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Posted: Mon Dec 17, 2007 6:53 pm
by Benjamin
Weirdan wrote:Most of the complaints I heard thus far were about Vista x32 on laptops. Somehow this makes me think laptops do actually suck, not vista, because I haven't experienced most of the problems I heard about on desktop dual-core AMD64 with Vista Ultimate x64.
It's certainly possible that Vista has more issues on laptops than desktops however most of the issues that annoy me are related to the way the OS is designed and organized.

Posted: Tue Dec 18, 2007 2:41 am
by matthijs
To me it just seems like microsoft takes the "developers, developers, developers" mantra a bit too far. Meaning: having absolutely no designers on the team. No graphic designers, more importantly no user interface and user interaction designers, no usability experts.

To give an example, IE7. If you have had such a large market share, with most people working with IE6 for years and years. What makes you think it's a good idea to randomly shuffle around the buttons in IE7? The refresh button has been on the top left side for years, and is in all other browsers.

Or, take the 15 ways to shut down your Vista machine. Let's keep things simple, eh?

Or, maybe it's not the fact that there are no talented UI people there, but the way microsoft is organized.

Interesting read:
http://moishelettvin.blogspot.com/2006/ ... pfest.html
writes about how he worked on the shutdown menu for a year:
I spent a full year working on a feature which should've been designed, implemented and tested in a week.
...
So that nets us an estimate -- to pull a number out of the air -- of 24 people involved in this feature. Also each team was separated by 6 layers of management from the leads, so let's add them in too, giving us 24 + (6 * 3) + 1 (the shared manager) 43 total people with a voice in this feature. Twenty-four of them were connected sorta closely to the code, and of those twenty four there were exactly zero with final say in how the feature worked. Somewhere in those other 19 was somebody who did have final say but who that was I have no idea since when I left the team -- after a year -- there was still no decision about exactly how this feature would work.
We all know how disastrous the results of this kind of "design-by-committee" are.

If you want a really strong user interface/interaction, you should just take the best designers, put them in an isolated place, and let them design the best thing.

Posted: Tue Dec 18, 2007 3:08 am
by Maugrim_The_Reaper
Most of the complaints I heard thus far were about Vista x32 on laptops. Somehow this makes me think laptops do actually suck, not vista, because I haven't experienced most of the problems I heard about on desktop dual-core AMD64 with Vista Ultimate x64.
3 installations and counting... My main PC runs on an Athlon X2 5200 with 2GB RAM. At least 80% of the noted problems are common across all three. I can even add another - inability by Administrator to delete folders/files. Got this one a few times using VCE. Apparently you have to delete files, then parent directories, than maybe manage to delete the root parent you want rid of. The regional selection I have is set to an Irish Keyboard, it sometimes reverts after a permission-needed prompt when a keyboard region selection box appears mysteriously and for no apparent reason (looks like the keyboard selection if enabled, and then detached from the icon dock).

I can add complaints all day (these are just the daily annoyances) - Vista is a dogpile of inconsistent intentions. I find myself thinking fondly of XP appreciating it's relative quality.

Posted: Tue Dec 18, 2007 3:09 am
by Benjamin
Another quote from that article:
My team had a very talented UI designer and my particular feature had a good, headstrong program manager with strong ideas about user experience. We had a Mac [owned personally by a team member] that we looked to as a paragon of clean UI. Of course the Shell team also had some great UI designers and numerous good, headstrong PMs who valued (I can only assume) simplicity and so on. Perhaps they had a Mac too.
LOL - This is an MS programmer straight up saying that they were looking at Apple software for inspiration. There is no other way to spin that.

Posted: Tue Dec 18, 2007 10:45 am
by RobertGonzalez
Hey, I'd look to Apple for inspiration, too.

Posted: Tue Dec 18, 2007 11:41 am
by Benjamin
Perhaps I should clarify --

This is validation that Microsoft and/or Microsoft employees have in fact looked at and inevitably copied from competitors.

Posted: Tue Dec 18, 2007 11:46 am
by Maugrim_The_Reaper
Sounds normal - who else is there to copy from ;). They copied tabs from everyone else in IE7 (and their non-existing UI expertise was exposed by all the button relocations). Seems pretty normal in any case - I'd certainly be buying Macs for the team if designing Windows Vista all over again ;).

Posted: Tue Dec 18, 2007 12:08 pm
by DaveTheAve
Why pay for windows when you can get THE WHOLE HOUSE!

Choose Linux!

While your pouring your $1xx into M$, I'll be putting it towards a new hardware!

Posted: Tue Dec 18, 2007 2:33 pm
by s.dot
I read an article that Internet Explorer 8 is currently in development. I wonder what kind of advantages it will offer, because IE7 has surely had a short life.

On a windows note, I don't mind windows. It's all I know (basically, I have dabbled around a bit in nix).

Posted: Wed Dec 19, 2007 7:53 pm
by John Cartwright
Web Standards compliance for one :wink:

Posted: Thu Dec 20, 2007 10:00 am
by Ollie Saunders
Although the mass programmer exodus to OS X is certainly inspiring you have to remember the average computer user is some guy (or gal) stuck in an office using Word. Microsoft Office is the only reason why people are still using Windows. Everybody is used to it and loyal to the brand. Because 90% of any company's workforce isn't exposed to any aspects of the operating system besides the bits that allow them to open documents the Office Suite is the single most important thing. The various in-house IT departments insulate users from anything that doesn't work reliably and if there's one thing Microsoft are good at, it's providing those workarounds.

In many ways the quality of Office is considerably more important to keeping people on Microsoft products than Windows is and sadly the recent version of Office is actually good, which is what happens when you put usability testing at the forefront of your development process.

More people are using Macs than ever before and that's great. Macs are definitely better. I'm keen for Apple to become a bigger player in the office computing market but OS X isn't perfect. In fact I wouldn't say there is such a thing as a really good operating system out there. Nobody has tried anything really forward thinking and original with user interfaces for decades.

The only hope for really significant improvements in the way we use computers come from projects like Linux that are lowering the the barrier of difficulty associated with producing an operating system. Now, you can take a basic distro and already have a full complement of drivers and a decent GUI API now. There's still a lot missing but if Linux, the platform, was able to reach the level completeness necessary to allow developers to stick together pieces of interfaces, dynamically if necessary, easily with a very high level language then things can only get better.

Posted: Thu Dec 20, 2007 10:02 am
by RobertGonzalez
scottayy wrote:I read an article that Internet Explorer 8 is currently in development. I wonder what kind of advantages it will offer, because IE7 has surely had a short life.
The only advantage it will offer is that you will now have add conditional hacks to your markup for IE 8 in addition to IE 7, IE 6, IE 5.5 and IE 5.

Posted: Thu Dec 20, 2007 10:06 am
by RobertGonzalez
@ole, I think the bigger reason that Microsoft is so abundant still is their license agreements with manufacturers and retailers to carry only their OS. Right now your choices for an OS are:
  • Windows when buying a PC from just about any store
  • OSX when buying a Mac
  • Linux, if you are comfortable hacking a computer you own
It seems that Microsoft has been able to strong arm everything out of retail except OSX. If there is one reason that it is so widely used still, I would say it is because of this.

There are lots of office applications availble. Not all have to be Office. But Microsofts ability to monopolize a market at the OS level has given them the kes to the door of just about every PC that is owned by a non-techie.

Posted: Thu Dec 20, 2007 11:07 am
by Kieran Huggins
ole wrote:Nobody has tried anything really forward thinking and original with user interfaces for decades.
ole++
ole wrote:There's still a lot missing but if Linux, the platform, was able to reach the level completeness necessary to allow developers to stick together pieces of interfaces, dynamically if necessary, easily with a very high level language then things can only get better.
XULrunner FTW! Platform independent, well understood technology, extremely heavily tested. Too bad about the documentation :-(

Posted: Thu Dec 20, 2007 11:30 am
by Maugrim_The_Reaper
What about KDE4 in general, Oxygen and Plasma? It's heading the direction of supporting Mac OS Dashboard widgets for example. Widgets written in Ruby, Javascript, Python or (if crazy and insane) C++. It's coming in January... The RC I tried was looking pretty spiffy.

Also Adobe AIR. I don't know how familiar it is to anyone (if you have a Mac or Windows download Ed Finkler's Spaz Twitter client) but it's quite fun to play with - if you're not into Flash or Flex, you can run primarily with HTML and Javascript.