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Improving the Windows XP User Interface?
Pimpin' Up Windows asks: "Many of us are forced to live with Windows XP for our day-to-day computing needs - at work, home or school - and longingly look to the not only beautiful, but functional and efficient, Mac OS X 'Aqua' user interface. Apart from just themes, what would be Slashdot reader's suggestions for improving the user interface of XP? What changes, add-ons and other improvements could further enhance its usability?"
Make it NOT look like froofy pastel crap that makes people violently ill! That's a good first step.
... and as mentioned above, windows powertoys, and a whole bunch of firefox extentions
[what?]
One of my biggest usability changes in XP came from unlocking the taskbar and making effective use of the tabs inside it. No, I'm not just talking about Quicklaunch here. You can add different folders, including My Computer. For example, right now I have my drive letters exposed. I can right click on the C:\ drive and do a properties to get an idea of how much space I have left. I have two optical drives so at a glance I can see what discs are in there. (The name of the disc is put in place of the title.) I also have a 'shortcuts' folder I made (sort of like Quicklaunch) with a shortcut to that folder. Why is this useful? A.) it's easy to get at that folder so I can add remove stuff. B.) I'm constantly changing folders or files so I can quickly add stuff.
In short, I've made effective use of shortcuts etc using the taskbar. I don't have to do near as much folder surfing. On top of all that, the interface is pretty simple provided you know to unlock it first.
"Derp de derp."
It shouldn't be possible for a dialog box, especially one from another application, to steal keyboard focus. It's bad enough that the dialogs are usually very poorly written. I was afraid of "sheets" the first time I heard about them in OSX, but that plus the bouncing dock icons really makes it a lot easier to focus on what I'm doing. The hundreds of little icons, sliding boxes and word ckouds in the system tray need to be completely rethought.
Next I guess I would say that bitmapped icons should be dumped in favor of vector based ones for readability at higher resolution.
This site has a lot of window dressing (pun intended) to change the look and add a few items to XP to customize your interface.
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To be fair, not all of the annoying pop-ups come from Windows itself. Norton is really bad about popping up windows that say nothing more than "I'm here to completely interrupt your work to let you know that everything is just fine. Please click here to make me go away for a little while." However, it is a larger problem with WinXP if only because it's become an accepted practice among the software vendors.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong (wait -- this is Slashdot -- someone will correct me mercilessly if I'm wrong) but doesn't the Mac have pretty well defined UI guidelines that cover things like this?
"Install some decent fonts"
I like to bash MS as well, but Georgia and (especially) Verdana are lovely (read more here). Verdana-Regular-8 is a great non-antialiased font that I use for everything (including coding).
An aside - why do so many coders insist on using non-proportional fonts in their editor of choice (we've come a long way from text-mode displays)? Proportional fonts are more readable and take up less horizontal space on the screen. Try it!
Get MS to untie us from the Windows "window manager" so that we can run 3rd party ones or write our own. I'd love to get rid of the raise-on-focus policy (if anyone knows how to do this I'd love to know about it)...
Huh. There's still some kind of difference, although I'm not sure what:
Windows-D flickers on hide
Windows-M is solid
Windows-D flickers on reveal
Windows-shift-M flickrs more on reveal, only barely. Er, maybe not.
This is now extremely nitpicky, but based on the slightly different behavior, I bet there's stuff I'm not noticing.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
Say what you want about the Windows UI. In my opinion it is far better than the OS X UI, NOT because of its inherent functionalty, but because its far more customizable than the Mac UI. The Windows UI also does a passable job supporting keyboard shortcuts in a consistent way, and making more of the UI accessible from the keyboard.
The Mac theory of UI seems to revolve around Apple knowing the right way to do something. But different people end up working with the UI in different ways. There's never just one right way to do a thing with something as complex as an application or an operating system.
Jherico
What can the average user can do to ensure his security? "Nothing, you're screwed"
not only beautiful, but functional and efficient, Mac OS X 'Aqua' user interface
Excuse me? Since when was rendering metalic textures for half your windows either efficient, or functional? OK, GPU might make it less inefficient, but it's hardly the simplest thing to render to a screen. And it gets worse when you try to work out WHY the windows are metal. Why is my web browser metal, but my FTP program not?
And don't get me started on the "traffic lights" window closing buttons. Apple wrote the book on colourised user interfaces (Inside Macintosh), which they then ignored. They also had a good section in that book on Fitt's law, and how stuff in a fixed position at the edge of a screen is easiest to mouse to. So they stick the dock floating somewhere at the base of the screen, at variying positions depending on how many apps you have open. OK, expose is nice, font rendering is good, admin is less of a chore than with traditional unix, but I really wish they'd bothered reading their own guidelines from the 80s. Humans still only use 2 eyes and 1 mouse, it's not as though faster CPUs have rendered WIMP obsolete. Man, it almost makes me long for Motif.
The taskbar's default position should be on the left-hand side of the screen, not the bottom. Here's why:
1. Having the bar at the bottom uses up vertical space, esp. when it's two units high or more. Reading stuff on a screen requires much more vertical space than horizontal. Moving the bar to the side frees up vertical space and results in less scrolling.
2. You can fit WAY more quicklaunch buttons without affecting how much taskbar room you have for running programs. Quicklaunch buttons are a blessing and I can't live without em.
3. You also get way more room for the hooks for running programs that show on the taskbar (can't think of a better way to describe them). They stack vertically and you can fit dozens more than when the taskbar is horizontal.
Seriously, once you move the startbar to the side and get used to it, you'll keep it there forever. Give it a shot if you haven't tried it.
One of the first things I do when I'm on a new 2000 or XP box is add the address bar to my task bar. (Right click on task bar | toolbars | Address). From there, you can type almost any command you like. I almost never use the start menu now; I just click into the address bar and type winword (or soffice -writer). You can also just type a URL to go directly to it, type c:\ to go straight to the root of c: in explorer, cmd to get a command prompt, or lusrmgr.msc to open user manager.
I often use it while telnetting to network devices (go to address bar, type telnet 10.x.x.x). It really can't be beat, and nobody does it.
Steve
This space for rent.