It’s not down to hardware or form factor, or ARM versus Intel, or slate versus laptop versus desktop. Windows 8 wows plain and simply because of the quality, breadth and depth of the design effort that was put into Metro, Microsoft’s new and increasing pervasive UI paradigm.

The seeds of Metro can be found in the Zune music player, then about 18 months ago it was introduced as the UI for Windows Phone 7, the XBOX 360 dashboard will be updated with Metro sometime this Autumn and then, about this time next year, it will hit Windows desktops and slates.

I believe that finally Microsoft have ‘got’ what Apple have know all along – design matters, REALLY matters, and that it’s not just a case of making buttons look shiny or an icon look glossy, design runs to the very core of the way a user interacts with any system.

They call it way-finding, pretty much any action you perform on a computer is to get you from one place (or state) to another, and you want the simplest and clearest form of guidance to help you do that. From what I’ve seen so far of Metro in action, it does that in spades.

I’d recommend you watch these two videos from the Build conference, they weigh in at nearly 3 hours but if you can find the time they are a great insight into Microsoft’s current thinking regarding UX, and into how the design team are now first class citizens in a company full of developers, suits and marketers.

• 8 traits of great Metro style apps: Jensen Harris – http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/BUILD/BUILD2011/BPS-1004
• Designing Metro style, principles and personality: Samuel Moreau – http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/BUILD/BUILD2011/APP-395T

UPDATE (April 14th): It has since been pointed out that you CAN run your previous version as well as the upgrade on the same computer – from the CS5 licence aggrement;

If the Software is an upgrade or update to a previous version of Adobe software, you must possess a valid license to such previous version in order to use such upgrade or update. After you install such update or upgrade, you may continue to use any such previous version in accordance with its end-user license agreement only if (a) the upgrade or update and all previous versions are installed on the same Computer, (b) the previous versions or copies thereof are not transferred to another party or device unless all copies of the update or upgrade are also transferred to such party or device, and (c) you acknowledge that any obligation Adobe may have to support the previous version(s) may end upon the availability of the upgrade or update. No other use of the previous version(s) is permitted after installation of an update or upgrade. Upgrades and updates may be licensed to you by Adobe with additional or different terms.

Freelancers are hit pretty hard by this; at each new release of CS we have to make a choice, upgrade to save cash but risk not being compatible with a bunch of our clients, or buy a new full suite licence (to the best of my knowledge upgrade licences rely on previous versions, you cannot install both versions side by side).

InDesign is the only CS application that is not either fully file compatible (a la Photoshop and Fireworks) or has the ability to save back to previous versions (aka Illustrator – honestly; is ANYONE out there still using Illustrator 3 )

I think it’s time for a little lateral thinking here – and maybe some pressure from user groups like this. Here are a couple of suggestions to kick off (in order of  my preference);

1. Add back saving into the application proper; similar to how MS Word does it, if you are using features that are not supported in the version you want to save back to you are warned what’s wrong.
2. A web service that takes your InDesign document and saves it back to whatever version you require.
3. Your licence for copy of CS*latest* enables you to run any previous stand-alone version of InDesign (special downloadable version if necessary) This is already true – see above.
4. Adobe supply a virtual machine with all previous versions of InDesign preinstalled but hobbled so they can only open a file and save as IDML. (both Mac and Windows can run a Windows VM with relative ease)

Any other ideas? Discuss

The Peek device brings mobile email to the masses. The unit is thin and lightweight, comes with a full qwerty keyboard to make typing super easy and is available in three colours. Unfortunately it’s only available in the US.

Below you can view the initial concept designs we supplied which won the pitch.

As is always the case the designs were reigned in during the course of the project to meet with developing client specifications. As can be seen in the final product, the resulting screen layout has a more conventional feel.

Liaising with the company, based in San Francisco, and the software development team in China was a challenge, but the eight week project was completed on time and within budget.

This was a great project to be involved, the guys at Peek were a breeze to work with and we wish them well with the product.

Bill is blogging at http://futureofreading.spaces.live.com/ and has a great proof of concept typography site at http://www.billhillsite.com/ there are also plenty more Bill Hill interviews from Channel 9:

• http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/Charles/Bill-Hill-Digital-Democracy-and-the-Declaration-of-Digital-Independence/
• http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/scobleizer/Cleartype-Team-Typography-in-Windows-Vista/
• http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/TheChannel9Team/Bill-Hill-There-is-only-one-space-after-a-period/
• http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/TheChannel9Team/Bill-Hill-Windows-is-not-the-most-important-OS/
• http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/TheChannel9Team/Bill-Hill-What-were-the-influences-in-your-life/
• http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/scobleizer/Bill-Hill-Do-you-think-anyone-is-going-to-read-a-book-on-the-screen/
• http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/TheChannel9Team/Bill-Hill-Why-isnt-ClearType-on-by-default-in-Windows-XP/
• http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/TheChannel9Team/Bill-Hill-How-does-ClearType-work/
• http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/TheChannel9Team/Bill-Hill-A-Hike-Around-Microsofts-Forests-Happy-Birthday-Video-5/

We were recently working in at Taylor O’Brien on an absolute screamer for a new client of theirs. We knew in advance that the copy would be changing up to the very last minute. The client is a high profile, high quality brand, it had to absolutely bang on and there was no wiggle room.

The problem was the copy had to overlay a grid panel, that panel would have to increase or decrease in size to match the length of the copy, and there had to be a white border surrounding the entire grid.

We could have gone with a single .ai file of the basic grid with enough divisions to suit the largest use case, and then put the stroke on the content box. This can be really fiddly to get absolutely right, and, as the final printout was around 3 meters square, even if we were a fraction out it would be glaringly obvious.

Claire however came up with an elegant solution – use a table (with no header or footer rows) to form the grid. Set the cell width and cell height to the required grid size (in our case 15mm each). Now, because a table is treated as text in the content box if a row does not fully fit in the space it’s treated as overflow and the whole row disappears! No niggly little line ends to worry about! Then for the white surround border simply select all the visible cells with the text tool, deselect the inner borders on the toolbar and set the border style.

Saved us a whole bucket full of grief.

Oh, and as a side note, with the page full of large tables performance did slow a little with Screen Mode set to Normal, spookily though when set to Preview things sped right back up again!

You can click on any border line to toggle its state one at a time, or you can toggle a horizontal and vertical outer border by clicking on an edge node, i.e. clicking on the bottom right node toggles the right and bottom border state (only if both are on or both are off).

But, here’s the tip – whatever combination of selected or unselected states the border lines are in, if you double click any outside line all outside borders become selected, double click again and they are all deselected. Likewise for the inner borders.

And there’s more, triple click on any border and all borders are selected, triple click again and they are all deselected!