installed on. We work with printer manufacturers to get these packages updated, but this does take some time.

Ideally, when you plug a new printer into Windows, it just works, without your needing to go off and find drivers.

So how do we make that happen? In the past we've shipped a lot of printer drivers in Windows. Vista contained about 4500 drivers, and Windows 7 contained about 2100 drivers. Even though Windows 7 had half as many drivers as Vista, it provided better market coverage, by which I mean that there was a better chance that it had a driver for the more popular printers. Why is this? There is an incredible diversity of printers in use. In Vista, we supported a lot of devices that were old and no longer in popular use, and so the relevance of the set of devices supported was not as good as in Windows 7.

As an aside, the other thing we do when we release a new version of Windows is to take the drivers that were in the previous version and post them to Windows Update, so that even though these devices may be dropping in popularity, it’s still possible for people to automatically get the device working by just plugging it in.

Here's a photo I took of one of the benches in one of the printer labs (we have several) where we test that this all works. You can see several small inkjets and laser printers from different manufacturers. Luckily for my ears, we don’t test with dot matrix printers very often these days.

People tend to keep printers for 5-7 years on average, so when we want to add support, we have to think "what devices are people using? Which were the most popular devices over the past several years, and what will be the most popular in the future?" This last part is tricky because, pretty soon after we release Windows, the printer manufacturers will release devices that we didn’t know anything about. This means that over time, the set of devices that we support in any particular version of Windows becomes stale.

We know that at any given moment, about 100 specific printer models make up about 50% of the installed base. If we want to support 75% of the models being used today, then we need to support about 300 models. The diagram below illustrates this.

To get to 95%, we need over 1000 models supported. But the problem is even harder because the printers that make up this set of 100, or 300, or 1000 changes all the time. The 100 printers that represent 50% of the market today are not the same 100 printers that will represent 50% next week, or next month, and especially not next year. Every day, many people buy and install new printers.

As I mentioned above, we basically took a brute-force approach to solving this in the past. We have representatives from the major printer manufacturers working directly with Microsoft, sitting in offices in Redmond, working to check their source code into Windows. They would create a completely new set of in-box drivers for each new release of Windows. This just isn’t very efficient.

In Windows 8, we took a radically different approach, and have stopped shipping lots of printer drivers with Windows. Instead, we built a print class driver framework. This framework is extensible, as it supports printing to existing devices, but it also allows manufacturers to include support for new devices, even those that have not yet been designed.

With a print class driver framework, we can get closer to giving you an experience like driverless printing, where you don't have to actually go and find a driver, but instead the printer just works with the Windows printing system. A true driverless printing experience requires changes to how most printers are designed, and the print class driver framework provides support for this idea, but we also feel that it’s very important to provide as much support for existing devices as possible.

With the ability to support new and planned printers, the number of printers that are supported by the Windows 8 print class driver framework will actually increase over time.

Besides the great progress in increasing the number of devices covered, we have also been able to reduce the resources that we use to achieve this coverage.

First, we reduced the amount of disk space needed to support printers and imaging devices from 768MB in Windows Vista, to about 184MB in Windows 8. This number is an average across different editions and architectures of Windows 8. The following graphic illustrates the reduction in space used since Windows Vista.

Comparison of disk space needed to support printers and imaging devices in Windows 8, Windows 7, and Windows Vista

In addition, the reduction in disk space used has been accompanied by an increase in the relevance of the devices supported directly by Windows. The following table summarizes how the relevance of the inbox coverage has increased, while disk use has decreased.

	Approximate number of devices supported in-box	Approximate installed base	Disk space used
Windows Vista	4200	55-60%	768 MB
Windows 7	2100	60-65%	446 MB
Windows 8	2500	70% at release growing to 80%	184 MB

This is a huge improvement in Windows 8, and this reduction in space used directly translates into more available storage space for users of hardware with limited storage capacity, which we expect will be a characteristic of some Windows RT computers.

The Windows 8 printer driver model also allows us to focus our manufacturing partners on a set of code that will not change as much from one version of Windows to the next, so we will be able to more usefully spend those resources on improving quality and performance, instead of constantly repopulating the driver set.

Print class driver architecture

Besides wanting to create an architecture that supports the needs of Windows RT and Metro style apps, we wanted to make sure the model would also work with existing devices, and would utilize technologies that were familiar to printer manufacturers, so that it would be easier for them to implement the new driver technology.

A printer driver does several key things:

Configuration allows the user to change settings, translating the intent to turn on double-sided printing (for example) into the specific command that the printer needs for this. Configuration is presented to the user through the user interface.
Rendering translates the printed content from the format that Windows print system uses into the format that the printer understands. In some cases, the printer may directly understand the native Windows print format (XPS), so for those devices, there is no work to do here, unless they want to do extra rendering (doing multiple pages per physical sheet of paper is an example of this case). The part of the driver that does rendering is called the render filter.
Events allow the printer to inform the user that something has happened – a job has completed, there has been a paper jam, or the printer is out of ink.

Configuration UI

One big change between the old driver model and the Windows 8 driver model is in how the UI is provided. In the old printer driver model, the configuration UI was built into the driver. Here's an example of some typical printer UI (taken from the Epson NX430 that is currently on my desk).

As I mentioned earlier, we needed to find a way to enable the display of Metro style UI when people wanted to change printer settings.

In the Windows 8 driver model, the manufacturer’s UI is completely separate from their driver. This is a much better architectural decision for many reasons: The UI to control the printer is now an app that can be invoked when printing from Metro style apps or desktop apps. This allows printer manufacturers to present you with a much richer experience – imagine access to video showing you how to set up your printer or install an ink cartridge.

Here is an example of a Metro style app that Epson has developed for the Epson NX430:

You can see that this UI has all the hallmarks of a Metro style app, but for your printer. It includes an attractive view of the ink levels of the printer, and is much easier to use, especially on touch-screen devices.

Windows will automatically show you the correct type of UI – desktop printer UI when you're printing from desktop apps, and Metro style UI when you're printing from Metro style apps.

If the manufacturer hasn't provided any configuration UI for their device, then Windows provides some standard UI that you can use with any printer. However, when the printer manufacturer has decided to invest in providing a customized experience for their device, they can provide an app that replaces the standard Windows UI. Then, when you decide to alter the configuration of the device, or when the device configuration changes during printing (e.g. paper jam), then Windows will display the manufacturer’s customized app to you instead.

Rendering

One of the most important functions of a printer driver is to take the content that the app produces when you ask it to print, and convert that into something that the printer can understand. This was one of the most challenging areas of building the Windows 8 print class driver, so let’s look at it in a bit more detail.

As described above, desktop apps like Word or Photoshop use graphics commands to draw their content onto the screen or the printer. When they do this, the print system receives the content, converts it into XPS if necessary, and then calls the printer's driver (or more specifically, the render filter part of the driver) to convert the content into the right format. This is sent to the printer and your file is printed out.

Probably one of the largest challenges in supporting a very wide range of printers is in dealing with the rendering portion of the problem. Some of the more expensive printers support standard “page description languages” or PDLs, such as PostScript, PCL, and XPS. However, less expensive, consumer-focused devices are manufactured with cost savings in mind, and many of these support proprietary methods of sending the page information to the printer. Some manufacturers may have only a few languages that they use across their product line, but others may tweak the language from one model to the next, trying to get the most out of their printer hardware.

This leads to a 1:1 mapping between printer driver and printer hardware.

Imagine each PDL as being a complete printer driver and it’s easy to see that increasing support involves a steadily increasing number of drivers. Of course, this is a bit of a simplification and it is possible to create a driver that supports a number of devices, and we have often seen drivers that support a series of printers. But the key point here is that Windows 7 and earlier versions of Windows didn’t do anything to support this design approach.

The printer driver model in Windows 8 supports the idea that a PDL (or driver) can be associated with multiple devices.

We've been working with our printer manufacturer partners to have them include an identifier in their device that describes how they are supported more generically. We call this a compatible ID. So for example, if a device has a compatible ID that says that the device supports XPS, then the print system knows that it doesn’t need to find a model-specific driver for that device, it can just install a generic XPS driver for the device. Windows understands that the device is a generic XPS printer and can treat it that way. Of course, Windows also understands that this is a Fabrikam 1000 printer (or whatever), so if there is a model-specific driver, then Windows will install it. But if there is no driver available, then Windows can still print to the printer using the class driver.

So in this example, we have a set of render filters in-box as part of the class driver model, and these can be installed for any device that implements a matching compatible ID. The logical extension of this idea is that it’s quite possible for future devices, devices not yet designed or built, to be compatible with the print class driver in Windows 8. We’ve been working with the printer manufacturers and they all plan to implement compatible IDs in their devices (many already do). Because of this capability, the number of printers that are supported in Windows 8 will increase over time, rather than decrease, and more and more people will get the experience of being able to use their printers instantaneously from Windows 8 without the need to go and find a driver.

But what about all the devices that have proprietary rendering languages? The print class driver supports that model too, but with the disadvantage that we do need to have a separate rendering filter for each small set of models that speak each unique language. There is no way around this, and in Windows 8 we've taken a number of filters that address a set of popular models. However, once again, we've been working with the printer manufacturers to improve this position, and we expect to see manufacturers produce printers that can more easily utilize the class driver in the future.

Printing from Windows RT

The reduction in the resources used by the print class driver contributes directly to a smaller footprint for Windows, which is especially valuable on Windows RT. In addition, the V3 printer driver architecture was highly extensible and had evolved over many years into a model that encouraged the development of large, complex printer drivers. Some drivers install services that run all the time, exhausting battery power and using processor time. I've seen some drivers that support only one device but that are larger than the complete printer driver set in Windows 8!

The need to support printing in Windows RT, and a general desire to make printing more efficient, led us to develop an architecture that more tightly controls what the driver can do. I’ve already mentioned that the UI portion of the print experience is now a completely separate component, an app instead of being part of the driver. This means that it’s also optional, and drivers will work well with the standard Microsoft printing UI. We’ve also simplified the driver architecture to be more power-efficient, by removing service dependencies and reducing the likelihood that additional software will be included with the driver.

With the Windows 8 driver model, we also made significant changes to how printer drivers are installed. In Windows 7 and earlier versions of Windows, all printer drivers are stored in the “Driver Store,”—sort of like a database for all types of drivers. When you plugged in a printer, we would find the correct driver in the driver store, and copy it to a special location where the spooler could use it with your printer. In Windows 8, we have eliminated this extra copying, which removed quite a bit of disk I/O. The print spooler now just knows how to find the driver in the driver store.

For a real world example, we compared the installation times for an Epson Artisan on Windows 7 versus Windows 8 (using a relatively small driver on Windows 7): the install time on Windows 7 was 14 seconds, compared to under 2 seconds on Windows 8.

Final thoughts

As you can see, the Windows 8 printer driver architecture is big step forward. It provides good support for a lot of the printers that people already own, and supports future devices with a small, fast, built-in class driver framework. The performance is great and the disk footprint is small.

We’re look forward to your feedback!

-- Adrian Lannin

Hardware accelerating everything: Windows 8 graphics

Steven Sinofsky — Mon, 23 Jul 2012 16:00:00 GMT

With Windows 8 we set out to enable all applications to have the beautiful and high-performance graphics enabled by modern graphics hardware. This work builds on the well-established foundations of DirectX graphics, which have been providing an increasing breadth of APIs and capabilities. In Windows 7, we expanded the capabilities of DirectX to provide a common hardware-accelerated graphics platform for a broader range of applications. Whereas previously, DirectX mainly provided 3-D graphics, we added functionality for what we call “mainstream” graphics. Mainstream uses center on the typical desktop applications most people find themselves using every day, including web browsers, email, calendars, and productivity applications. Windows 7 added two new components to DirectX: Direct2D for two-dimensional graphics (shapes, bitmaps, etc.) and DirectWrite for handling text. Both of these additions not only focused on performance but also on delivering high-quality 2-D rendering. With these additions, DirectX became a hardware-accelerated graphics platform for all types of applications. Indeed, we showed what a typical application could achieve by using DirectX when Internet Explorer 9 brought hardware-accelerated graphics to the web. WinRT bring these capabilities to the full range of new Windows 8 applications. In this post, authored by Rob Copeland the group program manager on our Graphics team, we look at the details behind the scenes in enabling this new class of graphical application. --Steven

In computer graphics, high performance is a guiding principle. In the early days of personal computing, discrete, add-on graphics cards were mostly focused on specialized applications such as CAD/CAM and gaming. Even early on, there was a view that all of this graphics horsepower could be used for more: notably a better user interface and experience. One of the first graphics cards for a PC was called a “Windows Accelerator” from S3 Graphics, which focused on the user experience by moving windows around the screen faster. As graphics hardware evolved, so, too, did the methods that developers use to interact with that hardware.

DirectX is the part of Windows that provides a common application programming interface, or API, that allows developers to use the graphics hardware in the PC to draw text, shapes, and three-dimensional scenes, and display them on the screen. DirectX has also evolved over time in both capabilities and performance characteristics. In the early years, DirectX was focused mainly on games. As applications evolved to provide richer and more graphically-intense user experiences, many of them started to use DirectX as a way to get better performance and richer visuals.

Enter Windows 8

When we started to plan the work we’d undertake for graphics in Windows 8, we knew that we would be creating a new, visually rich way for users to interact with apps and with Windows itself. We also knew that we’d be building a new platform for creating Metro style apps, and that we’d be targeting a more diverse set of hardware than ever before. While we had a great graphics platform to start with, there was more work to do in order to support those efforts. We came up with four main goals:

Ensure that all Metro style experiences are rendered smoothly and quickly.
Provide a hardware-accelerated platform for all Metro style apps.
Add new capabilities to DirectX to enable stunning visual experiences.
Support the widest diversity of graphics hardware ever.

While each of these focus on different aspects of building Windows 8, they all depend on great performance and capabilities from the graphics platform.

Planning for performance

Graphics performance on Windows depends on both the operating system and the hardware system, comprised of the CPU, the GPU (graphics processing unit), and the associated display driver. To ensure that we could deliver a great experience for new Metro style apps, we needed to make sure that both the software platform and the hardware system would deliver great performance.

In the past we’ve used many different benchmarks and apps to measure the performance of DirectX. These have been largely focused on 3D games. While games are still very important, we knew that many of these existing ways to measure graphics performance did not tell us everything we needed to know for graphics-intensive, 2D, mainstream apps.

So we created new scenario-focused tests and metrics to track our progress. The metrics we use are as follows:

1. Frame rate

We express frame rate in frames per second (FPS). This metric is widely reported for gaming benchmarks, and is equally important for video content and other apps. When something is animating on the screen, a rate of 60 FPS makes the animation appear smooth. We target that rate because most computer screens refresh at 60 hertz. With that frame rate, Windows can provide very smooth animations with “stick to your finger” touch interactions.

2. Glitch count

While frame rate is an important metric, it doesn't tell the whole story. For example, running a benchmark for 10 minutes and getting 60 FPS on average sounds perfect. But, it doesn’t tell us how low the frame rate might have dropped during the test. For example, if the frame rate dips down to 10 FPS momentarily during demanding parts, the animations will stutter. The glitch count metric looks for the total number of times that rendering took more than 1/60 of a second, thus resulting in a reduced frame rate. It also looks at the number of concurrent frames missed. The goal here is to have no missed frames during animations.

3. Time to first frame

Most people expect their apps to launch quickly, so initializing DirectX needs to be fast. “Time to first frame” tells us how much time it takes from the moment you tap or click to launch an app until you see the first frame of the app on the screen. To measure this, we created simple apps to help analyze and optimize the graphics system for the time it takes to initialize a graphics device, allocate the required memory, and so on. This helps us ensure that the work to set up DirectX takes very little time.

4. Memory utilization

The more memory our graphics components use, the less memory is available for apps. By ensuring that most of the system’s memory is available for apps, you get the best app performance, and more apps can run at the same time. Apps use a mix of system memory and GPU memory. GPU memory is mostly used for rendering operations such as drawing images, geometric shapes, and text. Additionally there are graphics operations that use the CPU and therefore use system memory.

In order to characterize memory utilization, we measure the memory used by the system for the following scenarios:

The app is idle. That is, it is not doing any work and is not rendering or displaying new information to the screen.
The app is displaying information to the screen. This represents the base memory cost of a simple drawing.
Texture creation. This represents the memory used for creating a large number of image objects on the GPU.
Vertex buffer creation. This represents the memory overhead of creating geometric shapes.
GPU data upload. This measures memory overhead involved in uploading data to the GPU.

Measuring memory usage across many types of apps and these various scenarios has helped us further optimize DirectX and the display drivers.

5. CPU utilization

Most graphics operations utilize the CPU in addition to the GPU. For example, when an app is figuring out what it’s going to draw, it typically does these calculations on the CPU. CPU utilization is important to understand because the higher the percentage of the CPU used by a task, the fewer cycles the CPU can devote to other tasks. For good graphics performance and overall system responsiveness, it is important to effectively balance work between the CPU and the GPU.

These benchmarks and metrics help us ensure that the experiences and apps are smooth and have great performance. They play a big role in our understanding of mainstream apps. Of course, we still utilize industry benchmarks, games, and other ways to measure our overall performance.

Hardware accelerating mainstream graphics

There are many ways to look at mainstream graphics. To ensure that our work would give users the right performance and the right experiences we studied many examples of both Metro style and desktop apps to understand how they used the graphics hardware. In particular, Internet Explorer 9, Windows Live Mail, and Windows Live Messenger make excellent use of DirectX. Because these apps have done great work utilizing DirectX, they're good examples of what other apps might do. This led to a number of investments to ensure mainstream apps were fast and looked great.

Improving text performance

Text is by far the most frequently used graphical element in Windows, so improving text rendering performance goes a long way towards creating a better experience. Web pages, email programs, instant messaging, and other reading apps all benefit from high-quality and high-performance text display.

The Metro style design language is typographically rich and a number of Metro style experiences are focused on providing an excellent reading experience. DirectWrite enables great typographic quality, super-fast processing of font data for rendering, and provides industry-leading global text support. We’ve continued to improve text performance in Windows 8 by optimizing our default text rendering in Metro style apps to deliver better performance and efficiency, while maintaining typographic quality and global text support.

The bar chart below illustrates the performance improvements that result from this work. It includes measurements for the following text scenarios:

Rendering a screen full of reading-size text formatted as paragraphs as you would find in a web page or Word document
Rendering a screen full of small chunks of text at reading sizes as you would find in user interface controls such as button labels or menus
Rendering a screen full of small chunks of heading-sized text as you would see in titles & headings in Metro style apps and as headlines on blog posts and news articles on the web.

The most noticeable performance improvement can be seen when scrolling through a long document on a touch screen. The reduction in time required to render the characters frees up CPU cycles to handle other tasks like processing high-frequency touch input, or displaying more complex document layouts.

Improving geometry rendering performance

Along with text, we also made dramatic performance improvements for 2D geometry rendering. Geometry rendering is the core graphics technology that is used to create things like tables, charts, graphs, diagrams, and user interface elements, as shown in the example below. For Windows 8, our improvements in this area have primarily focused on delivering high-performance implementations of HTML5 Canvas and SVG technologies for use in Metro style apps, and webpages viewed with Internet Explorer 10.

The Weather app in Windows 8 uses geometry to display a graph of historical temperature and precipitation data

When Direct2D draws geometry, it takes instructions from the app about what to draw in the form of 2D figures (e.g. rectangles, ellipses, and paths), the size and location of the figures, and specifics about the style of rendering, including brush color and stroke style. Then it converts those instructions into a set of triangles and commands that it sends to Direct3D to generate the desired output. We call this conversion process tessellation.

To improve geometry rendering performance in Windows 8, we focused on reducing the CPU cost associated with tessellation in two ways.

First, we optimized our implementation of tessellation when rendering simple geometries like rectangles, lines, rounded rectangles, and ellipses. Below is a chart showing the impact of these improvements.

Second, to improve performance when rendering irregular geometry (e.g. geographical borders on a map), we use a new graphics hardware feature called Target Independent Rasterization, or TIR.

TIR enables Direct2D to spend fewer CPU cycles on tessellation, so it can give drawing instructions to the GPU more quickly and efficiently, without sacrificing visual quality. TIR is available in new GPU hardware designed for Windows 8 that supports DirectX 11.1.

Below is a chart showing the performance improvement for rendering anti-aliased geometry from a variety of SVG files on a DirectX 11.1 GPU supporting TIR:

We worked closely with our graphics hardware partners to design TIR. Dramatic improvements were made possible because of that partnership. DirectX 11.1 hardware is already on the market today and we’re working with our partners to make sure more TIR-capable products will be broadly available.

Rendering images

Images are widely used in a variety of scenarios including displaying user interfaces, webpages, and other app content. Websites commonly use JPEGs for pictures and PNG and GIF files to efficiently store user interface elements such as button graphics.

Working with digital photographs is also a very common activity on Windows. The number of digital photographs that Windows customers view and manipulate on their PCs continues to grow at an incredible rate.

We’ve made several performance improvements for working with images and photographs using the JPEG, GIF, and PNG formats.

For JPEG, improvements include:

Faster image decoding by expanding SIMD usage on all CPU architectures
Faster Huffman decoding and encoding

For PNG, improvements include:

Faster image decoding by expanding SIMD usage on all CPU architectures
Faster image encoding and decoding by optimizing our zlib implementation

In addition, we’ve improved pixel format conversion as well as image scaling. This results in faster decoding and rendering of images for all apps.

The video below uses a test app to measure the decoding and rendering time for a set of images. Windows 8 takes 40% less time than Windows 7 to render 64images (4.38 seconds vs. 7.28 seconds)

Rendering and displaying

As we evolve DirectX to support more mainstream scenarios, another area we we’ve invested in is optimizing how apps render and display their content. There are some big differences in how a 3D game draws its content and how a mainstream app such as Internet Explorer draws its content. For example, consider the video of the game below. In games like this, the entire scene changes rapidly. As the “camera” moves around the vehicle, the clouds move across the sky, and smoke billows up from the engine, the app must redraw the entire scene in each frame in order to achieve a life-like and engaging experience.

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Now consider the webpage below. It has both a text article and a video. While the video plays, the browser must update the portion of the window containing the video but not the text. Additionally, if the user scrolls the page up, then we only need to render the new text at the bottom of the page. The rest of the text has already been rendered and simply needs to be moved.

To improve apps that don’t need to redraw the entire screen for each frame, we optimized how DirectX deals with redrawing just portions of the screen and how it scrolls. This work not only improves app efficiency and performance, but since it reduces redundant drawing and reduces the number of times graphics data needs to be copied in memory, it also reduces power consumption, thus increasing battery life.

Making the entire platform great

All of these changes help Windows render experiences very quickly and smoothly. While we’ve talked mostly about features in DirectX, the great thing is that all of this work contributes to making our entire platform hardware-accelerated by default. Since we built the Metro style platform on top of DirectX, all apps take full advantage of the graphics hardware on the system, regardless of the programming language and framework the developer chooses.

Creating stunning visual experiences with Direct2D and Direct3D

Direct2D Effects

Stylistic effects applied to images are becoming more common in modern user experiences. They can help highlight an area of an app, draw your attention to a specific part of the screen, or just make things look better. As we planned the graphics capabilities for Windows 8, we wanted to make it really easy for developers to apply these types of effects in their apps. We looked at two main areas where image processing would be useful:

User interface images
The Metro style experience uses dynamic visuals. We wanted to enable Metro style apps to do image processing in real-time. This can range from 3D transition effects to perspective transforms, blurs, and highlights on user interface elements.
Photos
Apps that deal with photographs often want a rich set of image processing features. Effects such as adjusting exposure, brightness, and contrast, applying vibrancy and clarity, working with advanced curves, and applying lens corrections all allow these apps to enhance your digital memories.

To enable these types of experiences, we added “Direct2D Effects,” a new set of APIs that enable high-quality, hardware-accelerated effects to be applied to any image. Direct2D Effects have the following benefits:

They provide optimal-quality renderings of image effects to suit the needs of wide variety of apps.
The effects are hardware-accelerated and work on a wide variety of graphics hardware.
A simple API enables great effects with minimal programming.
They provide many built-in effects.
They support large image sizes and up to 32 bits per channel.
Custom effects can be combined with built-in effects or other custom effects.

Direct2D Effects power some of the new user experiences in Windows 8. For example, when tapping on a tile on the Start screen, the tile uses the 3D perspective transform effect to “tilt” in the right direction. They also power the rest of our platform. For example, SVG filter effects and CSS 3D transforms are implemented using Direct2D Effects.

Direct3D 11.1 as a common foundation

While adding new features like Direct2D Effects is a great way to help developers deliver new experiences, we also looked at ways to make it easier to use existing DirectX features.

Over years of development, we've added various different features to DirectX. Hardware acceleration of video decoding came alongside programmable shaders in Direct3D 9. In Windows 7, we added Direct2D and built it on top of Direct3D 10. At that time, we also created DirectCompute, a new system for high-performance computation on the GPU that became part of Direct3D 11. One result of all these updates is that DirectX has a very comprehensive set of features around graphics and GPU computation, but as a side effect, it has also become increasingly difficult to create an app that uses video, 2D graphics, 3D graphics, text, and DirectCompute together.

In Windows 8, the new Direct3D 11.1 API is the foundation for hardware acceleration of 2D graphics and text, image processing, 3D graphics and computation, and video. The new API makes it much simpler to mix different types of content in a single scene because that single API now manages all of the GPU resources associated with rendering. This also reduces memory usage by eliminating the redundancy involved in creating multiple graphics device-management objects in app code. In addition, Direct3D 11.1 provides a uniform way for apps to access the various capabilities of different graphics hardware. It provides mechanisms for the app to determine what features are available, and then only uses those capabilities. This enables apps to make maximum use of the GPU’s capabilities, whether the GPU was designed for long battery life on a tablet, or high-end gaming on a desktop PC.

Diverse graphics hardware

Historically, the expectations for each successive release of Windows have been that both the graphics platform and the graphics hardware capabilities will become richer and higher in performance. This is still true, as the graphics hardware industry continues to develop faster, more powerful GPUs. But in Windows 7, we started to see an inflection point in these assumptions, as the diversity of the hardware broadened with the introduction of mobile, low-power devices.

With Windows 8, this trend towards diverse hardware types is continuing and accelerating, both with new, high-performance graphics cards, and with an increasingly wide range of low-power mobile devices. The diversity of the hardware for Windows 8 will span a broader range than ever before; from graphics hardware that consumes on the order of 1 watt in always-connected tablets all the way up to high-end systems with multiple graphics cards that use a total of 1,000 watts or more. This broadening diversity brings with it new design considerations.

Our goal remains to provide visually compelling, high-performance experiences. With highly mobile devices, the primary power source is a battery, so we also need to maximize battery life. To meet both the performance and power consumption requirements of these new form factors, many of our graphics hardware partners have employed new GPU architectures.

Low-power systems

One of the graphics architectures commonly used in low-power system designs to achieve performance along with great battery life is called “tile-based rendering.” The general concept of a tile-based rendering approach is to have a very high performance (but small) memory cache that the graphics engine uses for rendering. The GPU then renders the screen in sections (or tiles) by repeatedly processing the same set of commands on each tile, rather than the whole screen at once. The intent is to minimize operations that use memory off-chip, therefore keeping power consumption low and performance high. Repeatedly accessing memory off-chip is expensive both in terms of time and power consumption.

To increase the efficiency of these tile-based architectures, we added a number of flags, hints, and new APIs that can minimize the number of times the tiles are rendered. We have incorporated the use of these into the Metro style app development platform to ensure greater efficiency in apps running on graphics hardware that uses a tile-based rendering architecture.

Another way for graphics hardware to reduce power consumption while still achieving great performance is to perform graphics rendering calculations using fewer bits of precision. This allows the GPU to more efficiently structure its data so that it can process more data simultaneously, thus reducing the power needed. For Windows 8, we added new mechanisms for apps to specify the amount of precision needed in their graphical calculations. For example, when doing custom blending of multiple images where the image data is 8 bits per component, the blending computations could be done with 10 bits of precision rather than the default of 32 bits. The reduced precision doesn’t impact image quality, but does reduce power consumption.

Great performance, smoothly rendered

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As you can see, we’ve done a lot of work to enable a very fast and smoothly animated user experience in Windows 8. From new ways to measure our progress, to optimizations for mainstream uses of our graphics platform, and new hardware features, we’ve created the best Windows graphics platform yet. And of course, we continue to push the envelope on immersive, three-dimensional gaming, with great performance and new features such as stereoscopic 3D.

From high-end gaming rigs to light-weight, always-connected tablets, Windows 8 supports the broadest range of graphics hardware ever in a single operating system. We hope this post has helped explain some ways in which this work enables a whole new set of rich experiences.

- Rob Copeland

P.S. Thanks to Sriram Subramanian, Dan McLachlan, Kam VedBrat, Steve Lim, and Jianye Lu, for their substantial contributions to this blog post.

Using your feedback to make Narrator work better with touch

Steven Sinofsky — Wed, 18 Jul 2012 13:00:00 GMT

Shortly before we released the Windows 8 Consumer Preview in February, we blogged about our work to make Windows 8 more accessible to people with disabilities. This included our work on Narrator to enable customers who are blind to use Windows 8 on touch screens. This work has continued to evolve in the Release Preview, and will also improve as we move toward the final release of Windows 8. This post details some of the work we have done to improve Narrator when using a touch-enabled PC. This post was authored by Doug Kirschner on our Accessibility team. –Steven

First off, we would like to thank all the people who have given us feedback; there has been a lot of positive reaction—people are excited that Windows 8 touch screens will include basic screen reading support by default. We've gotten a tremendous amount of constructive feedback on things we could do to make Narrator work better on touch screens and easier to use on the web. We’ve listened. Your suggestions, combined with suggestions from usability testing on visually impaired users here at Microsoft, have resulted in some important changes that we think you'll really like.

Listening to the accessibility community

When the Developer Preview build was released, we took the opportunity to reach out and gather feedback on Narrator from as many people who require visual assistance tools as we could. To start with, we worked with the community of folks inside Microsoft (we are fortunate to have a significant and organized community that is engaged in the accessibility of all Microsoft products) to install Windows 8 and send us their impressions, and we held internal accessibility events where people could come and try it out in person. We also held usability studies where we invited people to Microsoft’s campus to experience Narrator on a touch screen and walk through common tasks to see where we could improve. Millions of you downloaded the Developer and Consumer Previews, and many of you tried out Narrator and sent us some great feedback. We followed up with a number of people who contacted us via @BuildWindows8. Lastly, we attended the CSUN conference for Technology and Persons with Disabilities, where we were lucky to have the chance to sit down with people one-on-one as they tried out the Windows 8 Consumer Preview for the first time on touch screens.

There were a couple of key scenarios we wanted to validate. In particular, we wanted to make sure touch users could get up and running using Narrator on a new PC, right out of the box. That includes finding and installing accessible apps from the Store, and accomplishing basic everyday tasks like sending email, reading webpages, and listening to music. The excitement around the work we'd done so far was overwhelming and gratifying, but it was clear that we still had more work to do to make touch Narrator even better.

Thanks to all of your constructive feedback, we identified key areas that we've improved for the Release Preview:

Responsiveness: We heard that Narrator on touch screens didn’t feel responsive enough.
Gestures: Some people had difficulty with Narrator gestures, particularly some of the more complicated multi-finger gestures.
App exploration: Finding particular elements on the screen (e.g. finding tiles on the Start screen) could be hard for people not already familiar with the particular app or UI.
Web navigation: The commands available in the Consumer Preview were not extensive enough for some webpages.

We worked heavily on each of these areas for the Release Preview, and we're still working in some areas for the final release of Windows 8. We wanted to share with you some of the improvements you can already experience in the Release Preview today.

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Making Narrator feel more responsive to touch

Some people we heard from felt that Narrator touch was not very responsive. We heard various versions of this feedback–that Narrator was slow, that Narrator sometimes didn’t respond, or that people just felt disconnected or disoriented—but the root cause of the issue was the same. When you touch the screen, you expect a timely response. We found two common scenarios where this problem occurred:

Single-finger exploration: When people had to find an item on the screen by dragging a finger around, we observed that they would often skip right over the item they were searching for, as they moved their fingers too quickly, generally before Narrator had a chance to start reading the item.
Gesture response: Some people were confused as to whether their gesture had succeeded, and would attempt to repeat the gesture several times, even though the first attempt was already successful. The problem was that there was a delay between the time Narrator recognized the gesture, and when it provided the speech response. Sometimes it was also unclear from the response whether Narrator had done what the user wanted, or was just reading something similar but unrelated.

In each case, the blue, visual highlight rectangle that moves to whatever Narrator is currently reading was quick to jump to the appropriate item, indicating that Narrator had registered the user’s movement and was responding appropriately. However, the problem was in the actual speech process. The text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis is fast, but even at high speeds, it takes a while for the system to read the response back; moreover it took additional cognitive time to process the language and to understand what they were hearing. To complicate matters, the speech response time varied widely, depending on context, which made it hard for the user to discern whether the intended gesture was the one that Narrator had recognized. Each of these minor delays added up; people would skip over items altogether or repeat successful gestures, thinking that their first attempt was not successful.

Audio cues

For users with full vision, even if an action takes a few more milliseconds to complete, visual feedback such as highlighting a button or animating a flyout help indicate immediately that the system is responding. These cues are not only aesthetically pleasing, but also functionally important to understand how your touches are influencing the system in real-time.

As we dug into some of the feedback around responsiveness, we realized that Narrator could make more effective use of audio cues. In the Release Preview, we have started to add audible cues; each gesture now has an associated sound that plays when the gesture is performed. These cues were designed to be quick, short and easily distinguishable, allowing you to instantly recognize whether your gesture is successful and if your action has been taken. Here are some examples:

Moving to the next item plays a “tick.”
Activating plays a “click.”
Scrolling plays a sliding sound.
Selecting plays a “thud.”
Narrator errors play a “bloop” sound that is easily distinguishable from the system error "ding."
Explore the screen with a single finger, and Narrator makes a tick with each new item that you touch, so you know if you passed over an item too quickly to hear what it was.

We had a lot of fun designing and implementing these sounds!

Making interactions easier

The next step was to tune Narrator's touch interaction model. Some people told us they found it difficult to use multi-finger gestures. In particular, we saw people struggle with the two-finger swipe for next and previous item, and even more so with the four-finger swipe to scroll. We also observed people accidentally triggering the commands lists (available item commands, search window, etc.), which consequently caused them to lose their context in an app.

In response, we've made it easier to interact with touch Narrator. The system is now more forgiving, with a simpler gesture model that is easier to remember. Single-finger taps and flicks now carry out a majority of the common tasks in Narrator. The revised interaction model is easier to perform, and it groups gestures more logically, so that command lists and windows don’t pop up when you’re trying to perform an unrelated gesture.

The table below outlines the new interaction model:

Touch gesture	Command
Tap or drag	Read item under finger
Double-tap OR Hold with one finger and tap anywhere with a second	Do primary action
Triple-tap OR Hold with onefinger and double-tap with a second	Do secondary action
Flick left or right	Move to previous/next item
Flick up or down	Change move increment
Hold with one finger and 2-finger-tap with additional fingers	Start dragging or extra key options
2-finger tap	Stop speaking
2-finger swipe	Scroll
3-finger tap	Show/hide Narrator settings window
3-finger swipe up	Read current window
3-finger swipe down	Read from current location in text
3-finger swipe left or right	TAB forward and backward
4-finger tap	Show commands for current item
4-finger double tap	Toggle search mode
4-finger triple tap	Show Narrator commands list
4-finger swipe up or down	Enable/disable semantic zoom (semantic zoom provides a high-level view of large blocks of content)

Improving Narrator’s exploration model

As we collected feedback from people who were using the Developer Preview, we reviewed the exploration model in Narrator. One of the things we heard clearly was that people wanted an easy way to find all of the controls on the screen like buttons, labels, text fields, list items, etc. without having to manually touch around the whole screen. One user who was blind gave the analogy that when he enters a hotel room, his first task is always to walk around the room and locate the door, dresser, beds, and bathroom in order to understand the layout of the room before doing anything else. Similarly, when exploring a new app, users want to know what's on the screen before deciding what to do next.

One of the ways we made all elements on the screen accessible in Developer Preview was to use horizontal swipe gestures to move between items in a container, and vertical swipe gestures to move into and out of containers. This was a powerful model —you could find all accessible items on the screen—and it was a true representation of how graphical UI is constructed. However, it wasn't intuitive. Having to navigate into and out of containers made it difficult to discover all of the interesting elements on the screen.

Changing our default cursor mode

In response to the feedback, we made some changes to the way navigation works by default in Release Preview. The navigation gestures, which are now all single-finger flicks left and right, move you through all of the items on the screen. You no longer need to know how the UI is constructed in order to navigate it; all you need to do is flick to get to the next and previous items, and Narrator presents you with a linear ordering of the important items on the screen.

This allows you to learn about all of the interesting items in an app in an easy step-by-step manner, and interact with any item as you go. If you just want to hear all of the items in an app without flicking each time, you can swipe up with three fingers and Narrator will read through all of them in order, without stopping.

(Note: This is the new default mode of navigation, which allows you to explore apps by flicking left and right to find all of the interesting items. If you prefer the old way of moving through the multiple layers of UI manually, you can change the Narrator cursor movement mode to “Advanced” in the Narrator settings).

Improving web navigation

In Windows 8, Narrator has made reading the web much easier. It has various features that are optimized for web reading, such as the “start reading” command, which reads out continuous sections of webpages without stopping, and search mode, which provides a list of various types of controls on a page. After we released the Developer and Consumer Preview builds, we heard from users that although these features were helpful, they did not enable them to accomplish some common tasks on the web, such as quickly scanning news headlines, doing a quick search, or checking stock quotes.

So we revisited this feature, and as we dug further and gained a better understanding of these scenarios, we found ways to improve them in the Release Preview. For news reading in particular, we heard people saying they wanted to jump to various points in the page (e.g. headings, links), and then subsequently to be able to read line-by-line and even letter-by-letter. Many users wanted Narrator to provide these commands for them to navigate the web with more precision.

In response, we added the concept of views to Narrator’s navigation commands. The new views are available in default navigation mode whenever you are on a webpage or other accessible text area, such as in the Mail app. The default Item view moves through the items on the page, and works the same way as item navigation throughout the system. But for accessible text areas such as webpages or Mail, Narrator now supports seven additional views:

Headings
Links
Tables
Paragraphs
Lines
Words
Characters

You can easily change the view by flicking up or down, and then flick left or right to move through the items in that view. These commands are also available with a keyboard by using Caps Lock + Arrow keys.

With the new views, web reading is more powerful in the Release Preview. The views work with other Narrator reading commands as well. For example, if you find an interesting news headline and want to hear more, you can swipe down with three fingers and Narrator will start reading all of the page content until you tell it to stop.

Finishing the job

These examples represent some of the major work we’ve done in response to feedback from people who tried Narrator touch in the Developer Preview and Consumer Preview. We’ve made many more improvements based on your feedback—including reading out touch hints that teach you how to activate items, improving the Narrator settings UI to be easier to use with touch, and adding a new setting that makes it easier to type on the touch keyboard. While we believe Narrator is feature complete at this point, we’re still fixing bugs and fine-tuning it before Windows 8 is complete.

It’s been fantastic and humbling to hear from so many of you who have had the chance to try out Narrator. We’ve thoroughly enjoyed working one-on-one with users through our usability studies, at the CSUN conference, and within the Microsoft community. Thanks to all of the great constructive feedback we’ve received, we’ve made these important changes to Narrator for the Release Preview to make it a much better feature.

While we work towards shipping this product soon, we’d love for you to download and install the Release Preview for yourself, and try out Narrator.

Note: The touch features described in this blog require touch screens supporting at least four contact points. Windows 8 certified touch hardware will universally meet this requirement, but some current Windows 7 hardware may not (see this post for more info). If you do not have a touch screen supporting four contact points, you can still run Narrator using the keyboard.

Thanks!

-Doug Kirschner

Designing the Windows 8 touch keyboard

Steven Sinofsky — Tue, 17 Jul 2012 15:00:00 GMT

Starting with the earliest TabletPC enhancements to Windows, we have been working on “on-screen keyboards.” With Windows 8, we started fresh and took a "first principles" approach to developing the touch keyboard. Given the amount of experience many of us have with touch keyboards for phones, and the myriad of touch devices we interact with these days, we set a very high bar for the quality of the experience and effectiveness of input with the new Windows 8 touch keyboard. In this post, Kip Knox, a member of the Windows User Experience program management team, details this work. --Steven

When we began planning how touch and new types of PCs might work on Windows 8, we recognized the need to provide an effective method for text entry on tablets and other touch screen PCs. Since Windows XP SP1, which had Tablet PC features built in, Windows has included a touchable on-screen keyboard. But those features were designed as extensions to the desktop experience. For Windows 8, we set out to improve on that model and introduce text input support that meets people’s needs, matches our design principles, and works well with the form factors we see today and expect to see in the future.

I’m writing this blog post on our Windows 8 touch keyboard using the standard QWERTY layout in English. As I look at it, the keyboard seems very simple and sort of obvious. This comes partly from having worked on it for a while, but also because keyboards are familiar to us. But there is more here than meets the eye (or, fingertips).

We started planning this feature area with no preconceived notions. As we do with all our features, we began the text input design project with a set of principles or goals. On a Windows 8 PC using touch, we want people to be able to:

Enter text quickly, reasonably close to the speed with which they type on a physical keyboard
Avoid errors, and be able to easily correct mistakes
Enter text comfortably, in terms of posture, interaction with the device, and social setting

You might note that none of those goals explicitly assumes a keyboard. And when we started the project, we cast a broad net across possible approaches to text input. We found that of all the methods of text input we considered, none met the goals above as well as a keyboard. The majority of people are simply faster, more accurate, and more comfortable typing than they are writing any other way. Windows has highly accurate handwriting recognition in several languages, as well as advanced speech recognition, for example. But without a great touch keyboard, we were not going to be able to fulfill people’s needs and expectations for touch-screen devices running Windows. So we set out to create the best touch keyboard on any device.

Optimizing for comfort and posture

There are many ways to imagine touch keyboards on a tablet, and we sketched a lot of them—large keyboards, tiny keyboards, floating keyboards, circular keyboards, swipe keyboards. But our initial design process was grounded in research we did into the ways that people interact with tablets. Our researchers conducted an in-depth study in which they observed people “living with” tablets over a period of time. Through these observations and interviews, we saw a set of three postures that are most common among people using tablets:

One hand holding the device, with one hand interacting with the user interface
Two hands holding the device, with thumbs interacting
Resting the device on table, lap, or stand, and interacting with both hands

Research into people “living with” tablets revealed three common postures.

In these postures, people felt most natural and most likely to use the tablet for longer periods of time. We’ve made many design decisions in Windows 8 to optimize for these postures, and that includes how people intuitively input text. When typing on a tablet, most people either set it on their lap or a table and multi-finger type, or hold it in their hands and type with their thumbs, or hold it with one hand and “hunt and peck.”

Our standard touch keyboard layout is optimized for laying the tablet down and multi-finger typing, and also works well for typing with one hand. We also introduced a new layout we call the thumb keyboard (which we showed for the first time at our very first preview of Windows 8 about a year ago), which is designed for holding the tablet with two hands and typing with your thumbs. This keyboard is adjustable in size, to accommodate different hand sizes. An interesting observation from our posture research is that people frequently switch postures, and that posture switch is often seen as a positive thing, as we move about to remain comfortable. So in our keyboard layouts we also considered what it would be like to type for a period of time—say, an email to your mom—and switch postures while you do it. You might start by typing with the tablet lying on the coffee table, for example, but then you might tire of that posture and pick up the tablet, lie back on the couch, and interact with two thumbs.

Further research into posture and comfort helped us to understand how people hold tablets, and how far our thumbs typically reach. In a follow-up study, we had a wide selection of people with different hand sizes use a tablet with sensors that would indicate where their thumbs could reach most comfortably, where they could extend to, and where reach was just uncomfortable. These results helped us optimize the use of the system with thumbs, and helped shape the thumb keyboard layout.

This heat map illustrates the typical reach of people’s thumbs, overlaid on the thumb keyboard layout. Green is very comfortable, yellow can be reached, and red is typically uncomfortable.

Typing on glass

The next challenge we considered was the experience of typing on the glass display of a tablet. At least one of the key postures—laying the tablet down—is analogous to typing on a physical keyboard. So unlike typing text on a phone, we were faced with direct comparisons with the physical keyboard experience. When you type on your laptop or desktop, you enjoy some real benefits. You get a lot of sensory feedback as you type. First, you can position your hands quickly on your home keys, and most keyboards have small bumps on the J and F keys (in English QWERTY keyboards) to confirm that position. Then, as you type, the shape of the keys reinforces where your fingers are as they move about. The keys have “travel,” or small up-and-down movement, which confirms that you struck them. And because the keyboard is mechanical, there is a tapping sound that confirms your key strikes (perhaps to your chagrin, if your colleagues are checking email during meetings J).

If you lay down a piece of glass and type on it, you get no feedback; there is no indication for where to position your hands, and there is no indication of whether you’ve hit a target or not. Recognizing this, we made a few decisions. We needed to provide some type of feedback, and we needed to recognize that people will be more “sloppy” when typing on a touch keyboard. But we also observed that a touch keyboard can do things that a physical keyboard can’t, and we should bring those functions out.

The feedback you see in the touch keyboard comes in two forms—the keys change color when you touch them, and they trigger a subtle sound. This is similar to what you see on most phone touch keyboards. We considered other forms of feedback, but ruled them out as too disruptive or unnatural. For example, we explored haptic feedback (a vibration of the device based on input) which you also find on many phones. But most people find the current state-of-the-art haptics somewhat irritating when typing pieces of any length and a buzz can feel as much like a punishment as a reassurance.

Our two forms of feedback—visual key changes and sounds—are not without controversy either. Visual key changes are not always ideal when you are entering a password, for example, and for that reason we enable you to suppress feedback in these cases. Some people have argued that key press sounds are irritating and artificial. But user testing confirmed our assumption that people clearly find the sounds reassuring and confidence-inspiring when typing on glass. The specific sounds we use (which are very similar to those on the Windows Phone) are designed to be “residual,” where you quickly forget that they are there, but would notice if they were turned off.

Both forms of feedback may be used more when people are first getting used to the experience. We have done eye-tracking studies in the lab, which showed that as people become more proficient with the touch keyboard, they spend more time looking at the input field, and less time looking at the keyboard itself. So the appearance of each character becomes the best feedback when you are typing efficiently. I’ll tell you a little more about these eye-tracking studies later in this post.

As people spend time with the touch keyboard, their focus moves more consistently to the input field, as this heat map from an eye-tracking study shows.

But even when you “get good” at typing on a touch keyboard on glass, you will still be sloppier and slower than you would be with a physical keyboard. The Windows 8 touch keyboard has some special accommodations to address this reality. The most interesting one is what we call the “touch model.”

When you tap a key on the touch keyboard, we detect the coordinates of your touch, and we can map it to the geometry of the keys. But as your fingers move about across the glass, your press is likely to migrate outside the boundaries of the key you intended to touch. If we relied simply on the geometry mapping of the keys, you would see a lot of errors. To account for this, the key press is first compared against a model that assesses the likelihood that you intended to strike that key or a key near it. This processing is informed by two things. First, we use data from many people’s typing pangrams, or phrases that use every letter of the alphabet, recording trends where peoples bias their touch away from the intended target. For example, they might intend to type a p, but often strike the o, because most people’s fingers curve inward. Based on a set of characteristics, including typing speed, the model weights the likelihood that you intended to type one key over another. Secondly, we use lexical data representing letters and words that are likely to be strung together in writing. This is the same system that enables spelling correction—the system “knows” what you probably intended to type even if you made a mistake.

Based on the touch model, the keyboard is often able to quietly correct cases where you intended to type a p for example, but inadvertently struck the o, on a QWERTY layout. Or consider the example where you are typing the word “the.” If you type t then h and then touch between the e and w but slightly more on the w, the touch model adjudicates this, knows that t-h-e is the common character combination in English rather than t-h-w, and appropriately outputs the e. But if you touch the w fully, the keyboard respects that input and assumes you know best. This all happens while you are typing, so the right character goes into the input field and doesn’t require further correction. When this works best, you don’t realize it’s even happening, increasing your confidence in typing on glass.

This map from a report on touch model data illustrates biases that people show toward certain keys when typing on a touch keyboard.

Great for typing

Once we accounted for feedback and provided “guard rails” for inevitable mistakes, we still had to determine the specific keyboard layouts—what keys go where. Key positions have a big influence over typing speed and accuracy, and people have very strong—and often conflicting—opinions about keys. But the design problem broke down logically, based on our observations of interaction and some physical realities. For example, we confirmed our assumptions that:

Most people have developed very strong habits based on the conventions of physical keyboards. When you break these conventions, it slows their typing down appreciably. This even applies to very young folks or dedicated T9 typists, for example, as most of us learn to touch-type in some form at a young age.
There are optimal targetable sizes of keys. The extensive research Microsoft has done into physical keyboards applied here too. For example, the letter keys on our touch keyboard are 19mm wide, the same as on most physical keyboards, because people showed faster typing speeds with targets of that size (rather than smaller or larger).
The more keys you include, the more likely people are to make mistakes. This is partly because more keys mean the keys need to be smaller and there’s a greater likelihood of hitting a key you didn’t intend. More keys also create visual clutter and distraction and slow your ability to scan and find a key.
You don’t want to obscure more than half the display with a keyboard. A too-large keyboard creates a claustrophobic experience and you lose context. However, there is a counter rule that says obscuring about half the display works fine. This is because entering text is most often a “modal” activity, where your focus is very much on typing something and not on the periphery. Your area of focus outside the keyboard is relatively small, and directed toward the characters you’re typing. Our eye-tracking studies, illustrated in this post, demonstrate this.
People use some keys more than others. We deduce this from analyzing passages of text written in real-world circumstances. There are clear patterns of frequency in the use of letters and symbols.
People will learn to do new things—and learn quickly—if they don’t interfere with habits.

So in the end, the layout of a touch keyboard in any language becomes a balancing act of the different factors. You want to reduce the number of keys in the default layout, for example, but if you remove a key people rely on in typing every day, you will frustrate them. The layout needs to be big enough to support accuracy, but not so big it obscures the application.

There was one more overall rule or principle that we applied to the keyboard layouts specifically: They must be great for typing. That seems obvious but it’s clarifying when you recognize that keyboards are used for a lot of things other than writing words—shortcuts to UI, for example, or sending commands, or entering codes. Our keyboard is optimized for typing, because that is its primary purpose and it must do it well above all other things. Let’s take a look at a few of the decisions we made that fit within these parameters.

Numbers

We get a lot of questions about why we don’t include a number row in the default keyboard layout. We use numbers frequently in our jobs, and we’re used to finding number keys on the top of our physical keyboard. The Windows 7 on-screen keyboard has a number row, for example. This is consistent with the overall design of that keyboard—it is essentially a software emulation of a physical keyboard. It has not been optimized for a world of touch.

The Windows 7 on-screen keyboard emulates a physical keyboard and isn’t optimized for touch or typing.

Some of our early designs and prototypes had a number row too. But when we brought these designs in front of people, the feedback was strong that the keyboard felt “cramped” compared to what they were used to. We observed frequent errors and accidental invocation of keys, especially around the perimeter of the layout. This resulted in a number of changes, and it confirmed the decision to not include a number row. Here’s why: Including a number row meant adding a fourth row of character keys. When we optimize for keys with a targetable size, that means the keyboard must be that much higher. On a typical tablet device (say with a screen size of 10.6 inches) adding a number row would mean that more than half of the display would be covered by the keyboard. When we combined this with the observation that numbers are typed less frequently than most letters and common symbols, and you recognize that the extra keys are causing accidental key presses, we settled on including numbers on the separate number and symbol view.

That settled, we still had debates about whether to display numbers as a row across the top of the numbers and symbols view, or to display it as a numeric pad. We chose the numeric pad for a few reasons:

People often enter multiple numbers at once.
It’s easier to scan an organized group than a long row.
People type number sequences much faster when the numbers are clustered.

We also decided to include the numbers in 1,2,3 order from the top, rather than 7,8,9, as it appears on many extended computer keyboards or cash registers. This is an interesting case where the physical keyboard convention didn’t matter as much, because people have become familiar and very comfortable with the order of number pads on phones, ATMs, remote controls, and other modern devices. 1,2,3 order is simply easier for the eyes to scan and the brain to process than any other order.

The number and symbol view includes a numeric pad that reflects modern layouts we find on phones, ATMs, and remote controls.

Tab key

The tab key has a similar story. It’s a key we use a lot—for formatting documents, but also for things like navigating input fields on a webpage. For that reason, we included it in one of our early touch-optimized layouts, after we had removed a lot of other keys typically found on physical keyboards. It looked like this.

An early layout of the keyboard had extra keys that interfered with accuracy and speed.

You might observe that on the right and the left, there are borders of keys that aren’t letters or symbols. This layout yielded the results described above—people experienced a cramped feeling. And worse than that, they frequently missed character keys and inadvertently touched one of the border keys. When we removed them, people raved about the openness and comfort of the layout, their errors went down, and their speed went up. With the Tab key on the numbers and symbols view, it was harder to reach—but the keyboard was better for typing, and so the Tab key’s peregrinations were over.

Downshift: a mistake to learn from

The last example we’ll share involves a feature we had in the product and have subsequently cut. This is a feature inspired by our desire to make punctuation easier to get to, without a complete view switch. In this design, the left shift key acted as the shift key does today—it enabled capital letters and access to alternate symbols from the default view. We used the right shift key differently—it provided a “peek” into frequently-used symbols or punctuation. The idea was that you would “downshift” briefly to select punctuation, for example, but not lose the context of the main view, and thus be faster. We theorized that this was a place where we could deviate from convention and provide value you could only get with software. Here’s a picture of the “downshift” keyboard.

The downshift design was intended to provide fast way to access symbols, but interfered with expectations for shift behavior.

Suffice to say this prototype did not succeed in the lab. Participants continually struck the right shift key for the usual reasons you’d use a shift key. And when the keyboard showed the “peek” to symbols, they were confused and their typing came to a halt. So this was a case where we had to stick with the convention of a physical keyboard.

There is an interesting counter example in press-and-hold behavior. On a physical keyboard, when you press and hold a character, it repeats. On our touch keyboard when you press and hold, we show alternate characters or symbols. This is something a touch keyboard can do well and a physical keyboard can’t. If you don’t know the specific key combination to show ñ or é or š, for example, it’s painful to type on a physical keyboard. It’s easy to find on the touch keyboard. Practically no one has complained about this departure from convention. We built on it, in fact. You might discover that you can simply swipe from a key in the direction of the secondary key, and that character will be entered, without an explicit selection from the menu. So if you use accented characters a lot, you can get pretty fast with this. Try it out!

When you press and hold a key, it reveals related keys. If you swipe quickly toward the secondary key you want, you can select it quickly.

Testing and validating

We’ve been conducting a series of eye-tracking studies, where cameras record the direction of the participants’ gaze as they are interacting with the system. These studies help us determine a few things: Where do people look when typing on a touch keyboard? Does visual gaze change over time? Are these patterns consistent across different views or layouts? And is visual gaze correlated to speed of typing?

An eye-tracking study participant begins the session.

We’ve found very consistently that people primarily look at the text field where their characters appear, and they look at the keyboard. This is so consistent that we designed our text suggestion experience to optimize for this tendency. Text suggestions (words that are predicted as you type) appear right by the cursor in the text field, and you insert them by touching the “Insert” key on the touch keyboard. This is optimized for where we saw people putting their attention as they typed. It is notably different, for example, from text suggestion UI you see on many phones, where there is a band of possible words that run across the top of the keyboard. On a PC with a full-sized keyboard, people just don’t look there, and they don’t want to stop typing and change their posture to select these words.

Individual fixations, or recordings of a stabilized retina, show that people look either at the keyboard or at the text field. We do not typically look in between the two. Our text prediction UI appears near the caret for this reason.

We also found that our gaze does change over time, and as the gaze changes, we type faster. You can see this very clearly in the gaze plots of the eye-tracking studies. A full range of people show this tendency—from slow typists unfamiliar with tablets to skilled typists who spend a lot of time with tablets. In all cases, at first, there is more attention on the keyboard, and the speed is slower. Over time—say, about 90 minutes over a few days—there is markedly less attention paid to the keyboard, more to the text field, and words per minute go up significantly.

We can see in lab studies that the focus of our gaze changes over time. The left hand image shows a typist after just a few minutes. The right image shows the gaze plots after about 90 minutes. You can see that focus moves to the text field. This typist doubled her speed during the session.

Continued refinement

Lastly, below is a picture of the current English QWERTY layout, which we have in the Windows 8 Release Preview. It is intentionally spare and open, and the keys that remain are there for explicit reasons. Each of these has its own story, but we can call out a few highlights:

The backspace key is there because it’s used very frequently on physical keyboards and touch keyboards. If we removed it, you would find your finger groping for it repeatedly.
The mode switch key is essential to moving between views and languages and for hiding the keyboard. IME users will find that this is how you switch to Windows IMEs, which also feature touch-optimized keyboard layouts.
The CTRL key and the right and left arrow keys are intended for text editing operations. You can move your input cursor and cut, copy, and paste without moving your hands from the keyboard. (Note that the CTRL key works just as it does on a physical keyboard—so any supported combination will work. We include labels for things like cut, copy, paste, and bold, because they are related to text editing. The touch keyboard is not intended for “commanding,” which is why you don’t see things like the Windows key or function keys. That is a deliberate decision to stay focused on the goal of being really great for typing.
The space bar is centered and wide. Physical keyboard research shows that about 80% of strikes on the space bar occur on the right (if you look at older keyboards, you will notice the wear on that side). This holds for touch keyboards too, where people will miss the spacebar if it’s not ample-sized, and this creates errors that are hard to recover from.
The “emoji” or emoticon key switches you to emoji view, where we support a full set of Unicode-based emoji characters. The use of emoji continues to grow worldwide, and has become a part of how people write and express themselves.
We also include an option for a standard keyboard layout, which can be useful on a PC without a keyboard when using desktop software that requires function keys or other extended keys. This is easily enabled from the settings Charm, in the General Settings section of PC Settings.

As you use the keyboard, we hope you also discover some extra features we’ve added to make things easier. For example, if you hold down the &123 key, you can select symbols or numbers with your other hand, and when you release, you return to your original view. The team calls this “multi-touch view peek.”

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The current touch-optimized layout reflects decisions about each of the keys based on a series of studies.

These optimizations apply across the input languages we have in Windows, as we support a touch-optimized typing experience worldwide. We expect to make a few more improvements to the typing experience, and we are really grateful and delighted by the feedback we’ve received so far. Thanks!

Kip Knox

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Protecting user files with File History

Steven Sinofsky — Tue, 10 Jul 2012 16:00:00 GMT

Backing up your critical files is something we all know we should do. Even with everything in SkyDrive, it is still something we need to do. With Windows 8, we took a new look at the way backup can work and set out to solve the perennial problem of not just restoring all your files but restoring a previous version of a critical file you have been editing through the course of a day. To achieve this, we're introducing a new feature in Windows 8, File History. Bohdan Raciborski, a program manager on the Storage team authored this post. --Steven

Note: Comments have been off topic. Please maintain community standards and focus on the topic at hand.

What is File History?

File History is a backup application that continuously protects your personal files stored in Libraries, Desktop, Favorites, and Contacts folders. It periodically (by default every hour) scans the file system for changes and copies changed files to another location. Every time any of your personal files has changed, its copy will be stored on a dedicated, external storage device selected by you. Over time, File History builds a complete history of changes made to any personal file.

It’s a feature introduced in Windows 8 that offers a new way to protect files for consumers. It supersedes the existing Windows Backup and Restore features of Windows 7.

What is unique about this approach compared to a more traditional backup and restore?

Regretfully, backup is not a very popular application. Our telemetry shows that less than 5% of consumer PCs use Windows Backup and even adding up all the third party tools in use, it is clear nowhere near half of consumer PCs are backed up. This leaves user’s personal data and digital memories quite vulnerable as any accident can lead to data loss. In Windows 8 Microsoft is actively trying to accomplish the following:

Make data protection so easy that any Windows user can turn it on and feel confident that their personal files are protected.
Eliminate the complexity of setting up and using backup.
Turn backup into an automatic, silent service that does the hard work of protecting user files in the background without any user interaction.
Offer a very simple, engaging restore experience that makes finding, previewing and restoring versions of personal files much easier.

While designing File History we used learnings from the past and added requirements to address the changing needs of PC users.

PC users are more mobile than ever. To address that, we optimized File History to better support laptops that constantly transition through power states or are being connected and disconnected from networks and devices.
PC users create more data and are more dependent on it than ever before. So we do not only protect what’s currently on the system drive but also any work they have done and data they have created in the past.

When a specific point in time (PiT) version of a file or even an entire folder is needed, you can quickly find it and restore it. The restore application was designed to offer engaging experience optimized for browsing, searching, previewing and restoring files.

Setting it up

Before you start using File History to back up your files, you'll need to set up a drive to save files to. We recommend that you use an external drive or network location to help protect your files against a crash or other PC problem.

File History only saves copies of files that are in your libraries, contacts, favorites, and on your desktop. If you have folders elsewhere that you want backed up, you can add them to one of your existing libraries or create a new library.

To set up File History

Open File History control panel applet.
Connect an external drive, refresh the page, and then tap or click Turn on.

You can also set up a drive in AutoPlay by connecting the drive to your PC, tapping or clicking the notification that appears…

… and then tapping or clicking Configure this drive for backup.

That’s it. From that moment, every hour, File History will check your libraries, desktop, favorites and contacts for any changes. If it finds changed files, it will automatically copy them to the File History drive.

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Restoring files

When something bad happens and one or more personal files are lost, the restore application makes it very easy to:

Browse personal libraries, folders and files in a way very similar to Windows Explorer.
Search for specific versions using keywords, file names and date ranges.
Preview versions of a selected file.
Restore a file or a selection of files with one tap or a click of a mouse.

We designed the restore application for wide screen displays and to offer a unique, engaging and convenient way of finding a specific version of a file by looking at its preview.

With other backup applications you would have to select a backup set that was created on a specific date. Then you would have to browse to find a specific folder, and then find the one file you need. However at this point it is impossible to open the file or preview its content in order to determine if it is the right one. You would have to restore the file. If it is not the right version, you’d have to start over.

With File History, the search starts right in Windows Explorer. You can browse to a specific location and click or tap on the History button in the explorer ribbon in order to see all versions of the selected library, folder or an individual file.

For example, when you select a Pictures library and click or tap on the History button…

… you will see the entire history of this library.

When you click on a specific file, you can see the entire history of the selected picture.

In this example, the selected picture has 4 versions. You can easily navigate to the desired version by clicking on the Previous/Next buttons or by swiping the screen. Once you have found the version you were looking for, you can click the Restore button to bring it back. The selected version will be restored to its original location.

Continuous, reliable protection

File History, instead of using the old backup model, takes a different approach to data protection.

Protect only what is most important

Instead of protecting the entire system (operating system, applications, settings and user files) File History focuses only on user personal files. That’s what is most precious and hardest to recreate in case of an accident.

Optimized for performance

In the past, most backup applications used brute force method of checking for changes in directories or files by scanning the entire volume. This approach could significantly affect the system performance and requires an extended period of time to complete. File History, on the other hand, takes advantage of the NTFS change journal. The NTFS change journal records any changes made to any files stored on an NTFS volume. Instead of scanning the volume, which involves opening and reading directories, File History opens the NTFS change journal and quickly scans it for any changes. Based on this information it creates a list of files that have changed and need to be copied. The process is very quick and efficient.

File History was designed to be easily interrupted and to quickly resume. This way, File History can resume its operation, without the need to start over when a system goes into sleep mode, a user logs off, the system gets too busy and needs more CPU cycles to complete foreground operations, or the network connection is lost or saturated.

File History was designed to work well on any PC including small form factor PCs with limited resources and tablets. It uses system resources in a way to minimize the impact on system performance, battery life and overall experience.

File History process runs at low priority, uses low priority IO and low priority memory.

Figure 1: File History reaction to an increasing workload.

Figure 2: File History disk utilization in presence of other processes with normal priority I/Os.

When File History service is idle, it uses an average of 10 MB of working set. When it runs, it uses little memory and only for a short period of time. The chart below shows the working set histogram collected using a simulated workload over a period of 4 hours with File History cycle frequency set to one hour.

Figure 3 Working set size per backup cycle, sampling every 3 min.

The amount of data being backed up in one cycle is throttled.
Any activity is suspended when the machine is sleeping.

File History takes into account:

If the user is present, i.e. logged on and actively using the system.
If the machine is on AC or battery power.
When the last backup cycle was completed.
How many changes have been made since the last cycle.
Activity of foreground processes.

Based on all of these factors, which are re-checked every 10 seconds, it determines the optimal way to back up your data. If any of those conditions change, the service makes a decision to reduce/increase quota or suspend/terminate the backup cycle.

Optimized for mobile users

When File History is running, it gracefully handles state transitions. For example, when you close the lid of your laptop, disconnect an external drive or leave home and take your laptop out of the range of the home wireless network, File History takes the right action:

Lid closed - When a PC goes into sleep mode, File History detects the power mode transition and suspends its operation.
Lid opened – File History resumes its operation at a priority that makes sure files are protected without impacting overall system performance, even for gamers. It also waits for all post “lid open” activities to complete so that we do not affect the system while it is coming back out of sleep.
Dedicated storage device disconnected – File History detects that the storage device is not present and starts caching versions of changed files on a system drive.
Dedicated storage device re-connected – in the next cycle, File History detects that the storage device was reconnected, flushes all versions from the local cache to the external drive and resumes normal operation.

Simplicity and peace of mind

We designed File History with two objectives in mind; 1) offer best possible protection of user personal files and 2) offer ease, simplicity and peace of mind.

If you want to take advantage of File History, you have to make only few, simple decisions. In most cases it will be limited to only one – which external drive to use. The rest is taken care of by Windows. The operation of File History is transparent and doesn’t affect the user experience, reliability or performance of Windows in any way.

Full control

Most backup applications, including the Windows Backup and Restore that shipped in Windows 7 require administrator privileges to set up and use. This means that standard users have to ask the administrator to set it up and every time they need to restore a file, or to grant them administrative privileges. Not so with File History. File History offers full control to each individual user. Now users can decide if and when to turn File History on and which external drive to use. In fact, each user can select a different location to store their file history. And they do not have to ask for the administrator’s help to restore a file.

Enthusiasts and experienced PC users can use advanced File History features to control many aspects of its operation, like:

How often you want to save copies of your files: The frequency of backups can be changed from 10 minutes to 24 hours. Higher frequency offers better protection but consumes more disk space.

How long you want to keep saved versions: Versions can be stored forever or as little as one month. This setting is useful when the File History drive fills up to fast. You can slow down this rate by reducing the time versions are stored.

Changing the size of the local cache: File History uses a small amount of space on the local drive to store versions of files while the File History target drive is not available. If you create a lot of versions of files while disconnected or stay disconnected for longer periods of time, you may need to reserve more space on the local drive to keep all versions. Note that the versions stored in the local cache are flushed to the external drive when it becomes available again.

Excluding folders that you do not want to back up: Some folders may contain very large files that do not have to be protected because they can be easily recreated (like downloaded high definition movies or podcasts). These files would quickly consume all of the File History drive capacity. This setting allows you to exclude such folders.

Recommend a drive to other HomeGroup members on your home network: This setting is covered in more detail in the File History and HomeGroup section below.

Accessing the File History event log: The event log contains records of events that may be useful while troubleshooting File History. It may be particularly useful if you want to identify files that File History could not access for any reason.

Advanced settings can be accessed from the File History control panel applet.

To exclude a folder, select Exclude folders. Next, click on the Add button, browse to the folder you want to exclude and select it. Files in this folder will not be backed up starting with the next backup cycle. To start backing it up again, simply remove the folder from the list.

Other advanced settings are available on the Advanced Settings page.

File History also supports new storage features introduced in Windows 8. Users who have lots of data to back up can use Storage Spaces to create a resilient storage pool using off-the-shelf USB drives. When the pool fills up, they can easily add more drives and extra storage capacity to the pool. You can find more about Storage Spaces in this blog post.

Users who use BitLocker to protect the content of their personal files can also use File History as it seamlessly supports BitLocker on both source and destination drives.

File History was designed for consumers but could also be used by enterprise customers. In some cases, File History may conflict with the enterprise policies (like retention policy). To prevent such conflicts, we added a group policy that gives enterprise IT administrators the ability to turn off File History on managed client PCs.

You will find the File History policy setting in the Group Policy Object Editor under Computer Configuration, Administrative Templates, Windows Components, File History.

Minimal setup

File History is part of Windows so you don’t need to install any additional software. However, File History has to be turned on, which typically requires only one click.

As described above, to start protecting your libraries, you need to attach an external drive or select a network location. File History will store versions of your files on this device.

File History automatically selects an external drive if one is available. If more than one drive is available, one with the most free storage capacity is selected.

No schedule

File History wakes up once an hour and looks for personal files that have changed. Versions of all files that have changed are replicated to a dedicated storage device. This approach eliminates the need to set up a schedule and leave a computer idle for an extended period of time. One hour frequency offers a good balance between the level of protection and amount of storage space consumed by file versions. Enthusiasts can change the frequency from 10 min to 1 day in order to increase the level of protection or reduce storage consumption.

No maintenance

File History runs silently in the background and doesn’t require any ongoing maintenance. The only time when it will ask you to intervene is when the external drive is full. At this point you will be asked to either replace the drive with a bigger one or change a setting that tells File History how long to keep file versions around. By default, we keep versions of user personal files forever, but if storage is an issue, it can be reduced to a period of time that best suits your needs.

File History and HomeGroup

File History was also integrated with HomeGroup to make it easier for someone to set up backup for all members of a home network. Here is how it works.

Jane wants her entire family to have their personal data automatically protected. She knows she can do this with File History.
Jane creates a HomeGroup on the family’s home network.
Jane turns on File History on a computer that has a large external drive.
File History control panel detects the HomeGroup and asks if Jane wants to recommend this backup destination to other HomeGroup members.
Jane selects this option and File History uses HomeGroup to broadcast the recommendation to all HomeGroup members.
Each HomeGroup member can now accept the recommendation. If they do, their libraries, desktop, favorites and contacts are automatically backed up to a network share on Jane’s computer.

File History and SkyDrive

File History doesn’t back up your files to the cloud. While the cloud is great for storing files you’d like to access on-the-go, or for sharing files with others, backing up terabytes of data to the cloud requires a specialized service. Many cloud services today support local synchronization, where the data in the cloud is mirrored in your local file system. Sync solutions by their very nature copy changes immediately to all locations, which means accidental deletes or inadvertent changes or corruption to files will be synchronized as well. The best way to address this problem is to couple your sync service with a point-in-time backup solution like File History.

In the blog post, Connecting your apps, files, PCs and devices to the cloud with SkyDrive and Windows 8 we discussed how SkyDrive will integrate with Windows Explorer and the file system. File History takes advantage of that integration. If your SkyDrive is synced to your file system, File History will automatically start protecting the files stored in your local SkyDrive folder. This is a great example of local backup plus reliable anytime, anywhere access. You can access your files in SkyDrive through your PC, your phone, or the web and you’ll also know that File History is providing fast local backup and instantaneous access to all versions of those files.

Full system backup

Usually a full system backup is used to protect your PC against complete system loss, for example when a PC was stolen or lost or the internal hard drive stopped working. Our research showed that only a small number of users are concerned about losing the operating system, applications or settings. They are by far more concerned about losing their personal files. For these reasons, File History was designed specifically to protect user personal files.

File History doesn’t offer the ability to do a full system backup but for those users who may need a full system backup it offers a good compromise. Together with other features introduced in Windows 8 it provides protection against such disasters.

If you want to prepare for a disaster, we recommend a following strategy:

Create a recovery drive to be used when you need to refresh or restore your PC. You can find more about it in this blog post.
Connect to your Microsoft account
Configure your PC to sync your settings
Load apps from the Store
Turn on File History

When your PC is replaced or needs to be reinstalled:

Use the recovery drive to restore the operating system
Connect to your Microsoft account
Configure your PC to sync your settings – this will bring your settings back
Go to the Store and reinstall your modern apps
Reinstall legacy apps
Connect your old File History drive and restore everything – this will restore your personal files

It may require more steps than a file or image restore but has some clear benefits:

You do not restore any “no more desired” software or settings that were on your system
You do not restore sources of some problems that you might have (or create new problems if you restore to different hardware)
You do not restore settings that may cause your system to perform badly or fail

Those who need a full system backup can still use Windows Backup to create a system image.

Requirements

File History requires:

Windows 8 Client operating system
An external storage device with enough storage capacity to store a copy of all user libraries, such as a USB drive, Network Attached Storage device, or share on another PC in the home network.

FAQ

What happens when you upgrade to Windows 8 from Windows 7?
If Windows 7 Backup was active, i.e. it was scheduled and the schedule was active, then it will continue running as scheduled after the upgrade. File History will be disabled by default and users will not be able to turn it on as long as the Windows 7 Backup schedule is active. To turn it you will have to first disable the Windows 7 Backup schedule.

Can Windows 7 users use File History?
Windows 7 users cannot use File History. However, they can restore files from a drive used by File History by browsing the volume in the Windows Explorer and selecting a specific file. Files on the File History drive are stored in the same relative location, and use the same name. The specific version can be identified by the time stamp appended to the file name.

Does File History protect the operating system and applications?
File History only protects user libraries, desktop, favorites and contacts. Other files, such as operating system files, applications, and settings, are not backed up.

Can File History be used with cloud storage?
No. File History is designed specifically for consumers and does not support cloud storage in this release. Windows 8 Server offers a backup feature that can back up files to a cloud. This feature is available on the Server version of Windows and is designed for small and medium businesses.

Can File History be used by enterprise customers?
Yes. However, enterprise customers should be aware that File History may not comply with their company security, access, and retention policies. For that reason, we offer a group policy setting that allows enterprise administrators to disable the feature for an entire organization.

Will File History protect files stored on a file share?
No. File History only protects file stored on a local drive.

If you use offline folders and folder redirection, your folders (like My Documents or My Pictures) are redirected to a network share and will not be protected.
If you add a network location to any of your libraries, this location will not be protected.

In closing

File History silently protects all of your important files stored in Libraries, Desktop, Favorites and Contacts. Once turned on, it requires no effort at all to protect your data. When you lose a file or just need to find an original version of a picture or a specific version of a resume, all versions of your files are available. With the File History restore application you can find it quickly and effortlessly.

--Bohdan Raciborski

Readying Metro style apps for launch

Steven Sinofsky — Tue, 03 Jul 2012 17:30:00 GMT

We know many folks are looking forward to RTM. Developers currently working on apps in the Store are especially excited. We have hundreds of apps in the Windows Store now and many more on the way. There’s a broad set of developers around the world that we have been working closely with since the first Developer Preview. The WinRT platform is evolving rapidly during development based on feedback, and we have the dual task of keeping the Store up and running so we can supply apps to the millions of Preview users, while also getting ready for the next build. It means that if we change or add APIs or improve the tools, the apps will change and require an updated OS to test and verify the app. That’s why we have been providing updated builds to developers who have or are committed to having apps in the Store through strong partnerships.

This post explains the work we’ve been doing since September to keep developers updated with APIs and tools so that apps can stay up to date. We’re doing this even after the Release Preview, just to make sure new apps are ready to go once we get to broad availability. This post was authored by Dennis Flanagan, who leads our ecosystem outreach team. --Steven

As we approach the release of Windows 8, the catalog of Metro style apps continues to grow. To date, people have experienced apps that Microsoft has included with the downloaded build, and those that are offered in the Store in both the Consumer Preview and Release Preview timeframe. Many of those apps are great examples of immersive, touch-first Metro style experiences. However, like the Windows releases they run on, these apps are preview versions of the apps to come. The final versions of all Metro style apps will be available when Windows 8 becomes generally available.

Last year, we began working closely with the developer community by releasing early versions of the Windows 8 platform and tools. We decided to engage developers earlier in the engineering process so we could help them build skills in Metro style app development and give them the opportunity to influence the platform through feedback. Since September of 2011 we have released 8 developer preview versions. Some of these versions have been available to a limited developer audience. Some have been distributed broadly. All of these releases had similar goals:

Deliver new capabilities and APIs
Update tools to simplify Metro style app development
Enhance performance and reliability
Respond to developer feedback

We released our first Developer Preview version at the //build conference in Anaheim. This version introduced developers to the Windows 8 platform, tools and programming models. The WinRT platform included new APIs, and we used the conference to present literally hundreds of technical sessions and samples to give developers a basic understanding of the platform. . Many developers got right to work building Metro style apps, produced some impressive early results, and provided us with useful feedback and recommendations about how to improve the platform and tools.

We made it clear that the first Developer Preview ("DP1") was an early version of the code, and we had a lot of work to complete Windows 8. DP4 and DP5, released in January and February of this year, were targeted at developers who wanted to be the first to publish applications in the Windows Store. By the time we released the Consumer Preview in February of 2012, we had added almost a thousand new WinRT APIs, and had modified hundreds of other APIs based on developer feedback.

For a detailed description of the changes that happened between //build and Consumer Preview, check out these posts on our App Developer blog:

In April and May of this year, we released DP6 and DP7, which allowed developers to prepare their apps for the Release Preview. However, in close collaboration with the development community, we've continued to evolve the platform in response to their feedback. By the time we delivered the Release Preview, we had added 334 more APIs and continued to change existing APIs to address feedback.

One example of a change we made in Release Preview (RP) based on developer feedback is the HTML ListView control (in WinJS). This was an area where lots of developers had difficulties, so we overhauled it to make it easier to work with and to allow a much more extensive degree of performance tuning.

We also made lots of improvements to developer resources, such as templates in Visual Studio. We even added a new template that makes it easier for developers to start a new project and get a great app up and running in very little time.

Design tools were another focus area for improvements. Metro is a design-forward experience, which means the app’s user interface is one of the key ways developers get their apps noticed and differentiate them. We did a lot of work to make it as easy as possible for developers to integrate all the new Metro style design concepts into their apps.

For a complete overview of the changes between CP and RP, see What's changed for app developers since the Consumer Preview.

Our next major milestone is the release to manufacturing (RTM). When the code reaches this milestone, the platform is complete for general availability (GA), and so we won’t have interim updates for developers.

When Developers get the RTM version, they will continue enhancing the features, capabilities and performance of their apps. Some of the apps you’ve already seen will look and perform differently when you download the final released version. There are also many more apps in development that haven’t been released to the Store yet. Many of those developers are waiting for RTM to put the finishing touches on their apps.

The release of Windows 8 will be a great milestone for app developers, but it is really just the beginning. A great benefit of the built-in Windows Store and update mechanism is that they provide developers with the opportunity to gain wide distribution for new apps and continuously improve apps that they've already released. As the app developer community evolves, we expect app developers to take advantage of this and provide regular updates to apps.

--Dennis

Introducing the Photos app for Windows 8

Steven Sinofsky — Tue, 26 Jun 2012 17:00:00 GMT

Wrapping up our series of posts on some of the new apps in Windows 8, we take a look at the new Photos app. With this app, along with Metro style design principles, we set out to design an app that allows you to bring together photos from many different sources and to then view and share them. Brad Weed, a group program manager in the Windows Live team authored this post. --Steven

We take a lot of photos that end up in a lot of different places. Some are on our PCs, others end up on a photo sharing service like Flickr or Facebook, and even more are on our phones—sometimes indefinitely. How and where we store and share photos has changed and will continue to change as we take more photos, buy more devices, and share to more places with more people. What we need is one place where we can see, relive, enjoy, share, and immerse ourselves in all of them, all in one place.

All of your memories in one place

For the Windows 8 Consumer Preview we released an App Preview of the Photos app that introduced a new way to enjoy more of your photos. We realize the myriad places you have to go to see all of your photos, so we decided to bring them all to you in one place. Because you can connect your Microsoft account to services like Facebook and Flickr, you can get to all of your photos and all of those memories just by signing in to Windows 8 with your Microsoft account. Of course, the Photos app works best with our SkyDrive service, and with Windows Phone, you can automatically send all the pictures from your Phone to SkyDrive. This makes the Photos app in Windows 8 a great way to show off your photos without having to huddle around a phone. Even though you took your photos on your phone, you can easily enjoy them on your PC, just about as fast as you can take them.

Tell beautiful stories

Because Windows 8 is optimized for a landscape orientation, we designed the Photos app in the same way—to give you a view that tells the story best.

Our storyline view shows a photo just big enough to enjoy, but small enough to see more than one at a time. If you want to see more of your pictures at once, just pinch to zoom out, and you’ll see a thumbnail view of your collection.

But notice: the thumbnail view isn’t just all of your photos cropped and displayed as square thumbnails. We show your thumbnails in the way that best represents the orientation of the photo.

And of course, the best way to view a photo is in its full glory, so naturally, you can also view a single photo at a time.

And if you don’t want to swipe through your pictures to see them one or a few at a time, launch the slide show and sit back and enjoy. Better yet, use the Windows 8 Devices charm to play your slide show on your TV or any other Windows certified Play To device. Of course, this works for video as well, so you can also show off your latest Movie Maker creations this way, too.

New enhancements for Windows 8 Release Preview

Photos from all of your devices

Since the Consumer Preview, we’ve been listening to the feedback and have been hard at work making improvements. We’ve heard from many of you that most of your photos aren’t actually sitting on a web service, but they’re on a PC somewhere in your home. And often they’re on a PC that isn’t convenient to get to or in a spot conducive to gathering your dinner guests around the monitor for “show and tell.” So we’ve partnered with our friends in SkyDrive to make this a whole lot easier. Now, if you install the SkyDrive desktop app, you can choose to have all of your photos automatically sent and saved to SkyDrive. Any PC with the SkyDrive desktop app installed will show up in the Photos app. So by simply running SkyDrive desktop app on the PC(s) where all your photos reside, the Photos app will reach back to that PC so that you can look at your old photos alongside your recent ones. You’ll soon be revisiting photos you forgot you had.

Import

If you want to use your new Windows 8 PC as the primary place to store all of your photos, we’ve also added the ability to import with the Photos app.

When you plug your camera in to your PC, all you have to do is pick the Photos app as your importer, and we’ll take care of the rest. You don’t need any additional cables, and the quality of your photos will not be diminished. After you import your photos, if you don’t have time to organize them, don’t worry. All of your photos can always be viewed by date, so it’s easy to browse through large collections of photos.

New home screen

The Photos app should scream “photos,” so we’ve added an edge-to-edge photo that appears in the background on the home screen of the app. When you open the Photos app for the first time, you’ll see a nice photo there, but you can change it to whatever photo you want, so it’s one of your own. It is a personal computer after all.

Sharing your memories

All of the rich views in the Photos app are especially helpful when you’re ready to share or print your photos. Now, when you go to pick your favorite photo for your Windows 8 lock screen, or you want to share that perfect photo using the Share charm, you can grab a photo from Facebook, Flickr, SkyDrive, or any PC with the SkyDrive desktop app installed–all using the Photos app as a picker.

Sometimes you stumble across a series of photos that you’d like to share while just browsing around. The Photos app makes it easy to select a set of photos, and use the Share charm to share in Mail, and off they go either as basic attachments or by sending a link to a slides show hosted on SkyDrive instead. Using SkyDrive allows you to send a lot of photos without having to worry about file size limitations.

Over the years we’ve all imported, shared, and saved photos to myriad SD cards, hard drives, and Internet services. It’s rare that we ever go back and relive those memories, because they’re in so many places that it’s become too onerous. The Photos app lets you see the last photo you took on your Windows Phone, or the very first photo you shot with your very first digital camera. We’ve taken a lot of photos and videos in our lives and we’re only going to take more. The Photos app not only brings all of those memories back, but it puts them in the palm of your hand.

Keep the feedback coming. We know there’s a lot more to do. Until then, sit back and enjoy the photos you forgot you had.

Brad Weed
Group Program Manager, Windows Photos and Videos

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Designing the Windows 8 Calendar app

Steven Sinofsky — Fri, 15 Jun 2012 22:00:00 GMT

This post builds on the Mail app and People app posts, and details the Calendar app. We’ve worked hard to integrate these apps together into a seamless communication suite that connects to the cloud services most important to you. This post details the integration with Windows 8, some of the features in the current preview, and features on the way. We also look at a little bit of the design history and iteration as some background. Colin Anthony, a lead program manager on the Windows Live team, authored this post. --Steven

When we set out to design the Calendar app for Windows 8, there was no shortage of directional possibilities. Given the long history of calendars in society, and the diversity of Windows customers, we asked ourselves: What are the essential attributes of a great calendaring experience and how can we bring them to life by using the uniquely rich capabilities of Windows 8?

At its heart, a great calendar should to do the following:

Show your life clearly. You should have crystal clear visibility into what’s happening in your life – at home, at work, and at school.
Make it easy to get around. Moving back and forth in time should be quick and efficient. Opening events and appointments should feel natural.
Make it easy to add new items. New things are always coming up in your life. A great calendar makes it easy to make new plans.
Keep you on time. Well laid plans aren’t very useful if you show up late!
Be ready to do more. As you get busier, scheduling gets more complicated. Calendar should gracefully handle your needs as they change.

Showing your life clearly

One of the most important functions of a calendar is its ability to answer the questions “What’s going on for me today?” and “What’s coming up next?” As we designed the Calendar app, we focused on providing that clarity and eliminating distractions. Given all the potential capabilities of a digital calendar, keeping this focus can actually be quite difficult. The temptation to add extra bells and whistles can be very real. At the same time, we realized that focus is one thing paper calendars have always been quite good at --- they simply present you with the calendar grid and the information you’ve written on it.

With that insight and the clear principles of what it means to be a great Metro style app, we committed to clarity of presentation. The app focuses on the calendar and your content, above all else.

A calendar with no distractions - your schedule is the focus.

Of course, having an easy-to-read calendar is only useful if all your information is available. Whether you’re keeping track of appointments at work, managing family activities, or mapping out your class schedule at school, Calendar brings everything together to provide a more complete picture of your life.

Work and personal appointments are available in one view

You’re also in complete control of how these calendars appear in the app. For example, if a certain calendar has special meaning for you, you can make it stand out by changing its color. If you’re overwhelmed by the number of birthdays showing up from your favorite social network, you can hide those items in order to see everything else more clearly.

All of these personalization controls are tucked away neatly in Settings to avoid distracting you when you don’t need them.

Having less frequently used Calendar options tucked away in Settings provides control without distractions.

Making it easy to get around

Another important function of the calendar is the ability to move around in time. Our most important goals were:

Making it simple to move forward and backward in time
Making view switching predictable
Making it easy to open and view existing events

Moving forward and backward in time

One thing was apparent to us early on: We wanted a simple model where a gesture forward would take you into the future, and a gesture backwards would take you into the past—a direct way of moving around in time. No buttons to click or extra controls to manipulate.

But even in this simple design there's a question of how far forward and how far back each movement should take you. Not only were there user experience tradeoffs to be considered, but technical ones as well.

If we decided one swipe could move you forward multiple months (depending on the speed of the gesture) that would give you a natural and powerful way to make huge leaps forward in time. But there’s a challenge in making the landing place predictable. That is, if you’re starting in June, and want to move to July, you might end up in August if you swipe too quickly. If this happens frequently enough, it can feel as if you’re not in control.

Additionally, since the boundaries between months are well defined–landing halfway between July and August doesn't make sense–accuracy is important. Contrast this to panning a two-dimensional grid of photos, where “getting close” is ok as long as you arrive in the general region of the photos you’re looking for.

To avoid these pitfalls, we went with an approach that enables you to consistently move forward one month at a time–by swiping once, hitting page down on the keyboard, or clicking the Forward button. This makes your experience much more predictable, putting you in control. If you’re in June and you want to arrive at August, you simply click or swipe twice. That’s it. You’re guaranteed never to overshoot the intended target.

Simple movements forward are quick and predictable

Switching views

When using the app, most people want to stay in the same view the majority of the time, depending on how busy their schedules tend be. People with fewer appointments tend to prefer Month view. Those with very busy schedules tend to prefer Day view. So, rather than making view switching a top level command that would always be visible, we opted to place it on the app bar instead. You can easily pull up the app bar in Windows 8 with a right-click or swipe up from the bottom edge, so you have access to the view switcher when you need it, without being distracted by it the rest of the time.

Opening the app bar gives you simple switching between views when needed

Opening individual events

Making it easy to open events is an interesting problem because of the tension between two variables:

Making each event larger (in height and width) makes them easier to target with the mouse or your finger.
Making events smaller means you can see more content at one time.

We needed to find a solution that would give you easy targeting while also showing enough content in each view. This was especially important in Month view, which has the tightest space constraints for each particular day. Keeping the key variables in mind, we designed the event sizes within a sweet spot, one in which Month view typically shows 2 events per day (the average for the majority customers) while maintaining nearly 100% accuracy for mouse and touch targeting. And, of course, when you have busier days at home, work, and school, switching to Week o Day views shows you all the events you need while providing the same high accuracy.

Making it easy to add new plans

Because new events can come up in life so quickly, we wanted event creation to be direct and instantly available at all times. When you think about paper calendars, they’re very direct—you identify a date, move your hand towards it and start writing. It all happens quite naturally, and we do it without much thought because of the paper calendar’s simplicity and purity of design. In a similar way, you can add new events to the Calendar in Windows 8 by simply clicking or tapping on the day or time you want.

Click-to-add is like putting pen to paper

This design—using the grid as the primary command surface—means no other buttons are necessary to complete this frequent task. Everything happens in the calendar grid. This reinforces our Metro design principle of content over chrome. And it allows for a pure experience that isn’t just about great consumption, but also about simple and direct creation.

Keeping you on time

Of course, even given all of the above, a calendar is only valuable if it helps you stay on time. Towards that goal, we designed Calendar with a range of smart capabilities to ensure you don't miss any important events.

Notifications and reminders

In the full page for an event, you can set any reminder time you want. At the desired time, you'll get a lightweight popup to remind you.

Notifications tell you about upcoming events

Notifications don’t block your current task. They don’t force you to interact with them. Using the built-in notifications system in Windows 8, a Calendar notification simply nudges you about what’s coming up and gets out of your way.

In addition, similar to Windows Phone, you can see information about upcoming events on the lock screen and on the Start tile:

Snapping the Calendar for always-on visibility

When you’re extremely busy on a particular day, you often want your full schedule visible at all times. With Snap, you can see your calendar while you use other apps.

Of course, the slim form factor of the snapped view presents quite a design challenge for Calendar. Some views, like Day view, fit very naturally into the more condensed space. To make it fit, we could simply show one day instead of two, and the overall model of the view would stay the same. Problem solved.

But Week and Month view are more challenging. A full week or month is quite difficult to fit in such a narrow area with any hope of showing the actual titles of each event. In addition, we want to maintain predictability in the system by avoiding situations where certain views (like Day view) look essentially the same when snapped, but other views (Month, Week) look entirely different when compared to their larger versions.

Given the challenges and goals, we designed a simple and consistent model where all views are represented by a single, snapped view. This single view maintains the context and positioning from the larger views. (That is, if you’re on Wednesday in the large view, you’re still on Wednesday when going to snapped view.) It’s also designed to give you the same life clarity and ease of navigation: All events from all of your calendars are available in a simple list. A swipe or click to the right or left takes you forward or backwards in time.

Calendar in snapped view lets you plan and browse at the same time

Ready to do more

Lastly, if we’ve done our job well, more and more customers will start using Calendar to manage larger portions of their lives at home and work. With that in mind, Calendar is designed to do more as your usage increases.

Week view

As you’d expect, Week view is useful when you have a large volume of appointments, and it’s crafted to give you the clarity you need for a particular week:

Week view lets you see a Sunday to Saturday overview

Two-day view

We also know there are days where you’re extremely busy at work, home, school, or all three. And we wanted a design that would allow even greater focus and precision. At the same time, we didn’t want to zoom in so far as to create “tunnel vision” by removing too much context. To strike the right balance, we designed Calendar with a two-day view:

Two-day view gives you the best detail about today and tomorrow

The two-day view is useful because making good time management decisions today often requires understanding what’s coming up tomorrow. In addition, this view takes advantage of today’s modern wide-screen displays without adding additional chrome or distractions just to fill up the extra space. As with the other views, it’s simply the calendar grid and your events. (And here’s a tip: each day scrolls independently without affecting the adjacent day. So, you can view information about tonight, while keeping an eye on your first appointment tomorrow.)

Doing more with events

Finally, we know many customers already use their calendars for quick reminders to themselves (e.g. “Pay the phone bill”, “Parent/Teacher conference at noon”). As mentioned earlier, you can click or tap any place in the calendar, and simply type in the few details you need.

In addition to these typical scenarios, we designed Calendar so you can do more as your needs change—because depth and richness are a core part of what makes a digital calendar special.

For example, you may have a family trip coming up this summer. Not only can you add your trip to the calendar, but you can also add all the related information about your trip directly in the appointment—things like flight times, confirmation numbers, and day-by-day itineraries—no separate papers or messages to manage. It’s all right there. You can also send the event to other members of your family, directly from the calendar, so everyone has the info they need.

As another example, on my family’s calendar we have a recurring appointment that lists each person’s cleaning responsibilities for Saturdays. On a paper calendar, this would be tedious to manage, or it would require a special calendar dedicated to that purpose. However, a dedicated page for each calendar event makes this level of richness possible in a single app.

The events page provides the options you need to manage your life

As you use Calendar in the Release Preview, we hope you enjoy it. The feedback we received during the Consumer Preview was extremely valuable, and we’ve looked at all of it very closely. Thanks! As we move towards the final release of Windows 8, we hope you’ll enjoy the upcoming improvements as well.

--Colin

Building the Mail app

Steven Sinofsky — Thu, 14 Jun 2012 18:00:00 GMT

Hundreds of thousands of folks have been using the “App Preview” of Mail on a daily basis since the Windows 8 Release Preview. We’ve also been updating it along the way through the new Windows Store with more updates planned. In this post we go into the background of the Mail app and talk about the design and features, especially relative to Metro style design principles. This isn’t an exhaustive list of Mail features or features yet to be added and primarily focuses on the design and integration with Windows 8. This post was written by Jeremy Epling, a lead program manager on the Windows Live team. This is the second in a series of posts on the new apps. --Steven

When we started planning the email experience for Windows 8, our goal was to create an app that embodied the Metro style design principles. It needed to be fast and fluid, be great with touch and a keyboard and mouse, focus on your content, provide the right features at the right time, and fulfill our expectations of email on modern devices. Starting from scratch gave us an opportunity to carry forward the essential functions of an email app, while also designing features with a fresh eye and taking advantage of what Windows 8 offers uniquely.

How people use email today

At the start of our design process, we conducted research into how people use email today. Email has been around for decades. It’s changed a lot and so have our expectations.

Multiple email accounts are common. The average user has 2 to 3 email accounts. One is for work, one is personal, and another account might be used primarily for mailing lists and coupons, or isn’t used frequently, like an account from a school that you no longer attend.

We receive a lot of email. Our data shows that those who we would consider light email users receive more than about 180 messages a week, while heavy email users receive more than 2100 messages a week. These numbers are growing as more services come online and support newsletters, coupons, receipts, and other types of messages via email. We need to make it easy to quickly get through all your email.

Folders aren’t used that often. This is probably a surprise to many people who rely heavily on folders, which is a very common practice in many enterprise environments, and for enthusiasts. At some enterprises, users have up to 50 folders, while the majority of people using Exchange and Hotmail have far fewer folders. The right balance for Mail was to make folders easy to use, but not to optimize for 50+ folders and deeply-nested hierarchies.

Email is real-time. While email is often used for asynchronous communication, where you don’t expect an immediate response, more and more, the expectation is for an immediate, real-time response. After you sign up for a new service, you’re often told to expect an email immediately. We expect to be notified the instant a new email comes in and most people check their email frequently throughout the day or leave it running all day long so they can see every message as it comes in.

People expect consistency with mobile phone experiences. Many people are using their phones in conjunction with their PCs. In fact, they’re using their phones for triage, reading, and filing away of mail (among other things). The importance of consistency between your phone view and PC view of email are more important than ever. The use of standard protocols such as Exchange Active Sync as implemented in the Mail app are increasingly important, especially because this protocol allows for syncing of contacts and calendar, in addition to mail. (Don’t worry, support for other protocols, such as IMAP, are on the way.)

We took these trends into account as guiding principles as we began to consider how people would use the Mail app to manage their email, write messages, and stay up-to-date.

Managing email

Accounts and folders

One of the goals of Metro style design is to emphasize the content of the app, and de-emphasize UI commands or navigation that you use rarely. We wanted the Mail app to allow you to focus on the most important aspects of doing email. The 16:9 aspect ratio of Windows 8 made it possible for us to comfortably fit all the essential pieces of content that we use every day: accounts, folders, messages, and a reading pane. It provides an easy way for you to quickly take in all of your email without switching views, and while still feeling open. This is a change from the way it appeared in Consumer Preview, where we only showed messages and a reading pane. We realized that switching accounts and folders wasn’t fast and fluid enough (and customer feedback supported this conclusion). Because folders and accounts are key pieces of content that you need to see, we updated the design to show them in Release Preview.

3-pane design of the Mail app

Both of these realizations led to the 3-pane design that you see in the Release Preview today. This design shows your different accounts so it is just just one tap to switch between them. The unread count on each account makes it easy to see if you have new mail to look at in that account. The same is true for folders. Even though most users don’t have many folders, they are a core way that many people use email, so we made it easy to quickly switch between them. An always-present folder list is especially valuable for people who use server rules to automatically filter their email into specific folders.

Commands

We spent a lot of time deciding which functionality, or commands,would be always visible in the app so that most people wouldn’t be distracted by commands they never used. We decided to include commands for the tasks that every person uses almost every time they launch Mail: creating, responding to, and deleting messages. All the respond commands are grouped into a single top-level command since they preform a similar function. Delete is in the corner, which also aligns with the Cancel command when writing an email.

Some people change the read/unread state of emails or move emails frequently, but for the majority of users, this is actually a pretty rare task. Deleting, starting a new mail, and responding to mail dramatically overshadow these as common tasks, so we made sure these commands would always be visible. The other commands are quickly accessible via the app bar at the bottom of the screen (Windows key + Z, or swipe up from the bottom of the screen, or right-click to invoke the app bar). If you select multiple messages, we anticipate that you’re likely to use “Mark as read” or “Move,” so we automatically bring up the app bar for you.

The app bar automatically appears when you select multiple messages

Message list

In Release Preview, we also updated the message list to show as many messages as possible, to help you get through your email more quickly. The message list spans from the top to the bottom of the app, doesn’t show a message preview, and uses a smaller font than before. At a resolution of 1366x768, this allows you to see 14 messages instead of the 8.5 messages you could see in Consumer Preview. It’s a delicate balance to create a message list that has large enough items to work great for touch, but still provides the density that many enthusiasts expect. We also added profile pictures to the message list, so you can quickly spot messages from the people you care about most, like friends and family. This helps the message list come alive and provide a more personal experience. The profile picture comes from your friends on different social networks that you’ve connected to your Microsoft account.

Reading pane

The reading pane makes it fast and fluid to switch between messages, so you don’t need to go through a full page transition. The reading pane is optimized to be 640px wide so it can fit newsletters, receipts, and other commercial mail without showing a horizontal scrollbar. Also, we’ve found that when using our default reading font, 640px is the optimal width for reading a line of text so you don’t get eye fatigue or lose your place. When you receive an email we restrict the text to conform to this optimal line length, whenever possible.

There is a large profile picture so it’s easy to see who sent the message. We made the subject line bold to make it stand out more in the reading pane, since it sets the context of the message. If you know on the sender or another recipient of the message via a social network that’s connected to your Microsoft account, you can tap on her name to view her profile page in the People app. From there, you can see her latest status, send an IM, etc.

Writing email

The screen you see when writing an email is composed of two panes, side-by-side, so that you have more room to write your message. The touch keyboard limits the amount of vertical space available, so it didn’t make sense to put the To, Cc, and other information above the body of the email. To create more space for your content, we put the To and Cc lines in one pane, and the subject and body into another. This also groups the info logically: all the information related to addressing the message is in one group, and your content is in another. The formatting commands are hidden by default to give you more space to write your email.

Writing an email

Even though formatting is not used frequently in email, it is critical when you need it. To make it easier to format messages, Mail automatically shows the formatting commands when you select text in the message pane. After you apply formatting, the commands go away so you have more room to focus on what you’re writing. Our goal is to provide the right commands at the right time. When you’ve selected text, it’s most likely because you want to copy or format that text, so those options automatically come up. Many of the formatting keyboard shortcuts that you’re used to from Outlook work as well.

When writing an email, select some text and the formatting commands automatically appear above the keyboard.

Designed for Windows 8

Another part of designing a great Metro style app is to make sure it takes advantage of the unique aspects of Windows 8. Mail does this by deeply integrating into the operating system to make it easier to share, print, and stay up-to-date on your email.

Snap

I frequently snap Mail to the side of another app (or the desktop) so that I can easily stay on top of it while I’m doing something else. It allows me to instantly see when I have new email and act on it. I can delete, move, or respond directly from the snapped Mail pane, so I can quickly get back to what I was doing. In Release Preview, you can also switch accounts and folders in the snapped state, so you can stay on top of any folder or account while you’re using another app. With these updates, it’s easy to keep the snapped view of Mail up all day long.

This is really useful if you are composing a long email and need to copy and paste things into it from multiple apps. You can start a new message, snap Mail to the side, and then on the main part of the screen, switch between other apps to get everything you need and directly paste it into the message.

Mail snapped to the side of IE

Print

Printing is still a common need–to print a ticket, receipt, or coupon you received in email–and it’s something every Windows user expects to just work. In Release Preview, you just need to select the email you want to print, then open the Devices charm and select the printer you want to print it with.

Printing in Mail

Share

Mail integrates with the Share contract so that you can easily share to Mail from any app. Many times you don’t want to send something to your entire social network. Instead, you want to send a link, some photos, or a game score to just a few of your friends. Mail provides a great way to accomplish targeted, private sharing from other apps via the Share charm. If you’re sharing with the same group of people again and again, Windows remembers that group so it’s easier to share with them the next time.

Open the Share charm from IE and you’ll see a list of the people you commonly share with using Mail

Mail supports sharing text, links, and pictures. If the app provides a public URL, Mail automatically grabs a picture, title, and description from the webpage. Then, you can add your message and send it to your friends. Using Mail from the Share charm looks and behaves the same as the when you compose a new message in the Mail app, so all your formatting keyboard shortcuts still work, like CTRL+B for bold.

When you share from a webpage, you can send a preview in Mail

Live tiles

We expect modern devices to always be up-to-date with the latest info. The Mail tile does this by rotating through the last 5 unread and unseen messages. This lets you know if there is something new since the last time you checked your email.

You can also create a secondary tile for any email folder or account, and pin that to the Start screen to see live updates of new mail in just that folder or account. This is very convenient if you use server rules to automatically move email to another folder.

For example, I’ve arranged Start to have separate tiles for my corporate Exchange account and my Hotmail account, so I can easily tell if I have new email in either account.

You can pin tiles to the Start screen for any email account or folder

You can also put these secondary tiles on the lock screen so it’s easy to see if you have new email and what folder it’s in, without signing in to your device.

Lock screen with new mail counts for both Exchange and Hotmail

If you want to know immediately when new email arrives, you can turn on notifications for each account by going to Settings, and then Accounts.

New email notification

Of course, all of these are customizable, and if you prefer, you can reduce the amount of information that appears on the tiles or the lock screen. You can turn off Live tiles individually for each of your pinned folders or accounts. Notifications can be controlled for each account from the Settings charm, and include a sleep mode with several levels of silencing.

Always up to date

On a modern device, we just expect to have our email (and other information) always up to date. We also expect our apps to be respectful of CPU usage and battery life. Mail strikes this balance by using the background processing APIs built into Windows 8. These allow the Mail app to be suspended, but still wake up the email sync engine when new email arrives (push) or when a timer fires (polling). We’ve factored the email sync engine into a separate process so that only the minimal amount of functionality is run to keep you up to date and preserve the battery. This is what drives the Mail app’s tile and notifications.

Mail has account-specific settings, so that you can choose the configuration that works best for each account on your device. By default, all accounts will download new email “as items arrive” (push), but you can configure that to happen every 15 minutes, 30 minutes, 1 hour, or manually.

We want to prevent bill shock, so we try to use the minimal amount of data necessary while still delivering a great experience. One way we prevent out-of-control data usage is to only download the last 2 weeks of email by default. We’ve found that most people only actively engage with the last 2 weeks of email, so we don’t download all of the messages in your multi-gigabyte email account unless you specifically configure it that way for any given account. Also, this provides a much faster first download, so you can start acting on your messages more quickly.

Mail default account settings for Exchange

If you’re on a metered network where you pay per MB of data you use, Mail uses the new networking APIs in Windows 8 to detect this, and only downloads the first 20KB of each message body and no attachments. For the majority of messages, this is the entire thing. If it’s a larger email, it’s just one tap to download the rest of the message. If you’re on Wi-Fi, the entire message is downloaded by default.

What’s next

Email is an important part of our daily lives. We’re still continually working to improve Mail and have many more features on the way. Today we’re excited about the response to the app and the first preview release. We believe that people want a great email app that meets their modern expectations and, based on usage, we are seeing this in the Windows 8 Mail app.

Thanks for all the great feedback, and keep it coming.

Jeremy Epling
Lead Program Manager
Windows Mail

The People app: the complete, cloud-powered address book for Windows 8

Steven Sinofsky — Wed, 13 Jun 2012 17:15:00 GMT

Managing "contacts" has been a bit of a challenge for many, especially as the number of places that contacts can be stored and the number of PCs and devices we use to access those contacts has increased. Storing contacts in the cloud for easy roaming and connectivity is a part of the solution. With Windows 8 and the new People app, we are taking cloud storage a step further by optionally connecting it to other services you already use. This brings together email contacts and contacts from your service / social accounts in one easy to access and use place that roams across your Windows 8 PCs and phone.

In this post, Jeff Kunins, a group program manager on the Windows Live team, details the People app. This is the first of a series of posts on the new service-connected apps that are currently in App Preview. --Steven

Modern devices come with an address book or contact list because the people we communicate and share with are so important to how we use those devices. Email, texting, phone and video calls, social updates and comments – these are but a few of the people-based activities we do with the phones, PCs, and tablets we use every day. With Windows 8 we set out to meet this fundamental need with a new kind of contact experience: the People app.

The People app in Windows 8 is a modern take on the flat contact lists of the past–it’s built for the way you communicate today, and it’s connected to the cloud services you already use. The People app connects to your email and social accounts, bringing together all your contacts (and what they’re up to) in one convenient place. Windows 8 Consumer Preview users have already used the People app millions of times and received millions of social notifications on its live tiles. We are proud of the early enthusiasm for our approach, and thankful for everyone’s helpful feedback on how we can improve this early preview version. We thought we would take some time to share more of our perspective on the modern social address book, and how our point of view is driving the evolution of the People app in Windows 8.

Modern devices like Windows 8 and Windows Phone require an address book that's crafted around four simple principles:

Complete & Connected – All your personal and work contacts are there, alive with their social activities and photos, letting you instantly engage and react to them. Data syncs from your email and social accounts rather than getting this info from a one-time import, and you get a simple unified contact card for each person, regardless of how many versions of their contact info you have from different accounts.
Designed for Windows 8 – On modern devices the address book is a core part of the overall experience, therefore it is important to design it with the whole system in mind. The People app follows Metro style design principles so it is fast and fluid, and it works together with all your other apps through the Share and Picker contracts.
Cloud-powered – your contacts and settings are effortlessly backed up, so “they just work” when you sign in from a new device, or even from the web. And when you pin a contact to your Start screen, the live tile lights up with real-time notifications about new photos, comments, and tweets.
In control – you decide what you share with whom across your home, work, and social networks. And of course, those networks decide what information is shared and connected, respecting their policies and customer privacy.

Here’s a short video illustrating these principles in the People app:

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Complete & Connected

We’ve talked before about how people should be able to connect the services they already use, without needing to re-spam their friends with invitations. For many years, one of the primary ways that you got contact data into an email account or a social network was to import your contacts (and in some cases, import, and then re-invite them) from another account. This even holds true for mobile phones—how many people do you know who have delayed buying a new phone just to avoid the crazy hassle of “transferring” the contacts from the old phone to the new one?

Many of us have had this problem at least partially solved with smart phones that sync our email accounts—but it should just work for everyone, with one easy place for all our contacts and all our accounts.

So, the People app does this. It uses Exchange ActiveSync, as well as the secure, standards-based APIs (OAuth, REST, etc.) exposed by our partners like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn to sync a copy of your contact list from the cloud. It’s always up to date with new friends you add (and respects deletions if you un-friend them :-)), so you don’t have the problems of a brittle one-time import.

Connecting accounts like Facebook, Twitter, and Exchange

Once your contacts are in the People app, we give you a beautifully tailored experience where you can see and comment on their social activities and photos, view their contact details, or send them a message via whatever service you and that contact have in common. Whether you’re browsing the summary of “What’s new” across your contacts and networks, or just looking at a specific contact, it’s easy to catch up and stay connected.

Main contact list view features large tiles for your favorite contacts

Windows 8 “semantic zoom” lets you quickly pinch to navigate your contact list

Looking at a single contact gets you their contact info and what they’re up to

Tap “What’s new” for an at-a-glance summary from your social networks

Looking at a single social update lets you see all the comments and add to them

One challenge that any modern address book like the People app needs to handle is duplicates—we all tend to be friends with and have info on a given person from many different accounts. For example, I have contacts for my friend Omar Shahine in Exchange and Hotmail, we’re friends on Facebook and colleagues on LinkedIn, and of course I follow him on Twitter.

The People app – just like Windows Phone and Hotmail – automatically detects that all of these contacts are the same human being (my friend Omar), and presents them to me as a single “linked” contact with all the data together in one place, on one tile, etc. And very importantly, it does this without messing with any of the underlying source data.

We do our best to get this “right” automatically, but recognizing that we can’t be perfect, we want users to be able to edit and add/remove their own links. We already provide this on Hotmail and Windows Phone, and we’ll be adding that to the Windows 8 version over time.

By connecting multiple accounts and linking your duplicate contacts, we’re able to create a contact card for everyone in your address book, regardless of how you’re connected to them. So, at a glance I can see a quick summary, and then I’m one click away from common tasks – sending an email, starting a chat, getting map information, finding a phone number or address, or just browsing through their recent activity.

Designed for Windows 8

A second principle we followed was to design the app to take advantage of the power of Windows 8. Unlike other systems, in Windows 8, apps can connect to other apps and to the OS itself through APIs that we call contracts. This means not only are the built-in applications like Mail and Messaging powered by People’s contact list – so are the other apps you install on your Windows 8 device.

One of the highlights of the Metro style Start screen are all the tiles that are alive with activity and provide one-touch access to the apps and content you’re interested in. The People app takes advantage of the secondary tiles feature, which lets you have additional tiles that immediately link to that part of the underlying app. So, when I pin contacts like TechMeme, Top Chef, my wife, and my friend Omar to my Start screen, it’s just one tap to get right to their contact info and activity, and one more touch to send them mail or look at their latest photos.

Also new since the Consumer Preview is that the People app now supports the Share contract, allowing you to post to Facebook or Twitter from any Windows 8 app, including Internet Explorer. So, just by connecting your accounts to the People app, with a few quick touches you can share your latest favorite article with your friends and followers.

Any Windows 8 app (like IE) can use the Share charm to let you post to Facebook and Twitter

Lastly, another great feature is the People picker contract—with this, any Windows 8 app can speed up simple tasks like sending a package from a website or emailing a list of friends by letting you quickly select contacts from the People app. And unlike a silent, full-access API, this never happens without bringing up the system-brokered user experience that you’re in control of.

Any app can invoke the People Picker, letting you choose contacts to use

Cloud-powered

None of the features we’ve talked about so far would be possible if the app and your device weren’t cloud-powered, so we can sync data from your various accounts and display it within the app. But if all of your data and settings were solely managed by the “client” app itself (like a traditional mobile phone or email app), then you’d have a few problems: (1) once you set this up on one device like your phone, you’d have to do it all over again when you got a new PC at home or at work, (2) you wouldn’t get any of the benefits of this unified experience when you were at someone else’s machine just using a web browser, and (3) when services like Facebook or LinkedIn evolve their APIs you’d have to upgrade to a new version of the app before things would work right again.

Our approach is to use your Microsoft account and the cloud to safely cache your settings, so that when you go to a new device or even access your contact list from the web , things will still “just work” as you’d expect. Additionally, we make many of the API calls to networks like Facebook and Twitter from the cloud, so that we can often adjust to how those APIs evolve without making everyone update to a new version of the app.

A great example of how you benefit from the cloud is that the People app remembers your connection to Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, no matter what device you sign in from. Over 50 million people have already connected social networks to their Microsoft account through their use of social features in Windows 8, Windows Phone, Hotmail, Messenger, and SkyDrive. Every one of those people, when they sign in to a new Windows 8 PC for the very first time, will automatically have their People app populated with their complete, connected, cloud-powered address book.

Being cloud-powered means that not only do you have an always up-to-date copy of your contact list on your device, but that your People app tile and tiles for your pinned contacts automatically light up with the latest notifications from your social networks. For example, when someone comments on the photos you just posted, the People app tile (and the “Me” Notifications tab in the app itself) will animate with that update and encourage you to take a look. Similarly, each time one of your pinned contacts does something new, their tile will show that activity.

In control

Of course, we respect the policies of each data source we connect to – for example, the People app doesn’t currently sync any Exchange data to the cloud. This ensures that data that is governed by your employer’s policies aren’t even temporarily cached in a third-party data center, even though it also means you have to set up your Exchange accounts separately on each device and you can’t get to them from contacts.live.com. Similarly, Facebook has different policies for syncing contacts’ email addresses and phone numbers on specific mobile apps vs. other devices and the web. So, to get Facebook contacts on your Windows Phone you connect it separately in order to have that additional data available to you in the People app on Windows Phone. Twitter also has smart, specific policies regarding how tweets are displayed, which are important to get right.

We also recognize that each person uses their address book and networks in slightly different ways. So we put you in control of what you share with which network and individuals on the network. For example, when you connect Facebook you can decide to connect just the address book, or additional features like instant messaging.

Moving forward

We’re excited to see the initial response to our point of view that modern devices should come with a complete, connected, and cloud-powered address book that you’re in control of. We hope you enjoy the key additions we’ve been able to add so far since the Consumer Preview, such as Semantic Zoom and letting you share to people you know on Facebook and Twitter from any Windows 8 app that uses the Share contract.

--Jeff Kunins

Activating Windows 8 contracts in your app

Steven Sinofsky — Mon, 11 Jun 2012 19:00:00 GMT

One topic that we’ve demonstrated quite a bit is how apps on a Windows 8 PC can communicate with other apps and web services. At the start of Windows 8 we chose an approach where apps can be the source or destination for data you want to share—sort of like a clipboard, but with a richer interaction model and clearer semantics. When an app implements a contract, Windows 8 can provide glue between that app and any other apps on the system, and the system itself. You can see this in action when you do something simple like use the Share charm from a web page in the Metro style Internet Explorer—you can share the link via the Mail app, with someone whose contact info you've stored in the People app, and so on. You can search across apps that implement the Search contract. You can open and save files from or to any location that implements the File Open and Save Picker contracts. This innovative approach allows Windows 8 to work with any app/service pair rather than “hardcoding” a single level of support for a given app. And all of this is supported, if you choose, by your Microsoft account, which you can connect to different services, from Facebook to Twitter to LinkedIn and more. Over the course of this week, we’ll do a series of posts on the new Microsoft apps, where sharing, connecting, and integration with Windows 8 are key topics. This is a repost of a developer-focused post from our Windows 8 App Developer blog and was authored by Derek Gebhard, a program manager on our User Experience team. --Steven

When you start writing Metro style apps you’ll quickly come across contracts, a new and powerful concept in Windows 8. Metro style apps use contracts to declare interactions they support with other apps and with Windows. You’ve probably already heard about some of them: search, share, etc. Using contracts, apps become better by working with the system or with each other when users install more apps that implement contracts. In this post I’ll walk you through activation, one of the main concepts to think about as you add contracts to your apps.

The Windows activation platform is used to launch Metro Style apps and to notify them of the reason why a user launched them. The reasons vary from a user starting the app using its tile on the start screen to the app being launched for a specific task such as showing a user search results for a query. Windows provides your app with the reason it was launched and if applicable any additional info needed to complete its task. Before our Windows 8 activation platform, you passed this info to apps via command-line parameters. With our new model, we also support passing live objects such as a StorageFile, ShareOperation, etc to provide the app with context. You’ll see that this makes contracts all the more powerful. Let’s jump into the details of what you need to know to support being launched for a contract.

Contracts: Launching Metro style apps for a purpose and with context

As you can see in the Windows 8 Consumer Preview demo, Windows 8 contracts are the glue that binds your app to other Metro style apps and to the system UI. For example, the File Open Picker contract allows the user to import files from one app into another. With the Search contract, users are empowered to search an app from anywhere in the system and can quickly transfer a query between multiple apps. In all of these cases, and a lot of other contract scenarios, Windows needs to be able to launch directly to a spot in your app’s UI where the user can complete a specific task quickly and efficiently. This is where our activation platform and API come into play.

Users initiate app interactions in one of two ways:

Through an action that requires the app’s fully immersive view to be in the foreground. This is also called main view activation. An example is the Search contract.

Example of main view activation
Through an action that is hosted inline, without leaving the context of the currently running app. This is also called hosted view activation. Here are two examples, an app participating in the file picker and an app being used as a Share target.

Example of hosted view activation in the Picker

Example of hosted view activation for Share targets

The differences between these two are:

Main view activation	Hosted view activation
Is fully immersive and launches as the main app on screen	Renders UI within system chrome
Can be used for potentially many different tasks	Is used for a short, directed task and code is focused solely on this task
Appears in the switch list	Never shows up in the switch list
Can be closed via the close gesture	Doesn’t change the view of the main window for the same app

So let’s look at these activation models and apply them to a couple of common scenarios that will help you build your great Metro style apps.

Scenario 1: Integrating Search activation in your app

In Windows 8, adding search through the Search contract lets users search your app's content from anywhere in their system at any time. If your app is the main app on screen, users can search its content immediately by using the Search charm. Otherwise, users can select the Search charm and then pick your app from the list of apps in the Search pane to search it.

Supporting Search activation means that your app can be launched at any time to show search results for a specific query. Just like being launched from the start screen, being launched from the Search pane falls under main view activation. So, if you support multiple contracts, your app can potentially be activated for many different scenarios. In addition, your app could end up receiving this activation when it is already running, because a user may want to repurpose your main view to handle a specific scenario like showing search results. To make this work, I recommend that you:

Delay loading of your code that isn’t essential to the main view contract your app is activated to handle.
Separate your general initialization logic that you use for all contracts from the logic that needs to be run for a specific contract.
Ensure that any code expected to run only one time at launch isn’t added into your activation handler in such a way that it can execute multiple times.
Reload any previous state and settings when being launched from a terminated state so that your app appears to the user as always running and connected.

Check out the Store and Photos apps. They do a great job of following these recommendations when supporting Search activation.

Search in the Store app

Search in the Photos app

Let’s take a look at how you can support Search activation properly in your JavaScript and XAML apps.

JavaScript apps

For JavaScript Metro style apps, activation is exposed through the WinJS.Application.onactivated event. This event is fired after DOMContentLoaded completes if the app isn’t already running or isn’t suspended. Otherwise, the event is fired as soon as Windows needs to activate the app. Visual Studio tooling for JavaScript apps takes care of setting up this event registration in default.js and provides an area where you can add code that will run when a generic launch activation occurs, that is when the user launches your app from the start screen.

To extend support for Search activation in your app:

Add the Search declaration to your manifest using the Visual Studio Manifest Designer.
Place in your JavaScript’s global scope any general initialization code that needs to run every time your app is started irrespective of the reason. If any of this code needs to access the DOM, add the code in a DOMContentLoaded event handler.
Register to handle being activated for Search.
When your app is activated for Search, navigate to your search results page and pass in the queryText you get from the activation event arguments.

If you are like me, you are probably looking for an easier way than doing this manually. Fortunately you can use Visual Studio tooling for completing most of this by right clicking your project, selecting Add > New Item, and choosing Search Contract in the dialog. Most of the code you see here, and a search UI that displays results in a way that follows our search ux guidelines is automatically created for you. But you must use the WinJS.Navigation framework with this tooling.

Here is a code snippet from my photo app’s default.js file that shows support for Search activation:

// Register activated event handler
WinJS.Application.addEventListener("activated", function (eventObject) {
    ...
    if (eventObject.detail.kind === appModel.Activation.ActivationKind.launch) {
        ...
    } else if (eventObject.detail.kind === appModel.Activation.ActivationKind.search) {
        uri = searchPageURI;
        pageParameters = { queryText: eventObject.detail.queryText };
    }
    // Indicate to the system that the splash screen must not be torn down
    // until after processAll and navigate complete asynchronously.
    if (uri) {
        eventObject.setPromise(ui.processAll().then(function () {
            return nav.navigate(uri, pageParameters);
        }));
    }
});

XAML apps

For XAML Metro style apps, the Windows.UI.Xaml.Application class does a lot of the work needed for your app to support activation. This class exposes a set of strongly typed activation methods that you can override for supporting common contracts such as Search. For all contract activations that don’t have a strongly typed method, you can override the OnActivated method and inspect the activation kind to determine the contract for which your app is activated.

New XAML app projects in Visual Studio come with generated code that uses the Windows.UI.Xaml.Application class to make the app capable of being activated for a generic launch. The code for handling this activation is in the class representation for your app, found in the App.xaml.cs/cpp/vb files.

To extend support for Search activation in your app:

Add the Search declaration to your manifest using the Visual Studio Manifest Designer.
Place in the App constructor of App.xaml.cs/cpp/vb any general initialization code that needs to run every time your application is started irrespective of the reason.
Override the strongly typed OnSearchActivated method in App.xaml.cs/cpp/vb to handle search activation.
Load your Search UI and show search results for the query you receive in the SearchActivatedEventArgs.

Again, just like for JavaScript apps, there is an easier way than manually doing this work. You can use Visual Studio tooling for completing a lot of this work. Just right click on your project, select Add > New Item, and choose Search Contract in the dialog. Most of the code you see here, and a search UI that displays results in a way that follows our Search UX guidelines is automatically created for you.

Here are snippets of C# code from my photo app that shows support for Search activation.

We must override the OnSearchActivated method to support activation for Search:

protected override void OnSearchActivated(SearchActivatedEventArgs args)
{
    // Load Search UI
    PhotoApp.SearchResultsPage.Activate(args.QueryText);
}

The Activate method of the SearchResultsPage sets up a UI that shows search results for the user’s search query:

// SearchResultsPage.xaml.cs code snippet 
public static void Activate(String queryText)
{
    // If the window isn't already using Frame navigation, insert our own frame
    var previousContent = Window.Current.Content;
    var frame = previousContent as Frame;
    if (frame == null)
    {
        frame = new Frame();
        Window.Current.Content = frame;
    }
    // Use navigation to display the results, packing both the query text and the previous
    // Window content into a single parameter object
    frame.Navigate(typeof(SearchResultsPage1),
        new Tuple<String, UIElement>(queryText, previousContent));
    // The window must be activated in 15 seconds
    Window.Current.Activate();
}

The logic and principles showcased here don’t just apply to adding Search activation support. You can use the same techniques when adding support for Protocols, File Associations, and Device AutoPlay as these are also main view activation contracts.

Scenario 2: Integrating File Open Picker activation in your app

A Metro style app can call the file picker to let the user browse their system and pick files or folders for the app to operate on or to let the user save a file using a new name, file type, or location ("Save As"). Apps can also use the file picker as an interface to provide other apps with files, a save location, or even file updates. By incorporating the File Open Picker contract, you can help users pick files from your app directly within another app. Users gain freedom and flexibility to choose files that your app stores and presents.

Launching an app for the File Open Picker contract falls under hosted view activation. The app’s UI is hosted inside of the file picker and the code that runs for this activation must be solely focused on the task of enabling users to pick their files. It is important that your app is as fast as possible here to give users a great experience. Don’t load any code or libraries that are unnecessary for the specific hosted view activation task.

I recommend looking at the SkyDrive app because it is a great example of supporting File Open Picker activation and focusing solely on the task of allowing users to pick files.

File Open Picker support in the SkyDrive app

Let’s take a look at how you can support File Open Picker activation properly in your JavaScript and XAML apps.

JavaScript apps

For JavaScript Metro style apps, the hosted view activation behaves the same as main view activation, except for one key difference: hosted view activation always occurs in a new window and script context. This means that your code for handling this activation can’t access libraries, global variables, or the DOM of your main app.

To extending your app to support File Open Picker activation:

Create a new HTML page that is specifically designed to handle only the File Open Picker contract.
Add the File Open Picker declaration in the Visual Studio manifest designer and specify the newly created HTML page as the start page.
Load only JavaScript and other resources in this page that are necessary for supporting the File Open Picker contract to improve performance.
Structure the activation event handler to handle only activation for the File Open Picker contract. This handler is called only once during the lifetime of the file picking task.
Use the activation event arguments to interact with the file picker.

To save time you can you use Visual Studio tooling for completing this work. Just right click on your project, select Add > New Item, and choose File Picker Contract in the dialog. Most of what you see next is automatically created for you in your project.

Here is a code snippet from my photo app’s fileOpenPicker.js file for handling File Open Picker activation:

// Register activated event handler for handling File Open Picker activation
WinJS.Application.addEventListener("activated", function (eventObject) {
    if (eventObject.detail.kind === Windows.ApplicationModel.Activation.ActivationKind.fileOpenPicker) {
        pickerUI = eventObject.detail.fileOpenPickerUI;
        pickerUI.onfileremoved = fileRemovedFromPickerUI;
        ...
    }
});

WinJS.Application.start();

XAML apps

For XAML Metro style apps, you support hosted view activation in your app similarly to main view activation. The biggest difference is that now your app must create a new thread and new window to handle the activation. The Visual Studio template code handles all of the work to create the new thread and new window on your behalf for hosted view activations.

To handle File Open Picker activation a XAML app must:

Add the File Open Picker declaration to your manifest using the Visual Studio Manifest Designer.
Override the OnFileOpenPickerActivated method in App.Xaml.cs/cpp/vb and load your page that will handle this contract.
Pass in the FileOpenPickerActivatedEventArgs to the page handling this contract so that it can interact with the file picker.

To save time you can use Visual Studio tooling for completing this work. Just right click your project, select Add > New Item, and choose File Picker Contract in the dialog. Most of what you see next is automatically created for you in your project.

Here is a snippet of C# code from my photo app for handling File Open Picker activation:

// App.xaml.cs code snippet
protected override void OnFileOpenPickerActivated(FileOpenPickerActivatedEventArgs args)
{
    var fileOpenPickerPage = new PhotoApp.FileOpenPickerPage();
    fileOpenPickerPage.Activate(args);
}

// FileOpenPickerPage.xaml.cs code snippet 
public void Activate(FileOpenPickerActivatedEventArgs args)
{
    this._fileOpenPickerUI = args.FileOpenPickerUI;
    this._fileOpenPickerUI.FileRemoved += FileOpenPickerUI_FileRemoved;
            
    // Show the user’s photos in the Picker UI
    ...

    Window.Current.Content = this;
    // The window must be activated in 15 seconds
    Window.Current.Activate();
}

The logic and principles showcased here don’t just apply to adding File Open Picker activation support. You can use the same techniques when adding support for Share Target, File Save Picker, Contact Picker, Camera Settings, and Print Task Settings as these are also hosted view activation contracts.

In closing

I showed you how Search, File Picker, and other Windows 8 contracts offer the ability to drive users to your app for completing a specific task from other parts of the system and even other apps in certain scenarios. Users will expect these experiences in your app are fast and fluid because Windows and your app are both aware of their intent and the task they are trying to complete. Implementing your app activation correctly is core to creating a great experience for these contracts. Even if you are just working on the core of an app and are not using any contracts, it is good to keep these tips in mind as you set up your generic launch activation. This way you can easily extend your app in the future to support contracts without refactoring your code.

Things to remember:

Place any general app initialization logic in a location where it will be executed independent of how your app is activated.
Your activation handlers can be executed even when your app is already running or is suspended. Make sure this can’t cause any unintended consequences for your app.
Visual Studio tooling can do a lot of the work for you to support the Search, Share Target, and File Open Picker contracts. All you need to do is right click your project and select Add > New Item.
When receiving a hosted view activation, load only the code necessary for the task associated with the activation.

To learn more about activation and contracts in Windows 8, you can follow these links or ask questions in our forums:

Documentation

Samples

Thanks,

Derek Gebhard
Program Manager, Windows User Experience

Contributions by: Jake Sabulsky, Marco Matos, Daniel Oliver

Building a rich and extensible media platform

Steven Sinofsky — Fri, 08 Jun 2012 15:00:00 GMT

Windows provides a broad set of technologies for consumers to experience video and audio and for developers to tap into these technologies through rich APIs. This post goes into depth on both of these aspects of the Windows media platform, which has been substantially improved for both desktop and Metro style apps. The landscape for media playback has changed significantly since Windows 7 was released, with an increased focus on streaming, and the desire for content owners to offer playback of their content on a broader array of devices, all while significantly reducing the battery power required for playback. With these new capabilities, which are part of both Windows 8 and Windows RT of course, we worked to provide industry-leading support for consumers and developers. This post was authored by Scott Manchester, group program manager for our Media Platform and Technologies team. –Steven

Engaging with rich media—whether watching a movie, video chatting, or playing music—is one of the most prevalent and enjoyable things we do on our PCs today. I’d like to talk a little bit about the work we’ve done in Windows 8 to make a rich variety of multimedia activities possible, and to extend those capabilities to third party developers through an extensible media platform.

We had three goals in mind when designing the Windows 8 media platform:

Maximize performance. We wanted media playback to be fast and responsive, enabling the full power of the hardware while maximizing battery life on each PC.
Simplify development and extensibility. We wanted to provide a platform that could be easily extended and tailored for a given application, setting the stage for innovative custom media apps on Windows.
Enable a breadth of scenarios. A high performance, high efficiency, extensible platform can then enable a wide range of music, video, communications, and other multimedia apps.

With these three goals in mind, we set out to reimagine the media experience on the Windows platform.

Faster, more responsive media experiences

Performance is a key aspect of any user experience, but it is especially critical in multimedia scenarios. Videos need to play in real time, voice communication needs to feel instantaneous, and all of these tasks need to minimize the drain on your battery.

We measure performance by the time, computing resources, and memory that a given task takes on a system. We aimed to minimize all of those metrics. Our goals for media performance were focused on audio and video playback, transcoding, encoding, and capture.

Efficient video decoding

To get better battery life or just reduce power consumption for all media scenarios, we continue to work with partners in the silicon chip industry to enable new and faster experiences. With Windows 8 running on a Windows 8 certified PC, video decoding for common media formats will be offloaded to a dedicated hardware subsystem for media. This allows us to significantly lower CPU usage, resulting in smoother video playback and a longer battery life, as the dedicated media hardware is much more efficient than the CPU at media decoding. This improves all scenarios that require video decoding, including playback, transcoding, encoding, and capture scenarios.

The figure below shows a comparison of the average CPU utilization between Windows 7 and Windows 8 during playback of 720p VC1/H.264 video clips and webcam capture preview.

In addition to video offload, the improvements to webcam capture are made possible by the move from a DirectShow Capture API to the new, far more optimized Windows 8 Media Foundation Capture API. We’ve also improved software encoders for H.264 and VC-1 content so that encoding using the CPU (when it makes sense) is both fast and power-efficient.

Maximizing battery life during audio playback

Another example of the media performance improvements we’ve made in Windows 8 is in maximizing battery life (or just reducing power consumption) during audio playback. In addition to enabling offload of the audio pipeline (similar to the offload of video described above), we’ve radically improved the audio playback pipeline to be more efficient during steady-state playback. By batching up large chunks of audio data and doing all the processing for that chunk at one time, the CPU can stay asleep for over 100 times longer (over 1 second vs. 10ms), which can result in dramatically increased battery life during audio playback.

Of course, this approach isn’t perfect for all scenarios since the increased buffering introduces additional delay. In the communications section below, we’ll talk more about these tradeoffs and how the media stack adapts to optimize for each scenario

Audio and video offloading are just a couple of examples of the ways we’ve optimized the media stack in Windows 8 to provide lower CPU utilization, lower memory utilization, and better battery life for Desktop and Metro style apps.

Supporting a rich set of media scenarios

Performance is a critical aspect of the platform, but it is only as important as the features that shine because of it. In Windows 8, those features include support for modern video formats, low-latency communication streams, and a seamless connection to external media devices.

Platform tradeoffs

One of the challenges in developing a single media platform that serves different scenarios is that the platform has competing goals. For example, communication scenarios require low-latency, and audio/video encoding and playback, whose quality and performance benefit from buffering, which results in higher latency. In the next several sections, we’ll touch on these challenges in the context of some of the scenarios we’ve worked to enable in Windows 8, including:

Communications (e.g. Skype, Lync, etc.)
Video playback and modern format support
Auto-orientation of video
Playback of premium content
Seamless audio transitions
Bringing the media experience to additional screens
Emerging media capabilities

Simplifying development and extensibility

One common theme across these experiences is the extensibility that we’ve incorporated into the multimedia platform. Because users have a wide range of use cases, media formats, codecs, protection mechanisms, and processing, we provided our developers with the ability to customize and tailor their offerings to create great apps and websites on Windows.

As we discuss some of the media scenarios in the next several sections, we'll also cover some of the work we’ve done to make those scenarios extensible by developers and third-party partners. Let’s dive deeper into the scenarios we’ve targeted for Windows 8.

Communications

Real-time communication on PCs, especially on mobile devices, has seen a huge growth over the last decade. Windows users are using services like Skype and Lync to make several billion minutes of voice and video calls per day. TeleGeography estimates that international Skype-to-Skype calls (including video calls) grew 48 percent in 2011, to 145 billion minutes. We’ve made a significant investment in improving the experience of video and audio calling on all Windows 8 PCs. To achieve this goal, we focused our efforts in two areas:

Enable built-in low-latency media capture and rendering. Low latency is essential for communications apps, so Windows supports low-latency media capture and playback into the OS.
Support HD cameras to enhance video communication experience. High-definition videos make your communication experience more real and enjoyable, so Windows supports HD camera devices.

Enabling low latency

When you communicate with another person, you expect near-instant responses. For this reason, communications systems generally try to minimize the end-to-end delay (also referred to as latency). In designing audio and video systems for playback, buffering is often used as both a protection against glitches caused by processing spikes or network traffic, and to reduce power consumption. However, this buffering introduces a delay into the audio and video, which is perceived as latency by the audience. In engineering Windows 8, we designed the media platform to support both playback-optimized and communication-optimized scenarios. The media infrastructure can switch between a playback mode (high buffering, more tolerant of varying conditions) and a communications-optimized mode (low delay).

According to the TIA/EIA 920 standard, the one-way audio latency that can be attributed to just the media processing pipeline cannot exceed 100ms in order to achieve a usable real-time communication experience. With this metric in mind, we designed a test environment to measure the end-to-end latency of the pipeline, shown in the following diagram:

There are many components to optimize to get low latency

In the case of video communication, the end-to-end or “glass-to-glass” pipeline latency is measured as the delay it takes for a video frame to be captured by the camera device and then encoded to a supported video format, streamed over the network loopback interfaces, decoded, and finally rendered by the display.

Looking at the figure below, you can see the result obtained for capturing and rendering PCM audio when the media pipeline is in low latency mode. The first set of spikes corresponds to the original spoken words at the transmitter and the second set shows those words at the receiver. The delay between the two is 65ms, well below the 100ms goal.

End-to-end pipeline latency of PCM audio: Low latency mode

The next chart shows a comparison of the pipeline latency of playback and communication-optimized mode when a video frame is captured, encoded (in H.264 format), streamed, decoded, and then displayed at various resolutions. The goal of 145ms overall latency (as deemed by TIA/EIA 920 for usable real-time video calling) is shown by the green line on the chart.

Video frames are captured at a rate of 30 frames per second and encoded into H.264

In playback mode, the average latency of the pipeline is about 575ms. This delay is necessary for a smooth playback experience when consuming video, but unacceptable for real-time video communication. In low latency mode, on the other hand, the measured latency is well under the target goal at each of the measured video resolutions.

Supporting HD video calling

Another example of the work we have done to improve communication on Windows 8 PCs is through OS support for HD cameras. New class drivers will work transparently with applications to provide support for HD video features. In addition, all of the hardware acceleration for video decoding discussed previously will be utilized for communication scenarios.

Windows 8 will offer a consistent, high-quality, hardware-accelerated, power efficient media communication experience on PCs designed for Windows 8. We have made significant investments in the media platform to improve pipeline latency, and with added support for H.264 cameras, users will be able to communicate with friends and family in high-fidelity HD video.

Video and audio support for Metro style apps

Our main goal for native media format support for Metro style apps was to ensure users and app developers could count on a consistently great playback experience across a wide variety of PC form factors, with modern formats used in mainstream scenarios such as:

HTML5-based entertainment on the web
Home movies captured using popular smartphones, point-and-shoot cameras, or AVC-HD cameras
Streaming music, movies, and TV shows from popular services

The tables below show the video and audio formats that have built-in support for Metro style apps. Formats recommended for use by Metro style apps are a reflection of deep partnerships with hardware manufacturers for predictable hardware acceleration across PC form factors and predictable end-to-end scenario performance beyond playback such as capture, streaming, and transcoding.

Windows 8 has excellent support for MPEG-4, most typically comprised of H.264 video and AAC audio. Several popular codecs, including Divx and Xvid, implement the MPEG-4 Part 2 standard, so many of these files play great in Metro style apps. The same is true for modern MOV files, which are based on the MPEG-4 Part 12 standard, such as videos captured on iOS devices. Fragmented MPEG-4 and 2K/4K resolutions are now possible. We have previously talked about MPEG-2 and DVD playback, which is available in Windows 8 Media Center.

During the development of Windows 7 we talked quite a bit about CODEC support natively in Windows and the formats available through extensibility. Since then, the environment around CODECs has consistently moved towards a smaller set of well-defined and broadly-supported formats, particularly h.264 for video. Due to factors such as intellectual property and hardware support, this makes a great deal of sense. Even browsers are making this transition with HTML5. But we also recognize that some individuals have preferred formats for a variety of reasons, and we wanted to make sure Windows 8 app developers could choose to use the formats they prefer. Formats popular among the enthusiast community or with specific developers such as FLAC, MKV, and OGG, can have their own CODECs packaged as part of a Metro style app, since the Windows 8 media platform is highly extensible.

Auto-orientation of video

With the proliferation of video recording in traditional cameras, smartphones, and tablets, users can capture video while holding their device in either portrait or landscape mode – there is no “right-side-up” any longer, thanks to modern touch-based interfaces. Many of us have experienced the frustration of recording a video and realizing the camera was sideways or upside down only after viewing it on the PC. Since the video scan pattern is fixed, videos may not be oriented properly when viewed.

To overcome this problem, cameras are beginning to author orientation metadata in mainstream file formats such as MP4 and ASF when saving recorded video to storage.

To ensure a terrific viewing experience of personal videos from Windows PCs, we’ve made the following improvements to address this problem:

Orientation metadata is now supported in MP4 and ASF (VC-1, WMV) videos.
Videos with orientation metadata are auto-rotated during playback.
The thumbnail for a video with orientation metadata is auto-rotated.
Metro style apps with video capture capabilities can easily read and author orientation metadata.

Premium content

Another area where we’ve invested heavily for Windows 8 is in allowing seamless playback of premium content. Although most of the video content consumed initially on the Internet was user generated, much of the growth in the Internet video space can now be attributed to “premium content,” which includes online movie purchases through on-demand streaming video, as well as the ad-supported TV offerings. According to IHS Screen Digest, 3.4 billion paid movies will be streamed online in the US in 2012—over double the number watched in 2011, and over a billion more movies than were consumed via DVD and Blu-Ray combined.

Premium video content has many of the same requirements as any other video content, but it also requires two substantial platform features in order to deliver the best experience: adaptive bitrate streaming and content protection.

Adaptive bitrate streaming

Adaptive bitrate streaming provides a smoother, more responsive video playback experience by enabling the PC to adapt to the most appropriate bitrate under varying networking and resource utilization conditions. As a result, startup and seek times can be significantly improved because the first few frames can be delivered at a lower bitrate to reduce buffering time and increase responsiveness. If network or device conditions change, the PC can negotiate a lower or higher bitrate to minimize buffering or increase video quality.

Through the extensibility of the Media Foundation Platform in Windows 8, apps can have custom media sources and adaptive bitrate media sources to support new formats. Custom media sources and streaming protocols can also take advantage of hardware offload and content protection.

The Windows Azure Media Services team is using our extensibility model to build the Smooth Streaming Client SDK for Metro style apps. Smooth Streaming is Microsoft’s initiative to deliver high quality multi-bitrate content and enable Video-on-demand, Live, Linear TV, and Download-and-Play.

Content protection

Most premium Internet video content services choose to apply content protection, which is often a requirement from the content owners (e.g. movie studios or TV networks). To enable the playback of protected content in Metro style apps, Microsoft is making available the PlayReady Client SDK for premium content services. PlayReady supports download as well as streaming, and the above-mentioned IIS Smooth Streaming Client SDK integrates seamlessly with the PlayReady Client SDK to allow services to easily build protected streaming experiences.

We recognize that there are other content protection technologies being used today in the industry. Just like with adaptive streaming, the Media Foundation extensibility model allows for third parties to integrate their custom content protection systems with built-in hardware-accelerated video decoding. If a service needs to use a custom streaming format or content protection system, it can integrate its own technology without having to compromise on decoding quality or battery runtime.

In summary, Windows 8 will enable a wider offering of premium content services for customers to choose from and enjoy on their Windows 8 devices, providing a great streaming and downloaded experience as well as great battery life when watching premium HD video content.

Seamless audio transitions

As Windows 8 enables a multitude of media scenarios, we wanted to make sure that transitioning between these scenarios was as seamless and fluid as possible. Users often run into overlapping audio-based activities – for example, while listening to a music streaming service, they attempt to watch a video clip. We wanted to provide a clean, uncluttered audio experience that would make it easier and simpler for you to listen to the content you want, when you want it.

In Windows 8, instead of mixing all audio content and sending the resulting (often incoherent) stream to the speakers, Windows can pause a stream when a second stream is played and when it makes sense to do so. In most cases, Windows prioritizes audio coming from the app that is in the foreground. When you move the app to the background, the system quiets the stream. An example is a game app where you likely don’t want to listen to game audio when you’ve switched away from the game. However, there are cases where this is not the desired behavior – for example, if you’re listening to music in the background while checking email or surfing the web. To enable these scenarios and to allow you to hear background audio when it makes sense, we’ve introduced stream types that reflect the type of audio being played.

Below is a list of different stream types, along with an example of the type of content expected for each stream.

Audio category	Example streams	Background capable?
Background capable media	Local and streaming audio playlists	Yes
Foreground only media	Movies, games	No
Communications	Skype, Voice-over-IP, live chatting	Yes
Alerts	Alarms, ringing notifications	No
Game media	Background music played by a game	No
Game effects	Gun shots, explosions, characters talking, all non-music sounds	No
Sound effects	Button confirmation sounds, beeps, dings	No
Other	Default audio type, and recommended for all audio media that does not need to continue playing in the background.	No

Bringing the media experience to additional screens

In Windows 7, we announced Play To, which you can use to stream media files to supported external devices from Windows Explorer and Windows Media player. In Windows 8, Play To makes it even easier and simpler to share personal media collections and HTML5 media with Play-To-enabled devices at home. Our focus for Play To was to create rich social experiences built around personal content – like sharing photos with family and friends, streaming music for a party, or watching user-generated videos from the Internet. The experience has been designed from the ground up to integrate tightly with HTML5 from existing websites and your personal media collections, whether they’re stored in the local library of a Windows PC or tablet, on another home PC or network-attached media server, or on a web server in the cloud.

Play To is now easier to discover and will deliver a consistent, high quality experience from a multitude of Metro style apps. A few of the improved user experiences include:

Improved setup: On home networks (or HomeGroup) where you’ve allowed sharing, Play To devices are automatically discovered and installed on your PC.
Improved device experience: Metro style apps work only with Windows certified Play To receivers. These devices are validated to support modern media formats, are DLNA standards-compliant, and have great performance (including the updated Xbox 360 available later this year). The desktop experience first introduced in Windows 7 has been added to the Explorer Ribbon and will continue to support all DLNA DMR devices.
Easier discovery: Play To is accessible from the Devices charm, making it easy to initiate from any app that supports Play To. Just swipe in from the right edge (or point your mouse to the top-right corner), select the Devices charm, and then select the device you want to stream to.
Integrated into Metro style IE: IE allows you to stream HTML5 music, video, and photos from the web to your devices.
Works with the new Music, Video, and Photo apps: Apps can stream photos from a variety of sources and personal music and video collections.

Play To from the Videos app

We have also focused heavily on making it easy for developers to use Play To in their apps and websites – the functionality is available to all Metro style apps via the Play To contract. The XBox 360 will support Play To in an update later this year.

Emerging media capabilities

Windows is enabling support for new content types for consumption and increased flexibility for content creation and communication. Stereo 3D, accessibility, and DSP effects are three examples of how we are enabling great multimedia experiences on Windows 8

Experiencing stereo 3D video

Over the last few years, the Stereo 3D (S3D) market has evolved from hype to finished consumer products. S3D provides a 3D viewing experience by displaying two overlapping copies of a video (captured from different angles), which appear as a single 3D video when viewed with 3D glasses. Our goal is to enable a viable S3D ecosystem for Windows by enabling key gaming and video playback scenarios on a platform that abstracts away the specifics of the 3D technology from the end-user’s PC.

In Windows 8, S3D support is available on DirectX 10 or higher GPUs with compatible drivers. A S3D-compatible display is needed to see S3D content. We wanted to make sure that Windows would support a wide range of display technologies with a consistent user experience, and make it easy for software and hardware to develop on our platform. As a result, specific S3D display technologies are largely made irrelevant by the graphics drivers, and a consistent set of APIs are available to apps using stereo 3D.

The Windows 8 media platform provides support for standards-compliant media formats for S3D video. H.264 video with frame-packing metadata represented as Supplemental Enhancement Information (SEI) is the typical format being adopted for online delivery, and is therefore the desirable S3D video format in Windows 8. The frame-packing formats that we support natively in the platform include both side-by-side and top-and-bottom arrangements, as in the illustration below.

Windows 8 supports a range of stereo 3D input formats, including side-by-side and top-bottom.

Delivering accessible media experiences in the web platform

Media accessibility is an important part of the Windows promise to our customers, especially for users with accessibility needs.

Subtitles provide interpretive or additional information to viewers who prefer a written transcript, those who need to see a translation in a different language, or those who need to see a transcript due to limited hearing ability.

Video playback in Windows 8 with subtitles

The web community has worked together through W3C to specify the best ways to deliver the subtitling experience through all modern web platforms. These include the following:

The <track> element can carry subtitle and closed captions for the HTML5 video tag. This feature is now incorporated into Windows 8. Subtitle support is now available through the video tag in IE10 and in apps using HTML.
User controls are available on the default media controls of the video tag.
There is native support for the WebVTT and SMPTE-TT formats that are commonly found in the web community and with partners in the TV and broadcasting industries.
The Windows 8 media platform provides support for multiple audio tracks within a media source. Users can switch audio tracks to their preferred language, and tracks can also be used for audio descriptions for sight-impaired users. Metro style apps can now easily switch between audio tracks or even play multiple audio tracks simultaneously, for instance, a normal audio track plus an audio description.

Video playback in Windows 8 with multiple audio tracks

Adding effects to the media pipeline

The Windows 8 media platform has been designed to adapt easily. One way that we’ve done this is by allowing effects (often referred to as digital signal processing, or DSP) to be added to the pipeline. We’ve included several built-in effects, like image stabilization and horizontal flipping (which is useful for webcam preview), and we’ve also made it easy for applications to plug in to the Media Foundation pipeline with custom effects. In addition, we’ve made sure that media data can pass through the pipeline efficiently, thus minimizing the performance and power impact of adding DSPs.

Summary

The Windows 8 media platform is designed to deliver a fluid and responsive media experience with great battery life. We’ve engineered Windows to give you a great user experience across a broad set of scenarios, including voice communication, audio and video playback, and streaming content. As media applications continue to evolve, the media platform in Windows will enable these experiences to shine across all Windows 8 PCs.

I’ll close now with a video that walks you through some of the highlights of the new media platform.

--Scott

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Connecting with IPv6 in Windows 8

Steven Sinofsky — Tue, 05 Jun 2012 16:00:00 GMT

With World IPv6 Launch upon us, we thought it would be good to provide a look at the work in the Windows 8 Release Preview supporting IPv6. Christopher Palmer on the core networking program management team authored this post.
--Steven

IPv4 is the Internet Protocol that has been used for Internet connectivity for decades. However, IPv4 was never designed for such load and scale, and it is beginning to show signs of strain as the Internet grows—even though the incredible foresight of the original designers continues to power the Internet at a massive scale. Internet service providers are finding IPv4 increasingly costly to maintain; it will require an overhaul to sustain the upcoming onslaught of connected PCs and devices.

For several years, the industry, including Microsoft, has been working to roll out a completely new version of the Internet Protocol – IPv6 – across various devices, services, and network infrastructure. Windows releases since Windows XP SP3 have supported IPv6, making the IPv6 transition possible. We have engineered Windows 8 to keep you (and your apps) reliably connected as this dramatic transition takes place.

The limitations of IPv4

First, let’s cover some basics. Every time you browse to a website like www.bing.com, that friendly name gets turned into an IP address, something like 23.3.105.97. An IP address is conceptually similar to a telephone number. Just as all your contacts have telephone numbers, everything that connects to the Internet has one or more IP addresses. The “telephone directory” for the Internet is the Domain Name System (DNS). Given a name, DNS resolves the name to a set of IP addresses.

IPv4 only provided around 4 billion IP addresses. That seemed like a lot in the 1970s. But by 2015, an estimated 15 billion devices will be connected (PCs, phones, household appliances, cars, even furniture!). IPv4 simply does not have the addresses necessary to connect this many devices to the Internet.

As demand for IPv4 addresses has grown in recent years, the Internet community has found ways to “share” those vital resources. The most common way to share an IPv4 address is to use network address translation (NAT). This functionality is in most home routers, enabling computers and other devices in a household to share a single public IPv4 address.

Conventionally, ISPs provide a single IP address to each home. However, that is becoming increasingly difficult. Because of IP address depletion, unique IPv4 addresses simply aren’t available for each home. Soon, whole cities or countries may be behind large-scale network address translation. Internet service providers have to develop costly and complex infrastructure to continue to support IPv4. For end users, IP address exhaustion means that location-based services, such as Bing, will not work properly, and peer-to-peer applications will face degraded performance.

IPv6 is the future

Microsoft, along with other technology companies, has been working on the deployment of IPv6 to ensure that end-users continue to have high-quality Internet access, despite the performance and connectivity limitations brought about by IPv4 address exhaustion.

The most immediate benefit of IPv6 is that it provides more than 3×10³⁸IP addresses, enough for every person to have billions of addresses all to themselves, or enough to give every star in the universe a unique address. This will allow the Internet to grow and evolve. IPv6 also provides for many security and performance improvements, like built-in support for IPsec. (What happened to IPv5, you ask? Bing can help you find out why it’s being “skipped.”)

Upgrading the entire Internet to IPv6 isn’t something that can be done instantly. It has taken many years to get to where we are today, and we still have many years of work to do. Currently, around 1% of devices can connect to the Internet using only IPv6.

During the transition period, most networks will fall into three categories:

IPv4-only networks. This is probably what you have today, as most Internet Service Providers have only just started rolling out IPv6 support. Many devices that connect to the Internet might only support IPv4 as well.
IPv4 and IPv6 networks (dual-stack). This means your Internet Service Provider is configuring your PC with both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses. This model is common in cable and dial-up networks that are transitioning.
IPv6-only networks. This means your Internet Service Provider is configuring your device with only IPv6 addresses. Because many websites are still only on the IPv4 Internet, ISPs must use a translation device to allow access from your IPv6 network to the IPv4 Internet. This device is called a NAT64. This mode is becoming popular in the mobile environment, because having only one kind of Internet Protocol between the mobile device and the operator’s infrastructure is simpler to deploy and cheaper than a dual-stack configuration. Also, mobile operators are feeling the IPv4 address exhaustion pinch most severely. Here is a basic diagram of this configuration:

You might be wondering what kind of connection you have right now. We have a widget at the bottom of this post that can show you.

Windows 8 is designed to ensure connectivity across all types of network configurations. In Windows 8, you can launch DNS look-ups using the Resolve-DNSname cmdlets in Windows PowerShell. Open up PowerShell and run the below command, and you will see both IPv6 and IPv4 records returned. Only websites that support IPv6 will have IPv6 records.

Windows 8 on IPv4-only networks

On an IPv4-only network, devices are configured with IPv4 addresses only. This model continues to work in Windows 8 as it has in the past. In addition, Windows hosts also provide IPv6 connectivity by tunneling that traffic inside various transition technologies – an example of which is Teredo, where IPv6 packets are encapsulated in IPv4 UDP packets. Now that we are starting to see the emergence of IPv6-only servers and services, Windows 8 automatically attempts IPv6 connectivity when the server does not offer an IPv4 address. Note that Teredo is enabled by default only on non-domain networks, and Teredo may not be available if your network blocks UDP.

Windows 8 on dual-stack networks

During the transition period, dual-stack networks will be the common deployment model. On a dual-stack network, devices will be configured with both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses.

Our primary focus during this transition has always been to minimize the impact of the transition for everyday users. It shouldn’t matter whether your connection is over IPv4 or IPv6. You should have an Internet experience that is fast and reliable, with little evidence of the IPv6 transition, so you can just enjoy the content.

At the same time, it’s also a priority for us to help the IPv6 transition move ahead. To this end, Windows prefers native IPv6 connectivity over IPv4 connectivity, if both connection modes are available.

In summary we have the dual goals of ensuring a reliable user experience, and enabling the IPv6 transition. As you might imagine, this can sometimes involve subtle tradeoffs, which have been the subject of much debate in the Internet community.

In an effort to sort out those sometimes competing goals, major websites around the world--including Bing.com, Microsoft.com, and Xbox.com–organized an event called World IPv6 Day last year. During this one-day test of the IPv6 Internet, participating websites turned on IPv6 in addition to IPv4.

The good news is that most things worked. All that goes into the Internet’s correct functioning—servers, end-user devices, and content delivery networks—were able to work at scale without issue.

However, we also observed that a small subset of the population (0.01% of the world) was misconfigured with IPv6, seemingly because of a router or ISP issue. That’s not too surprising, as IPv6 is a fairly new technology, and mistakes happen. But for those unlucky users, it could cause a significant impact on everyday experiences with the Internet.

Engineering resiliency into our connectivity algorithms for dual-stack networks

In order for a device to truly support dual-stack networks, apps must not only be able to send traffic with IPv4 and IPv6, but the OS must be smart enough to know which protocol is appropriate for the task at hand. Even more specifically, because your device might have multiple IPv4 and IPv6 addresses, and because the destination you’re trying to reach might also have multiple IPv4 and IPv6 addresses, the stack must be smart enough to know which specific source and destination addresses should be used for connectivity. This functionality is called address sorting, and is an area that we have enhanced in Windows 8. The idea behind address sorting is to determine which address pair is likely to produce the best connection, so the application does not need to wait.

When Windows tries to connect to a dual-stack website, Windows sorts through its own and the website’s IP addresses to decide which pair it should use to make the connection. (For standards buffs, address sorting is standardized in RFC 3484.)

Below is a diagram showing how Windows uses address sorting.

Traditionally, address sorting relies on Windows being correctly configured by your router. Windows analyzes the routing information provided by the router and uses that information in conjunction with address sorting to ensure fast connectivity to named resources. The RFC 3484 standard specifies that IPv6 should be preferred if IPv6 is configured by your router.

World IPv6 Day showed that some clients were configured with IPv6 routing information, but they did not actually have IPv6 connectivity to the Internet. This appears to be the result of a misconfiguration by some Internet Service Providers or buggy home routers. Windows attempts to connect to websites using IPv6, expecting it to work, but it won’t! Eventually, Windows detects that the connection attempt failed and falls back to IPv4 connectivity. However, for users, connectivity to dual-stack websites can be delayed by 10-15 seconds. This obviously causes a problem for web browsers, but any network-connected app faces this issue.

As we looked into engineering a solution to this problem, we had to consider a couple of important issues. First, many enterprises deploy complex routing topologies. We had to make sure that our change did not break connectivity in these environments. Second, we needed a solution that worked not only for Internet Explorer but also all the other apps that are relying on Windows to help them connect to network resources. Those apps rely on us to remain intelligently connected throughout the IPv6 transition. Our solution needed to address the needs of existing desktop apps as well as new Metro-style apps.

Windows 8 tests IPv6 connectivity when you connect to a new network that advertises IPv6 routabilty, and it will only use IPv6 if IPv6 connectivity is actually functioning. This approach is a modification of our implementation of RFC 3484. Instead of sorting addresses as a result of policy, we use the actual state of the network as input to our algorithm. On a misconfigured network, this approach improves the experience not only for browsers but also for apps that connect to dual-stack destinations using standard Windows APIs.

Windows 8 performs the network connectivity test when you first connect to a new network; it caches this information and repeats the test every 30 days. The actual test for connectivity is a simple HTTP GET to an IPv6-only server that is hosted by Microsoft. (For standards buffs, this is implemented between rules 5 and 6 of destination address sorting in our implementation of RFC 3484.) Windows performs a similar network connectivity test for IPv4 connectivity. If both IPv4 and IPv6 are functioning, IPv6 will be preferred.

To make sure that Windows 8 does not cause problems on enterprise networks, the functionality has two safeguards:

If the enterprise has provided specific routing information to a particular destination, then Windows 8 will honor that preference, regardless of the connectivity determined by Windows. In enterprise environments, Windows assumes that network administrators who configure such routes specifically thought it was a good idea to use those routes.
This change isn’t implemented on networks with web proxies. In these networks, the proxy provides connectivity to the Internet; so end-to-end testing of IPv6 connectivity is not useful. Instead, Windows 8 simply opens connections to the proxy in the most efficient manner possible.

In this way, we’ve ensured that apps and experiences on Windows 8 can remain reliably and speedily connected to the Internet throughout the IPv6 transition, even if your local network is misconfigured.

Ready for the future of IPv6-only networks

On an IPv6-only network, the best way to improve a user’s experience is to increase the number of services and experiences that are available over IPv6. On such a network, access to the IPv4 Internet is through a NAT64. These devices can be a fragile point of failure for connectivity, and can have severe performance limitations that lead to dropped packets. They also break IPv4 peer-to-peer connectivity, needed for some multiplayer games.

Across Microsoft, we have done a lot of work to enable the growth of IPv6 deployments, both in enterprise and Internet settings. One of our most important efforts is to ensure that our server products support IPv6. IPv6 support is part of our Common Engineering Criteria (CEC). This is part of a broad company-wide commitment to customers that our business products, such as Exchange Server and SharePoint, support IPv6 in either dual-stack or IPv6-only configurations. Most Microsoft products built since 2007 have supported IPv6, but you can find out about IPv6 support in other Microsoft products on Technet. Through this effort, developers and solution providers can support IPv6 in their own products.

Microsoft is also working on IPv6 support for our own services. Earlier this year, the Internet Society announced the World IPv6 Launch, a major milestone in the process of upgrading the Internet to IPv6. In June, Bing and other websites will start serving traffic over IPv6 on a permanent basis. Hardware vendors are working on IPv6 support in home routing devices, and many ISPs will start large-scale deployments of IPv6. CDNs (content delivery networks) have also started enabling support for IPv6 within their networks.

With the release of Windows 8, some of our infrastructure services will deploy IPv6 support.

Windows Update is a critical service providing ongoing support and updates to millions of users every day. More and more PCs are going to be connected to mobile broadband networks, where IPv6-only is a popular configuration. We have to make sure that downloads are reliably available to you on those networks.

For this reason the Windows Update service now supports both IPv6 and IPv4. Windows Update utilizes CDNs for worldwide distribution of updates and we are partnering with them to enable IPv6 support. Windows 8 will use IPv6, if available, to download Windows Updates so that users always get the best possible connectivity when downloading updates.

We are working with CDNs to extend IPv6 support beyond Windows 8. Once that work is complete, even Windows 7 and Windows Vista will automatically use IPv6, where it is available, for connecting to Windows Update.

Leading the way

Windows 8 is connected and ready to use, and our support of IPv6 is a key part of ensuring that connectivity for years to come. Because IPv4 wasn’t designed to handle the scale of connectivity today, the Internet is undergoing a radical change in its foundation. Every connection to every website, every multiplayer game, and every video call will gradually move to IPv6.

As part of that transition, Microsoft is leading the way by ensuring that Windows 8 provides the most resilient connectivity to the Internet while providing IPv6-ready products and services.

- Chris

Note: Several sections of this blog post were missing from the original publication. The missing sections were added several hours later. Apologies for the error.

Web browsing in Windows 8 Release Preview with IE10

Steven Sinofsky — Fri, 01 Jun 2012 17:01:00 GMT

In the Windows 8 Release Preview, we continue to deliver the re-imagined experience of the web browser, incorporating your feedback to provide the best browsing across all Windows 8 devices, including more of the web you browse every day. Rob Mauceri, the group program manager for Internet Explorer, authored this post.
--Steven

We built a new browsing experience in lockstep with Windows 8 to give you all the advantages that Metro style apps offer. We built that experience by extending IE’s underlying architecture to provide a fast, fully hardware-accelerated browsing engine with strong security and support for HTML5 and other web standards.

Internet Explorer 10 is designed to make website interaction fast and fluid for touch as well as for heavy mouse and keyboard use. With IE10, websites participate in the Metro style experience in Windows 8, including the Start screen, charms, snap, and more. IE10 also provides the best protection from malicious software on the web while providing convenient control over your online privacy.

The Metro style browsing experience is a better way to browse on a desktop computer with a big screen, mouse and keyboard, or on a touch-enabled mobile device. As people browse more “chromelessly” on their phones, they’ve become accustomed to a more immersive and less manual browsing experience compared with the desktop. Metro style browsing offers you a full-screen, immersive site experience with every pixel of the screen for your favorite sites. With IE and Windows 8 you can always use the charms to accomplish what you want to do next with a website (e.g. share, print, search…). We’ve heard from many people – even those with the most enthusiastic and intense browsing patterns – prefer Metro style browsing because it’s fast, fluid and more focused on what you browse than on how you browse.

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Note: On June 7, 2012, we updated the video above to provide
a more illustrative demo of interacting with videos in IE10.

Browsing more of the web

The Windows 8 Release Preview includes a new power-optimized, touch-friendly Adobe Flash Player for IE10 that is updated through Windows Update. Adobe Flash content on compatible websites will now play in the new Metro style web browser. This optimized Flash Player is integrated with IE 10 in Windows 8 to ensure that our customers have a great experience browsing the web on Windows 8. We believe that having more sites “just work” in the Metro style browser improves the experience for consumers and businesses alike.

As a practical matter, the primary device you walk around with should play the web content on sites you rely on. Otherwise, the device is just a companion to a PC. Some popular websites require Adobe Flash and do not offer HTML5 alternatives, and this change to the product reflects the feedback that we’ve heard from customers about their experience with sites that do not offer an HTML5-only experience for Metro style IE. For example, try pbskids.org on an iPad. Some workforce solutions, like Beeline, require Flash. Some financial management sites, like this one, require Flash. And some sites still deliver their best experience with Flash, such as youtube.com.

You can read more about the technical details and architectural improvements to the underlying HTML5 “Trident” browser engine and Chakra JavaScript engine, including support for integrating the Flash Player on the IE Blog.

The Metro style browser for Windows 8

We built IE10’s user experience exclusively around all the Metro style design patterns to be fast and fluid for even the most intense everyday browsing. We listened to your feedback from the Consumer Preview and acted, adding more conveniences like saving images from web pages, “paste and go” for faster navigation, and integrated network diagnostics.

We designed the interface and controls to be there when you need them and out of view when you don’t. We also designed in the comprehensive functionality that people need for everyday heavy-duty web browsing: great touch keyboard support for forms, integrated spell checking with AutoCorrect, finding text on the page, etc. The user experience follows Metro style patterns and conventions for personality, animations, and command activation, and support for Windows 8 charms, snap, and more.

IE10 puts the focus on your sites, providing a full screen edge-to-edge experience that uses
every pixel for the web.

Tabs are available, and stay out of your way until you need them.

IE10 is fast and fluid for the full web, not just the mobile versions of sites. We made IE super responsive to touch, mouse, and keyboard. The Metro style browser delivers on touch browsing, not just browsing on a touch device. You can feel it in the stick-to-your-finger responsiveness of the touch support for panning and zooming, swiping back and forward for page navigation, and double tapping to zoom in and out of content. The Release Preview includes improved visual feedback when following links with touch, for higher confidence even when the site isn’t coded for touch. Context menus and form controls are optimized for touch, and the browser responds fluidly to device orientation (scaling smoothly to landscape and portrait screen layouts) and “snapping” Windows 8 applications next to it. IE10 also improves on the experience of browsing the Web with mouse and keyboard with support for the keyboard shortcuts you expect, and convenient mouse affordances for back and forward navigation. These are also improved in the Release Preview; for example, you can just slam your mouse to the left edge of screen and click on the back button, which is now smaller.

Metro style IE10 takes a different, more modern approach to browsing. It puts the focus squarely on the websites you browse rather than the tab and window management intensive activity that has defined browsing for the last decade. For example, in the Release Preview, you can double-tap to focus on HTML5 video with full-screen playback. On our hallways, we’ve been using it as our primary browser on laptops and desktop workstations, with touch screens as well as with keyboards and mice. From tiles on the Start screen for websites to the immersive full screen web experience, we designed IE in Windows 8 to be your daily browser for the real web.

Navigation: Navigation tiles are designed to help you find and navigate to sites immediately using the site’s icon and color while minimizing your typing. In the Release Preview, we improved the layout of these tiles for efficiency and speed, optimized for visual recognition of sites you visit most often, and with clearer consistency with the Start screen.

Get to your most important sites quickly with navigation tiles.

You can quickly access your favorites by typing the first few letters of the name and in the Release Preview, favorite and pinned sites are marked with a badge for quick recognition. IE shows you frequently visited sites as well as sites that you’ve pinned to the Start screen. As you type in the address bar, the navigation tiles filter to show you sites from your history, favorites and even popular URLs.

With Windows 8 roaming and connected accounts, your browsing history and favorites roam with you so that you can easily access recent webpages across all of your PCs.

Access your favorites by typing the first few letters of the name. Favorite and pinned sites are marked with a badge for quick recognition.

The navigation bar in IE10 appears when you need it, again keeping the focus on websites. In the Windows Release Preview, the navigation bar consolidates easy-to-use controls (touch or keyboard/mouse) for common operations like back, forward, stop/refresh, pinning sites to the Start screen, and getting an app. The address bar shows badges and coloring for secure sites, SmartScreen, and InPrivate browsing. It also supports auto-complete as well as web search, matching the behavior of IE on the desktop. Also new in Release Preview is the “Paste and Go” command for fast navigation to copied URLs or search terms on the clipboard. The address box shows a progress indicator when a page is loading, and includes indicators for site compatibility and tracking protection. The navigation bar includes commands for Find on Page, and Open in IE on the desktop, for compatibility with sites that require legacy plug-in technologies, or for when you are using desktop tools and wish to continue using them in your existing workflows.

Navigation is faster with Paste and go.

Enhanced touch browsing: In the Release Preview, IE10’s Metro style experience offers a new way of browsing multi-page and sequenced content. Flip ahead enables you to navigate your favorite sites like you read a magazine by replacing the need to click on links with a more natural forward swipe gesture on touch-centric devices (and forward button with mouse). Imagine flipping through a multi-page New York Times article, through product listings on Amazon or eBay, or quickly catching up on the latest news by flipping through CNN.com, all by simply swiping forward without hunting for the "Next" link on the page.

You can swipe to flip ahead to next page listings without hunting for the “next” link.

Transitioning to next page is fast and fluid with touch.

Moving through multi-page content is fast and fluid.

Once you turn on Flip Ahead, you can swipe through content spread across multiple pages to go to the next page within the same article, post or thread. When browsing sequenced content, such as blogs or news sites, and whenever you've reached the end of your multi-page content, flip ahead will suggest an appropriate next article, post or thread to continue your exploration. Using Flip Ahead requires end user opt-in, and sends your browsing history to Microsoft to improve the quality of the experience.

Other aspects of the Metro style experience have largely stayed the same:

Tabs: Browsing multiple web pages is core to any good web experience. The Metro style tab switcher appears when you swipe in from the bottom or top of the screen with touch, right-click with the mouse, or press Windows key+Z on the keyboard:

Active tabs are shown as page thumbnails with page titles in text overlays. Tabs have a touch-friendly button for closing, and button for creating a new tab, or a new InPrivate tab. IE10 shows the last 10 tabs you’ve used, reducing the need to actively manage your tabs. You can even clean up tabs quickly and easily with one command.

Touch keyboard: IE10 works great with physical keyboards as well as the Windows 8 touch keyboard, which it automatically adjusts to make your experience easier. For example, when you set focus in the address bar, the “/” and “.com” keys become available to quickly enter URLs:

IE automatically adjusts the touch keyboard based on where you’re typing. For example,
email form fields show the “@” and “.com” keys.

IE10 takes a clean, “low nag” approach to notifications. All alerts and user prompts come through a notification bar at the bottom of the screen. IE uses Windows 8 Metro style “fly-outs” when more interaction is needed. Notification bars automatically dismiss as appropriate. Downloads in the Metro style browser protect you from malicious software via SmartScreen’s Application Reputation, as in IE on the desktop. The Release Preview adds support for “pop-up” windows as background tabs in the Metro style experience.

Connecting websites and apps in the Metro style

With IE10, websites are part of the Metro style experience in Windows 8. Through snap, charms, and integration with the Store and the Start screen, Metro style browsing blurs the boundaries between the web and apps.

With site pinning, you can personalize your Windows Start screen with the sites you use all the time. You can pin any website to the Start screen from IE10, so you have one place to access all the things you care about or need.

The tiles for pinned sites reflect the site’s color and icon. In the Release Preview developers can provide higher resolution PNG file site icon and specify the tile background color. With IE10, sites can provide background notifications for new messages and other account activity on the website. The site can also program additional commands that appear in IE’s navigation bar in a touch-friendly way, the same way that sites can program jumplists for IE on the desktop.

Site tiles let you go directly to your sites from the Windows 8 Start screen.

Pinned site high-resolution image, custom tile colors, and background notifications make it
easier to find your favorite site and keep you up-to-date at a glance.

Integration with the Store makes it easy to discover and launch Metro style apps for the sites you visit in IE. In Release Preview, we have continued reducing UI concepts to make you even confident in IE. The Tools icon is updated to tell you when there is something "special" about the page. You can tap on it to go to the store to install an app. Once an app is installed, you can launch it directly from the site. For example, here’s WordPress.com in IE10:

Updated tools menu lets you know when there is an app for the site.

Other aspects of integrating sites in the Metro style experience include:

Snap makes it easy to use Windows 8 for more than one thing at a time. You can browse in IE10 and have side-by-side access to your mail, music, or any other application. The browser adapts to the narrow “snap” size and automatically undocks when necessary for user interaction. All of the core browsing capabilities are available when snapped – panning, pinch and double-tap zooming, and following links.

Multitasking with Windows 8 “snap” lets you put your site side-by-side with other applications like the Messaging app.

Charms provide a consistent way to perform common actions like searching and sharing in Windows 8. IE10 supports the Search, Share, Devices, and Settings charms:

The charms appear when you swipe in from the right edge, press Windows key+C,
or move your mouse to the bottom or top-right corner of the screen.

For the Search charm, IE10 uses the default search engine, which you can set to your preference. After initiating a search in the charm fly-out, search results are shown as you type, including the same picture and instant results you see in IE on the desktop, if your search engine supports them.

With the Share charm, you can access any application that supports sharing (like Mail). This allows you to send a rich link preview with image, description, and hyperlink so it’s easy to share more than just a link.

IE10 and Mail support sending rich link previews with image, description, and hyperlink,
you can share more than just a link with very little work.

The Devices charm makes printing, projecting, and playing to external devices easy and consistent. For example, you can print from any webpage from IE – handy for things like airline boarding passes –by tapping or clicking the Devices charm and selecting a printer.

The Settings charm provides quick access to the most frequently used configuration settings for IE10. You can quickly clear browsing history, control location access, and more. Consumers get a simplified interaction with IE settings, while enthusiasts still have an easy way to access fine-grained controls through settings in IE on the desktop.

Protection from the malicious web

IE10 offers the same industry leading security, privacy, and reliability features, building on IE9’s SmartScreen, XSS filtering, Application Reputation, InPrivate browsing, Tracking Protection, and hang detection and recovery. In addition, IE10 makes your security and privacy more convenient with “Enhanced Protected mode” for better isolation of website content in each tab, and new in the Release Preview is one simple setting (on by default) for sending the Do Not Track (DNT) signal to web sites. .

Summary of other key changes from the Consumer Preview

IE10 in the Windows 8 Release Preview brings a more full-featured Metro style experience to your browsing. Again, you can read more details of changes to the underlying HTML5 engine and more on the IE blog. Here are just some of the improvements to IE10 for fast and fluid browsing:

Improved Fast & fluid touch: full independent composition for real web sites (including fixed elements, sub-scrollers, animations, and video)
Smoother UI transitions and animations with less flicker on low-end hardware
Support for subset of Flash in Metro style IE for top sites for media playback and gaming
Support for full-screen HTML5 video, including double-tap zoom to full-screen
Improved layout for site selection with “light dismiss” and notation for Favorites and Pinned site
Improved browser command bar layout and favicon treatment, with consolidated navigation bar controls
Adjust default web page zoom level on high res screens
Context menu for “Save Image”
Context menu for “Paste and Go”
Improved touch visual feedback for following links
Support for high-res image for pinned sites tile in start screen
Integrated network trouble shooter in Metro style IE
Metro style auto-complete drop down
Flip ahead for next page navigation (user opt-in)
Do Not Track (DNT) setting on by default

Metro style and no-compromise browsing

You used to have to make a choice between browsing the mobile web on small screens with good touch support, and browsing the full web with good mouse and keyboard support on big screens. The Metro style web experience in IE10 in the Windows 8 Release Preview means no compromises. You can browse and touch and multitask and print and share with all the power of Windows 8 and your PC. The web with IE10 is more fast and fluid, better connected to your applications, and more secure and private.

--Rob

Delivering the Windows 8 Release Preview

Steven Sinofsky — Thu, 31 May 2012 19:01:00 GMT

Today, Windows 8 Release Preview is available for download in 14 languages. This is our final pre-release, and includes Windows 8, Internet Explorer 10, new Windows 8 apps for connecting to Hotmail, SkyDrive, and Messenger (and many more), and hundreds of new and updated apps in the Windows Store. Since our first preview release last September, millions of people now use the pre-release product on a daily basis and millions more have been taking it through its paces, totaling hundreds of millions of hours of testing. We genuinely appreciate the effort that so many have put into pre-release testing, and of course, we appreciate the feedback too. Direct feedback and feedback through usage contributed to hundreds of visible changes in the product and tens of thousands of under-the-hood changes.

Just nine months ago, we kicked off this blog as a dialog about the design and development of Windows 8. We’ve talked in depth about building Windows 8, including the features, the designs, and the background behind these. We’ve done so in over 70 posts totaling over 500 pages if printed out and 34 videos totaling over 90 minutes, all coming directly from engineers of the product. We’ve had about 18,000 comments from approximately 7,000 people. Over 170 Windows engineers contributed to the dialog, including over 200 comments I posted (though I was out-commented by one other pretty active reader!). Of course, we’ve been carefully watching the telemetry of the millions of tech enthusiasts using the product at each milestone.

Windows is unique in this way. No other product used by so many provides such an inside view of the choices and development of the product as it evolves—and sometimes we forget that we are talking about a product still under active development even while we are discussing the designs and actively using it. The affirmations, debates, and even disagreements play a crucial role in the development of Windows. This has never been truer, as we reimagine Windows from the chipset to the experience—new hardware support, new user interaction models, new scenarios, new APIs and more, are all enabled with Windows 8, while we bring forward and improve the way Windows 7 has been used on over 550 million PCs around the world. Coming soon, we will see a new wave of PCs designed for Windows 8, along with new apps powered by the new Windows 8 platform.

The team has the deepest respect for, and is always humbled by the responses on the blog and in the stories about the posts. Thank you!

Our next milestone is traditionally called RTM, Release to Manufacturing, and from today until RTM, we will still be changing Windows 8, as we have done in past releases of Windows. We thought it would be a good idea to outline the kinds of feedback we are acting on as millions download and use the Windows 8 Release Preview.

Our focus from now until RTM is on continuing to maintain a quality level higher than Windows 7 in all the measures we focus on, including reliability over time; security to the core; PC, software, and peripheral compatibility; and resource utilization. We will rely heavily on the telemetry built into the product from setup through usage to inform us of the real world experience over time of the Release Preview. In addition, we carefully monitor our forums for reproducible reports relative to PC, software, and peripheral compatibility. We’ll be looking hard at every aspect of Windows 8 as we complete the work on the product, but we want to highlight the following:

Installation – We have significant telemetry in the setup process and also significant logging. Of course, if you can’t set up Windows 8 at all, that is something we are interested in, and the same holds for upgrades from Windows 7. Please note the specifics regarding installation requirements and cautions found on the download page.
Security and privacy – Obviously, any vulnerability is a something we would want to address. We will use the same criteria to address these issues as we would for any in-market product.
Reliability and responsiveness – We are monitoring the “crash” reports for issues that impact broad sets of people. These could be caused by Windows code, Microsoft or third-party drivers, or third-party apps. Information about crashes streams in “real time” to Microsoft, and we watch it very carefully. We also have a lot of new data coming on the hundreds of new apps in the Windows Store.
Device installation and compatibility – When you download a driver from Windows Update or install a driver via a manufacturer’s setup program, we collect data about that download via the Plug and Play (PnP) ID program. We’ve seen millions of unique PnP IDs through the Consumer Preview. We also receive the IDs for devices that failed to locate drivers. We are constantly updating the Plug and Play web service with pointers to information about each device (driver availability, instructions, etc.) We actively monitor the use of the compatibility modes required when the first installation of a Windows 7 based product does not succeed.
Software compatibility – Similar to device compatibility, we are also monitoring the installation process for software, and noting programs that do not install successfully. Again, we have the mechanism to help move that forward, and/or introduce compatibility work in the RTM milestone. Here too, we actively monitor the use of compatibility modes required when the first installation of a Windows 7-based product does not succeed. We have tested thousands of complex commercial products from around the world in preparation for the Release Preview.
Servicing – We will continue to test the servicing of Windows 8 so everyone should expect updates to be made available via Windows Update. This will include new drivers and updates to Windows 8, some arriving very soon as part of a planned rollout. Test updates will be labeled as such. We might also fix any significant issue with new code. All of this effort serves to validate the servicing pipeline, and to maintain the quality of the Release Preview.
New hardware – Perhaps the most important category for potential fixes comes from making sure that we work with all the new hardware being made as we all use build 8400. Our PC manufacturing partners and hardware partners are engineering new PCs, and these include hardware combinations that are new to the market and new to the OS. We’re working together to make sure Windows 8 has great support for these new PCs and hardware.

In fact, as some have noted, the RP itself was compiled over a week ago (build 8400). It takes time to complete the localized builds, validate the download images and process, as well as gear up all along the network edge for a fairly significant download event.

The path to RTM is well defined and critical to the careful and high quality landing of Windows 8 for our PC manufacturing partners. The changes we make to the product from RP to RTM are all carefully considered and deliberate, including some specific feature changes we plan on making to the user experience (as we talked about in previous posts). This is a routine part of the late stages of bringing a complex product like Windows to market. Throughout this process, every change to the code is looked at by many people across development and test, and across many different teams. We have a lot of engineers changing a very little bit of code. We often say that shipping a major product means “slowing everything down.” Right now we’re being very deliberate with every change we make and ensuring our quality is higher than ever as we progress towards RTM. The product is final when it is loaded on new PCs or broadly available for purchase.

RTM itself is a product development phase, rather than a moment in time. We continue to roll out Windows 8 in over 100 different languages and we are preparing final products for different markets around the world. As that process concludes, we are done changing the code and are officially “servicing” Windows 8. That means any subsequent changes are delivered as fixes (KB articles) or subsequent servicing via Windows Update. Obviously, our ability to deliver fixes via Windows Update has substantially changed the way we release to manufacturing, and so it is not unreasonable to expect updates soon after the product is complete, as occurred for Windows 7. There are no surprises here, but we’re making sure readers of this blog know what is coming down the road.

Once we have entered the RTM stage, our partners will begin making their final images and manufacturing PCs, and hardware and software vendors will ready their Windows 8 support and new products. We will also begin to manufacture retail boxes for shipment around the world. We will continue to work with our enterprise customers as well, as we ensure availability of the volume license tools and products.

Remember, if you buy a new PC running Windows 7 today, with the great support from our PC partners, you will be ready for Windows 8.

Delivering the highest quality Windows 8 is the most important criteria for us at this point—quality in every dimension. The RTM process is designed to be deliberate and maintain the overall engineering integrity of the system.

Ultimately, our partners will determine when their PCs are available in market. If the feedback and telemetry on Windows 8 and Windows RT match our expectations, then we will enter the final phases of the RTM process in about 2 months. If we are successful in that, then we are tracking to our shared goal of having PCs with Windows 8 and Windows RT available for the holidays.

On behalf of the Windows team,

Steven Sinofsky

PS: Please be sure to check the download page for system requirements, release notes, upgrade instructions, and other details on how to install and use the Release Preview.

Designing for PCs that boot faster than ever before

Steven Sinofsky — Tue, 22 May 2012 15:30:00 GMT

While we're hard at work making sure you never have to turn off your PC and can run in a connected standby state, we know that there will still be reboots for updating key system components. We've previously talked about reengineering the Windows boot experience and how we modernized and touch-enabled the core boot loader and choices. We've also made boot go by very fast. In fact, it is now so fast that we had to look at the design to enable the kinds of diagnostic boots required by those who do want to dig into their BIOS or load in alternative ways.

In this post, Chris Clark, a program manager on our User Experience team, talks about the design of an incredibly fast boot experience.
--Steven

Windows 8 has a problem – it really can boot up too quickly.

So quickly, in fact, that there is no longer time for anything to interrupt boot. When you turn on a Windows 8 PC, there’s no longer long enough to detect keystrokes like F2 or F8, much less time to read a message such as “Press F2 for Setup.” For the first time in decades, you will no longer be able to interrupt boot and tell your PC to do anything different than what it was already expecting to do.

Fast booting is something we definitely want to preserve. Certainly no one would imagine intentionally slowing down boot to allow these functions to work as they did in the past. In this blog I’ll walk through how we’re addressing this “problem” with new solutions that will keep your PC booting as quickly as possible, while still letting you do all the things you expect.

Too fast to interrupt

It’s worth taking a moment to watch (again, if you’ve already seen it) the fast boot video posted by Gabe Aul in his previous post about delivering fast boot times in Windows 8. In this video you can see a laptop with a solid state drive (SSD) fully booting in less than 7 seconds. Booting this fast doesn't require special hardware, but it is a feature of new PCs. You'll still see much improved boot times in existing hardware, but in many PCs, the BIOS itself (the BIOS logo and set of messages you see as you boot up) does take significant time. An SSD contributes to the fast boot time as well, as you can imagine.

If the entire length of boot passes in just seven seconds, the individual portions that comprise the boot sequence go by almost too quickly to notice (much less, interrupt). Most of the decisions about what will happen in boot are over in the first 2-3 seconds – after that, booting is just about getting to Windows as quickly as possible. These 2-3 seconds include the time allowed for firmware initialization and POST (< 2 seconds), and the time allowed for the Windows boot manager to detect an alternate boot path (< 200 milliseconds on some systems). These times will continue to shrink, and even now they no longer allow enough time to interrupt boot as you could in the past.

On the Windows team, we felt the impact of this change first, and perhaps most painfully, with our own F8 behavior. In previous versions of Windows (as far back as Windows 95), you could press F8 at the beginning of boot to access an advanced boot options menu. This is where you’d find useful options such as Safe Mode and “Disable driver signing.” I personally remember using them when I upgraded my first PC from Windows 3.1 to Windows 95. F8 helped me quickly resolve an upgrade issue and get started using Windows 95.

However, the hardware and software improvements in Windows 8 have collapsed the slice of time that remains for Windows to read and respond to the F8 keystroke. We have SSD-based UEFI systems where the “F8 window” is always less than 200 milliseconds. No matter how fast your fingers are, there is no way to reliably catch a 200 millisecond event. So you tap. I remember walking the halls and hearing people frantically trying to catch the F8 window – “tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap” – only to watch them reboot several times until they managed to finally get a tap inside the F8 window. We did an informal study and determined that top performers could, at best, sustain repeated tapping at about a 250ms frequency. Even in this best case, catching a 200 millisecond window still depends somewhat on randomness. And even if you eventually manage to catch this short window of time, you still have to contend with sore fingers, wasted time, and just how ridiculous people look when they are frantically jamming on their keyboard.

The problem we saw with our F8 key extends to any other key you may want to press during boot. For example, in the Windows 8 Developer Preview release, the F8 key led to a full set of repair, recovery, and advanced boot options. A different key allowed developer-focused options, such as enabling debugging or disabling driver signing. And on most PCs, there are additional keystrokes used by the firmware and advertised by messages during POST: “Press F2 for Setup” or “Press F12 for Network Boot.” Now, POST is almost over by the time these instructions could be displayed. And in many cases, the keyboard wouldn’t be functional until so late in POST that it’s almost not worth the time it would take the firmware to look for these keystrokes. Some devices won’t even try.

Even so, every one of these keystrokes plays an important role, and we have historically counted on them to provide important interrupt functions in boot. However, now, there is no longer time to do any of them.

Defining the problem space

We looked at these problems from many angles, and took a holistic approach to solving them. This effort spanned across developers, testers, and program managers, examining everything from the deepest parts of the kernel to the overall user experience. Approaching this first as an engineering problem, we identified the situations and scenarios that depended on keystrokes in boot and considered literally dozens of ways to restore functionality to each scenario in Windows 8.

Here are some of the key scenarios pulled from this list:

Even when Windows is booting up correctly, you may want to do something different – for example, you may want to boot from an alternate device such as a USB drive, go to the firmware’s BIOS setup options, or run tools from within the protected Windows Recovery Environment image on a separate partition. In general, these scenarios were accomplished in the past mainly without the involvement of Windows, using firmware-specific keys such as F2 or F12 (or some other key that you couldn't quite remember!).
You may need to troubleshoot a problem after something goes wrong, or want to undo something that just happened. Windows has many tools that assist with situations like these, such as allowing you to refresh or reset your PC, go back to a restore point using System Restore, or perform manual troubleshooting via the always-popular Command Prompt. In the past, these troubleshooting options were accessed primarily via the Windows boot manager, by pressing F8 at the beginning of boot.
Some error cases in startup are difficult to automatically detect. For example, the Windows boot process may have succeeded, but errors in components that are loaded later actually make Windows unusable. These cases are rare, but an example of where this might happen is a corrupt driver installation causing the login screen to crash whenever it loads. On previous-era hardware, you could interrupt boot with a keystroke (F8, for example) and reach a suitable repair option before the crashing component was even loaded. Over time, it has gotten harder to interrupt boot in this way, and in Windows 8, it’s virtually impossible.
We needed to enable certain startup options that are mainly used by developers – both inside and outside of Windows. Previously you could access these by pressing a key like F8 at the beginning of boot. These developer-targeted options are still important and include disabling driver signature enforcement, turning off “early launch anti-malware,” as well as other options.

One key design principle we focused on was how our solutions would fit in with the rest of Windows 8. We believed that these various boot options were more alike than they were different, and shouldn’t be located in different places within Windows. To look at this from the opposite direction, no one should need to learn how Windows is built, under the hood, to know where to go for a certain task. In the purest sense, we wanted it to “just work.”

Three solutions – one experience

We ultimately solved these problems with a combination of three different solutions. Together they create a unified experience and solve the scenarios without needing to interrupt boot with a keystroke:

We pulled together all the options into a single menu – the boot options menu – that has all the troubleshooting tools, the developer-focused options for Windows startup, methods for accessing the firmware’s BIOS setup, and a straightforward method for booting to alternate devices such as USB drives.
We created failover behaviors that automatically bring up the boot options menu (in a highly robust and validated environment) whenever there is a problem that would keep the PC from booting successfully into Windows.
Finally, we created several straightforward methods to easily reach the boot options menu, even when nothing is wrong with Windows or boot. Instead of these menus and options being “interrupt-driven,” they are triggered in an intentional way that is much easier to accomplish successfully.

Each of these solutions addresses a different aspect of the core problem, and together they create a single, cohesive end-to-end experience.

A single menu for every boot option

The core vision behind the boot options menu is to create a single place for every option that affects the startup behavior of the Windows 8 PC. Portions of this menu were discussed in detail in our previous blog post titled Reengineering the Windows boot experience. That post has the complete details and describes the fundamental changes made within the boot menus to enable touch interaction, Windows 8 visuals, and a cohesive user experience across the many surfaces that make up boot. Here is a screenshot of the boot options menu on one of my UEFI-based PCs:

Booting to an alternate device (such as a USB drive or network) is one of the most common scenarios that previously required interrupting boot with a keystroke. With Windows 8 UEFI-based firmware, we can now use software to trigger this. On these devices, you’ll now see the “Use a device” button in the boot options menu, which provides this functionality directly. As you can see in the above image, this functionality sits side-by-side with the other boot options. Windows no longer requires a keystroke interruption to boot from an alternate device, (assuming, for the moment, that you can reach the boot options menu itself without requiring a keystroke in boot. More on this in a minute.)

Into this same menu, we’ve added new functionality that allows you to reboot directly into the UEFI firmware’s BIOS setup (on Windows 8 UEFI hardware that supports this). On previous-era hardware, instructions for entering BIOS setup appeared at POST in messages like “Press F2 for setup.” (These messages have been around on PCs longer than perhaps any other type of UI.) They will still occur on systems that were made prior to Windows 8, where they will continue to work (primarily because these devices take several seconds to POST.) However, a Windows 8 UEFI-based PC won’t stay in POST long enough for keystrokes like this to be used, so the new UEFI-based functionality allows this option to live on in the boot options menu. After looking at the other items in this menu, we decided to place the button that reboots the PC into the UEFI firmware’s BIOS setup under the “Troubleshooting” node, within the “Advanced options” group:

A quick note about older, non-UEFI devices: legacy hardware that was made before Windows 8 will not have these new UEFI-provided menu features (booting to firmware settings and booting directly to a device). The firmware on these devices will continue to support this functionality from the POST screen as it did in the past (using messages such as “Press F2 for Setup”). There is still time for keystrokes like this to work in POST on these legacy devices, since they won’t have the improvements that enable a Windows 8 PC to POST in less than 2 seconds.

The next item appears on all Windows 8 devices – UEFI and non-UEFI alike. In the image above, you can see that we’ve added Windows Startup Settings. This new addition brings the entry point for the developer-focused Windows startup options into the unified boot options menu, and allows us to satisfy the scenarios that previously required the separate key during boot. These include items such as “disable driver signing” and “debugging mode,” as well as Safe Mode and several other options. Here is a close-up view of the informational page for these options:

The boot options menu creates a single place for every option that affects the startup behavior of the Windows 8 PC. By bringing these together into a single place, the boot options menu has become a familiar, unified, and highly usable place for these related items. Tasks such as changing Windows Startup settings, entering the UEFI firmware’s BIOS setup, or booting to a USB drive no longer require interrupting boot with a keystroke – assuming you can get to the boot options menu itself. So let’s look at how you get there.

Getting to the boot options menu (automatically) when there is a problem

There are two main situations where you’ll need to get to the boot options menu on a Windows 8 PC. The first case is when something has gone wrong and a repair action is necessary to restore the PC to full functionality. The second case (which I’ll cover in the next section) is when nothing is wrong, but you want to change some aspect of startup behavior or firmware configuration, or boot from a different device than usual.

In the first case, something has gone wrong and repairs are needed. The previous model of PC hardware required you (or someone you trust) to begin this troubleshooting process by pressing one of the several possible keystrokes during boot. For example, the options in the Windows Developer Preview release were split between Shift+F8, F8, and firmware-dependent keys such as F2 or F12, (which often varied across different PCs).

Each of these keystrokes represents the first step in troubleshooting that will lead to eventual repair. Unifying all of these in a single boot options menu removes the need to use multiple keys for the many available options. And to take this even further, we’ve removed even this one remaining keystroke by automatically loading the boot options menu when there is no way to successfully complete Windows startup.

In Windows 8, this automatic failover behavior will take you directly to the boot options menu whenever there is a problem that would otherwise keep your PC from loading Windows. This even includes cases where it appears (to Windows) that boot has succeeded, but in actuality the PC is unusable. An example of how this could occur would be a faulty driver installation that is causing the main logon screen to appear completely blank. Windows may not be aware that the screen is blank, but anyone looking at the screen knows this immediately. We now algorithmically detect when this has occurred across multiple boots, and automatically boot directly into the boot options menu inside the Windows Recovery Environment (WinRE). Since the source image for WinRE contains drivers and files that are kept separate from the main Windows installation, it’s not affected by any software changes and is a reliable environment to begin troubleshooting from the boot options menu.

Could this behavior ever result in Windows going to the boot options menu in Windows RE when nothing is actually wrong? Requiring two consecutive occurrences certainly reduces this chance, but it’s definitely possible. With this in mind, we designed the boot options menu to have a prominent Continue button in the first position, as a clear escape path for anyone not actually experiencing problems with their Windows 8 PC. We studied this in our usability lab to see what people would do when this boot options menu appeared unexpectedly. We were happy to find that the Continue button served its purpose and provided an important escape hatch against false positives.

In certain situations, Windows 8 can be even more specific about taking appropriate action to a specific problem. For example, if the core boot sequence itself fails to complete, we automatically try a second time. If this also doesn’t succeed, then Windows RE is automatically loaded and launches the specialized Startup Repair Tool. Even though this tool is tailor-made to fix many errors in the boot process, we still provide a pathway to all the other troubleshooting tools within the boot options menu for cases when the Startup Repair Tool is unsuccessful.

These automatic detection behaviors ensure the repair and recovery tools within Windows are always available, even when Windows itself is unable to load properly. Without needing to press a key or take any action, Windows RE is automatically loaded when it’s needed, allowing repair and recovery using the troubleshooting tools from the boot options menu itself.

Getting to the boot options menu whenever you want (even when nothing is wrong)

Even in non-error situations, we wanted an easy pathway to the boot options from within Windows. Many of the items in the menu are necessary even when everything is fully functional: booting to an alternate device, changing firmware configuration, and changing the developer-focused Windows Startup Settings, for example.

We wanted to make it easy to get to the boot options menu whenever you needed it, in a way that would logically fit within a fully-functional Windows 8.

In general, our preference is to create one method to do a certain thing, and make this one method the best possible. Even when there are multiple ways to do something, there is always a primary method – usually the most commonly used one, which covers the majority of cases. By choosing one way to do a certain thing, this way can be designed for a specific set of usage scenarios, and we can reasonably expect it to remain useful, usable, and desirable across these scenarios. Sometimes there are other cases that are not covered by the primary method. If these cases are not compelling enough to address, the primary method may truly be the only way.

However, in our case, we built a primary method and then added two more pathways: one to ensure we covered all the necessary scenarios, and a second to maintain a consistent pattern with existing Windows components.

The primary method of reaching the boot options is from Advanced startup on the General tab of PC settings. You can get to PC settings from the Settings charm, or by searching from the Start screen using specific search terms, such as boot, startup, safe mode, firmware, BIOS, or several others. On the General tab, you’ll see a short description of the options that will be available in the boot options menu, as well as a Restart now button. The descriptions shown on this screen are fully dynamic, and will change based on the hardware, firmware, and software available on your specific Windows 8 PC.

Pressing the Restart now button under Advanced startup begins the primary pathway to reach the boot options on a fully functional system. The system begins the normal restart process. Then, just before Windows has finished shutting down and is about to fully restart and enter POST, the entire process is paused and the boot options menu fades into view. This is the latest point that UI can even appear during the shutdown/restart sequence. We decided to pause the restart process at this middle point, so that you can choose your destination before the PC goes through another POST. By choosing the desired boot option before POST occurs, we can jump directly to the firmware setup or device-boot (when these are chosen) without needing to go through a second restart and a second POST. You can even use this menu to quickly boot into a second Windows installation if you want to. Since Windows pauses the restart sequence to show the boot options menu, this is one of the fastest ways to boot to a second OS.

For even quicker access, there’s another way of reaching the boot options menu: from within the shutdown menu. If you hold down the Shift key while clicking Restart, Windows 8 will go through the same sequence of events as if you had clicked Advanced startup from within PC settings. Since you can open the shutdown menu from any part of Windows 8 using the Settings charm, this is an especially quick way to directly reach the boot options menu. As you watch the video at the end of this post, you will notice that we've moved this command so there is a straight linear flow with your mouse to reach these options — a flow that is less demanding than in Windows 7.

The reason that we added this Shift+Restart option to the shutdown menu was because the boot options need to be available even when no one has signed in to the PC. In the old hardware model that allowed keystrokes in boot, anyone with physical access to the PC could press a key to interrupt boot and use the available boot options. To preserve those scenarios, we needed a way for someone who hasn’t signed in (but is still physically using the PC) to use the boot options menu.

The shutdown menu fits these requirements perfectly – it’s always available from the login screen, even when no one is signed in. Also, the use of the Shift modifier on Restart fits with the pattern of using Shift on other items in that same menu. You may notice that the shutdown menu appears in many other places as well, for users who are signed in as well as users who aren’t. In all of these places, the same Shift+Restart behavior still works – we felt it was important for the shutdown menu to behave consistently and predictably, wherever it appears.

There’s one other way to trigger the boot options menu during shutdown, and this way has the added bonus of working from Command Prompt. We’ve added a new flag to shutdown.exe: /o. The /o flag only works in conjunction with /r (for restart), so the full syntax is:

Shutdown.exe /r /o

We added this new flag to shutdown.exe because we wanted to keep this part of Windows consistent and predictable. Not everyone uses Shutdown.exe, but those who do, depend on it for the full set of shutdown-related tasks.

- Chris Clark

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Enhancing Windows 8 for multiple monitors

Steven Sinofsky — Mon, 21 May 2012 15:00:00 GMT

This post goes into the details around the multi-monitor experience for Windows 8. From the very first public release and demonstrations of Windows 8 we have shown improvements over Windows 7 for multi-monitor scenarios and have shown how we support new Metro style apps within a multi-monitor environment. We have continued to develop and refine features for multiple monitors and have significantly enhanced the experience as we move to our next milestone, the Release Preview. This post provides a bit of a preview of work that was not yet complete at the Consumer Preview, and serves as a reminder that the Developer Preview and Consumer Preview were works in progress. Mark Yalovsky, a lead program manager on our User Experience team, authored this post. (Note: This post is unchanged from last week when it was inadvertently posted as noted on @buildwindows8.)
--Steven

Connecting multiple monitors to a PC is one of the easiest ways to enhance your Windows experience. Plug in a second monitor and you instantly double your working surface. I've had a multi-monitor setup for the past 10 years; once you start using multiple monitors, you’ll never want to go back to your old setup. A multi-monitor setup allows you to be more productive by having more windows across multiple screens. We’re very excited about the ease at which tablets in Windows 8 will be able to support large screen and high resolution monitors (often through HDMI connectors), as this opens up a broad range of exciting new scenarios.

When we embarked on planning Windows 8, enhancing multi-monitor functionality was an important area to improve. A multiple monitor setup is certainly more common today than they used to be, and many technical professionals (developers, graphics professionals, architects, etc.) have started using it. Today, support for multiple monitors is standard on virtually all PC hardware, and monitor prices are at an all-time low (as of writing this post, you can purchase a 21” LED display in the $140 USD range). As a result, we continue to see increased adoption of multi-monitor configurations, both by enthusiasts and technical professionals.

Data collected through the Windows Feedback Program indicates that approximately 14% of desktop PCs and approximately 5% of laptop PCs have run with multiple monitors. It is important to note that this particular opt-in data set is enthusiast-leaning so represents the high end of usage (relative to previously shared measures that look at the entire universe of PCs), but we thought we would share this data set to reinforce another data source.

Number of monitors	Desktop PC	Laptop PC
1	85.32%	95.64%
2	13.48%	4.36%
3	0.85%	0.00%
4	0.34%	0.00%

We recognize that a key value of using multiple monitors lies in the desire to increase multitasking. This is especially true of those of you who spend time arranging your desktop windows to maximize the available real estate across multiple displays. Speaking firsthand, most developers and testers at Microsoft have a multi-monitor setup in their offices, walking through the hallways one sees a wide range of monitor configurations from 2 to 4 or more monitors among the engineering team. This affords two important scenarios. First, developers can use a tool like Visual Studio on one screen and have the running/debugged program on another, or they can add an additional monitor and reserve it for side tasks such as email or web browsing.

With that in mind, we set out to achieve the following goals for those using multiple monitors with Windows 8:

Make the desktop a more personal experience. Perhaps the most personalized feature on the desktop is the ability to customize the desktop background. We set out to make this a great experience on multiple monitors too.
Improve the efficiency of accessing apps across monitors. In Windows 7, the top request from people using multiple monitors was to improve the taskbar efficiency.
Improve the efficiency of accessing system UI. In Windows 7, you could only access the Start menu on one monitor. With the introduction in Windows 8 of new UI that puts controls at the edges of the screen, we wanted to make sure that it’s still easy to access Start, the charms, the clock, and your recently used apps from every monitor.
Allow side-by-side Metro style and desktop apps. You can launch or move a Metro style app to any monitor, side-by-side with desktop apps on another screen.

Examples of multi-monitor configurations in Microsoft offices

Multi-monitor desktop background personalization

Customizing the desktop background is a very popular feature in Windows 7. In fact, telemetry shows that more than 75% of users customized the desktop background. A limitation in Windows 7 is that in a multi-monitor configuration, you can only select a single background image that is duplicated across your monitors. Not only is this limited from a customization perspective (how many people really want to look at the same picture twice?), but it also looks bad if your monitors have significantly different resolution or are different orientations (portrait vs. landscape).

We know that some of you use some pretty advanced third-party tools for sophisticated background image management. In Windows 8, we made the background customization feature customizable on each monitor you use, and for mainstream customers, we’ve provided solutions to the common desktop personalization problems encountered with Windows 7:

Show a different desktop background on each monitor. When selecting a personalization theme, Windows 8 automatically puts a different desktop background on each monitor. You can even set a slide show to cycle through pictures across all monitors, or pick specific background pictures for each monitor.

Different backgrounds on each monitor

Option to pick different backgrounds on each monitor

Multi-monitor slide show. It is very typical for people to have a multi-monitor setup that consists of different sized and/or oriented monitors. And of course, not all photos look great in both portrait and landscape or on all screen sizes and resolutions. To address this, we’ve added logic to the slide show code that selects the best suited images for each monitor.

Slideshow with image selection that matches monitor orientation

Span desktop background across all monitors. You can now span a single panoramic picture across multiple monitors. We are also including a new panoramic theme in the personalization options for Windows 8.

Span an image across all monitors

Option to span image across all monitors, including panoramic pictures

Multi-monitor taskbar

Of course the main reason most people use multi-monitor configurations is to be more productive. With the extra screen real estate you are able to see more windows up at the same time. The flip side to having more windows visible is that window management can become more challenging. In the desktop, the taskbar is the primary place for managing windows. As some of you pointed out to us in our Windows 7 blogs, lack of multi-monitor support for the taskbar is a gap. This can be summed up by one comment from the e7 blog:

@AlexJerebtsov, “The lack of multi-monitor [Taskbar] support is just about a crime”.

What’s interesting about adding multi-monitor support to the taskbar is that even among a relatively small group of users, there are several opinions as to what the ”right” design should be. As you can imagine, this is quite common in designing a new version of Windows—there are many points of view on how even relatively small things should be implemented. These are some observations from a variety of hands-on research methods:

People tend to approach window management in either an organized or an ad-hoc fashion. People who manage windows in an ad-hoc fashion frequently move windows between monitors as their workflow requires, and do not keep track of what monitor a window is on. People that manage windows in a more organized fashion tend to designate specific monitors for specific apps and tasks (for example, email always on the left, the browser always on the right). There is not always a hard line between these two working styles and most people move windows in an ad-hoc fashion from time to time.
Improved efficiency was consistently cited as a goal for the taskbar. Nearly all users conveyed the desire for improved taskbar efficiency. When we observed people using multiple monitors in their work, we noticed that the simple act of switching windows would sometimes require them to turn their heads, swivel in their seats, and reposition their mouse cursor as they jumped from a secondary monitor to the main taskbar monitor and all the way back again. Of course we also heard this articulated in term of mouse-efficiency. That is, we want to reduce the distance that you need to move the mouse to find and switch to a window on the taskbar.
It is common for people to have a primary monitor. Many people have one monitor that they run most of their apps on, with a smaller secondary monitor that has a few windows open for peripheral tasks (for example, managing a playlist, sending IMs, playing a video). This is particularly true for users who have kept their old monitor on-hand after upgrading to a newer, bigger, higher-resolution monitor. Ad hoc users still move windows freely between monitors, but tend to prefer one over the other for the tasks that they are currently focusing on, partly because it is comfortable to set up a chair, keyboard, and mouse to face one monitor directly.
Taskbar real estate is generally not a problem. When we designed the taskbar we were fairly confident that most people would find the default setting sufficient even with customization easy to find. Hands-on research confirms the majority of users keep the default setting where windows are grouped by app on the taskbar. Telemetry that looked at hundreds of millions of sessions further confirmed that only 6% of users ungroup taskbar buttons.

Multi-monitor taskbar options

Based on our field and lab observations we understood that people employ different window management techniques (always ad-hoc, always organized, mixed). For this reason, we chose to provide several multi-monitor taskbar options, so that advanced users with multiple monitors can still fine-tune their desktop experience.

Windows 8 taskbar properties

Show taskbar buttons on the taskbar where the window is open. This is the most obvious option that comes to mind when thinking of a multi-monitor taskbar. In this configuration, each monitor’s taskbar contains icons for only the windows that are on that monitor. The advantage of this option is that it is simple and predictable. This tested well with people who were very organized in their placement of windows, or who had dedicated monitors for specific tasks. On the other hand, ad-hoc users found this design to be inefficient, as they needed to remember what monitor a particular window was on.

App buttons on the taskbar where the window is open

Show taskbar buttons on main taskbar and taskbar where window is open. In this configuration, the main monitor has a special taskbar that contains all the windows across all monitors. All the other monitors have unique taskbars, as with the first option described above. This option offers some of the cleanliness of the taskbar where the window is open model, but also offers a consistent and efficient way to get to any window via the master taskbar. People who think in terms of a primary monitor will probably prefer this option.

App buttons on main taskbar and where window is open

Show taskbar buttons on all taskbars (default). In this configuration, all windows are available on all taskbars. This configuration is designed for maximum mouse efficiency because you can always activate any window from any monitor. Of all the options, this works the best for ad-hoc windows management, as there is no need to keep track of where windows are located. While some users indicated a preference for one of the other options, this was the only option that was efficient for the vast majority of users, which is why this is the default setting.

App buttons on all taskbars (default option)

Some changes for the Release Preview

For those of you who have used the Consumer Preview on multiple monitors, you’ll notice that Start, the charms, and the clock are only shown on a single monitor. The feedback has been vocal and clear on this and of course, given the prevalence of multi-monitor setups even in our own hallways, we understood that this feature simply wasn’t complete. Looking forward, here’s a sneak peak at some of the improvements we’re making to multi-monitor usage for the Release Preview.

No broken corners and edges

On the Consumer Preview in a multi-monitor setup, it is difficult to find the Start screen and other UI that is invoked from the corners with a mouse, since those activation areas are only available on a single monitor. In the upcoming Release Preview, we are making all the corners and edges alive on all monitors. You can now bring up Start, the charms, and app switching from the corners of any monitor. Want Start on monitor 1? Just go to the bottom-left corner on that monitor. Want it on monitor 2? Go to the bottom-left corner on monitor 2. This not only improves discoverability, it also improves mouse efficiency and multitasking. To launch or move an app to a specific monitor, bring up Start on that monitor and launch the app, or switch to the app using the app switcher at the left edge.

You can launch Start on any monitor:

You can switch back to recently used apps from any monitor:

And you can bring up the charms on any monitor:

Launch and move Metro style apps to any monitor

There are several ways that you can launch and move an app:

Start. You can bring up Start on any monitor by moving your mouse to the bottom-left corner, or via the Start charm that you can invoke from the top and bottom-right corners of any monitor. Pressing the Windows key launches Start on the last monitor where Start or a Metro style app appeared.

Switch back to an app from any monitor. You can switch back to an app on any monitor by moving your mouse to the top-left corner. Clicking the app thumbnail switches you back to the app on that monitor.

Keyboard shortcuts. We are introducing new keyboard shortcuts that build on the shortcuts from Windows 7. Win+Pg Up or Win+Pg Dn moves Metro style apps across monitors. Win+Arrow and Win+Shift+Arrow continue to work on desktop apps as they did in Windows 7, by snapping and moving desktop windows across monitors.

Drag and drop. Using the mouse, you can now drag and drop Metro Style apps across monitors. Drag and drop works for both full screen and snapped apps.

Improved mouse targeting on the shared edge

A multi-monitor setup brings the major benefit of more real estate, but it also lacks the Fitts' Law benefits of hard edges and corners across displays. While it’s extremely easy to trigger corner UI such as Start, charms, or recently used apps on a single monitor, it isn’t uncommon to overshoot the mouse when the corner appears on a shared edge on a multi-monitor configuration.

With multiple monitors in fact, targeting the shared edge can be downright difficult. Move a few pixels too far and your cursor is suddenly on the wrong monitor. This has been a common challenge in previous versions of Windows as well, like when you’re trying to hit the close button or scroll bars on a maximized window on a shared edge. Many work around this by remembering to move the mouse slowly as it approaches a shared edge or by avoiding window layouts that bump up against those edges. We commonly observe this behavior in our own usage and in field studies.

In the Release Preview, we’re introducing an improved model for shared edges that makes it easier to target UI along a shared edge.

Since corners are even more important for Windows 8, we’ve created real corners along the shared edges to mimic the Fitts’ Law advantages of a single monitor. The red corners in the diagram below demonstrate how these corners can help guide your mouse.

We’ve designed the corners to provide help when you need it and to get out of the way when you don’t. The protruding corner target is 6 pixels in height, which means that it is only noticeable when you’re trying to target the corner of the screen. Also, we’ve designed the corner to only work for the monitor your cursor is on. For example, leaving monitor 2 for monitor 1 in the diagram below, the bottom corner in monitor 1 will not interfere as you move your mouse across the shared edge.

Shared corner does not block cross monitor navigation

The shared corner isn’t just an improvement for the new Windows 8 UI, but it also makes it easier to target controls on the desktop like Close and Show desktop. As a result, targeting shared corners is fast and fluid. First-hand experience is a must with this design, as you will notice this improvement right away when using the new Release Preview.

More to come

We have lots of ideas for how we could do even more with Metro style apps on multiple monitors. Our goal for Windows 8 is to deliver a great Metro style app experience alongside desktop apps, improving multitasking efficiency and making it easy to access the controls you need along the edges of every screen. We wanted to make sure your desktop experience was even more efficient, with new functionality such as the spanning taskbar, and we wanted you to also have access to Metro style apps while you’re also using the desktop. As we see new apps developed, and as we see how developers might want to take advantage of multi-monitor configurations in new ways with immersive and full screen apps, we will of course enhance this experience (and APIs) even further.

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We hope that you enjoy these new multi-monitor features. Thank you for all of your feedback – it has certainly helped us to improve Windows 8 as we moved from Developer Preview, to Consumer Preview, and soon, to the Release Preview.

--Mark

Creating the Windows 8 user experience

Steven Sinofsky — Fri, 18 May 2012 19:30:00 GMT

This blog often focuses on the bits and features and less on the “philosophy” or “context” of the product. Given the level of brand new innovations in Windows 8, however, we think it is worth putting Windows 8 in the context in which we approached the design. As with any significant change to a broadly used product, Windows 8 has generated quite a bit of discussion. With millions of people using the Consumer Preview for their daily work, we’ve seen just as many points of view expressed. Many people—from David Pogue of the New York Times to Mat Honan from Gizmodo and many more—have been quite positive, and others less so, most notably in the comments on this blog, where we’ve seen the rich dialog we’d hoped for. Some have asked about design choices we’ve made in the product and the evolution of Windows or suitability of the design to different people. Some bloggers believe it is critical to further separate the traditional desktop from Metro style elements. Other people believe passionately that it is important to make the desktop more like the Metro style interface. There are as many opinions as there are folks who have tried out the Consumer Preview. Designing a new release of a product already used by a billion people in a billion different ways is, as we say, like ordering pizza for a billion people. Doing so out in the open encourages this dialog, and we embrace and value it. Jensen Harris, Director of Program Management for our User Experience team, authored this post.
--Steven

At the D: All Things Digital conference in June 2011, we demonstrated for the first time the new user interface that we developed for Windows 8. This new UI is fast and fluid to use, and optimized for mobile form factors such as laptops, tablets, and convertibles, where people spend the vast majority of their time today. Windows 8 works equally well with mouse, keyboard, or your fingers, and has the best pen support of any OS. It supports multiple displays and the widest array of configurations and form factors of any OS. On top of all that, Windows 8 introduces a new kind of app, which we codenamed “Metro style” following the design language that has evolved going back to Windows Media Center and the new Windows Phone. These apps are immersive, full-screen, beautiful, and optimized for the ways that people commonly use devices today.

I thought it would be useful to take a step back and describe a little bit of the background of how the Windows 8 user interface was designed, and discuss some of the decisions we’ve made and the goals of this new experience in more detail.

A brief history of the Windows user interface

The user interface of Windows has evolved and been transformed over the course of its entire 27-year history. Although we think about certain aspects of the Windows UI as being static or constant, the reality is that the interface is always changing to keep up with the way people use PCs. It is amazing to reflect back on the history of the Windows UI, and to see the level of dramatic change that has transpired over time.

Since Windows 8 marks a significant evolution of the user experience, I will focus on the releases where the user interface of Windows changed most significantly, and some of the initial perception surrounding those shifts. If you are interested, a full history of Windows is available to read on the Microsoft website.

Windows 1

Windows 1 was released in 1985, and it was designed for drastically different scenarios than what people use PCs for today.

The first version of Windows was a rough graphical shell around DOS, intended primarily to be used with the keyboard. A mouse was strictly optional and very few PCs had one.

In fact, the mouse was a bit of a curiosity at the time, perceived by many experienced users as inefficient, cumbersome, un-ergonomic, and hard to learn how to use. The mouse was certainly exotic. Do you roll it on the screen? Do you pick it up and talk into it?

Here are a couple of published expert opinions from early 1980s print publications about whether the mouse would catch on:

“Mice are nice ideas, but of dubious value for business users” (George Vinall, PC Week, April 24, 1984)
“There is no evidence that people want to use these things.” (John C. Dvorak, San Francisco Examiner, February 19, 1984)
“I was having lots of fun, but in the back of my corporate mind, I couldn't help but think about productivity.” (George Vinall, PC Week, April 24, 1984)
“Does the mouse make the computer more accessible, more friendly, to certain target audiences such as executives? The answer is no.” (Computerworld, October 31, 1983)
“There is no possibility that this device will feel more comfortable to the executive than the keyboard. Because of its ‘rollability,’ the mouse has the aura of a gimmick…” (Computerworld, October 31, 1983)
“The mouse and its friends are merely diversions in this process. What sounds revolutionary does not necessarily help anyone with anything, and therein lies the true test of commercial longevity.” (David A. Kay, Datamation, October 1983)

So, as you can see, the mouse was considered gimmicky, unnecessary, and not useful for mainstream use. On the other hand, some people are now asserting that the mouse is dead.

Windows 3 and 3.1

The first commercially successful version of Windows was Windows 3, released in 1990. It featured a totally new interface, centered on a new shell called Program Manager for launching, arranging, and switching programs.

File Manager was the most important new program in Windows 3, used for managing files and drives. This upgrade bet big for the first time on most users having a mouse, and knowing how to use it to click on the colorful, large (for the time) 32x32 icons. Many reviews were critical of the release because to use it effectively required one of those oft-criticized mice.

It is worth noting in the screenshot above that File Manager is being used to browse the files in the OS itself—something that was commonplace at the time, but now the modern equivalent of looking under the hood to repair an electronic fuel-injected car.
You could not put links to programs or files on the “desktop” in Windows 3. The area behind the floating windows was where programs went when you minimized them. Because getting to these minimized apps often required moving a bunch of windows out of the way first, the Alt+Tab keyboard shortcut became a very popular way to switch between running programs.

Windows 95

Windows 95, released a few years later in August of 1995, included a substantially reinvented user experience. Many of the constructs that are still present in Windows 7 were introduced in this version—the Start menu, taskbar, Explorer, and the desktop—but in very different forms.

Although we think about these user interface elements as familiar today, at the time, they were radically different from how anyone had used a PC before. The Start button was so undiscoverable that, despite having the word Start right on it, bouncing “<-- Click here to begin” text had to be added to the taskbar after early test releases so that people could figure out how to get started using the programs on their PC.

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Of course, once people figured out the “trick” of the Start button, it stuck with them, and then they were good to use it forever more. And of course, we were able to remove the “Click here to begin” text from subsequent versions.

At the time, PCs were still rather mysterious and the vast majority of homes were yet to have their first PC. Actions that we take for granted today, such as double-clicking and right-clicking, were to many users unknown—yet used extensively in the Windows 95 user interface. These actions proved problematic for many people to discover and master. Here is an historic video of a person in our usability labs trying an early build of Windows 95 which shows an example of the kind of problems many people had:

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The Windows 95 user interface, designed in 1993, was forward-looking, and drastically simplified the common tasks of the time. Yet, a vocal subset of users continued to criticize it for years, preferring instead the comfort of what they were familiar with: Windows 3.1. Ed Bott from ZDNet dug up some humorous posts highlighting the frustration some users were having making the transition to Windows 95.

So, while the building blocks of today’s familiar Windows experience were designed in 1993, the world of 2012 is very different. In 1993, the web was still new to everyone, and most Windows 95 users had not tried it yet. The included media player could only play .wav files. Online connectivity was not commonplace, and if it was present at all, it was usually through a service such as AOL, which used a modem to connect to proprietary content and a closed intra-service messaging system.

Windows 95 prominently featured a fax service and a terminal client/phone dialer. It did not include any support for commonplace devices such as digital cameras or portable mp3 players, since neither even existed as a consumer device in 1993. The first ever mobile phone with PDA capabilities, the IBM Simon, was introduced around this time. It weighed almost 1.5 pounds, ran DOS, and the only app ever designed for it sold only two copies. This was a very, very different world than the one we live in today.

And yet, the Windows 95 UI was designed in and for this world; the Start menu, the taskbar, the desktop, Explorer, and all of the rest of today’s familiar Windows UI was born in this time. A world in which you spent most of your time disconnected… typing in a word processor and manipulating files on your computer. A world in which the idea of not starting Windows by typing “win” at the DOS prompt seemed strange and almost unreal (and even the subject of many debates.)

From this distant time in the past, today’s familiar Windows user interface was born.

Windows XP

Windows XP was released to PC manufacturers on August 24, 2001. It represented another important evolution in the Windows user interface.

By 2001, people were using their PCs more every day. Typing and managing files, which doesn’t require the web, remained a critical percentage of the time people spent using a PC. Yet collecting and consuming information and media—especially music, photos, and videos—was on the verge of becoming mainstream. (Even then, early digital camera sales were still just one quarter of film camera sales, and would not eclipse them for another three years.) People were spending more time on the PC web browsing and doing mail, in addition to the document-focused productivity scenarios around which Windows 95 was developed.

Although you still invoked the Windows XP Start menu by clicking the word Start in the lower-left corner, the Start menu itself changed considerably. The familiar hierarchical programs list from all versions of Windows since 95, rooted in the old Program Manager, was demoted under an “All Programs” link. Mail, web browsing, pictures, and music were brought to the top level.

Although Windows XP eventually became a major success, some people at the time were frustrated with the changes to the user interface. They found the Windows XP experience to be garish, and users inquired about how to “downgrade” to previous versions.

Windows Vista

In 2006, Windows Vista substantially changed the visual appearance of Windows, introducing the Aero visual style. Aero gave the appearance of highly-rendered glass, light sources, reflections, and other graphically complex textures in the title bars, taskbar, and other system surfaces. These stylistic elements represented the design sensibilities of the time, reflecting the capabilities of the brand-new digital tools used to create and render them. This style of simulating faux-realistic materials (such as glass or aluminum) on the screen looks dated and cheesy now, but at the time, it was very much en vogue.

Aero was designed to help people focus less on the window chrome itself, and more on the content within the window. It draws the eye away from the title bar and window frames, and towards what is valuable and what an app is about.

And of course, the Start menu changed again, most notably by making it possible to press the Windows key (introduced in Windows 95) and then just start typing to search from anywhere in Windows. (This welcome innovation is one we’ve kept in Windows 8, expanding it to search even within apps.)

Of course, as with every change along the way, some people expressed reservations about the changes.

Windows 7

Windows 7 was released in the fall of 2009, and a number of the key aspects of the UI were significantly transformed. While many of these changes centered on an overhaul of the taskbar, significant modifications were also made to the Start menu, windowing, and to the logical organization of files on the PC.

Notably, launching and switching between programs were brought together in the new taskbar. Icons in the taskbar were made bigger and more touchable. The Start menu was changed to focus on launching only the programs you use less frequently, as no program can be pinned to both the taskbar and the Start menu. This marked the start of a transition where we were looking to remove the archaic distinction between starting a program for the first time and returning to a program that was already running. It is interesting to consider how odd it is that we trained ourselves to look one place for a program the first time it is running, and a different place once it is already running.

Windows 7 also was the first mainstream non-phone OS to introduce multitouch support into the base OS. Although tablets on other platforms have followed suit, Windows 7 was the first shipping OS to embrace multitouch in the platform. Along the way, we learned a great deal about the limitations of trying to use touch to navigate Windows when so much of the existing interface, and virtually all of the existing programs, were specifically designed to be used with mouse and keyboard.

Although some people had critical reactions and demanded changes to the user interface, Windows 7 quickly became the most-used OS in the world.

Trends that influenced the design of Windows 8

As we started planning the user experience of Windows 8 in mid-2009, just around the time of Windows 7 RTM, we looked around and took note of some of the trends playing out around us.

This was a pre-iPad world, a world before the recent proliferation of new form factors and device types. And although more than 93% of PCs run some version of Windows today, it was clear even then that the world we lived in and people’s expectations of computing devices were rapidly changing.

Here are a few of the trends we noted that influenced the design of the Windows 8 user experience and features:

1. Connected all the time.

Connectivity is becoming ubiquitous. While today’s file-centric Windows user interface was designed around assumptions of optional, limited, and sporadic connectivity, today, nearly everything people love to do on their PCs assumes they’re connected to the Internet. Wi-Fi is assumed in more and more public locations, and an increasing number of PCs also include the ability to connect to mobile broadband networks as well. Where connectivity was once the exception, it is now the rule.

2. People, not files, are the center of activity.

There has been a marked change in the kinds of activities people spend time doing on the PC. In balance to “traditional” PC activities such as writing and creating, people are increasingly reading and socializing, keeping up with people and their pictures and their thoughts, and communicating with them in short, frequent bursts. Life online is moving faster and faster, and people are progressively using their PCs to keep up with and participate in that. And much of this activity and excitement is happening inside the web browser, in experiences built using HTML and other web technologies.

3. The rise of mobile PCs over desktop PCs.

The kinds of PCs people are buying are rapidly moving towards mobile form factors like laptops and tablets, and away from traditional desktops. While powerful desktops will remain the form factor of choice for people who want to squeeze every ounce of performance out of a highly modular and extensible PC (for example video editors, financial analysts, scientists, gamers, PC enthusiasts…), most people want to have light, portable PCs.

In 2009, desktops were 44% of the worldwide market and laptops were 56%. Just 3 years later, over 61% of the PCs sold are laptops and the trend is accelerating—this is globally, measuring all Windows PCs sold. Among consumers in the United States buying a PC this year, more than 76% will purchase laptops—the absolute number of all US desktops sold will be fewer than the number of tablets in 2012! That is a fairly stunning change in the role of different form factors. Even in businesses, laptops are now purchased more than half the time.

Videos of the recent Windows 8 Consumer Preview event we hosted in Barcelona in February were shot, produced, edited, and controlled using only laptops. Many of these were very powerful laptops with secondary monitors plugged in for extra screen space, but even a few years ago we would have hauled around a truckload of desktop PCs for the event. Just because a PC is portable, light, and thin does not mean that it lacks the power or capability to do heavy-duty professional work.

4. Content is on the PC and in the cloud.

Following from ubiquitous connectivity and the popularity of laptops is the fact that people’s content now spans the PC and cloud services. This includes not just purpose-built storage services like SkyDrive, but also photos in Facebook and Flickr, videos put up for family to watch in Vimeo, music stored in and streamed from cloud services. All of this is augmented by GBs, or in some cases even TBs, of videos, photos, and music on the PCs in the home. People’s content is spreading out everywhere, and as cameras are now high-resolution and always in your pocket (via your phone), the amount of content being generated every day is multiplying rapidly. A service like SkyDrive providing up to 100GB of cloud storage dramatically changes how you think about your PC and the resources you have access to.

These are a few of the key things we took note of in 2009. What all of these trends have in common is that people had started to use their PCs with different expectations and scenarios in mind. Although the PC remains the world’s best tool for writing and typing and creating and making things, people increasingly were doing different kinds of things with the time they spent on their PCs. And they had started to expect PCs to behave more like their phones: connected, mobile, long battery life, centered on people and activities and keeping up with what’s going on.

At the same time, apps have continued to get richer on mobile devices, as developers have had more time and experience developing apps. Along the way, mobile platforms continue to add APIs and functionalities that already exist in Windows.

We realized that to enable Windows to lead with these trends emerging, we needed to reimagine the Windows experience. Like so many other times in our history, we needed to bring the Windows experience forward: not only to better service what people are doing today, but to anticipate and cultivate the ways they will be using PCs in the future; to modernize the experience of using Windows, and to set the stage for the next decade of platform and developer innovation; to make the PC the most desirable, useful, and loved device in the world.

Windows 8 looks forward towards a new world of capabilities, new hardware, new apps, and new scenarios. Windows 8 is about a billion people doing new things, and the next billion people experiencing Windows for the first time.

Goals of the Windows 8 user experience

As we designed this new experience, a few clear goals emerged for the characteristics of what we wanted to create.

1. Fast and fluid.

Those of you who have followed Windows 8 coverage over the last year have undoubtedly read or heard the phrase “fast and fluid.” This is not some "marketing" tagline we have recently created; these words are part of the design language we used to define what we intended as the soul of the new user experience in Windows 8. If Windows 8 were to be embodied in a phrase, this is it, and our goal is for this description to fit the product.

Fast and fluid represents a few core things to us. It means that the UI is responsive, performant, beautiful, and animated. That every piece of UI comes in from somewhere and goes somewhere when it exits the screen. It means that the most essential scenarios are efficient, and can be accomplished without extra questions or prompts. It means that things you don’t need are out of the way.

It also implies to us a certain feeling of fluidity or weightlessness in using Windows. For instance, swiping from the edge of the screen with your finger to bring up controls feels fluid and natural and pleasing. The human finger is designed for that kind of motion! For example, dragging down from the top of the screen to close an app, or dragging a tile to the bottom of the screen to invoke zoom and then moving it to a distant part of the Start screen feels satisfying to do, in addition to being efficient.

2. Long battery life.

Because most Windows PCs are now battery powered (and soon the vast majority will be), great battery life is just a requirement. When the original Windows programming model was created, literally every PC was plugged in all the time. There was no concept of power management or battery drain. As a result, programs were free to do whatever they wanted. Once running, they ran constantly, regardless of whether you were interacting with them or not. Programs could consume all the memory on the system, or all the CPU, or write to disk every second. Basically they could, in a totally unbridled way, chew through your battery.

Traditionally, the design of PC software was centered on using the CPU as much as possible, whenever possible, because “MIPS are cheap.” In contrast, now we heavily scrutinize usage of the CPU, and understand the role it plays in preserving or reducing battery life. In a mobile world, this is a new type of engineering tradeoff. Where Microsoft used to primarily focus on reducing memory consumption, now we are also laser-focused on improving battery life while still delivering a fast and fluid user experience. That means optimizing for memory consumption and CPU and GPU and performance and battery characteristics all at the same time, across a variety of platforms and hardware configurations. Therein lie the real engineering tradeoffs inherent in building a mobile OS, or just a modern OS that happens to be used on a mobile device.

Once we understood how important great battery life was, certain aspects of the new experience became clear. For instance, it became obvious early on in the planning process that to truly reimagine the Windows experience we would need to reimagine apps as well. Thus, WinRT and a new kind of app were born.
To help extend a device’s battery life, WinRT-based apps know how to save their state instantly. Windows can throttle them down to use no CPU or memory on a moment’s notice, but without the user losing anything they’ve been working on in the app. When the app resumes, it resumes in exactly the same place it left off. To the user, it has been running all the time—but technically the program has been suspended or terminated in the background.

There’s a reason phones and tablets generally show only one app on the screen at a time. It is not just because of the traditionally small screens on these devices, or because doing one social update is all people do, or because "toy apps take up the whole screen." It is because "one-at-a-time" lets an OS manage the background activity on the device so that only apps you are actively using can drain the battery.

Even with multitasking in the existing desktop still present (and improved), we did feel like only offering "one-at-a-time" in the Metro style experience was a bit of a constraint, and not totally true to the Windows history of multitasking. So we evolved Snap for Windows 8.This feature lets you run any two WinRT-based apps side-by-side, so that you can watch a video while you browse the web, or video chat while checking mail. And we created facilities for background processing of a wide class of apps, and background notification capabilities that are unique to Windows as well.

In the below picture, you can see the Windows 8 Messaging app snapped next to the Maps app—two apps at once, even on a tablet.

3. Grace and power: Windows 8 apps.

Windows 8 apps are so much more than just optimizing for battery life though. These apps are beautiful and immersive, using every pixel of the screen to display their content. For years, each release of Windows added more and more chrome around the edges of your screen and windows—buttons and widgets and gadgets. Windows 8 reverses this trend, with Windows itself receding into the background, and putting the content of your apps ahead of the chrome.

Every app has a rich canvas with which to express its soul—when you’re using a news app, you’re fully immersed in news. When you’re checking your social networks, content is presented beautifully and artfully and in ways that draw you in to spend more time enjoying yourself. When you play a game, you’re fully and completely immersed in the game. (Although, some types of games have been doing full-screen for years!)

And over time, as apps evolve, when you’re editing photos, writing a document, managing your finances, or any other professional productivity task, you’ll also be immersed in that. Of course, if you use popular professional tools today, you can see how they are on a path to being full-screen and immersive already. Our unique app constructs such as contracts, pickers, and many other cross-app capabilities (all accessible globally via the charms) are about new ways to connect apps together, and are relevant for anything from intense data transfer between apps to sharing a quick link via email. These cross-app capabilities (and more importantly the APIs) are a unique element of Windows 8.

Windows 8 apps are purpose-built and tailored for the specific set of scenarios they are great at. This is different than traditional desktop programs, which often contain hundreds of loosely-related, powerful, but hard-to-find features. Windows 8 apps focus on being great at something, or a few things, and really delivering a great experience for those targeted scenarios.

The history of development tools and system management tools shows that this approach of “little languages” (or "tiny tools") vs. monolithic apps maps better to a world in which obtaining and using apps is easier. The rich capabilities of the Windows Store, contracts, and the searchable Start screen all were designed so that it is easy for people to have, find, and use many apps in Windows 8.

Even though apps express their individual personality and brand and content, they still do so within the harmony of the overall "Metro style" design experience. Great Windows 8 apps align to a common typographic grid so that the PC feels fluid and harmonious as you switch between apps. We created standardized ways of doing common tasks: with touch, you swipe in from the edges to reveal commands. With a mouse, you move to the corners. The lower-left corner of the screen takes you to Start, no matter where you are. Right-click always reveals off-screen commands for the app you’re using. Within apps, Settings and Search and Share are always in the same location (the charms), no matter what app you are using. There is real value to having the consistent aspects of apps always work the same way. Yes, you do have to learn a few simple things up front, but once you know them, you know how to use the entire system.

WinRT apps scale gracefully from small 7” screens to large desktop monitors, to even larger wall-sized TV screens. Check out the Maps app in Windows 8 being used on an 82” touchscreen during the Consumer Preview launch event in Barcelona! (Or, watch the video, starting approximately at 1:13:00.)

These apps were designed from the beginning to allow developers to target devices with extremely high-density displays. They are designed to work well no matter what input method you choose to use them with—mouse, keyboard, touch, or pen. WinRT apps are designed for the future, and for all of the ways that hardware devices and people’s expectations are evolving.

Because all WinRT apps come from the Windows Store, you can find and install them with confidence. The apps run in a local sandbox called AppContainer, so they can’t mess with or corrupt your PC. And they always uninstall cleanly, without a trace left behind.

4. Live tiles make it personal.

The heart of a new Windows 8 app is its tile. We know that people are increasingly snacking on snippets of live information. Who wrote on my timeline? Did I get any new email? Did anyone post pictures of yesterday’s party? Did anything big happen in the news? Who’s winning the game? Is my expense report approved? Did someone beat my high score? Is it my turn? When is my next meeting? Is a new book by my favorite author available for preorder? Is our inventory running low? What’s the traffic like?

Today, this is increasingly how we see many people use their devices, obsessively switching between different websites and programs on their PC and apps on their phone, checking to see if there’s anything new to see or do.

Tiles are designed so that you can see all of this information together in one place, with a single click, tap, or keypress from anywhere in Windows, without even opening your apps. It takes a bit of imagination right now in the Consumer Preview to fully visualize how this might work, because only a very small number of apps are currently available, and for many of these, developers are still working on building great tiles.

This is also an area where we are bringing together a set of disparate concepts and more strongly connecting them to the apps you actually use. Today, we are all familiar with a row of icons in the Notification Area near the clock, beckoning for our attention (each one using different interfaces, with different methods of control to silence them). These are separate processes running silently (and perhaps secretly) in the background, waiting to update us at inopportune times, and otherwise using system resources like battery power. Gadgets, introduced in Windows Vista, held the promise of providing a more connected UI surface, but failed to relate to the apps and services we care the most about.

But as we move closer to general availability of Windows 8 and beyond, to a time when all of your favorite apps are available and represented by tiles, suddenly your Start screen will become a personalized dashboard of everything you care about. Your whole computing experience has the potential to be encapsulated in one view. A view that you organize and control.

Even content from within apps can be pinned to Start: people, mail folders, accounts, websites, books, albums, singers, movies, clients, sports teams, cities, etc. Everything you care about is efficiently available and up-to-date at all times. Tiles are the future and fit the way people look for fresh content in apps and websites. Just as yesterday's static highway signs telling you what you already know are being replaced by active and customizable message boards with road conditions, traffic alerts, and flexible lane usage, your PC should convey information that is current and up-to-date. Icons are yesterday’s way of representing apps.

5. Apps work together to save you time.

I mentioned before that we have observed that people are increasingly spreading their time and content across an ever-wider cross-section of websites, cloud services, and apps. The result of this is that your stuff is strewn everywhere! Some stuff is stored on your primary PC. Other things are trapped inside apps or cloud services that you can only get to from within those apps or websites.

This leads to many common tasks being more complicated to complete than when, in the past, everything would be saved locally to your PC.

For instance, let’s say that you are in a Skype call and you want to send a picture from a show you were at last weekend. Assume you took the picture with your phone and posted it to Yammer.

To do this today, typically, you would open your web browser, log in to Yammer, go to your main page, click on Images, find the photo and click it to select it, right-click it and choose Save As, put it somewhere on the hard drive, then switch back to Skype, choose “Attach”, navigate to wherever you put the photo on your hard drive (hope you remember!) and then click it again to attach it. That task took at least eight steps to complete. And now you have two copies of the photo: one on Yammer, and a duplicate somewhere on your PC. It takes expertise and time to find that duplicate file, move it around, or ultimately delete it. What was once a simple photo sharing scenario has become laden with “file management” tasks.

There is a better way, and it is part of what makes Windows 8 apps so powerful. Windows enables any Windows 8 app on the PC to share data with any other Windows 8 app, even if those apps know nothing about one another.

Think about the scenario above again, except this time using Windows 8 apps for Skype and Yammer. From Skype, you click “Attach” and a picker with all of your local photos appears. But because you’ve installed a Yammer app, you can also instantly switch to pick between photos on Yammer. You click the photo that you want, and it is now attached in Skype. Done! That’s only three steps—five fewer than the way it works today.

Although other OSs have attempted to streamline such tasks by hard-coding one or two currently popular services, Windows 8 is more useful, flexible, and future-proof. Our way is not limited to only a small set of specific, known services that are “baked into” the OS.

Any new Windows 8 app can pick from, share with, or save to any other installed app (and of course to the set of services that the app knows how to connect to.) It is a reinvention of how apps work in an OS, with Windows providing the “glue” that binds apps together. Getting to your stuff, in any service, anywhere in the cloud, is just as easy as getting to that data on your local PC or home network—as long as the service builds a Windows 8 app. And with a reach of over a billion Windows users worldwide, we expect most services will see the value in creating an app for Windows 8.

6. Roam your experience between PCs.

Just like the experience of using most websites, you can sign in to your Windows 8 PC using an online account. The account used to sign in to Windows is called a Microsoft account. It can be an existing Windows Live ID (the email address you use for Xbox Live, Hotmail, and most other Microsoft services), or one can be created using any email address you own.

Once you are signed in, something magical happens—as you personalize and customize your Windows experience, the changes roam to any other PC.

Have a lock screen picture or desktop wallpaper you love? It’s there on every Windows 8 PC you sign in to. Configure your settings, colors, and pinned websites just the way you like them? They move with you. Play the first ten levels of a game? You don’t have to replay them again on your other PCs. Your saved passwords and favorites and language settings are all just there, whenever you sign in.

After you invest deeply in personalizing Windows, we don’t want to you to have to redo those steps on every PC you use. Just like if you changed a setting on your favorite website while signed in, you would expect that setting to persist no matter what device you signed in from. We want that same experience in Windows 8. And because roaming is part of the WinRT platform, any app developer can roam the settings for their app just as easily as Windows roams system settings. Roaming is not just for a single app or browser, but part of a platform that every app can easily use and everyone benefits from.

7. Make your PC work like a device, not a computer.

Today most people love their PCs, but it is clear that people’s attitudes and expectations are changing for just about any device they carry around with them. People really want a product that just works. They want to sit on the couch and enjoy their favorite apps and games and websites and not worry about the vagaries of the registry or a million control panels or power profiles. They want to pick it up, enjoy using it, and then set it down.

In contrast, today’s Windows is almost absurdly configurable. Even the most obscure features are often tweakable through a sometimes impenetrable labyrinth of control panels, group policies, special command-line utilities, undocumented registry keys, etc. Most of these settings are changeable not only by the user, but by any program that happens to be running on the PC that decides to “tweak” something. Much of what has been pejoratively called winrot over the years is due to overzealous downloaded programs overstepping their bounds and installing system services and updaters and background tasks and all sorts of things that slow down the system.

We recognize that in the proper hands, or in the hands of someone who is willing to tolerate the downsides, these are not features to be critical of, but assets of Windows. Our intention is not to lock down Windows, but to provide a platform that meets consumer expectations for how a device should work. These assets are far too easily abused or accidently misused—there is a better way.

Our goal in Windows 8 is to redefine people’s expectations of their PC. The most commonly used settings (those similar to the ones exposed on most phones or tablets today) are available within the new UI. New Windows 8 apps cannot alter system settings for the most part (with the exception of a few specifically architected capabilities, such as enabling location services or using the webcam, which require user consent.)

Windows updates are applied silently in the background and in the middle-of-the-night “maintenance window” whenever possible. Because Windows 8 apps know how to preserve their state, this is totally seamless to you.

On SoC-based devices, you touch the power button to turn the screen off, and behind the scenes, your PC is immediately moved into a low-power mode. Press it again, and the device instantly wakes up. Windows 8 turns the PC into a device that delivers the kind of experience people expect out of a modern mobile device.

Now if you are an expert who really craves all of the traditional flexibility and customizability of all of the knobs and levers in the system, you can still access them just as easily as you could in Windows 7. These settings are still there, and they still work. The Control Panel and gpedit.msc and PowerShell and all of the other places you do expert customization of your PC are still there for you. People who don’t have the knowledge to use these advanced settings effectively can just enjoy their devices. And for those who do want that power, it is there for them.

Although these seven goals were certainly not the only aspirations we had when designing what became the Windows 8 user interface, they give you some idea of the relationship between the trends we observed and anticipated, and how these observations directly mapped to the goals of the new UI.

Touch as a first-class input method (but not the only one!)

Windows has continually innovated to adapt to and enable new ways of working with the PC.

The earliest versions of Windows were designed to be used with a keyboard. Windows helped transition mainstream users to the mouse by bundling a mouse with the first version of Microsoft Word, over 25 years ago! This transition took quite a while, as many users were initially very skeptical of the mouse. “Real users only use the keyboard!” (Some might still say this. The good news is, we have you covered.) Of course now, all these years later, it is hard to imagine using a PC without a pointing device.

In 2001, Microsoft announced Tablet PC, an “experiment” with a new kind of PC form factor, powered by the pen. We developed the best handwriting recognition in the market for certain languages. We pioneered ways to integrate natural “ink” and drawing into traditional programs like Microsoft Office. We experimented for the first time with slate PCs that had no keyboard. While the technology was not ready ten years ago to build light enough and quiet enough PCs with enough battery life to make this form factor widely compelling, clearly Tablet PC got a lot right in terms of predicting aspects of future computing.

So Windows originally had keyboard support, then added an assumption of mouse, then added the ability to use a pen. At each step of the way, these input devices were integrated into the core Windows UI without forgetting about or degrading the experience of the existing input methods.

Of course, some things had to change about how the user interface worked as each new input method was added (like, once you bet on a 2D grid of icons such as Program Manager did in Windows 3, keyboarding around with the arrows to launch an app becomes more cumbersome vs. traversing a simple list.) But it is fair to say that as of Windows Vista, mouse and keyboard were first-class input methods, with pen as a well-supported but secondary way of interacting with the PC.

Which brings us to the current day. In Windows 7, we introduced multitouch support into the base OS. Touch is an incredibly important long-term bet for us. For an increasingly large number of people over time, it will be the primary way they interact with Windows. And for the vast majority of users, it will eventually be used alongside mouse and keyboard to complete their experience.

In 2009 when we started planning Windows 8, touch was often ridiculed on phones—the rumors of an iPhone with a keyboard were prevalent and often hopeful. It is almost quaint to look back at the speculation from many wishing and hoping for an iPhone with a slide-out keyboard.

Today, you would be hard pressed to find many people who still dream of a phone with a physical keyboard, though in a diverse world with diverse needs, even a small percentage of people represents a large absolute number.

Tablets, of course, don’t come with physical keyboards. But something is different about tablets—people still do desire a physical keyboard. We've all seen countless peripherals spring up that provide a keyboard for a tablet as a case or other accessory. Why is that? We see time and time again that it is because people want to use a tablet in place of their PC, and adding a keyboard is the best way to get more work done.

Even in the absence of software like Microsoft Office, the reality is that when you need to write more than a few quick lines of text, you yearn for something better than on-screen typing. Touch typing rates on glass are at best half that of a physical keyboard (and frequently much less), and so the extra time, energy, and thought needed to get the work done is a real issue.

Just as there were always people who could type large amounts of text with T9, there are people who swear by multitouch typing as more than good enough for their work. Looking broadly, however, people benefit from the highly accurate, reliable, and fast user input enabled by a physical keyboard, and we think an OS and its apps should not compromise when one is available.

Beyond phones, touch has become the single most pervasive user model for a vast array of interactions—many of those powered under the hood by Windows PCs! From cash registers, to ATMs, movie rental kiosks, airline check-in, and grocery checkout, touch is literally everywhere. How would you explain to a 5-year-old that when she touches a laptop screen, nothing is supposed to happen?

To think that your PC would remain the single computing device you do not touch seems illogical. It is reminiscent of historic debates over the use of color back when PC displays were generally monochromatic; despite color being everywhere around us, many people believed color would be a distraction to work and should be reserved for play. (The Office team actually had a significant debate about the use of color icons in the first version that introduced toolbars.)

In a decade (or probably less,) we will look back at this transition period and say to each another “Hey, do you remember how PC screens didn’t used to be touchable? Wow, isn’t that weird to think about now?”

Designing for a successful touch experience

Some bloggers have written about how Microsoft invested in developing touch in Windows 7, but ultimately had a poor approach, as evidenced by the touch experience of both phones and tablets surpassing that of Windows-based devices. Going back to even the first public demonstrations of Windows 7, we worked hard on touch, but our approach to implementing touch as just an adjunct to existing Windows desktop software didn’t work very well. Adding touch on top of UI paradigms designed for mouse and keyboard held the experience back.

We took a step back and substantially changed both our approach and our implementation of touch for Windows 8.

Our approach to embracing touch in Windows 8 involved two parts:

1. Improving touch on the desktop.

We knew we needed to improve touch in the existing desktop using the feedback we received from touch users in Windows 7. We created larger touch targets, spread out controls a bit more, and added fuzzy targeting logic to make it easy to grab common controls such as resizable window borders.

We resisted the temptation to make people choose between using mouse + keyboard OR touch. So many elements of desktop apps just assume people are using both a mouse and a keyboard, and no number of improvements we make to the touch experience on the desktop can fix what has been assumed and designed into these existing app interfaces. (After all, these programs have already been released to the market, in many cases a decade or more ago!)

However, we do believe that touch is a useful adjunct to mouse and keyboard on the desktop. Historically, a new input method is seamlessly integrated as people learn the best use for it. Context menus, keyboard shortcuts, toolbars, and menus are all different ways of doing the same thing, yet everyone makes their own choice about what works best for them.

Touch will evolve the same way. Having used a touch-enabled laptop every day for the last year (a Lenovo x220 tablet), I have a hard time imagining not being able to touch the screen for scrolling, or to tap the OK or Cancel buttons in a dialog box. Whenever I use a non-touch laptop, it is as if I’ve forgotten how to use the PC. Of course touch is not the primary way I use this laptop, but it is a crucial piece of how I interact with it. Even on the large-screen monitor I use at work, I just instinctively touch it—I don’t think “because this screen is attached to a desktop PC, I must not be able to touch it.”

2. Creating an environment exclusively or primarily suited for touch input.

Within the new UI and WinRT apps, touch is promoted to an equal citizen alongside mouse and keyboard. Just like you can use a PC with mouse and keyboard only (or just keyboard,) you can also have a great experience using the UI with just touch. In other words, we aspired to design a user experience that is new, worked for touch-only devices as a first and only input method, and when a mouse and keyboard are added, these can be used exclusively or with touch. Keyboard shortcuts are there alongside gestures—you pick based on your preference and the capabilities of your PC.

Many have opined that touch can have no role in certain form factors—we’re all familiar with those quick to make comments about gorilla arms, fingerprints, poking at a screen, and so on. Many comments with this same tone were at the foundation of initial negative reaction to the mouse—“it makes me move my hand from the home row on the keyboard,” “I get sore wrists,” “it takes my focus off of my work while looking up at the screen,” etc.

While the ergonomics of a tablet placed in a dock with a keyboard is similar to that of a touch laptop, there is no doubt that touch is new and different in a laptop and desktop. But when you consider that we do not think it has to be used exclusively, it starts to look only like a benefit when it is there. (And our design does not assume it is always there—although we think you will learn to miss it when it is not.)

We designed Windows 8 to take into account the desire to have a PC that works the way you do—whether you want a laptop with a permanent keyboard, a tablet with a keyboard you can attach (wired or wireless), or something in the middle. Touch works across all of these form factors, and you choose which input method to use when. This is what we mean when we say Windows 8 provides a no-compromise experience.

Metro style and the desktop: working together

Most of this post thus far has discussed some of the ways we designed Windows 8 in response to the trends we observed: the popularity of laptops and tablets, and the corollary expectation of excellent battery life; a focus on people and activity as the center of attention more than just files and documents; the ubiquity of cloud services; and the upcoming universal prevalence of touch on every PC.

So what is the role of the desktop in Windows 8?

It is pretty straightforward. The desktop is there to run the millions of existing, powerful, familiar Windows programs that are designed for mouse and keyboard. Office. Visual Studio. Adobe Photoshop. AutoCAD. Lightroom. This software is widely-used, feature-rich, and powers the bulk of the work people do on the PC today. Bringing it forward (along with the metaphors such as manual discrete window sizing and overlapping placement) is a huge benefit when compared to tablets without these features or programs. It is an explicit design goal of Windows 8 to bring this software forward, run it better than in any previous version of Windows, and to provide the best environment possible for these products as they evolve into the future as well.

We see our approach validated time and time again. On one hand, the makers of tablets and phones are in a race to add “PC capabilities” to their devices: support for peripherals like printing, remote access, high-resolution screens, or classes of new APIs for developers that already exist in Windows. At the same time, we also see consumers demanding features in these platforms that have existed for years in Windows—from things as mundane as full support for the keyboard and mouse, to things as complex as support for multiple monitors, background processing, or third-party accessibility tools.

On other tablet platforms, there has been significant customer interest in apps to bring the Windows desktop, running software like Office, to touch devices. These solutions use over-the-network remoting technologies to send pictures of the screen and touch input back and forth between the tablet and a real Windows PC. Of course, because these tablet devices don’t natively support Windows software or a mouse, and because they require uninterrupted network connectivity, the experience is suboptimal—subject to frustrating lag, pixilation, and disconnections from the host PC.

We do not view the desktop as a mode, legacy or otherwise—it is simply a paradigm for working that suits some people and specific apps. This is very much like the person who uses a mobile “phone” but really uses it for the mobile browser and mail client and rarely uses apps or the phone. It is like the person who has a brand new tablet but only uses the web browser.

The desktop is a great way to work with mouse/keyboard and a large monitor or several monitors. It is a powerful and flexible paradigm, allowing for pervasive control over the size and layout of windows on the screen.

If you only want to “live in the desktop,” if you never plan on using a PC with touch or using any apps from the Windows Store whatsoever, Windows 8 still has a lot to offer. The Windows 7 desktop experience has been brought forward and significantly improved, with additions such as the new Task Manager, new Explorer and file copy UI, Hyper-V on the client, multi-monitor taskbar and wallpaper, etc. And all in a package that uses fewer system resources than Windows 7. The new Start screen is simply a continuation of the Windows 7 trend of unifying disparate elements of the user interface—starting, launching, switching, and notifications.

It is really your choice. You can use only desktop apps if you want. You can use only new apps and never leave them if you want (in which case all of the desktop code is not even loaded.) Or, you can choose to mix and match apps that run in both environments. We think in a short time everyone will mix and match, simply because there is so much creative development energy being put into the new scenarios made possible by new Windows 8 apps.

Two devices, not three

Imagine a tablet. Light and thin. Amazing battery life. Gorgeous screen. You can lounge on the couch enjoying a beautiful, fluid experience, doing the things you love to do on a tablet: playing games, socializing, browsing the web, reading, touching up photos, watching TV. You are just immersed in your experience, doing the things you love to do. You hand it to your daughter and she knows exactly how to use it.

But then, if you want to have a bit more control and efficiency, you can set this same tablet in a stand and attach a keyboard, or just flip a keyboard around, and suddenly you have a complete Windows desktop experience, with full Microsoft Office, multiple monitors, peripherals, and a mouse.

Or, imagine a featherweight laptop with a beautiful large screen and a great keyboard. But in addition to doing everything you use your laptop for today, you can also use your favorite new apps built for today’s tablets.

Windows 8 imagines the convergence of two kinds of devices: a laptop and a tablet. Instead of carrying around three devices (a phone, a tablet, and a laptop) you carry around just a phone and a Windows PC. A PC that is the best tablet or laptop you have ever used, but with the capabilities of the familiar Windows desktop if you need it. You may choose to carry a tablet, or you may choose a laptop/convertible, but you do not need to carry around both along with your phone. You never think about a choice, or fret over your choice of what to carry. Things just work without compromise.

Great hardware like this doesn’t quite exist yet, but it will be commonly available later this year. This is the promise of the Windows 8 experience. With a little imagination, you can start to see why this kind of device will change the way you think of a PC.

Updating the visual appearance of the desktop

Several bloggers have wondered about how much we would be changing the visual appearance of the desktop in Windows 8.

We have appreciated seeing people on various sites post screenshots of their proposed designs for “Metro-izing” the visual appearance of the desktop. It is exciting to see the interest and passion that goes into designing them!

We spent a lot of energy carefully considering how substantially to update the appearance of the desktop in Windows 8. We looked at many, many pictures, and considered hundreds of designs. Our primary goal was to bring visual harmony to Windows, while still preserving much of the familiar feel of the Windows 7 desktop and not sacrificing the compatibility of existing apps.

In the end, we decided to bring the desktop closer to the Metro aesthetic, while preserving the compatibility afforded by not changing the size of window chrome, controls, or system UI. We have moved beyond Aero Glass—flattening surfaces, removing reflections, and scaling back distracting gradients.

A couple of the considerations we thought through:

While much of the Metro style UI uses white text on a colorful saturated background, the desktop in Windows 8 will continue to use black text on light-colored chrome, as in Windows 7. This choice was made to help preserve maximum compatibility with existing programs.

Since the release of Windows Vista (which introduced Aero Glass), many desktop programs have integrated with glass, making assumptions that they should custom draw dark text with a cloudy “blur” texture behind it to make their text readable.

Some of you may remember the substantial compatibility problems that arose when the system colors changed from light on dark (Windows XP) to dark on light (Windows Vista.) It took many years for these to be fully sorted out. We would prefer not to reintroduce these compatibility issues again in the other direction. So, “color matching” the new design on the desktop is not entirely feasible.
But at the same time, we want desktop windows to continue to feel light and airy, and we want a chrome style that doesn’t distract from the content of the app. We talk about Metro style apps as being “chromeless,” (that is, no title bar, borders, or Windows UI surrounding them.) Desktop apps, on the other hand, have a lot of chrome. When you add up the cacophony of a bunch of these windows floating on the screen, suddenly you have a lot of chrome pleading for your attention. Aero was designed to help the app’s content to be the center of attention, and for the Windows system UI to recede into the background. This is still relevant today, and while we are moving beyond Aero, we don’t want to lose sight of these goals.
Visual compatibility with Windows 7. Windows 7 is the most popular and widely-used version of Windows so far. We made a conscious effort to relate the visual appearance of the Windows 8 desktop to the visual appearance of the familiar Windows 7 desktop. This helps people who want to predominantly use the desktop feel comfortable and immediately at home in the new environment.

We have made a number of improvements to the desktop visual appearance in Windows 8. Although we wanted the desktop to feel familiar, we also wanted to take some ideas from our new design language and apply them where we could.

We applied the principles of “clean and crisp” when updating window and taskbar chrome. Gone are the glass and reflections. We squared off the edges of windows and the taskbar. We removed all the glows and gradients found on buttons within the chrome. We made the appearance of windows crisper by removing unnecessary shadows and transparency. The default window chrome is white, creating an airy and premium look. The taskbar continues to blend into the desktop wallpaper, but appears less complicated overall.

To complete the story, we updated the appearance of most common controls, such as buttons, check boxes, sliders, and the Ribbon. We squared off the rounded edges, cleaned away gradients, and flattened the control backgrounds to align with our chrome changes. We also tweaked the colors to make them feel more modern and neutral.

While a few of these visual changes are hinted at in the upcoming Release Preview, most of them will not yet be publicly available. You’ll see them all in the final release of Windows 8!

How will people learn to use Windows 8?

As people have tried the Consumer Preview, some folks have publicly asked questions about “learnability.” The new UI introduces a few new concepts to the PC: in particular, swipe from the edge (for touch) and move to the corner (for the mouse.)

Neither gesture works perfectly in the Consumer Preview—it should be expected that some things will not be perfect when we effectively design and test the product in the open like we do. The corners are too fragile to target reliably with the mouse right now, and it is too easy to frustratingly “fall away” from them. We have already significantly improved this in internal builds. And today’s touch hardware, which was designed for Windows 7, doesn’t always do a great job of interpreting swipes from the edge. The good news is that hardware designed for Windows 8 will have excellent edge detection, and our device manufacturer partners have been working on this for a long time.

So, the gestures themselves will work more consistently, and will be better-tuned than what is in the Consumer Preview. But how will people learn to use them?

We will post more about learnability soon: about how people discover and understand new concepts, and the specific steps we will be taking to make sure that people don’t feel lost the first time they sit down with a Windows 8 PC.

But fundamentally, we believe in people and their ability to adapt and move forward. Throughout the history of computing, people have again and again adapted to new paradigms and interaction methods—even just when switching between different websites and apps and phones. We will help people get off on the right foot, and we have confidence that people will quickly find the new paradigms to be second-nature.

Looking forward

The Windows 8 user experience is forward-looking, yet respectful of the past. It reimagines what a PC is capable of, the scenarios for which it is optimized, and how you interact with it. It enables tablets and laptops that are incredibly light and thin, with excellent battery life, which you can use with touch and keyboard and mouse in any combination you prefer. It is also the most capable, lean, and usable OS ever to power desktop PCs and gaming rigs.

The new Windows 8 user experience is no less than a bet on the future of computing, and stakes a claim to Windows’ role in that future. We tried to break new ground in imagining how using a PC might become a fluid and enjoyable experience, how apps might work together to simplify the tasks you do every day, and how a single screen could bring together everything you love and care about into one always up-to-date place.

We believe in convergence—this has happened again and again in technology, and it will continue. We believe that you will want to carry around fewer, more capable devices. In addition to your phone, you want only one device that is equally at home on the couch and on the desk. You want a device that is light enough to hold for hours, but powerful enough to do real work with familiar and full-featured software—and which also allows a mouse or physical keyboard if you want. A device that is deeply personal, that natively understands the cloud, that roams your settings and content wherever you go.

Yes, there are parts of the Windows 8 UI that have generated discussions and even debate, and aspects of the change that will take some people a little time to understand and digest. Any change, particularly a change that doesn’t just follow in the footsteps of what everyone else is doing, can be hard to fully grasp at first and will bring forward its share of both deep believers and naysayers.

The full picture of the Windows 8 experience will only emerge when new hardware from our partners becomes available, and when the Store opens up for all developers to start submitting their new apps. At the same time, there's no doubt that all the features of Windows 8 are compelling on today's hardware designed for Windows 7—with or without touch. Since we designed Windows 8 to work great for laptops and desktops, it will work naturally for your Windows 7 hardware. Think of past versions of Windows that worked on existing hardware but were even better with new hardware. That's our approach with Windows 8.

In 1993, when today’s familiar Windows 95 user experience was first designed, PCs were beige, heavy, disconnected, and sitting under an office desk plugged in all the time. An average PC cost $3450 in today’s money!

Today, PCs are in the kitchen, in the living room, at the coffee shop, in your purse, on the train, in the passenger seat of your car. Increasingly they are mobile, always connected, affordable, and beautiful. And Windows PCs are in the workplace, no matter where that is or moves to. What would have seemed unrecognizable and “post-PC” 20 years ago is now the very definition of a PC.

The world changes and moves forward. Windows will continue to change too, as it has throughout its 27-year history.

Our vision for Windows 8 was to create a modern, fast and fluid user experience that defines the platform for the next decade of computing. One which upends the way conventional people think about tablets and laptops and the role of the devices they carry.

We wanted to create an experience that works however you want to work, powering a new class of PCs that you are proud to own and love having in your life.

Jensen Harris

Delivering reliable and trustworthy Metro style apps

Steven Sinofsky — Thu, 17 May 2012 15:30:00 GMT

As we developed the app model for Windows 8 and the new Metro style apps, a key architectural requirement has been to deliver apps to customers that can be used with confidence--confidence that apps will be well-behaved with respect to resources, that apps will not interfere with other apps, that apps use system resources with your permission, that apps can be installed and uninstalled with ease, and so on. These attributes require a robust platform and strong set of tools for developers. This is an effort that requires a fresh start and cannot be retrofitted on an existing system. Windows 8 is a fresh start in this regard. This post details some of the work we have done at the platform level to deliver reliable and trustworthy Metro style apps. This post is authored by John Hazen, a program manager on our Developer Experience team. --Steven

One of our core principles in the development of the Windows 8 Metro style app platform was to ensure that users would have confidence in their apps. This is a mission we’re in together; in this post, I explain our vision for app confidence and reliability and help you build confidence by design into your apps.

Let me start by explaining what we mean by confidence. Picture a customer browsing the Windows Store looking at a Metro style app; we want them to be thinking only about the app and whether or not it is right for them. We want them to assume—in fact be confident—that the app will behave the way they expect and thus will perform well on their system, will use only the data and information they authorize, and will harmoniously co-exist with their other applications.

Our goal with the platform is to help us all build great apps that embody this vision of confidence so that we get confidence by default. To that end we made investments throughout the system. Here’s how we picture it:

App Confidence: Windows 8 SDK for Metro style apps, Windows App Certification Kit, App Signatures,
App Container, Ratings and Reviews, Store Onboarding, Frictionless Install, Telemetry Feedback

This post covers these areas and towards the end goes into depth on our app capabilities. First, a quick overview:

Windows Store – For customers, it starts with the Store, their one-stop-shop for Metro style apps. To get into the Store your app is reviewed for both technical and policy compliance, including security checks. After it’s published to the Store, your app will be rated and reviewed by the community. Together, the onboarding process and community reviews help create an environment in which customers can try apps with confidence.
App install – Windows 8 handles all the details of deploying apps on your behalf so your customers don’t have to worry that installing, updating, or removing one app will adversely affect other apps.
SDK – The Windows 8 SDK for Metro style apps provides a well-defined set of APIs that help you build reliable apps that conform to the Store onboarding requirements and provide the best experiences for your customers.
App container and capabilities – Windows 8 provides a greater degree of separation between apps than was possible with traditional desktop apps, so you can build apps that interact with each other in more predictable ways, giving customers a more consistent experience.

We of course recognize that any onboarding process can be gamed, API sets can be abused, SDK limits cleverly avoided, and that app containers are not impenetrable. But we are confident that the investments we made in this new ecosystem will help you build apps that delight customers. This multi-dimensional approach is the most effective way to build customer confidence and we will improve each dimension over time as we learn from experience. Now let’s talk about confidence.

The Windows Store

Several folks on the team have shared quite a bit on the Windows Store Blog about the overall design and plan for the Store. If you have not had a chance yet, read about the Store, because it plays a central role in helping you connect with your customers. Let’s look at a few ways in which the Store helps build confidence in the app ecosystem.

First, the Store onboarding process establishes a consistent baseline for app quality and reliability. The technical conformance tests, contained in the Windows App Certification Kit, help you know that you meet the expected standards before you submit your app. As you and other devs continue to deliver apps that meet these standards, customers will be excited to discover and try out new apps, creating a stronger app ecosystem for all of us.

The Store also makes it easy for customers to provide ratings and reviews that will help the best apps stand out, enticing even more customers to try out the top rated apps with confidence. In the sample app listing page below, note the highlights not just for ratings and reviews, but also two other important elements of the app listing page. Prior to installing a new app, customers can see what permissions the app has once it is installed (more detail on this later in the blog). After installing an app if the customer has concerns about app content or behavior, they can easily report their concern and we can follow up with you to address any problems identified. Helping customers decide which apps best meet their needs and allowing customers to provide input and feedback is an important way to improve overall confidence in the Windows 8 app ecosystem.

App listing page from the Windows Store

Finally, the Store collects telemetry data that can help you investigate problems your customers see, including the number and types of crashes they suffered. We review this automated telemetry for indications that an app’s behavior is unreliable or inconsistent with the expectations of our customers. Our goal is to make effective use not only of the individual feedback that customers provide on apps through ratings and reviews, but also provide insight into how your app is actually behaving on customers’ machines and give you the opportunity to improve your app based on this data.

In all these ways, the Windows Store is your partner in connecting you with people who want your apps, and helping them have a great experience with your apps.

Apps are just a click away

When you have your customer’s attention on the app listing page, you don’t want anything to get in the way of your customer getting your app. On Windows 8, getting an app is a matter of clicking a single button. Customers no longer have to wade through a series of questions or click button after button. After logging into the Store, when they find something they like, they just click the button, confirm the purchase, and go!

The great news for you is that you don’t have to write a single line of installation code to make this magic happen; it is all provided for you as part of Windows 8. Not only is installation handled, but Windows uses digital signatures to ensure the integrity of your app all the way from the Store to installation and even when the app is loaded and running on your customer’s computer. If Windows detects that the app no longer matches its digital signature, it guides the customer to download a corrected version from the Store.

Because Windows installs each app in a discrete location with separate and private locations for each app’s data and settings, customers don’t have to worry that installing, or removing, one app will interfere with the behavior of other apps or their computer. Customers will be more willing to try more apps than ever before, knowing that installing and removing apps won’t degrade their experience over time (in fact, with Windows 8 contracts, each app you install makes the experience better). You benefit by knowing that there is little another app might do that will damage your customer’s experience of your app.

Having a single, verifiable, and consistent mechanism to install apps not only simplifies your work, it provides an easy and positive experience for your customers, giving them confidence to get even more of your great apps. You can learn more about app deployment in App packages and deployment.

Windows 8 SDK for Metro style apps

The better experience customers have with your apps, the more readily they will try new apps and updates as you release them. The Windows 8 SDK for Metro style apps is a great foundation for you to build apps that customers won’t hesitate to install.

We put a lot of thought into the API set we offer for Metro style apps, not only to simplify the Windows programming environment, but also to provide a well-tested platform on which you could confidently build your apps, knowing they will work well with the Windows 8 Metro style app model.

Resist the temptation to find ways to invoke APIs that are not included in the SDK. This ultimately undermines the expectations that customers have for your app. APIs that are outside the SDK are not guaranteed to work with Metro style apps either in this release or in future releases, so you may find that your app doesn’t function properly for all customers. These APIs may also not function properly in the async environment that is foundational to Metro style app design. Finally these APIs may undermine customer confidence by accessing resources or data that Metro style apps would not normally interact with. For all these reasons, we have provided checks in the Windows App Certification Kit to help you catch places where you might have inadvertently called interfaces not exposed by the SDK.

While it is possible to hide or obfuscate calls to APIs that are not included in the SDK, this is still a violation of customer expectations and Store policy. In the end, we have created this platform to help developers like you to build amazing apps that work well with the system and with other apps and devices to delight customers. Working with the Metro style SDK is fundamental to your realizing that goal.

Working well together and apart

A clean installation process is important to your customers, and the SDK helps you build apps that integrate well with the system. Beyond this, customers expect a high degree of reliability from your app and our platform. We help you achieve your reliability goals by providing a greater degree of separation between Metro style apps than is possible for traditional Windows desktop applications. On Windows 8, each Metro style app runs in the context of a unique app container that helps insulate it and its data from other Metro style apps.

App containers provide a few characteristics that are shared by all Metro style apps. They:

Provide a dedicated environment for your app, including your own store for data and settings. You have little worry that some other Metro style app will change your app’s data, settings, or behavior.
Help ensure that your app doesn’t accidently interfere with the reliability of the Windows platform itself, or accidently use your customers’ data or devices in ways they don’t expect.
Provide a well-defined way to extend the capabilities of your app through declarations you make in the manifest and disclose to your customer in the app listing page.

Having this degree of separation makes it far easier to write apps that are reliable and respectful of the user. At the same time, we all want apps that interact well with one another. Windows 8 provides several mechanisms for Metro style apps to work with each other and with the platform to provide these satisfying experiences, including:

App contracts, which are the glue that binds Metro style apps together and to the system UI.
The FilePicker, which allows your app to interact with data the user selects.
App capability declarations, which allow your app to programmatically interact with devices and data, when appropriate for your functionality.

These are all well-defined ways for your app to engage more deeply with other apps and the system. The app container exists to help you deliver on your customer’s expectations of reliability and respectful use of their system and data. The constraints of the app container are designed to help realize customers’ expectations for consistent and intuitive app behaviors, and using techniques that allow your app to run code outside of an app container is a violation of user trust and Store policy.

In our discussions with developers during this preview period, we have seen apps that have misunderstood or accidently misused some of these mechanisms, so let’s go into more detail about the app capabilities in particular.

App capability declarations

The app container can be extended in a variety of ways using capability declarations, each of which is designed to enable certain scenarios. Therefore, we recommend that you use them only under certain conditions. These capabilities fall into 4 primary buckets:

Data libraries: By default, apps have no access to the customer’s data libraries, like the Music library, or the Documents library. We recommend that you use the FilePicker to interact with these libraries, but in some rare cases it is necessary for your app to be able to directly read and manage data in these locations.
Device access: By default, apps can’t use devices that most users consider sensitive for their privacy, including the webcam, microphone, and location. When apps need these devices, they must both declare their intent, and get consent from the user.
Network access: By default, apps have no access to the customer’s networks. Because most apps interact with the Internet, we enabled this particular capability in all the Visual Studio templates for Metro style apps. If your app needs more than just simple Internet access, you can read about your options below.
User identity: These capabilities provide direct access to a particular customer’s corporate logon info, or to certificates associated with their identity. These capabilities, although rarely needed, are necessary for certain enterprise apps, and you might need to use them in scenarios like banking transactions in which a smartcard might be required for authorization.

Declaring a capability in any of these categories is as simple as checking it off in the Visual Studio manifest designer. But add capabilities only if they are critical to realizing a scenario for an app. During the Consumer Preview, we saw several apps submitted to the Store that declared every capability or a capability that was not essential for the app. So, while the list of possible capabilities is relatively short, it is worth reviewing in more detail each of these capabilities and how to use them.

Visual Studio's manifest designer

Data libraries

These capabilities grant your app access to user data that wasn’t necessarily created in your app. Users expect apps to be respectful of access to their private data. One way to honor the trust users place in your app is by declaring only the minimum access necessary for your app. In most cases you can avoid using these capabilities entirely by using the FilePicker, through which the user can browse files anywhere on their hard drive or network. For example, use the FilePicker to provide a File open experience, or to add Save as to your app in order to give your user the opportunity to save content from your app into their library locations or to removable storage.

Manifest declaration	What it provides
musicLibrary	Provides the capability to add, change, or delete files in the Music Library for the local PC and HomeGroup PCs.
videoLibrary	Provides the capability to add, change, or delete files in the Videos Library for the local PC and HomeGroup PCs.
pictureLibrary	Provides the capability to add, change, or delete files in the Pictures Library for the local PC and HomeGroup PCs.
documentsLibrary	Provides the capability to add, change, or delete files in the Documents Library for the local PC. The app can only access file types in the Documents Library that are defined using the File Type Associations declaration. The app can't access Document Libraries on HomeGroup PCs.
removableStorage	Provides the capability to add, change, or delete files on removable storage devices. The app can only access file types on removable storage that are defined in the manifest using the File Type Associations declaration. The app can't access removable storage on HomeGroup PCs.

During the Consumer Preview, we saw app submissions that declared these capabilities when they really didn’t need to. For example, apps declared documentsLibrary for a variety of reasons including:

Storing app-specific settings in the documents library. The private store is designed to provide this function. You can learn more about app settings and storage here.
Store a user-generated file. This is more properly accomplished using the FilePicker to allow the user to save the file to any location, including the documents library.
Sharing a document with another app. The Sharing contract is designed for this purpose.

If your app is designed to be the primary handler on the system for a given file type, for example a Fax Viewer that needs to handle all .TIFF files in the user’s documents library, then declare this capability.

Device access

Many devices, like orientation sensors and accelerometers, are available to any app. But most customers consider certain devices more sensitive than others, given that they are strongly associated with user privacy. There are a lot of great apps you can build on these devices. For example, if you have a casual game that allows shared gameplay, using proximity is a great way to establish a connection between devices.

Because these devices are closely coupled to user privacy, Windows 8 ensures that if you declare the capability, the customer will be prompted to approve this access the first time your app tries to access the particular device. For example, if your app offers mapping, you likely want to access the customer’s geolocation data. The first time your app tries to get this info, the customer sees a prompt to approve your app’s access. This approval sticks until the customer decides to explicitly remove the access through Settings at a later time. Because the customer can decline your app’s access to these devices, even if you have added the capability to the manifest, design your app to handle the lack of access gracefully. For example, if the customer has denied your app access to the built in GPS, you could simply prompt the user to select their location from a map.

Manifest declaration	What it provides
location	Provides access to the current location, which is obtained from dedicated hardware like a GPS sensor in the PC or derived from available network information.
webcam	Provides access to the webcam's video feed, which allows the app to capture snapshots and movies from connected webcams.
microphone	Provides access to the microphone's audio feed, which allows the app to record audio from connected microphones.
proximity	Provides the capability to connect to devices in close proximity to the PC via near field proximity radio. Near field proximity may be used to send files or communicate with an app on a nearby device.

Network access

Most apps need an Internet connection, so the Visual Studio templates for Metro style apps include the internetClient capability by default. If your app doesn’t need to communicate over the Internet, you should remove this capability. The internetClientServer capability is generally used in peer-to-peer (P2P) scenarios like gaming or VOIP, but unless your app must open a port in the firewall, don’t use this capability. Use the privateNetworkClientServer capability when your app needs to communicate over private networks, for example between devices within a home, or over a corporate network connection.

Manifest declaration	What it provides
internetClient	Provides outbound access to the Internet and networks in public places like airports and coffee shops. Most apps that require Internet should use this capability.
internetClientServer	Provides inbound and outbound access to the Internet and the networks in Public places like airports and coffee shops. This capability is a superset of internetClient. The internetClient capability doesn't need to be enabled if this capability is also enabled.
privateNetworkClientServer	Provides inbound and outbound access to Intranet networks that have an authenticated domain controller, or that the user has designated as either home or work networks.

User identity

Most developers don’t need these capabilities. Use of these capabilities will be highly restricted and subject to additional onboarding policy and review. But there are cases where such capabilities are necessary and appropriate, for example some banks require two-factor authentication and need to allow customers to provide a smartcard that carries a digital certificate that confirms their identity. Other apps that are designed primarily for enterprise customers rather than consumers might need access to corporate resources that cannot be accesses without domain credentials.

Manifest declaration	What it provides
enterpriseAuthentication	Provides the capability to connect to enterprise intranet resources that require domain credentials.
sharedUserCertificates	Provides the capability to access software and hardware certificates, such as smart card certificates, for validating a user's identity. When related APIs are invoked at runtime, the user must take action (insert card, select certificate, etc.). This capability is not necessary if your app includes a private certificate via a Certificates declaration.

Building confidence

Customers want to safely enjoy Windows 8 and the apps you build. The Metro style app experience is designed to make it easy for you to build apps that everyone can try and buy with confidence. This sets up a constructive cycle where people love and buy lots of apps that then generates opportunities for developers to create and deliver even more great Metro style apps.

As I noted at the beginning, we’re in this together; we are confident that the collective investments we made in this new ecosystem will help you build apps that people will be delighted with, and we look forward to partnering with you in delivering amazing new experiences to our joint customers.

--John Hazen

Keeping your family safer with Windows 8

Steven Sinofsky — Mon, 14 May 2012 18:00:00 GMT

One of the intrinsic capabilities of Windows 8 is the ability to use multiple accounts on any PC. This makes it much easier for parents to use tools that can help protect their children from content on the Internet as they see fit. It is also a great way for each family member to maintain their own unique online identity while still sharing a single PC. Microsoft has been a leader in creating tools to help maintain a safe computing environment for all users as well as for parents in particular. With Windows 8 we have substantially improved the family safety features and services available. Phil Sohn, the senior program manager lead for Family Safety, describes how Family Safety features will work in Windows 8.
--Steven

Kids today grow up online. They use computers to do their homework, play games, communicate with friends, and access the wealth of information on the web. Computers give children access to many positive experiences; however, parents face challenges in monitoring what their children see online, the people they meet, and the information they share.

At Microsoft, we want to help parents create a healthy computing environment for their kids. We encourage parents to talk to their children about online safety and to set guidelines for their computer use. Microsoft and many safety advocates also recommend moving the family computer to a common room in the house so parents can glance over their kids’ shoulders to gain a better understanding of their online activities. Parenting techniques like this are important, but they may be difficult to employ if your household has multiple PCs or if your kids use laptops and tablets. And glancing over a teenager’s shoulder can be awkward for both parents and kids.

A safer Internet is just a click away

With Windows 8, you can monitor what your kids are doing, no matter where they use their PC. All you have to do is create a Windows user account for each child, check the box to turn on Family Safety, and then review weekly reports that describe your children’s PC use. No additional downloads, installation wizards, or configuration steps are required. Just check the box!

The “monitor first” approach

In the past, many of the industry software solutions for family safety (including Microsoft’s) focused on web filtering and other software-based restrictions. This resulted in a more complex setup experience and a constant stream of parental approval requests that could be difficult to manage. The end result was that many parents abandoned family safety products and returned to in-person supervision only—a tactic that has become less effective as computers have gotten more mobile.

Windows 8 gives you a “monitor first” approach, which provides informative activity reports for each child. As previously discussed on this blog, signing in to Windows 8 with a Microsoft account makes setup much simpler: just create a separate user account for each child and then check the box to turn on Family Safety. As soon as you do, you’ll receive a welcome email followed by weekly email reports summarizing your child’s computer activities. We expect you’ll find activity reports a great tool for teaching your kids about responsible computer use. Of course, you can also easily add restrictions by just clicking a link in the activity report. With the simplicity of activity reports, we believe more parents will adopt Family Safety, resulting in a safer computing environment for children.

Here’s what a Family Safety activity report looks like:

With a Microsoft account, you can take action from anywhere, on any device, because the reports are delivered directly to your email inbox. Any changes you make to Family Safety settings are stored in the cloud at familysafety.microsoft.com. These changes are then automatically applied to all Windows PCs where Family Safety is active.

Standard accounts for the kids

We’ve long recommended that parents log in as the computer administrator and make sure children have separate standard accounts. In Windows 8, accounts that the administrator –or “parent”—creates are automatically created as standard accounts. This approach has several benefits. Children:

Won’t be able to access their parent’s email, online accounts, documents, etc.
Can customize their own account settings without affecting their parent’s account
Won’t be able to download malware or other questionable files because the SmartScreen Application Reputation service automatically prevents it

For parents who want more control

Activity reporting, which is on automatically in the new Family Safety, is the perfect solution for many parents. However, if you like more control, you can set up more powerful and customizable restrictions directly from links in the activity reporting email, or on familysafety.microsoft.com, if needed. In addition to the restrictions currently available in Windows 7, we’ve added some new ones in Windows 8, including:

Web filtering: You can choose between several web filtering levels.

SafeSearch: When web filtering is active, SafeSearch is locked into the “Strict” setting for popular search engines such as Bing, Google, and Yahoo. This will filter out adult text, images, and videos from your search results.
Time limits: With Windows 8, you now can restrict the number of hours per day your child can use their PC. For example, you might set a limit of one hour on school nights and two hours on weekends. This is in addition to the bedtime limits currently available in Windows 7.
Windows Store: Activity reports list the most recent Windows Store downloads, and you can set a game-rating level, which prevents your children from seeing apps in the Windows Store above a particular age rating.
Application and game restrictions: As in Windows 7, you can block specific applications and games or set an appropriate game rating level.

Here is a short video showing how Family Safety works in Windows 8:

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Watch for Family Safety in Windows 8 Release Preview

We are continually striving to help you create a safe, family-friendly computing environment for your kids, but of course, we know that this means different things to different parents. Some parents prefer to simply keep an eye on their children. Others prefer to set up software restrictions on their child’s computing activities. We think the simplicity and power of the “monitor first” approach in Microsoft Family Safety addresses either style effectively and will lead to more family conversations about online safety, a safer computing experience for kids, and increased peace of mind for parents. Watch for these Family Safety features in the Release Preview.

--Phil

Redesigning chkdsk and the new NTFS health model

Steven Sinofsky — Wed, 09 May 2012 22:00:00 GMT

We’ve written about tons of improvements in the OS kernel, networking, and file system. While for most client PCs, the tried and true chkdsk utility is one we rarely use anymore except in very rare circumstances, we are using Window 8 as an opportunity to improve this utility. We wanted to focus on rethinking how the utility works to increase availability and reduce downtime due to chkdsk operations. In looking at the real world usage of chkdsk, we note that corruptions are exceedingly rare though running chkdsk is not. While we’ve worked hard to reduce the manual invocation of disk tools (like defrag) we know many prefer to run them manually “just in case” and so we worked to improve the overall throughput of chkdsk, since running it reduces availability of the machine. With disk capacities becoming extremely large and multi-disk systems more common, we wanted to improve the utility. Kiran Bangalore, a program manager on our core system team, authored this post.
--Steven

In this blog post, I’ll talk about the new NTFS health model for Windows 8 and our redesigned tool for disk corruption detection and fixing, the chkdsk utility.

We’ve all experienced the frustration that can be caused by an unexpected chkdsk that pops up while restarting a computer at home or a server at the office. Beyond the surprise, there’s the interruption while waiting for the process to complete and Windows to be available. With Windows 8, we provide quick resolution to these problems when they arise, putting the user in control and making systems more available and more scalable.

One of our key design goals for Windows 8 was to increase availability and reduce the overall down-time of systems; this feature, along with other storage features such as Storage Spaces and the new ReFS file system, helps reduce the complexity of fixing corruptions and increases the overall availability of the entire system.

The previous chkdsk and NTFS health model

While exceedingly rare, there are a variety of unique causes for disk corruption today. Whether they are caused by media errors from the hard disk or transient memory errors, corruptions can happen in file system metadata (the information used to map physical blocks to that vacation photo you took last year). To maintain access to your data, Windows must isolate and correct these errors, and the way to do this is by running the chkdsk utility.

In past versions, NTFS implemented a simpler health model, where the file system volume was either healthy or not. In that model, the volume was taken offline for as long as necessary to fix the file system corruptions and bring the volume back to a healthy state. Downtime was directly proportional to the number of files in the volume.

Reliable telemetry data from systems all over the world have shown us that, although corruptions are quite rare, when chkdsk is needed, it can take between a few seconds to a few hours to run, depending on the number of files in the drive–and even longer for larger storage servers.

In Windows Vista and Windows 7, we made significant optimizations to the speed of chkdsk but, as hard disk capacities have continued to double every 18 months and the number of files per volume is increasing at an equal rate, chkdsk has taken longer and longer to complete (even with speed improvements) .

So in Windows 8, we’ve changed the way we approach the health model of NTFS and changed the way we fix corruptions so as to minimize the downtime due to chkdsk. We’ve also introduced a new file system for the future, ReFS, which does not require an offline chkdsk to repair corruptions.

File system health redone

The incredible growth in storage capacity and user data files has necessitated the redesign of the NTFS health model and chkdsk.

There were three important requirements for file system health that our customers made clear:

Downtime caused by file system corruptions must be zero in continuously available configurations and nearly zero in all other configurations.
A User or Administrator must be made aware of the file system health at all times.
A User or Administrator should be able to easily fix their file system when a corruption occurs in a scheduled manner.

Our design included changes both in the file system and the chkdsk utility to ensure the best availability. The new design splits the process into the following phases to ensure a coordinated, rapid, and transparent resolution to the corruption.

We developed a new method of communication that describes types of corruptions as “verbs” that act upon the key components and points of the design – the file system driver (NTFS), the self-healing module, the spot-verification service, and the chkdsk utility. All file system corruptions are classified as needing one of 18 different “verbs” that we’ve defined in Windows 8. We have also left room for possible new verb definitions that can help us diagnose issues even better in the future.

Key design changes to help improve availability:

Online self-healing: The NTFS self-healing feature was introduced in Windows Vista (and in Windows Server 2008) to reduce the need to run chkdsk. Self-healing is a feature built into NTFS that fixes certain classes of corruptions encountered during normal operation, and can make these fixes while still online. If all issues that are detected are self-healed online, there is no need for an offline repair. In Windows 8 we increased the number of issues that can be handled online and hence reduced any further need for chkdsk.
Online verification: Some corruptions are intermittent due to memory issues and may not be a result of an actual corruption on the disk; so we added a new service to Windows 8, called the spot verification service. It is triggered by the file system driver and it verifies that there is actual corruption on the disk before moving the file system along in the health model. This new service runs in the background and does not affect the normal functioning of the system; it does nothing unless the file system driver triggers it to verify a corruption.
Online identification and logging: When an issue is verified, this triggers an online scan of the file system, which runs as a maintenance task in the file system. In Windows 8, scheduled tasks that are for the maintenance of the computer run only when appropriate (during idle time, etc.). This scan can run as a background task while other programs continue to run in the foreground. As the file system is scanned, all issues that are found are logged for later correction.
Precise and rapid correction – At the user or administrator’s convenience, the volume can be taken offline, and the corruptions logged in the previous step can be fixed. The downtime from this operation, called “Spotfix,” takes only seconds, and on Windows Server 8 systems with cluster shared volumes, we’ve eliminated this downtime completely. With this new model, chkdsk offline run time is now directly proportional to the number of corruptions, rather than being proportional to the number of files as in the old model.

Comparison of Windows Server: chkdsk /f vs chkdsk /spotfix

Better manageability – To enable better transparency into the new health model, Windows now exposes the state of the file system via the following interfaces:

Action Center – The health of the drive is most visible in the Action Center as the “Drive Status” (see figure below), which tells you when you need to take an action to bring the volume to a healthy state.
Explorer: The health state is also exposed in Explorer, under Drive properties.
PowerShell: You can also invoke the chkdsk functionality using a new cmdlet in PowerShell, REPAIR-VOLUME, which can be helpful for remote management of file system health.
Server Manager: In Windows Server, you can also manage the volume health states directly from the server manager utility.

The new file system health model

In the new health model, the file system health status transitions through four states – some that are simply informational, and others that require you to act. The health states are:

Online and healthy
Online spot verification needed
Online scan needed
Spot fix needed

Windows 8 file system health states

Online and healthy – In this state there are no detected file system corruptions and there is no action required of you. The file system remains in this state most of the time.

Online spot verification needed – The file system stays in this transient state only for a brief instant after the file system finds a corruption that it cannot self-heal; it puts the volume in this state until the spot verification service verifies the corruption. Again, there is no user action required.
Online scan needed– When the spot-verification service confirms the corruption, it puts the file system in the “online scan needed” state. In the next maintenance window, an online scan is performed; there is no user action required. This state is reflected in the Action Center, so you can run the scan manually if you want to do that before the next maintenance window. The scan is run as a background operation, which means that you can continue using the computer while the scan is performed. During this online scan, all verified issues and fixes are logged for later repair. On Windows Server 8 systems, idle time is determined by monitoring the CPU and storage idle times.

Spot fix needed– The file system puts the volume in this state after the online scan is completed, if required, and this state is reflected in the Action Center. On client systems, you can restart the PC to fix all the file system issues logged in the previous step. The restart is quick (adding just a few additional seconds) and the PC is returned to a healthy state. For Windows Server 8 systems, a restart is unnecessary to fix corruptions on data volumes. Administrators can simply schedule a spot fix during the next maintenance window.

For more advanced users who want to avoid restarting their system to fix a non-system volume corruption, they can open the Properties dialog for the affected volume, and on the Tools tab, they’ll see an option to check the drive for file system errors. Corruption on drives that are not currently in use can be fixed without needing a full restart of the computer.

Conclusion

In Windows 8, we have made the detection and correction of file system errors more transparent and less intrusive. We believe these changes will be a welcome enhancement for you and we look forward to hearing your feedback.

-- Kiran Bangalore
Senior Program Manager, Windows Core Storage and File Systems

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FAQ

Q) Will the new health model work on removable drives?
Yes, this works on removable drives that report fixed media, like most external hard drives.

Q) How do I enable the new file system health model?
You don’t need to do a thing—the new file system health model is enabled by default.

Q) Will the new file system health model apply to Windows Server?
Yes, the health model is identical for both server and client. One thing that will be different by default is that the data drives will not be checked or fixed during boot of the system – this maintenance will be left to the administrator when time permits.

Q) Can I move between Windows 8 and Windows 7 and not affect the file system health model?
Yes, the file system health model will adapt to whichever operating system version it is mounted on.

Q) Will ReFS need to run chkdsk?
ReFS follows a different model for resiliency and does not need to run the traditional chkdsk utility.

Q) Will I ever need to run the old chkdsk /f?
There are cases where failing hardware can produce such severe corruption as to make the file system un-mountable; in these cases, you should perform a full, offline chkdsk to fix the file system. If for some reason this fails, we recommend that you restore from a backup.

Q) Is a reboot absolutely required to fix non-system volumes?
No, but the Action Center generally provides the simplest experience. If you’re an advanced user, you can fix non-system volumes by opening the properties of the drive, or by running chkdsk \scan <volume>: and chkdsk \spotfix <volume>: from the command line.

Q) I run chkdsk /f often to check the status of our drives, is that needed anymore?
No, the system will inform you when a corruption is found, and you can then choose to run the chkdsk /scan to detect all the issues. An online chkdsk /scan will not take away from the availability of the drive or system.

Q) I run read-only chkdsk today to check the status of our drives; do I still need to do this?
No, we recommend you run chkdsk/scan instead, since this will also perform all possible online repairs and will also prepare for a spotfix, if needed.