A bunch of screenshots have been obtained by ITHome.it, a Chinese website, claiming to show off Windows 10 Build 10009, although the build information is covered up in the images, we’ll just have to take their word for it.
In the images it can be seen that many more standard icons have received the flattened treatment, among them: the Recycle bin, Control Panel and Drive icons. New icons have also appeared, but the images are rather small, but embedded for your enjoyment below.
Huh.
It is.
Like made by children with too much colours.
Why do people make a desktop that is so ugly you don’t want to watch to it? Increases that productivity?
Microsoft should take some lessons from the kde5 Plasma desktop. It looks relaxed and stunning:
https://www.kde.org/announcements/plasma5.0/
Microsoft has always oscillated between flat and 3d, color and grayscale, tight and spacious. The point is to differentiate from previous iterations, nothing else.
Amazingly, the most pleasant one to look at for me is Windows 3.11. That approach with highres icons and slightly thinner borders would look stunning compared to these “modern” attempts.
I wish I was joking.
Edited 2015-02-06 11:23 UTC
Windows XP looked like Toy’r’us, Windows 10 will looks like… Playskool ?
The child in me loved XP.
Windows 2000 or Win XP in classic mode (emulating w2k). All the way.
Win 3.11 is way to dithered and flat. This theme seems like a return to the early 1990s.
Yeah, except they eliminated that option in Windows 8.
The Windows 2000 look is too sophisticated for Windows 8 to do, apparently.
My tastes are on the conservative side but I agree: Windows 2000 was their best looking effort. I like blue and grey.
It’s all a matter of taste. Personally, I’m not a fan of KDE’s “modern” stick figure, dumbed down black and white icons. So dull and boring. The desktop as a whole comes together and doesn’t look too bad, though. Personally, I still like the look of Windows 98, but apparently someone in Microsoft’s marking department thought it was “broken” and decided to “fix” it. Over, and over, and gut it, and completely redo it. Oh well.
The same was (rightfully) said about XP, which in the end proved the most popular Windows so far.
I think I threw up in my mouth a bit…
Edited 2015-02-06 12:40 UTC
You have a leaked version of the largest and arguably most closely watched OS development, what big news/features are coming I hear you ask?!
Recycle bin has a new icon?… get out, close the door….
All the other new features have been covered many times before. The new icon set is actually news. It’s not drowning out other new features.
They should buy those :
https://www.iconfinder.com/iconsets/super-8×8
actually something like the Recycle Bin *is* important, is one of the things that would be seen all the time on so many screens. More people will see it than the default wallpaper.
Personally I think that Apple reached the state-of-the-art GUI way back then on Mac OSX 10.1/10.2 with those beautiful, highly detailed, sharp and high definition 3D icons and other UI elements so beautiful that you could “lick” them. Everything else looked so primitive that is not even funny.
Those things were so beautiful that, at the time, I’d go out of my way to theme my KDE to look as close as that as possible (and mosfet’s High Performance Liquid theme for KDE did a decent job on that)!
Nowadays, computer UIs are so flat that makes one miss the old days of Windows 3.1 or Amiga 3.9.
I can’t be the only one that feels that this “flattening” trend is going way too far, am I?
Nope you are not alone.
Material design appeals a lot more to me, because it isn’t so afraid to use shadow and depth to assist usability.
Poorly implemented flat design is at odds with a windowing OS as the OS operates with a virtual Z-Axis. Windows sit in fron and behind each other, icons inside those windows.
That said these are just poorly made. They are an inconsistent mess.
When I move to Windows 10, I will hacking in a nicer theme and better icons. I feel for people without that knowledge. Kind of like my time with Windows XP. It might spur more creativity.
Make a proper Classic look and you will have a winner.
At least the latest build availabe to use mere mortals still has a Quick Launch toolbar (but for how long?)
I’m glad to see that I’m not the only one! I love realistic icons, and I hate the flat trend, that even the KDE team is adopting. Of course Apple and Microsoft are making flat icons even stupider by having basically 16 color icons again.
Our senses evolved to look at real objects, which have colors and depth in and of themselves, icons should look real too. Period.
Instead of making everything flat, someone should work on a desktop that allows the user to change the icons appearance dynamically, perhaps changing the “lighting” and shadows in response to the positions of windows and the mouse cursor? Hmm.
BTW, what do you think is the most realistic-looking icons available today? I end up returning to KDE’s Oxygen.
I couldn’t agree more. The “flat look” is ridiculous.
I guess Microsoft is going for the retro AmigaOS 3.1 look. Is it 1990s all over again?
Funny, I was thinking of Windows 2. Windows 8 also reminded me of Windows 2. Microsoft keeps jumping the shark.
Funny that you say that, the AmigaOS 3.1 icons are WAY better than they are here, and I believe the Amiga Icons to this day are the only ones who have a different icon when clicked, rather than just highlighting it.
I actually downloaded the Windows 10 Tech Preview and installed it under Gnome Boxes on my Debian Jessie install. Works pretty well (as far as the virtualization goes) though it definitely is butt ugly and inconsistent in it’s icons.
The Control Panel icons are all just black and white stick figures.
Wow! Revolutionary. How did we get along until now?
Seriously, though, WTF? That IS hideous. I think I’ll be switching back the *nix world again.
Edited 2015-02-06 13:20 UTC
Because of…icons? Wow, talk about being a drama queen, there.
I’m gonna be a dissenter here and say that those icons don’t really look that bad, people are just used to the old ones.
They do look ugly and, even though I would not switch an OS platform because of icons, they really make the hours we spend looking to our tools and applications a bit (or sometimes a lot) unpleasant, to the point I would feel compelled to act and change them what, luckily, is not that hard after all (lots of tools are available to do that).
I agree with a post above: OS X had the best icons some iterations back but they changed it probably because of envy and ego of the ones in charge of design, a very common happening on lots of industries (software included), unfortunately. Had designers the wisdom to practice incremental improvements of what already works we would not have to watch “all flat”, “all round”, “all square”, “all monochrome” bs we have to put up with.
Drama queen? No. It’s called sarcasm. And the whole thing is ugly, IMHO.
the word is “amateurish”. those icons do look amateurish.
Well cast one vote in favor of this style.
No! No! No! Definitely not. It looked like a bunch of 5 year old designed the icons. The most unfortunate colors. I’m usually for change but this is vomit inducing. Couldn’t be right, right?
No! No! No! Definitely not. It looked like a bunch of 5 year old designed the icons. The most unfortunate colors. I’m usually for change but this is vomit inducing. Couldn’t be right, right?
I think the Window Buttons are really ugly.
Do you spend so much time looking at the OS that you get no work done? The icon theme is fine, I might look at them once in a blue moon on my way to get something done, but really, “vomit inducing?” “I think I threw up in my mouth a bit… ” What a bunch of whiners.
Do you feel the same way about your car? House? Clothes? It doesn’t matter what they look like as long as they “get the job done”?
Do you disregard the appearance of all designs?
I do feel the same way about the icons on the dash of my car. As long as I csn recognize them and understand their meaning, I couldnt care less about their design.
I was more commenting on the remarks and hyperbole.
I would bet a beer that there are forums out there that have endless discussions about the icon designs of the new BMW/Mercedes/Audi models and how they compare with the other models .
The right discussions in the right forums I would say.
With the exception being that you can’t easily change the icon looks in a car
I wonder how the new 5.25″ floppy icon looks …
Let me disagree with most comments above. While not so eye catching like other famous designs – say, NeXTSTEP or OS X icons when they first appeared – they surely show a consistent and peculiar style. They better match the whole new overall flat design than old boring, glossy icons and – the thing most people overlook IMHO – they pave the way for an almost fully vectorised / scalable set(*) (something which in the past was achieved only by SGI with the _horrible!_ IRIX icons, at least to my knowledge).
(*) Also, just like it happened with Modern UI already, you don’t necessarily need a professional icon designer to draw a photorealistic icon for your application: you just really need to produce a nice icon outline to blend well with the look of the system!
That. Is. Hideous.
What the hell is happening in UI … For want of a better word, let’s call it design? The same crap happened with Mavericks and iOS 7. They took a glorious gorgeous 3D environment and just arbitrarily decided for us that we didn’t get to have it anymore, bait-and-switching successively crappier software for excellent world class stuff they used to have.
“Here’s a new even more powerful phone and tablet, and an operating system that makes less and less use of it, making you wonder why you’re wasting your money on our crap over and over again.” They as good as said.
Now Microsoft is doing the same stupid thing! If Tim Cook started punching himself in the face over and over again, would the head of Microsoft do that TOO?
i had it with windows look..all linux the way
the ui looks horrible, too much crayons effects..and i thought vista look bad..this looks worst than windows 8 and 7..you can’t called it 10..called it XP crayon edition
Microsoft needs to stop toddler-fying everything. Who in their right mind proposed this shit, and worse who approved it? They need to be slapped.