The iNterface (Part 1)
Before I begin, I’m certain my bias is going to come into play for this. I know Windows – it’s what I use for everything. I was born into DOS and moved on up through the Windows family from 3.1 all the way up to 8.1 (and hopefully rocking the “Threshold” preview soon). The operating system has constantly evolved during this time but, to me, the usability has gotten better with several key consistencies to keep Windows “Windows.” Love it or hate it, Windows 8 has made a huge impact on how people interact with their devices – and “Threshold” is set do make an even bigger change with a more universal Windows. My life is constantly changing, and my devices reflect that – and work the way I need them to. So, usability and productivity are huge to me when considering what I’m going to be using in my everyday life. So, I’m probably going to be pretty harsh against a device that “just works” against my devices that work for me.
I’ve recently updated the iPad Mini to iOS 8. Sadly, I’m not well versed in the world of Apple, so I can’t tell you from memory all the things that iOS 8 brings. However, I will say that Apple’s new versions of iOS are drastically different than their own Mac OS and even Windows versions. What I’m saying is, Mac users are still running OSX (there’s probably a 10.x attached to that, but it’s still 10). Comparing Mac OS 9 to OSX, you’ll see quite a lot of differences – almost like you’re looking at two completely different operating systems. Same goes for Windows. Windows 8 is hugely different from 7 – heck, 8.1 vs. 8 is even a huge change. If I spent more time with my iPad or did a bit more research, I’m sure I’d be able to find out what the biggest changes are but, as it is, iOS 8 in practice feels more like iOS 7.1. That’s nit picking, though, and doesn’t really have anything to do with usability. The rotating home screen (Home Screen? I’m not sure if that’s supposed to be capitalized) is a nice touch, though – something that I’ve enjoyed on my Surface for some time.
With that tangent out of the way, iOS 8 does bring support for third-party keyboards. Which is great because I’ve never been a fan of the keyboard available in iOS – this disdain has only grown worse since obtaining the iPad. It’s a terrible on-screen keyboard. But I guess I’m spoiled with my phone. However, the third-party keyboards can come at a cost (notably Swype is $0.99). In my experience, the built-in keyboard hasn’t made any drastic changes (aside from having better predictability and auto correct – I’m getting this from Apple’s website, because I haven’t seen this in action, personally). I didn’t want to spend the buck on Swype (mostly because I’m cheap and partly because I wanted to try getting another third-party keyboard working for me before spending money on one). I downloaded SwiftKey instead. I installed the app, added the keyboard in Settings, and gave it full permissions. It didn’t show up automatically, though. After looking over the help section in SwiftKey, I found that I needed to hit the globe icon on the keyboard in order to access the other keyboards. So, it didn’t “just work,” but some of that process is due to my unfamiliarity with the platform – though I think it’d make sense if you can, when configuring your new keyboard, say “Set this as default” and be done. A globe icon, to me, doesn’t represent changing keyboards – usually I think something like “the world wide web” when I see a globe covered in a network-like grid. On a side note, I do like the SwiftKey keyboard better than the built-in keyboard. It’s still slow to type with, but it makes a better distinction between capital and lower case lettering. There’s no swiping, which is a bummer, but I can’t do that on my Surface’s on-screen keyboard, either. It does load slowly in comparison to the built-in keyboard, however. At this time, it’s the only third-party keyboard I’ve installed, so I can’t say if this is the case with every keyboard.
So, how does the new keyboard option stack up against my Windows devices? Well, I can’t install third-party keyboards on my Surface or my Lumia Icon. However, the built-in keyboard on my Icon makes it so I don’t need to. It features “Word Flow” which has the speed of Swype mixed with excellent predictability. It’s a keyboard that learns how you type and continually improves your experience. It can also be instantly switched between the swiping interface to a tap to type without having to change any options – just tap instead of swipe. It’s a great keyboard and, honestly, my favorite on-screen keyboard. Sadly, my Surface 2 does not have Word Flow, but it does have a USB port to support any USB keyboard and my Surface Type Cover is a surprisingly good keyboard (I’m actually using it to type this up). But we’re not talking about hardware keyboards, we’re discussing on-screen keyboards. The keyboards that the Surface features are okay – there are four to choose from. One is a pretty standard on-screen keyboard – it’s a QWERTY keyboard not terribly unlike the built-in iOS keyboard (though it does a substantially better job in showing when you have shift or caps enabled/disabled). There’s another full keyboard that is similar to the first, but has less blank space to the keys and is more “fully featured.” Instead of just being letters with the option to cycle to letters and special characters, this keyboard is basically the same one you’d normally type on, just in digital form – complete with ctrl, alt, and Windows keys. The third, and the one I normally use, is split in half with a number pad in the middle. This makes the keys smaller, but more accessible when using my Surface in landscape orientation – making it similar to typing on a phone. It’s still a challenge to type like this, and the iPad does feature a similar split keyboard (though inexplicably needs to be “undocked” from the bottom of the screen – unless I’m doing something wrong), but if I’m not connected to the type cover, this is generally the easiest way to get stuff written for me. The last keyboard is more of a notebook – this works well if you prefer writing by hand instead of using the on-screen keyboard. I don’t use it because I have terrible handwriting, so sometimes it can’t decipher what I’m trying to write, but it puts forth an admirable effort. So, there’s not a lacking of options for on-screen keyboards for the Surface, though I think implementing Word Flow would make the on-screen keyboard even more usable.
Enough about keyboards, though, because they’re kinda boring and I’ve already written up more than I intended to on that. Instead, let’s talk about the main screens and options. The iPad has a Home Screen (we’re going with capitalized just to be on the safe side of proper) with app icons that can be arranged in folders – this helps reduce clutter and allows you to group your similar icons into a condensed space (e.g. throw all your games in a single folder so you can free up some space on your Home Screen). There’s also a Dock at the bottom of the screen which can be used for your most-used applications – these shortcuts are present on-screen no matter what page you are viewing on your Home Screen. The Dock is incredibly useful and serves a similar function to the Dock in OSX or Taskbar in Windows. However, the icons on the Home Screen are just that – icons. Your shortcuts tell you little more than the name of the application. There’s also, in my humble opinion, an inexplicably large amount of blank space between your icons. I’m not going to count pixels or anything, but it looks like a solid icon and a half could fit between each icon on-screen. I’m not opposed to having some blank space to reduce clutter – but having an extra row of icons on my Home Screen would be appreciated.
On my Windows devices, I’ve got the Start Screen; my phone and Surface share similar interfaces on this, but there are some key differences – we’ll get to those in a minute. Instead of arranging the Start Screens in pages, similar to how the iOS Home Screen is arranged, the Start Screens are a constant, flowing arrangement of Live Tiles. It’s a constant interface that allows for easier navigation by not stopping between segments if you’re looking to get to the last icon on your screen. Live Tiles are icons that provide useful information without having to open the application (e.g. my weather application will show me what the temperature is without having to open the app, the store might show what’s new or on sale, and a game may show me if a friend has beaten my high score – all from the Start Screen and all without opening the application). Live tiles can be resized and moved anywhere on your Start Screen and grouped together however you’d like. The Start Screen on my Surface (and all of my Windows 8.1 devices) can be zoomed out by pinching the screen or control scrolling (there’s a few other shortcuts, but I didn’t feel like making a list) – this allows all the groups to be seen on-screen without scrolling, creating further ease of navigation. If I am actually looking to get to the last icon on my Start Screen, I can pinch out, tap on my last group, and select the desired tile. There’s no pinching to zoom out on my phone (at this time, anyway – that may change when Windows Phone and Windows RT are merged with “Threshold”). However, navigation is made simpler by “Live Folders.” Instead of creating groups on my phone’s Start Screen, I can create a folder for my Live Tiles which allows them to remain easily accessible from the Start Screen while making it possible to have several tiles pinned without having to scroll for miles. The Live Folders constantly update similar to the Live Tiles by cycling through what is stored in the folder, tapping on the folder expands it to reveal the Live Tiles stored within – which update as Live Tiles appropriately when expanded.
In my experience, the differences between a single Start Screen and the multiple pages on the Home Screen makes a huge impact on the ease of customization. Moving icons and tiles on Windows and iOS devices is done similarly – tap and hold on the icon until it gives you customization options. When you’re in customization mode, you can tap, hold, and drag your icons or tiles wherever you’d like (though you also have the option of resizing your tiles on your Windows devices). With iOS, if you’re looking to move an icon from the last page to the first, you have to select that icon, and drag it to the next page – where it will hang until you go to the next page. There’s a frustrating delay when moving an icon from one screen to another, and if you’re looking to move an icon across several pages, it’s even worse. Tiles on Windows devices can be moved smoothly from one position to the next due to the lack of pages – the Start Screen is a single interface. If you’re looking to move a tile from the end of the screen to the beginning of it, this can be done even easier by zooming out on the Start Screen and moving that icon to wherever you’d like.
Another major difference between the two operating system’s main screens is the focus on customization with Windows. In iOS, the Home Screen shows you everything that is on the device, whether or not you want it to be there – this can be remedied by throwing it into a folder and tossing it on the last page (that way you don’t have to see it). This isn’t necessarily a big deal due to the fact that the user probably installed the majority of items on his or her iOS device, however, there are those number of pre-installed items that you may or may not use, but certainly can’t uninstall. I don’t want those taking up space on my Home Screen (they’re currently residing in a folder dubbed “pre-installed garbage”). On my Windows devices, only what I want is displayed on my Start Screens. If there is a program or app that shouldn’t be there, I can “unpin” it – if something is missing that I need, I can “pin” it. This can be done for apps, programs, and websites. It’s great. If there’s something on my system that I don’t want to uninstall because I might use it, but don’t want on my Start Screen because I don’t use it enough, I can still find under “Apps.” The Apps screen shows everything on that device (and lists them alphabetically). The Apps screen can be arranged to show desktop or Metro applications first (on my PCs, I have it set to list desktop apps first, my Surface shows Metro apps first). The Apps screen can even be configured as the default Start Screen on PCs and tablets – for those miserable souls who hate the Live Tiles. Otherwise, you can access the Apps screen from the Start Screen by swiping up or clicking on the down arrow (on phones, this is accessed by swiping left or pressing the right arrow at the bottom of the Start Screen). Additionally, my themes are synced across all of my Windows devices. Live Tile arrangements are shared between all of my computers, and theme color customizations are synced across all of my devices (if I change the color theme on my phone, that change will reflect on my computer in just seconds). I only have one iOS device (and my iBook is rocking the just ever so slightly out of date OSX 10.5.6), so I am not certain if a feature similar to this is available for Apple devices. It is something that I greatly appreciate on my Windows devices due to the fact that I can be certain that my experience will be uniform no matter what I’m using.
On the topic of customization, each user has different preferences – what I like my system to look and act like may be different than what someone else may like, shocking as it may be. Having multiple user accounts on a single device remedies this by allowing each individual accessing the device to have a separate experience. I can do this on my computers, and I can do this on my Surface. I cannot do this on my iPad. Being locked to a single user on a phone is understandable – that’s a personal, unshared device (though I’ll cover more on that later). Being locked to a single user on a device that is conveniently accessible to everybody in the home (or whomever you allow to access it – my fiancé and I share the iPad) is unforgivable. We’re locked to a single account on the device – meaning purchases have to be made for the both of us, the Home Screen is the same regardless who is using it, the background is the same regardless the user, the physical switch’s functionality is the same no matter who is holding the iPad, etc. There is no differentiation between her experience with the iPad and mine. If she wants an app and I don’t, we’re both paying for it. The iPad may be “user friendly” in some areas, but it’s “users friendly” in none.
Back onto the phone, I cannot have more than one user or Microsoft account on my Icon. I’m okay with this just as I am okay with the iPhone and Android phones being limited to one user. Your phone is your phone, you shouldn’t be sharing that with anybody (just like you shouldn’t be sharing your passwords or personal information with strangers over the World Wide Web). However, I do have one strike against my Windows Phone: Xbox Music. Incoming unnecessary tangent, but totally on the topic of multiple users alert! I’ve been a subscriber to Microsoft’s music pass for several years – I rocked a Zune HD and a Zune 80 before that. They were great media players and the subscription service was affordable and got me all the music that I wanted (like, actually wanted, not paying for a subscription service to listen to randomized music that I might like). Anyway, that music pass allowed me to store my music on up to three Zunes – which was fine, I had two and shared the subscription with my mom who was rocking the Zune 120. With Xbox Music, I was able to share my subscription with my fiancé when she upgraded to a Windows Phone 8 device. Because on a Windows Phone 8 device, the Xbox Music application wasn’t built into the operating system (meaning I could sign into the Xbox Music application with my Microsoft Account despite her phone being set up with her account). Windows Phone 8.1 changed that fact and only allows you to access Xbox Music through the account you’ve configured on your phone. So, if she wanted to access Xbox Music with a subscription on her phone, she would need her own subscription (and I’m not in the mood to pay $20 a month for a service that I was happily getting for $10 on multiple devices). We do have Xbox Music installed on the iPad and signed in with my account – so she can still listen to her playlists when using the iPad, just not her phone.
I think that’s good for this time. In my next blog, I will go over multitasking, accessories, and additional options. I’ll do my best to make sure that one is online with less delay that I had with this one.
