{"id":99585,"date":"2018-08-28T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2018-08-28T21:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/?p=99585"},"modified":"2019-03-13T00:38:48","modified_gmt":"2019-03-13T07:38:48","slug":"20180828-00","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20180828-00\/?p=99585","title":{"rendered":"The evolution of Windows 8 charms"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s unclear what inspired the name for charms. It may have come from the item of jewelry, or perhaps from <a HREF=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/gp\/search\/?keywords=wine charm&amp;tag=tholneth-20\">wine glass charms<\/a> which are used at cocktail parties in certain social circles to identify which wine glass is yours. <\/p>\n<p>Whatever the origin, the charms feature quickly gained the internal nickname <a HREF=\"http:\/\/www.luckycharms.com\/\">Lucky Charms<\/a> from the breakfast cereal. <\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m going to skip the prehistory of charms and just look at the evolution of the charm set. <\/p>\n<p>Early design explorations came up with a list of <a HREF=\"http:\/\/fourlights.ytmnd.com\/\"><i>seven<\/i> charms<\/a>. <\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Search<\/li>\n<li>Share<\/li>\n<li>Play To<\/li>\n<li>Print<\/li>\n<li>Pin<\/li>\n<li>Stash (I think this was sort of like a clipboard)<\/li>\n<li>Lookup (I don&#8217;t know how this was different from Search)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>After a few more design iterations, the list of charms evolved to <\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Search<\/li>\n<li>Share<\/li>\n<li>Switch<\/li>\n<li>Start<\/li>\n<li>Devices<\/li>\n<li>Settings<\/li>\n<li>Language<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>(There&#8217;s a long story behind the Switch charm, which I will have to tell some other time.) <\/p>\n<p>Each charm opened a <i>blossom<\/i>, which was a radial menu that opened up <i>around<\/i> the charm. This blossom idea didn&#8217;t last long. <\/p>\n<p>Eventually, the designers settled on these charms: <\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Search<\/li>\n<li>Share<\/li>\n<li>Send To<\/li>\n<li>Start<\/li>\n<li>Connect<\/li>\n<li>Settings<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>We&#8217;re very close to what shipped in Windows 8. Just two more tweaks. <\/p>\n<p>The first tweak is that the <i>Connect<\/i> charm was renamed <i>Devices<\/i>. <\/p>\n<p>The second tweak is that the <i>Send To<\/i> charm was removed. The story behind this is a bit more complicated. <\/p>\n<p>As originally envisioned, the <i>Share<\/i> charm was for <i>social sharing<\/i>: emailing a Web page to your friend, posting to your Facebook page, that sort of thing. On the other hand, the <i>Send To<\/i> charm was for <i>sending data to another application<\/i>, like adding an item to a to-do list. <\/p>\n<p><a HREF=\"http:\/\/channel9.msdn.com\/events\/BUILD\/BUILD2011\/PLAT-657T\">During the summer<\/a>, we discovered that when our interns wanted an application to receive data from another application, it was pretty much a toss-up whether they registered the application as a <i>Share<\/i> target or a <i>Send To<\/i> target. <\/p>\n<p>What this told us that segregating the two types of data sharing was interesting in a theoretical sense, but in practice, people didn&#8217;t really make a distinction between the two. A last-minute design change was made to merge the <i>Share<\/i> and <i>Send To<\/i> charms into a single <i>Share<\/i> charm, and made it cover both social sharing and application sharing. <\/p>\n<p>A happy side-effect of this reduction was that the number of charms was an odd number, allowing the Start charm to be placed in the center. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>For regaling people at your next cocktail party, perhaps.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1069,"featured_media":111744,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2],"class_list":["post-99585","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-history"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"<p>For regaling people at your next cocktail party, perhaps.<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99585","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1069"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=99585"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99585\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=99585"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=99585"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=99585"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}