Bing (in the US) has released a significant change to its homepage design today as the homepage image is no longer a static photo but instead it’s a HTML5 video. This functionality was first demoed well over a year ago in conjunction with the beta release of Internet Explorer 9. If users don’t have a HTML5 browser then they will continue to see the static picture that people are used to on Bing.

Obviously a photo of the new feature doesn’t do it justice but you can see that in the bottom right hand corner there is a new Metro UI icon allowing the user to pause the video. Thankfully Bing has provided a video about the new video homepage.

It appears that the video is the last thing on the page to be loaded so it doesn’t slow down the process of searching with Bing, which is a welcome way of showing a video on Bing. Microsoft has said that it wont always use a video on the homepage and will continue to use photos.

Over the past month Bing has received several tweaks and updates such as a refined homepage and Metro UI icons to control the homepage image (or now video). A tablet version of Bing was also spotted for BUILD but Microsoft never mentioned this version of Bing.

I would hope that more HTML5 features will be rolled out over the coming weeks seeing as Bing has received so many updates in the past few weeks. Expect this new video homepage to roll out internationally over the coming months.

So after only using Windows 8 for the past day and having watched the BUILD keynote I have already some ideas for minor tweak and features in Windows 8 that from a consumer’s UI point of view would be good.

First up is an idea I have already shared once before, long before I even got to use Windows 8 and that is to provide a better multitasking UI for the Metro UI. Currently its very much a “hit and hope” exercise when swiping from the left to navigate through the currently open apps as it becomes difficult to remember the order that the apps are open. I’ve created a mock up of what I think would be a better UI for multitasking that brings a bar on the screen when swiping from the left that shows a preview and name of all the running apps.

My next hope for Windows 8 is that the term “charms” is changed. It’s a very silly name. I’ve been trying to think of a better name for the bar but only really came up with “OS bar” or “Windows bar”, mainly because the bottom bar is called the “App bar”. The buttons within the bar can then simply be called buttons. There’s easily be the “Windows button”, “Share button”, “Settings button”, etc.

Does anyone have any better names for “charms”?

Another thing I’d like to see is the ability to have some more options for the lock screen.

The lock screen looks great, mainly because it just a photo with only a few essential pieces of information displayed. What I’d like to see added though is the ability to have a slideshow and not just a static photo. It would be nice if this idea could be built upon so that we could have Bing images as the lock screen background. It would also be good if, like in Windows Phone 7.5 we could set the lock screen to the “now playing” artist where the images are pulled down from Zune.

The lock screen already makes use of “contracts” for apps that allows them to place icons on the lock screen to show notifications. I think it would be good if apps could have “contracts” for the background too. There could then be some very interesting uses of photos as the background from many different online locations.

I know Windows 8 is far fro finished and it’s entirely likely things will change and that Microsoft may already be planning some of these idea anyway but I thought I’d share them with you anyway. Do you have any minor changes you’d like to see in Windows 8?

I was sent a tweet today by @vikman, Vkiram Dendi, who works at Microsoft Research on the various translation pieces of research, which informed me of what the big news was for Bing Translator.

The tweet says:

Bing Translator OData & OAuth, adding higher volume commercial tiers and 4 month free offer on everything! Big enough?

Those sound like pretty big things to me! I’d still like to know about Translating Telephone though.

Update: You can read more about these announcements on a blog post about the new features.

Does anyone have any plans for using Bing Translator with its new capabilities?

On your marks.

Get set.

Ready.

Go.

See a larger version of the image.

You can see this screen at 3:18:20 on the video from yesterday.

Well fear not for there’s plenty of places to catch up and see what all the excitement was about yesterday and why Windows 8 looks so good. Your first place to visit should be the http://www.buildwindows.com/ website which has a video of the keynote for you to watch.

However I understand that some people might not have a few hours free today to watch the whole thing, but thankfully Microsoft also understand this and have published a condensed version of the keynote with a few of the highlights.

If you like that video and want to see more of Windows 8 then again Microsoft can help as it has uploaded several videos showing specific features of Windows 8 and I expect they will be uploading more over the coming days.

But again I understand that some of you might be at work and not able to watch YouTube videos at your desk so I’ve compiled a list of articles about Windows 8 from a wide selection of publishers. I have written my own summary of yesterday’s announcements.

- Microsoft

- Paul Thurrott – Overview – Screenshot Gallery – Features and Terminology

- Long Zheng – Analysis of Metro in Windows 8 – What Microsoft didn’t show

- Liveside – Future of Windows Live – Windows Live videos

- WinRumors – This changes everything – Hands on

- Neowin

- The Verge

- Engadget – Windows 8 overview – Hands on

- Boy Genius Report

Let me know if I have missed any other good write ups about Windows 8 that I should add to this list. What are your thoughts of Windows 8? Now to start preparing myself for this afternoon’s keynote, I’m looking forward to it.