Microsoft reveals Vista UI Guidelines


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can anyone tell me how to install this thing?

If i understand correctly after i install it on win xp i will have vista gui? :blush:

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No, it's just preliminary documentation/guidelines for developers to use when designing their applications.

A fairly nice set of guidelines there, you'll all find a lot of them in the book of common sense as well. Now let’s hope Microsoft can stick with them.

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Perception is Reality, and if your customers don?t experience quality in your product throughout, they may conclude there is lack of quality everywhere. A visual bug seen by all your customers might do more damage to your business than a rarely occurring crashing bug.

that's from microsoft's own guide, i couldn't stop laughing when i read that:D:D

edit: OMG there's more too!!

A program fails to be ?cool? when it has:

Use or abuse of a technology just because it can.

Features that detract from usability, flow, or performance.

Is in the user?s face, constantly drawing unneeded attention to itself.

A fleeting good impression. It might have been fun the first time, but the enjoyment wears off quickly.

:ninja: :ninja:

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It's nice to see Microsoft taking up the problem of GUI consistency a bit seriously this time. Now it's up to the developers to maintain this.

I will predict the die hard Mac fans will use this as an opportunity to bash Vista, as it is quite clear Microsoft has taken some GUI design tips from Apple. But oh well.

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I have a mac lappy and a windows desktop. i'd be all for some nice new gui effects in windows if they had a purpose, even though I turn the xp ones off and use classic theme. Not because my computer can't handle it, just because i dont need the flash.

K.I.S.S

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Its nice to see that they are finally going hte route of osx with the standards for all applications, if you noticed that repeating functions/menus appear in the same locations throughout every osx application and even 3rd party apps require no guessing as to where a certain feature is.

The only problem I see is that microsoft is overdoing it with the transparency, it makes it hard to focus on the application at hand, that needs to be addressed, there is no reason for your primary application to be transparent, you want your eyes to focus on your work and not see through it and distract you (even though its just hte border/titlebar its still distracting.

I'm sure it will be changed by the time sp1 for vista comes out ;)

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very nice!

i want to see what kind of user experience this will bring if they really follow that.

granted, the guide itself is a bit inconsistent (it uses some dialogs which are right on some aspects to display rightness and wrong on other to display wrongness... which feels weird)

i love the redesign of some dialogs and some other dialogs need redesigning. i'd love to see all-new fresh dialogs :D

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It's nice to see Microsoft taking up the problem of GUI consistency a bit seriously this time. Now it's up to the developers to maintain this.

I will predict the die hard Mac fans will use this as an opportunity to bash Vista, as it is quite clear Microsoft has taken some GUI design tips from Apple. But oh well.

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Microsoft has released UI guidelines with each major version of Windows

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Microsoft has released UI guidelines with each major version of Windows

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Right. But stuff like dialog boxes with 'Save', 'Don't Save,' 'Cancel' come from Mac (and maybe some other Linux distros).

Comparing the two documents - Vista's guidelines over Windows XP's guidelines - Vista's is quite in depth on what developers should do.

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Perception is Reality, and if your customers don?t experience quality in your product throughout, they may conclude there is lack of quality everywhere. A visual bug seen by all your customers might do more damage to your business than a rarely occurring crashing bug.
that's from microsoft's own guide, i couldn't stop laughing when i read that&nbsp:D:D

edit: OMG there's more too!!

:ninja:a:

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I can't tell you how many times I stopped myself from downloading programs with UI flaws.

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