Dick Pountain/PC Pro/Idealog 207 16/10/2011
Should there be anyone out there who's been reading me since my very first PC Pro column, I'd like to apologise in advance for revisiting a topic I've covered here no less than four times before (in 1994, 1995, 1997 and 2000). That topic is how Microsoft's OS designers just don't get what an object-oriented user interface (OOUI) ought to look like, and the reason I'm covering it again here is the announcement of the Metro interface for Windows 8, which you'll find described in some detail in Simon Jones' Advanced Office column on pg xxx of this issue. It would appear that, after 17 years, they still don't quite get it, though they're getting pretty close.
A proper OOUI privileges data over applications, so that your computer ceases to be a rats-nest of programs written by people like Microsoft, Adobe and so on and becomes a store of content produced by you: documents, spreadsheets, pictures, videos, tunes, favourites, playlists, whatever. Whenever you locate and select one of these objects, it already knows the sorts of things you might want to do with it, like view it, edit it, play it, and so it invisibly launches the necessary application for you to do that. Metro brings that ability to Windows 8 in the shape of "Tiles" which you select from a tablet's touch screen with your finger, and which cause an app to be launched. The emphasis is still on the app itself (as it has to be since Microsoft intends to sell these to you from its app store), but it is possible to create "secondary" Tiles that are pinned to the desktop and launch some particular data file, site, feed or stream.
It's always been possible to do something like this with Windows, in a half-arsed kind of way, and I've been doing so for 15 years now. It's very, very crude because it's wholly dependent upon fragile and ambiguous filename associations - assign a particular application to open a particular type of file identified by name extension. Ever since Windows 95 my desktop has contained little but icons that open particular folders, and clicking on any file within one of these just opens it in Word, Textpad, Excel or whatever. I need no icons for Office applications, Adobe Reader or whatever, because I never launch them directly.
This was actually a horrid step backwards, because under Windows 3.1 I'd grown used to an add-on OOUI called WinTools that was years ahead of the game. Under WinTools desktop icons represented user data objects, which understood a load of built-in behaviours in addition to the app that opened and edited them. You could schedule them, add scripts to them, and have them talk to each other using DDE messages. It featured a huge scrolling virtual desktop, which on looking back bore an uncanny resemblance to the home screens on my Android phone. Regrettably Tool Technology Publishing, the small outfit that developed WinTools, was unable to afford to port it to Windows 95 and it disappeared, but it kept me using Windows 3.1 for two years after everyone else had moved on to 95.
That resemblance to Android is more than just coincidence because hand-held, touch-screen devices have blazed the trail toward today's object-oriented user interfaces. For most people this trend began with Apple's iPhone and iPod Touch, but to give credit where it's due PalmOS pioneered some of the more important aspects of OOUI. For example on the Palm Pilot you never needed to know about or see actual files: whenever you closed an app it automatically saved its content and resumed where you left off next time, a feature now taken for granted as absolutely natural by users of iPads and other tablets.
Actually though we've barely started to tap the real potential of OOUIs, and that's why Metro/Windows 8 is quite exciting, given Microsoft's expertise in development tools. Processing your data via intelligent objects implies that they should know how to talk to each other, and how to convert their own formats from one app to another without manual intervention. As Simon Jones reports, the hooks to support this are already in place in Metro through its system of "contracts": objects of different kinds that implement Search, Share, Settings and Picker interfaces can contract to find or exchange data with one another seamlessly, which opens up a friendlier route to create automated workflows.
In his Advanced Windows column last month Jon Honeyball sang the praises of Apple's OSX Automator, which enables data files to detect events like being dropped into a particular folder, and perform some action of your choice when they do so. This ability is built right into file system itself, a step beyond Windows where that would require VBA scripts embedded within Office documents (for 10 years I've had to use a utility called Macro Express to implement such inter-file automation). Now tablet-style OSes like Metro ought to make possible graphical automation interfaces: simply draw on-screen "wires" from one tile into an app, then into another, and so on to construct a whole workflow to process, for example, all the photographs loaded from a camera. Whoever cracks that in a sufficiently elegant way will make a lot of money.
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