Something’s going on the interwebs. I think it might be hell freezing over.
That’s really cool! I wonder who is working on that stuff.
In a detailed post over on E7 about the Win7 design process comes this:
With regard to where ideas come from, what we like to say is that the job of program management is not to have all the great ideas but to make sure all the great ideas are ultimately picked. The best program managers make sure the best ideas get done, no matter where they come from.
A nice formulation to add to my various other definitions of Program Management collected over the years.
Move stop-and-refresh back to where they were in IE6
![image_thumb[11]](https://blogs.msdn.com/blogfiles/justsean/WindowsLiveWriter/LittlethingsyoumaynothavenoticedinIE8Par_FD7/image_thumb%5B11%5D_6cf6ee9c-86ab-47c6-968b-d231eba5f2b9.png "image_thumb[11]")
This was going to be my first post in this series, but the Vista Team blog stole my thunder with a much more detailed post covering lots of the chrome customizations, so I left it for last. :) Be sure to check it out the Vista blog.
PS. A quick reminder: I don’t work on IE, and I haven’t for nearly a year. So this all qualifies as my personal opinion, and not the opinion of the IE team. I found all of these feature just by playing around with IE (okay, well, some of them I knew where to look -- but I didn’t necessarily know they had made the final release)
Authenticated RSS Feeds
When we first released the Windows RSS platform a number of people asked us about authenticated feeds. As I said in those posts, it was a hard cut for IE7, but I’m really happy to see that it’s here for IE8 :)
To set up an authenticated feed, just subscribe to it, and then go to the properties for the feed (on the right in the feed view), and you’ll see the “settings” button for the User name and password. Click, fill in the details and go.
Of course, anything that uses the RSS platform will get this new feature for free, including the Feed Headlines gadget that ships with Vista, and Windows Live Mail. Outlook uses its own download engine, so this won’t help if you were trying to use Outlook.
Trivia o’ the day: One of the key drivers for making this work was the Web Slices feature. It turns out there are far more web pages behind authentication than there are feeds, and since Web Slices are implemented using the Windows RSS Platform, it was natural to implement support for authenticated feeds for all types of feeds.
Clone your current place
One of the nice things about the “New Window” (Ctrl-N) feature dating back to early releases of IE, is that it always duplicates the current open window, as well as all of its state – in particular, the window’s history.
When the “New Tab” feature was created back in IE7, I remember discussing with Aaron how IE could recreate the New Window behavior for Tabs. Unfortunately, it didn’t make the cut for 7, but I’m thrilled to see it make it into 8 (along with a ton of other tab-related new features).
The valuable thing about Duplicate tab (Ctrl-K) is that it allows IE8 to support both of the two most common search-and-discovery patterns on the web. The two patterns are as follows:
Breadth-first
Let’s say you’re searching for information on IE8. You head up to your address bar and type in “ie8” (which, we’ve learned, will take you to your search engine). Looking at the results, you see a four or five likely sites, so, using Ctrl-click (or middle-click), you open several of them in background tabs. Then, once you have several candidates open, you switch over to them one-by-one to explore them.
This model of search-and-discovery is fully supported by the tab features in IE7 (and other browsers) today. But, there’s another model.
Depth-first
Interestingly, prior to tabbed browsing, this was the predominant model for finding information (using New page). Let’s say that you are searching for dinner menus at cuban restaurants. So you do a quick search for “cuban restaurant menus”. You then click on the first likely result, and navigate through the site until you find the menu. Now you’ve found it, you want to go back to the hub and find another, without losing the page you’re on.
This model is supported by the new Duplicate tab feature. With this feature, you hit Ctrl-K to duplicate your current tab, then hit back to get back to your search result page, and click on the next link to explore. The page you were on is left alone on its own tab until you are done with it.
The depth-first model is used when you are looking for specific pages deep within a site that may not be easily categorized at the top level. Prior to IE8, it wasn’t possible to do search-and-discovery using tabs.
This small feature reflects a theme of IE8 that should become clear over time: There are a lot of great major features which you’ll read about blogs and the news, but deep down, you’ll find that what the team did during planning and development was to research and hone in on common patterns of using the web and build in features – large and small – to make those patterns easier or more refined.
Use your address bar for searching
A little-known fact is that IE has always had a combination address-bar/search box (this goes back to at least IE6). Well, to be fair, I thought this was fairly well-known until reviewers starting going nuts over the Omnibox™.
If you enter a single word with no spaces, IE has always tried to find a site with that term, and then, if it failed to find one, it went to your search provider. But if you entered two or more words, it went straight to your default search engine. A little-known way to do single word searches quickly is to start typing into the address bar with a question-mark and space (as in the example above), which forces IE to always send your text off to your search provider.
Some people wonder why a separate search box is necessary. The search box’s primary value is to provide a prominent reminder that the browser can help them with the common internet task of searching. From a design point-of-view, however, the search box allows the browser to assume that the primary intention is searching for new things (with a secondary intent of searching for something you’ve searched for before). In IE8, because of this knowledge of user intent, the browser provides several features optimized around internet search, ranging from the quick pick feature to visual search suggestions. The address bar, by contrast, is optimized around navigation – getting you to sites that you know about already, or have visited before (so the drop-down includes your typed URLs, your history, your favorites and feeds).
In IE8, it was important to the team to continue the tradition having a unified address bar/search, but also to enable address-bar-searchers to get access to the cool new features that were being developed for the search box – like Visual Search Suggestions. The UX team built a great shared component known during early development as the GUP, or Grand Unified Picker (Bruce, the development lead who named it in jest, was unhappy that the name stuck, so he eventually forced it to be renamed. :), which allowed both the the address bar and the search box to provide a single drop-down experience across a number of different data sources – some local (like history) and some remote (like visual search suggestions), with a mix of text and images.
The IE team has pulled this off this complex piece of work beautifully. As noted above, the drop-down in the address bar is optimized for navigation scenarios. But, if you start typing in the address bar with a question-mark, IE knows immediately that you intend to do an Internet search, so it immediately swaps in the search-optimized drop-down (which also includes history search after the search-engine supplied suggestions). [Note: it should also do this as soon as you hit two words in the search, but it doesn’t do this in the current Beta. I don’t know if it will be addressed for the final release].
Bonus tip:
The address bar also includes built-in reminders of, and quick access to, some common navigation shortcuts. Click on the arrow at the bottom of the address-bar drop-down to see them.
Can’t resist section:
OmniBox™ + AwesomeBar™ == Smart Address Bar :)
PS. Chrome’s Omnibox gets one thing right – the autocomplete behavior. I’ve said before that IE’s autocomplete is one of my favorite features, and I’m sad that it’s missing from this beta of IE8. They also have a hard-to-use (but visually compelling) implementation of keyword search shortcuts similar to something we planned early in IE8, but which was one of the early cuts (IE has had this feature at least since IE6, but it requires delving into the registry to enable).
Searching the future
This morning I wanted to find out where I read about that “Skymarket” initiative. Off to IE, type in “skymarket” and it shows me not just Long Zheng’s original post, which I had read but also Joe Wilcox’s commentary, which I hadn’t read yet.
What happens is that IE is searching across not just my history, but also across the titles of feeds and feed items – so I can find not just what I’ve already seen, but also the new things from people and sources I find interesting.
A little interesting side-note: the ability to search favorites, history and feeds is provided by the Windows Search indexing platform, which is really cool. It really showcases the value of having fast, efficient indexer built-in to the platform. Without it, the team would have had to install its own indexer – and having two indexers running on the same system is a recipe for performance problems.
Formatted View Source
You don’t have to be a pro developer to love this one. Since the very beginning, IE has relied on the built-in Notepad editor to show page source. Notepad, it should be noted is not a source viewer.
In IE8, for the first time, the IE team itself took on ownership of the core development experience, making a deep investment in built-in developer tools. In the past, the developer experience belonged to the Visual Studio team (and the professional developer is still well-served by using that product for end-to-end development), but with the experience with the intern-developed Developer toolbar in IE7, the team realized that there is a place for a lightweight, built-in set of development tools.
A great side-effect of the deep work is that the team developed a great source viewer, and hooked it up as the default “View Source” app.
Bonus tip: If you have a better app (Notepad++ has been my standby for years) for source viewing/editing, don’t forget you can always change the editor to anything else by using the Programs tab in Internet Options. For my needs, however, I don’t think I’ll need anything more.
IE8 has a lot of big new features (see the IE blog for more of that), but what I like about it is the small things. This is the first in a short series of my favorites little features that I haven’t seen mentioned much (or at all) elsewhere:
Search Engine Quick Pick
I am so thrilled with the way this turned out. Early in IE8 planning, we spent a bunch of time looking at how people use search engines. One key observation was that users tend to have one (or maybe two) “main” search engine (say, Google, Yahoo or Live), and any number of “vertical” or specialized search engines.
We wanted to make it as easy as possible for users to be able to switch between the main search engine and these vertical engines. Thus, the Quick Pick menu was born. I still remember sketching it out roughly on a piece of paper in Sharon’s office (Sharon is the main Program Manager for the search features in IE8), and then seeing it mocked up by the awesome designers (Ben is the man) a few days later, adding in the “Find” button – which solved a common discovery problem we had with the Find dialog in IE7.
The team executed it perfectly – it takes two clicks to re-execute any search on any of your sites. Even more important, the site you choose doesn’t persist (i.e. your main search engine will be the default again in a new window). This is because Quick Pick is designed to help you search those specialized search engines, and you don’t want Amazon or Youtube to be your default, just because you happened to search on it once (ahem, other browsers :).
Bonus feature: Watch what happens to the text box if you do a search using the search box on Live search, and then, on the search results page, you change the search term using the box on the page. It works with any search engine (as long as the engine doesn’t have redirects in the query URL like, for example, the Ebay one). The idea behind this feature was to support a more complex variant of the pattern described above (searching on multiple engines): (1) search on A using the IE search box, (2) refine the search a couple times using the search box on the page, then (3) two clicks in the IE search box to search somewhere else using your refined search term.
I don’t think Yahoo likes us anymore. IE8 Beta 2 ships, and they start pushing Firefox on their home page.
Here’s the funny thing. They didn’t really want to work too hard on the page. Here’s the page they used for IE7, followed by the page they are using to push Firefox 3:
(Click the images to go to the live pages)
I had to chuckle this afternoon when Steven Sinofsky exploded upon the Internet with one of his missives describing the Windows 7 Team on the Engineering Windows 7 blog.
Steven has been blogging on the internal network since late 2006, and his blog posts have never been accused of being brief. In fact, I keep expecting him take his blog and publish it as a book (The Tao of SteveSi). It’s already over 300 pages long and about 140,000 words, so he’s got a great start.
Personally, I really appreciated the level of detail that Steven always went into about his process and his decisions when I was in that “Internet Explorer” feature team that he mentions in his list of Windows feature teams. In this respect, Steven raised the bar over his predecessors (and every other senior management that I’ve ever worked for, with or around).
Windows under VPs like Jim Allchin and Brian Valentine was a cowboy-culture – ambitious, technology-driven and always brought to the finish-line by blood, sweat and tears (to be fair, that included the VPs who didn’t spare themselves the long nights and hard work). This culture successfully delivered 6 or 7 releases of one of the largest and most successful software projects on the planet. But that couldn’t last. It was inevitable that the size of the project would outgrow this method of running a project.
Steven came to Windows from running the Office organization where he built a reputation for running a tight ship and getting the product out on time with the right set of features. Interestingly, from my standpoint outside of Office, I always saw the Office team as a team I’d never like to work on – it seemed stodgy where Windows seemed fluid; it seemed dictatorial where Windows seemed collaborative; it seemed boring where Windows seemed exciting.
Down in the troops, when Steven was named to take over Windows, there was, shall we say, trepidation. But Steven took the smart route. He spent the last few months of the Vista project quietly going around talking to people. And when he moved, he moved decisively – making sweeping organization changes that challenged the traditional structure of the Windows organization. Clearly, such changes might be difficult for the team to accept.
What made all of the difference is that Steven started blogging and he blogged regularly. His blog explained in sometimes excruciating detail the tradeoffs in his decisions and why he chose one way over another.
The bottom line was – you could disagree with him, but you couldn’t say that there wasn’t a well-thought out method to every decision he made. He showed clarity and thoughtfulness in his actions. He showed that he wasn’t making changes for the heck of it, but that there was a reason why he did everything. His thinking showed a long-term perspective on the product that had been completely missing from the previous management.
His blog enabled him to communicate more clearly and widely about these decisions to those who wanted to understand. It gave people a place to voice concerns and ask questions (the true open door policy in a company where going to his actual office would require a 15 minute trek across campus). Not everyone read it, to be sure (and even those who wanted to were often daunted by the length), but if you wanted to know, the information was there to be had.
In large part, that blog is why I accepted a position in his old team, Office. His development methodology is a proven system for how to bring a thousand-strong development team together while creating the freedom to develop and ship the features and ideas that I want. It may not be perfect, but it’s better than anything that the previous management of Windows had ever done.
I’m fascinated to watch the next step in this journey. I’m not completely convinced that his style will work in a public forum, but I’m glad that he’s doing this.
A long time ago, someone decided that Outlook should be able to browse web pages inside its frame*. Among other things, the “Web” toolbar was created, with a full complement of browser controls, including an address bar.
Shortly afterwards, people came to their senses and this kind of functionality is, at the very least, deprecated. But the Web toolbar is still something I turn on every time I install a new system. Why, I hear you ask with despair…?
Because of the back button.
Outlook treats each folder or module like a “page.” So if you’re in the Inbox and you switch to another folder, and then to the calendar, a quick tap on the back button takes you back to that mail folder, and another takes you back to the Inbox. Outlook even remembers the which message you had selected before you switched away. Perfect for navigating around Outlook.
Note: the back/forward buttons on mice also work just as well, and backspace (and alt-left/right arrow) work as well, too. You don’t need to have the web toolbar showing in order to use these keys.
Here’s how I customize the toolbar to show only what I need it to. I turn on the toolbar (right click on the existing toolbar, and select “Web”), and then I customize it (right-click and select “Customize”). Using drag-and-drop, I remove every button from the toolbar except the back and forward buttons. Then I rearrange the toolbars so the Web toolbar is at the top right (more or less where the back button is in every other app).
The end-result looks something like this:
Note: This post is now part of an ongoing “Things I do on every new PC” series.
* In fact, I worked for a time on a project while I was in Exchange that would allow web applications built using Exchange’s application development platform to run locally in Outlook using a subset of Exchange’s platform known as the “Exchange Localstore” (a long story, but the principal designers of that “make a large server application work on the client” project went on to work on a project to make SQL Server work on a client, codenamed “Mighty Mouse”. That work eventually became a little thing called WinFS)
Those who know me know that I have something of a keyboard/mouse fascination. I’ve gotten almost every interesting new keyboard and/or mouse that the company makes.
To be clear though, what I’m looking for is a better keyboard and mouse, not just a pretty one. So I avoid the purely aesthetic devices that we create, like the ones designed by Philippe Starck, and I will probably not get the new ones due this holiday.
My current keyboard of choice is the Wireless Entertainment Desktop 8000 (pictured at right). It’s a light, thin, completely wireless (rechargeable) keyboard designed for use with media center. I actually have three of these – two at work, and one at home for use with my Vista Media Center setup.
As a media center keyboard, it’s near perfect. It has a complete set of media controls, including “record” and volume controls, as well as a built-in mini-touchpad, so I almost never use the mouse itself at home – and I do browse the web quite a bit on the big TV (often to go over to hulu.com to watch episodes of shows I forgot to record, or otherwise missed).
Surprisingly though, it’s also a great keyboard for work. The best feature (and the reason I have two) is that it’s compact. Aside from being thin, it’s one of the few keyboards we make that doesn’t have a numeric keypad – something I never use. Overall, it takes up little space on my desk, allowing me to have a fairly small desk, with little space taken up by my monitor and the keyboard/mouse charger.
It’s thinness also means that the keys themselves are very similar to keyboards on laptops – i.e., very short travel, which is something I have come to like a lot for fast, light, quiet typing. The media keys are less useful than at home, but still come in handy, and I occasionally find myself use the mouse touchpad for quick things when I’m sitting back.
The major travesty of this keyboard is that ridiculous blue Vista button in the middle, which is the “win” key. It is different from the other keys on the keyboard in that it requires a pretty solid “click” to depress, which makes it difficult hit the various “Win”-key shortcuts.
Less serious, but a pet peeve: I wish manufacturers would come to agreement about the position of the “Fn” key, relative to the Ctrl and Win keys. On Lenovo keyboards, it’s “Fn-Ctrl-Win-Alt”, and on this keyboard, it’s “Ctrl-Fn-Alt”. The difference between the two makes me hit “Fn-C” to copy more often than I’d like – on both keyboards, since my fingers get used to one when I’m at home, and the other when I’m at work. Yay.
Over time, I have come to look for a series of specific things in a keyboard:
First, ergonomic is a must. I started with the full-split “Natural” keyboards, such as Natural Ergonomic Desktop 7000 (nice soft palm rest on this one). With the development of the “Comfort Curve” layout (starting with the Wireless Laser Desktop 4000 and the related 6000), I came to prefer the less drastic split – more compact, and seems to just as comfortable.
The latter two keyboards above represent another thing I look for – the design of the delete, page up/down and arrow keys. The keyboard on the left (the Desktop 6000) has the 30 year old “standard” layout, which people may be used to, but which is completely silly, since it gives legitimate space to the “Ins” key, which is used by almost no one (except to accidentally change the Insert mode in Word and wonder why it’s in overwrite mode). The design on the right, which is also more compact (a theme with me) rearranges those keys. The delete key is large and easy to hit, the page up/down keys are aligned vertically next to it, and the Home/End keys are aligned horizontally above it, which is a design that actually reflects how people use keyboards.
Of the many keyboards I’ve had, most have plenty of extra keys. In practice, I use almost none of them. The main ones I use are media keys: play/stop, next track, and volume controls (in particular, mute), so I look for keyboards with those. I never use programmable keys, though I have occasionally tried to program one to be an “lock” key, but it works so inconsistently, that I just got used to Win+L, which always works. The most useless keys tend to be connected to some particular app: the “Windows Live Call” key, the Gadget key (Win-Space works much better and consistently), the Magnifier button, the Messenger buttons. I also never use the browser buttons, since I prefer the back/forward buttons on the mouse (or I press “backspace” on the keyboard). Part of the problem with specialized buttons is that because I move from laptop to desktop, my fingers can’t get used to a consistent location.
I don’t care if they are bluetooth or not, as long as they are wireless. Rechargeable is also something I don’t care about (battery life on these things tends to be great).
On the mouse front, Microsoft has made had a great wireless mouse design for a several years, so I have a few variations of that mouse, in different colors and textures. I’m not particularly picky with mice (in fact the reason I have a few of them is that they tend to come with the keyboards) – they need to be wireless, have good weight, and have a scroll wheel, and back/forward buttons. Most of the mice Microsoft has made in the past few years meet those needs well. My current mouse is the one that came with the Desktop 8000 (pictured above).
I also have one of the nice new portable mice, Yes, that’s right, "Dragon Fruit”, beaatch.
A few years ago, I would pick up a new keyboard with every launch, looking for that something better. Most of the time they would improve something and make something else worse. But, in both the mouse and keyboard space, I’ve become pickier over time as I seen what works and what doesn’t, and I’m pretty happy with what I have now. So I don’t expect to pick up whatever the team produces for this fall, unless they produce a new variation on the WED 8000 with a less-stupid Windows key.
When you look at this picture, you are overwhelmed by Apple logos. There are other laptops there, but they don’t stand out.
Apple laptops do two important things with their logo. First, it is the right way up when the lid is open. To do that, the logo has to face away from the user of the laptop when it is closed. This is not a problem because the user of the laptop is perfectly aware of who made their laptop.
Second, it is very easy to make out, even from a distance. In fact, it glows.
On my new laptop, it’s clear that Lenovo hasn’t learned the simplest of these premises. When someone is sitting at a coffee shop with their awesome new tiny laptop, everyone else in the coffee shop (or across the conference table, or classroom) should be able to read the logo on the lid.
The X300 has a tiny black-gloss-on-black-matte “lenovo” logo on it’s lid, and it faces the user (and is therefore upside down to everyone else). The ThinkPad logo (two logos!) is easier to see, but is still small and upside down. The newer Lenovo IdeaPads seem to have improved in both of these areas.
Other laptop manufacturers vary (and also vary from model to model).
The Vaio laptop (the crocodile surfaced one in the front) we got recently gets the logo direction right, but what you can’t see in this picture is that the logo itself is indented and a highly reflective silver, which means that without the right lighting or angle, it’s quite difficult to make out.
The Toshiba Tecra M4 I retired for the Lenovo had a tiny silver-on-silver logo, facing the wrong way, but their latest laptops seem to go for large noticeable logos.
The overall branding lesson is here is that laptops (especially consumer, but more and more corporate, as well) are a “statement” device – something that you want to show off. Manufacturers need to take advantage of this trend by making showoffable laptops, and taking advantage of the opportunity to increase their brand awareness. And they also need to not wait 4 or 5 years after the competition does it before finally figuring it out.
A long time ago when I worked on Windows XP, I worked on a project to add Bluetooth PAN support to Windows. At the time (March 2004), I wrote:
We also added Bluetooth Personal Area Networking (PAN) support. PAN is a Bluetooth profile that essentially creates a standard IP network over a Bluetooth connection. PAN support is the first step to enabling rich Bluetooth networking scenarios, which can be secured using the well-tested IP-based security standards (IPSec, 802.1x, etc.). Devices supporting the PAN profile are already on the market, and there should be many more in the coming year (demand it from your vendor!).
Well, it took a while (I didn’t quite demand it from my vendor), but I finally got a phone that supports Bluetooth PAN earlier this year, specifically, the HTC Hermes, or the AT&T 8525, as it’s known. It runs Windows Mobile 6.1 (I think it comes with 6.0, but I upgraded). I like this device because it has a full keyboard, as well as a touch screen, which is handy for use with the Live Search mapping software.
Windows Mobile 6 comes with an application called Internet Sharing, which enables the Internet pass-through. I’ll let you use one of the many instructional sites on the web to do it yourself. Side note: that article I linked to talks about how to use your phone as a “modem”, which is not strictly correct – there are two Bluetooth profiles, one that lets your phone look like a modem and one that makes it look like a network router. This technique sets up your phone to look like a router, which allows the full networking stack to come into play and is ultimately more efficient (plus you don’t need to dial into an ISP – you just use the phone’s Internet connection).
All of the UI I designed in Windows XP is unchanged in Windows Vista, which was nice for me, since I never used it in the real world on XP. It was clearly not an area that was invested in for Windows Vista, in part, I’m sure, due the fact that it was rarely useable at the time, since most people’s phones didn’t support it. As more and more phones start to support Bluetooth network passthrough, I expect it’ll get some cleanup and better integration into the rest of the experience.
I have to admit, I cringe a little when I look at that UI, but given the constraints I was under at the time, I’m not completely embarrassed by it. A lot of what I was doing, as the owner of the user experience, was attempting to build a usable experience on top of a technology that was overwhelmingly technical and complicated. I’m not sure I completely succeeded in this case, but I think it might have been much worse :).
Once connected, the experience using the passthrough is pretty smooth. It’s completely unnoticeable to any of the applications I use and with the AT&T 3G network (unlimited data plan required for this activity :), it’s slow, but very usable. I can surf, have Outlook sync’ing the background, and have a remote desktop connection open to a system at home without any real problems. I tend to use it at the airport or at a coffee shop when I don’t want to pay for Wi-Fi. It can suck battery life from the phone, so I try to keep usage limited unless I know I’m going somewhere where I can charge the phone – but I have gotten at least two hours out of a fully charged phone without fully draining the battery.
