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Vista Worse For User Efficiency Than XP
erikvlie writes "Pfeiffer Consulting released a report on User Interface Friction, comparing Windows Vista/Aero with Windows XP and Mac OS X. The report concludes that Vista/Aero is worse in terms of desktop operations, menu latency, and mouse precision than XP — which was and still is said to be a lot worse on those measures than Mac OS X. The report was independently financed. The IT-Enquirer editor has read the report and summarized the most important findings."
i asked Vista to delete 36 000 files from a directory, and i ve already waited for 15 minutes and nothing resultes...
it is preparing 36 000 "are you sure?" windows
User Interface Fiction... That would explain why so much of it is so terrible.
Aero was an overhaul of the interface designed to sell copies due to the "wow" factor. I don't think that pretty widgets were meant to be a productivity booster, and any article that says that you can be productive on a mac for more than the generic things and like 2-3 specialized apps has a built in bias.
I'm still of the opinion that vista is a productivity booster only for the RIAA/MPAA and microsoft's stock.
Is it sad that I am more likely to recognize you and your posts by your sig than your name or UID?
Why? Because it's faster and familiarity reduces costs.
"The report concludes that Vista/Aero is worse in terms of desktop operations, menu latency, and mouse precision than XP -- which was and still is said to be a lot worse on those measures than Mac OS X."
All of the OSX machines I have access to seem more sluggish and less responsive than my 3 year old PC running XP.
Without more details, this "it-enquirer" is no better than the print Enquirer in the checkout line.
....clicking Cancel or Allow so freaking often.
This is my opinion. To make sure you don't steal it, it's covered by the DMCA.
At least at the time I visited the Pfeiffer site. While I'm not inclined to deny their results, it would be nice to have a little more in-depth knowledge of their methods.
'Loose' is when your pants are three sizes too big. 'Lose' is when you misuse 'loose'.
Guess what? Despite Microsoft's efforts to provide for a more fluid and agreeable interface with Vista's Aero, Pfeiffer Consulting found Vista to be even worse than Windows XP (SP2) --and of course Mac OS X. Their conclusion is backed with cold, hard research.
Where? I don't see the in the article. All I see is that Windows Vista (which I won't ever be using unless they make me at work) sucks compared to XP SP2 and OS X. I don't see why or how they came to those conclusions.
An OS should be first and foremost both secure and fast. It should have a very small footprint and... You are attempting to bash Vista. Cancel or Allow. DAMNIT!
(...bought my first Mac in February, 1984... with a teller's check... for $3000... and no way to print anythingbecause the ImageWriter because no cable was yet available...) ...the article sure reads like a Slashvertisement for "Pfeiffer's full report."
And, speaking as someone who personally perceives and is annoyed by logy, sticky, frictionlike behavior in Windows' UI... how the heck can you take an article seriously when it claims minuscule differences ("Windows XP scored 0.40 and Vista/Aero 0.52") in undefined metrics that are undoubtedly influenced by the hardware configuration?
Let's suppose, for the sake of argument, that Vista on a PC with 1 Gig of RAM and an ordinary video card has higher "friction" than Mac OS X... isn't it possible that it would outperform a Mac if you gave it the spiffiest video card and 4 gig? Let's suppose, for the sake of argument, that Vista "needs" more powerful hardware and that in a year or so, a cheap PC with Vista will have it and perform with less friction than a comparably cheap Mac? If this were true, one could justifiably criticize Microsoft for high cost of ownership, software bloat, and selling wine before its time... but it would only be a rather qualified knock on Vista.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
So this expert consulting firm is really recommending that users avoid Vista because of menu latency and mouse imprecision? Is this serious or some kind of joke?
I realize Slashdot will leave no stone unturned when it comes to slagging Windows, but isn't this getting just a bit carried away? There are plenty of things to criticize about Vista - substantial things - if one is so inclined. Look at the totally brain-dead backup and defrag utilities, for example; both are a major step back from their equivalents in XP. But if you really think it's a horrible OS for the reasons cited in this article, you're venturing into Ted Kaczynski-like levels of MS hatred.
36,000 files on the disk...36,000 files!
Deleting this file, Cancel or Allow?
35,999 files on the disk
35,999 files on the disk....35,999 files!
Delete this file, Cancel or Allow?
35,998 files on the disk
etc.....
A goal is a dream with a deadline
"Where Mac OS X scored 0.08, Windows XP scored 0.40 and Vista/Aero 0.52"
.52 units vs .08 units. That's unbelievable.
I knew the Mac was better than Windows but I didn't realize it
it was 4 times better.
However, one quick note:
FTA:
Menu latency is not always a bad thing -- it lets the user see what happened. As more of a "power user", I find latency annoying... but many of the people in my workplace benefit from menu latency, since they are pretty clueless. Latency allows them time for their brain to catch up to what's happening on their display.
Obviously, few of those who are clued in are upgrading to Vista until they will be buying better hardware anyway. I think MS is wisely targeting the "slow" demographic, since those are the people most likely to buy into their marketing hype anyway. Slower == better for them. Good move, MS.
(Only half-joking, folks).
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Take, for example, the way menus appear. This affects a lot more than just the OS, since many apps use the same interface widgets. If a menu takes 1/10th of a second to appear, then you could be wasting hours of time over the course of a week or month sitting there waiting for a window to load. Having them appear almost instantly would save that time.
The same goes for positioning the menu bars for an application at the top of the window rather than the top of the screen. On the Mac, the menu bar is essentially infinite in size. You don't have to worry about overshooting it vertically. On Windows, the menu bar is only about 50 pixels high, meaning that every time you overshoot it, it's another 1/10th of a second in lost productivity.
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
I've been teaching people for 5 years to use XP's "File and Folder Tasks" pane in Explorer. It was a very easy way to show people how to Copy, Move, or Email files and folders. It works great why change it? Apparently Microsoft now thinks everyone is a home user who wants nothing more than to assign star ratings to their picture and mp3 files. Thanks for removing the UP button too, you've made my life all the more easier. I keep harping on this but I swear to God the mantra during Vista's redesign had to have been "change for the sake of change!". I really don't know how else to explain some of the boneheaded changes they have made. And they wonder why sales are off.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
Remember, Internet Explorer is part of the operating system, so plenty of people use the 'operating system' all the time.
The article is unavailable for free. http://pfeifferreport.com/store/product_info.php?p roducts_id=42 to buy it, for only 499 euro. Anyone have some cash to burn? Steve Jobs? Karma whores?
Just upgraded from Ubuntu Breezy to Kubuntu Edgy....after having decided that, while I liked Ubuntu better than SuSE, I also prefered KDE to Gnome. I like to run a "clean" desktop but I did break down and add the SuperKaramba package "Liquid Weather"....
It's a very slick looking desktop...won't be upgrading to Vista here
A goal is a dream with a deadline
What is Mouse Precision supposed to mean? Clicking the mouse in Vista works exactly the same as it has in every version of windows. Exactly where I move the mouse is exactly where gets clicked. Can someone else explain what this is supposed to mean?
They claim a 16% reduction of speed in opening folders. I open folders in under a second on Vista. Why do I care if it now takes 1/8 seconds to open a folder instead of 1/7 seconds. Does this have anything to do with Vista installed on low end hardware? Also why didn't they talk about the parts of Vista that are noticably faster than XP: e.g. opening applications.
"Slow menus" in Vista are actually a feature. Menu's fade in an out in Aero. You can turn this behavior off if it bothers you. Most people don't care! I like it!
I can't speak about the entire UI, but there has been one big disappointment in my limited experience with Vista.
Ever since Apple added Exposé to OS X, I've been dependent on it. It's amazing how useful it is and how much I rely on it every time I use a computer.
Every time I have to use an XP machine, I find myself trying to go to the corner to show all windows for an application, or for all applications, or to show the desktop.
For that reason, I was very excited when I first heard about Flip 3D - and I thought the 3D effect was a cool addition to already impressive feature.
Unfortunately, Flip 3D almost completely missed the point.
With Exposé, you can see every non-hidden open window at once. Even though they may be thumbnail sized, I can go through more than a hundred windows at a time at a glance. If I need more detail, I can just look at all of the windows for a specific application.
It's not perfect. There are a few small things I'd like to see fixed about it (like clustering related windows together and doing a better job at keeping a given window in the same region in the Exposé view). Still, it almost completely eliminates the need for multiple desktops and vastly improves my ability to find a specific window.
Flip 3D looks cool. It shrinks all the windows to a reasonable size and layers them in a stack. Unfortunately, layering them in a stack means that you can't see everything in a given window at a glance without bring the focus to it. As far as I know, you also can't look at all of the windows for a given application, rather than all of the windows.
It's just sad.
Somehow, Microsoft managed to copy and improve upon the least useful bits of Exposé while losing almost everything that actually makes Exposé useful.
Given that one gaffe, I wouldn't be surprised to learn that the same philosophy permeates Aero through and through.
Having your foot pulverized by an asteroid. Finding a baby mouse in a bottle of beer. Having a circus midget shits on your lawn.
Microsoft should really try for the good wow, not the bad wow.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
I started typing this sentence 3 hours ago.
Now I've missed my chance at first post.
eleven plus two / twelve plus one
Well, we know how that chant turned out. Seriously, XP sucked brand new out of the box too, and it has matured into a solid OS. So will Vista. Anyone who follows this kind of thing knows to wait a year. Kind of like not buying the first model year of a car. I'll pay more attention to this kind of thing in about a year when I look at rebuilding my box and putting in a new OS.
Two years behind, uses way more memory to get the same job done but with not quite as good results, and if you actually like to be like my son on his Mac Mini - playing games while playing music and having chat and keeping open all your schoolwork as well ... then you will need 4 GB of RAM to stop it from swapping.
At twice the price.
Look, I've owned every Microsoft OS since DOS (think it was 1.x, it was back when I used CP/M and dBase in the Army), but my WinXP laptop is the last "upgrade" I'm ever getting from them. It's either Linux/BSD or MacOS after this, most likely a nice Ubuntu Linux burn from the UW servers and I'll run Open Office (which is what I have on my WinXP laptop).
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I have no plans to downgrade to Vista this year. I'm going to wait for the service packs, updates, cool little registry tweaks that come out in PC magazines and whatever that will make it useable. It's only the DRM clusterfuck that really gets my goat. The cosmetic stuff will be sorted by the time I go to Vista sometime in '08 for sure.
First, I'll admit that I'm currently using XP and not vista, due to horrible driver support from nvidia and creative. However, Vista is far superior for usability. You don't even need the start menu, for most things you either hit the quicklaunch icon or hit the windows key, type the first few letters of the program, then hit enter. I think OSX has a similar program called quicksilver. If someone knows a similar program for XP I would be grateful. Last, although vista suffers from "different names for the same thing" problem, for non power users it appears that things are more intuitive and easier to find (based on my limited anecdotal evidence from family members).
As for their whole "friction", what a load of crap. I could see how there might be some growing pains if you have to switch from XP to Vista, or from Office 2003 to 2007, but come on. I personally remember switching from 2000 to XP and at the time, I thought that it was absolutely stupid that the My Computer icon was moved to the Start Menu. Now I think it's extremely convenient to have just about everything I use on a regular basis just one (Windows) keystroke away.
As much as people like to knock the MS UI, I think they do a good job of making it easy to use for your average "Dumb user". As much as I dislike the new Office 2007 interface, I have a lot of clients with dumb users who think it's the greatest thing since sliced bread. I can't understand it personally, but they seem to like it.
And just to throw a shot across the bow of the Mac fanboys, how come I can't select file on OSX and use the "delete" key to delete it? What moron UI designer overlooked that simple shortcut? But, lemme guess... I can press OpenApple+Ctrl+Delete (or something similiar) to delete it without dragging it to the trashcan?
It was a full page magazine add that simply read:
C:\ONGRATS.W95!
Poking fun at the fact the W95 can now support long file names.
A goal is a dream with a deadline
"The OS" also provides the engine for the menus, dialogs. Think of it this way... look at Word for Windows and Word for Mac. They essentially "do" the same thing. But every way in which they "look" or "behave" differently is from the OS. The Application just calls it.
As both a Mac and a Windows user ("If there's a steady paycheck in it, I'll believe anything you say."), I am amused that OSX wins. I say this because MacOS 9 had features that makes OSX feel stodgy. I could open an item halfway down a submenu with a graceful -x^3 shaped swoop. I could drag a file off the desktop into "pop up tabbed window", have it pop up and drop the file into an icon. I could double click on the titlebar, and have the window "windowshade" into the title bar. WITHOUT MOVING MY MOUSE, I could repeat and get the window back. Spring Loaded Folders, where I drag a file onto a folder, wait, the folder opens, repeat, drop and they all close. I could drag a link off the page and get the SUBSTANCE of the link. If I drag a link to a JPG, I get teh actual JPG.
Windows Vista isn't 6 years behind the UI curve, it's about 10, counting what it STILL hasn't stolen from Copland/MacOS8.
=-=-=-=-=-
User interface is everything
RJ List, a windows developer who openly admitted he couldn't design the interface.
PS: Window's Maximize works better than that voodoo that Mac do on the green ball. I'll give them that.
Straight from the horse's mouth, without the childish Mac fanboy commentary given by "IT-Enquirer".
That said, I'd call the validity of the report itself is in question, given that they're not comparing apples to apples, but instead are running the tests on different machines. Perhaps even more importantly, they've failed to state the memory of the machines used, failed to take the opportunity to remove variables such as hard drive speed, etc. Their report attempts to sidestep these numerous issues by claiming that the tests aren't hardware dependent - but given that every single one of their tests gives a result based on length of time to complete tasks, it should be staggeringly obvious to anybody that a higher-specced machine will fare better.
I'd like to see a comparison between machines of the same cost, or machines specced to use identical (or near-identical) hardware. As is, this report is utterly useless.
On Windows (as well as MacOS) the operating system also includes a lot of the look-and-feel. It's not just dialogue boxes; it's the way you activate commands, whether menus morph in or just appear, whether certain dialogue boxes are modal or not, etc.
One of the things they mention in the article, for example, is "mouse precision". One of the nice things about MacOS is that the menu bar is always at the top of the screen, so you can be less precise about flinging your mouse up to the menu; you don't have to worry about overshooting. In Windows, even with a maximized app, you have the window title above the menus, so you have to be a bit more precise with your mouse movements. More precise mouse movements take more time, and that cuts into your productivity.
So even identical applications presented on the two different platforms can have different productivities.
From a Linux user's standpoint it's all the same; the OS is just the kernel and the rest of the user interface is up to the user's choice of window manager and the app designer's choice of widgets. There's upsides and downsides to that; more flexibility for the user vs. a common, uniform look that you only have to learn once.
Also remember that "productivity" depends on what you want to measure. I personally use mostly keyboard commands, and like the fact Windows menus can generally be operated without taking my hands off the keyboard, where MacOS is more secretive. There's also the fact that subjective effects can be more important than objective ones: if it feels faster to the user than that may be better for the overall experience, even if it is slower by a stopwatch. Good feedback, for example, can make slow operations seem faster; poor feedback can make an instantaneous one seem to take forever.
Beryl has a setting for UI friction. I can turn it up or down making my windows more or less wobbly.
First of all if you are gonna start the first sentence of an article by ripping a company or product, give all the facts to make it fair and to give yourself at least a shred of legitimacy. While these next items I mention may actually be in the full report, there is of course no mention in the pathetic VERY BIASED article. Comparing the accuracy of the mouse precision based solely on the operating system without mention of the hardward especially and specifically the mouse...is just rediculous and a waste of time. As far as the menus...same again goes...what video card did they use...what machine specs? The desktop and laptop I am currently running Vista on both have pretty much zero latency on menu/window operation...basically instantaneous. I also beta tested Vista on a laptop that didnt even meet the "minimum video card requirements" and it still loaded Aero and ran it at full speed. Im all for good studies and comparisions...but wow some of the groups and people are doing whatever they can to dig at MS and Vista. At least make your studies look legitimate with the basics I mentioned above!
That is the magic of Macs (and for the most part, any well-setup unix machine), you launch an app, and don't care about anything else. If the user doesn't have to think about the operating system, they will percieve it as "easy to use" (as long as it does everything they want it to).
Windows on the other hand, has pop-up "helper" ballons, a tray full of things that want to tell you every little thing going on. And now with Vista, UAC.
For example, one of my favourite programs at the moment is conky. But I would never bombard the standard user with that kind of information (they don't want it, and it'd probably scare the hell out of them).
All and all, I'd sum it up by saying that people don't want their computers to get in the way of their work.
Vista makes for a nice toilet wipe!
Ha ha bitches!
Linux rules!
I can remember when OSX had some pretty bad latency problems with menus too. One of the best parts of the 10.2 (think that was it) update was optimisation to reduce this to near OS9 levels. Given the major bloat of Vista I should imagine some major improvements could be had for the price of some intelligent analysis and coding.
I do agree with the mouse accuracy stuff though - I've always found Windows to be difficult on that point compared to whichever macintosh system. Possibly it's because I've spent 90% of my time in Mac systems I'm used to that, I don't know.
spoonerize "magic trackpad"
They compared a SETTING and conclude that the lag is worse by 20%. BS!
http://www.tweakxp.com/article37024.aspx shows how to change the setting, so if you set it to 10'000 (in XP) and compared that to Vista (with the default setting) and you would see a >99% DECREASE in lag for vista opening a menu. I'm not saying this is useful at all, but the report could just as easily been done this way and come to the conclusion that
"Here, the report concludes Vista/Aero has improved by no less than 99% compared to Windows XP"
For the record, I've never used vista and am definately not trying to defend it. I would have thought that they could have at least compared things that were programmed in by MS, not configurable by ME.
Who needs progress when you have profits?
I recently got a MacBook Pro, and while I really enjoy using it, and It's generally better than Windows, KDE, or GNOME, one thing I have noticed is that there is a tendency for it to lose keypresses and mouse clicks. This commonly occurs when switching back and forth between mouse and keyboard. For instance, if I use the mouse to click somewhere in this text I'm writing, there's a 50% chance that if I hit the Delete key, the keypress will be completely ignored. I have similar experiences with mouse clicks on window decorations or links in Safari being ignored. It's not a hardware problem, because use of the mouse alone is smooth, and continuous typing on the keyboard does not lose any keypresses. Moreover, people who have experienced this MacOS-knows-best loss of input events do not experience the same things when using the same hardware running Windows under bootcamp. There aren't very many frustrating things about MacOS (once you get used to it), but this problem is incredibly frustrating.
Would this be the same menu latency that is configurable using the registry?
o ws2000serv/reskit/regentry/34628.mspx?mfr=true
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/wind
What a pointless article.
This is getting absurd. Use Vista or don't. Upgrade now or wait for SP1. I don't particularly care.
I don't want to hear about how Vista is going to eat my children or destroy the Internet. I don't care whether some study indicates that it's "slower" than XP. I don't care that [H]ardOCP made a big deal out of the fact that Direct3D apps run 2-5% slower.
Vista is the OS that I use on my desktop and notebook. It's an OS that I have been using (in beta form) for over three years now. It doesn't stop me from playing XVID movies, my ripped MP3s, or my various-region DVDs. All of my software, with one exception (PDFCreator) runs just fine. It doesn't use up huge amounts of CPU time or gobble down my memory (I do have 1GB in my desktop, but I bet that most of you do as well).
You don't like it? Don't use it. There are legitimate beefs that you can have with Vista. But, please, don't post an article for every blowhard blogger who wants to spread some FUD about Vista.
I don't care. I have never blocked a specific topic on Slashdot before, but this is just getting old. If you feel like posting some real news about Windows, maybe I'll read it.
Microsoft put too much effort into making Vista look cool, and not enough time into making an intuitive interface. This was Microsoft's chance to really redefine and redo everything about Windows and they blew it.
Klingon Software is not released, it escapes, inflicting terrible damage onto the enemy as it does
Your point is very valid, and that is precisely the reason I have abandoned such antiquated input devices as "the mouse" in favor of the keyboard. The delay in that is like, zero.
Send email from the afterlife! Write your e-will at Dead Man's Switch.
Microsoft keep going on about "user experience" and "experience" in general.
I don't want a fscking "experience" when I use an OS, I want it to be a non-experience. The OS should just blend into the background and become almost unnoticable. If the OS is giving me an "experience" it's getting in the way. This is what Microsoft don't get. In some operating systems, transparency is used subtly as a cue to the user. Microsoft uses it as bling where it just makes the UI harder to use.
The day Microsoft stop going on continuously about "user experience" is probably the day their UI will not get in the way or pester the user.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
"The only intuitive interface is the nipple. Everything else is learned."
It takes time. And like other people have stated, I don't know that efficiency was necessarily the goal anyway.
Apple claims that OS X / Aqua is super easy to use, but I think more important to them and their users is that it looks pretty. People probably aren't going to take the time to learn an interface if they don't enjoy looking at it in the first place.
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
The sacchrine sweet mac-fanboy-ism on slashdot is enough to turn my stomach, and I generally think that anyone that loves a $bn corporation is a useless consumer tool, but I _LOVE_ that ad. It might be the most spot-on critique of a product that I've ever seen. As a rule, adverts only generalize their competition. It's YOUR AD for christ sake. But they threw that out the window entirely.
Many of the PC-Mac ads have been a little tired, IMO, but THAT is brilliant.
I have gotten used to the bar across the top, and I also believe it is better conceptually. However, in implementation I have found that you have to be more precise clicking on menu items. If you are off a little bit, the drop-down menu will close, and you have to start over. So, in my experience the OS X mouse precision trades off better menu location than Windows, but worse menu item navigation.
Something else not mentioned are: windowshading, focus-follows-mouse, and not having to click once to bring a window into focus, then another to hit a button. these all add speed to the desktop. In OS X, you can get Windowshading and you can get focus follows mouse with an 80 dollar app, but focus follows mouse doesn't really work right. Except for windowshading these are all nonstarters on mac, but I can set them up on Windows or Linux.
The deselection you describe is the fault of a spectacularly stupid decision on the part of the Finder's designers.
In List View, if your drag-click starts on the icon or text label of a file, it is interpreted as a drag-and-drop operation; if you start the drag on a blank area in the window, EVEN IF IT IS PART OF THE SELECTION, the Finder interprets it as the start of a new selection.
I can't figure out why they thought this was a good idea, but this is why some drag-and-drops turn into deselections; you have to start dragging a file's icon or name.
Why are people talking about productivity with a mouse? Any power user uses keyboard shortcuts anyway and the mouse for those less than common tasks... whether it's performing file operations, launching processes, programming in an IDE, drawing in Photoshop, building with 3d studio. Menus are meant for new users so (or when software designers don't provide a good array of shortcuts/key mapping in ther apps), as mentioned previously, the latency is a help in menus so new users see what's happening.
Aren't you all Linux keyboard console guys here at slashdot anyways? Why are you talking about mice? Even on Windows I use the keyboard far more than the mouse outside of web browsing... heck, I don't even double click IE to launch it WINKEY+R -> [url] -> ENTER. Or email: WINKEY+R -> mai1to:[emailaddr] -> ENTER.
-- Alex
I know how it applies to DRM (thanks Wikipedia!), but are people actually implying that Microsoft intentionally designed Vista to be worse than MacOS and even XP? Unless "defective by design" here means "defective design" instead of "designed to be defective", in which case we're overloading terms. Do we really want the term to split into "defectivebydesignasinwindowsbutnotdrm" and "defectivebydesignasinipod"?
Menu latency at least is customizable via setting HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Control Panel\Desktop\menushowdelay. XP defaults to 400 (ms). I use a value of 1. Going to zero has wierd effects...
Cheers
Keep your finger/hand of your mouse (or trackpad) while your typing you big dummy. Happens with every laptop you will have (had iBook, PowerBook, HP, Toshiba, Dell), I usually disable the 'feature' that disables the trackpad while I'm typing (is in Linux, Windows and Mac too). And you might not always notice that you're using the trackpad thus in the beginning I was annoyed at it too, I have pretty big hands and these days they make everything so darn small.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
that second sentence should read:
...stupid HTML entities... ;)
on <1ghz machines with <=512MB RAM, OSX usually feels sluggish in general; but on even relatively recent hardware, OSX is perfectly responsive.
...spike
Ewwwwww, coconut...
For the love of God, being able to "fling" your mouse in the direction of a menu instead of moving it there normally is not a real productivity increase. It may be more convenient, but it sure isn't going to help you get that report done more than 1 second faster, and that's being generous.
It may be measurable, but it is bullshit to say that it affects productivity. For example if YOU clicked on the menu item and there is a 1/10 of a second difference in speed will YOU see any difference. I know some /.'s here are quick on the draw but seriously? AND if you use the keyboard for menu selecting (like I do) you don't notice any delay since it doesn't matter if the menu is fully appeared.
In your Mac example of the menu bar, you have a good point in theory but I have never overshot a menu item that I was purposefully trying to click. And honestly I like just going to the top of the screen to get to the things that have to do with the window I'm in like closing or minimizing the window. This of course only applies to full screen apps. Like you said the Mac menu is always at the top of the screen. What happens when I have an app that takes up much less of the screen. And what if I decide (because I have other apps I need to see) to put the app at the bottom of my screen. I now waste that 1/10 of a second moving my cursor to the top of the screen instead of just moving a little bit while I'm working in the window. So all in all a wash.
Speaking of Flip3D...
A couple of weeks ago, I was watching "Heroes." When they did their previews of next week's episode (sponsored by Microsoft Vista), they started off with this amusing Exposé effect, showing all the different windows. Then all the windows moved into the Flip3D interface and they scrolled through each clip.
Well, I was wondering if Exposé would support this. So I went over to my Mac and fired up a couple of videos in QuickTime player and hit the Exposé button. Sure enough, the videos kept playing even though the size was reduced.
Will Flip3D do this? Or was the effect done at NBC? I sort of assume it was, because of the opening Exposé effect and the fact that the video clip paused until it was brought to the front of the "stack." But I'd be curious to see what happens when you play a video and bring up the Flip3D effect. Unfortunately, I don't have a Vista machine to check this out with...
How can you compare a Mac's mouse against XP/Vista which is just software? Or are they comparing the drivers? Some clarity would be nice. It's all in the wrist as they say...
Introduction When Windows Vista was released in early 2007, a significant amount of attention was given to the new user interface called Aero, that sets out to give Windows a slicker look and feel and promises more fluid operation. But eye-candy aside, how does the new Aero interface stack up compared to Windows XP and Mac OS X in terms of low-level user interface efficiency? Given the previous lackluster track-record of Windows in terms of User Interface Friction, it seemed important to measure if the new release improved on some of the weak spots of previous releases, such as menu latency and mouse precision. What is User Interface Friction (UIF)? UIF is the resistance imposed upon a user-guided process through the operating system and the way the user interface reacts. In most cases, it has nothing to do with functionality: we use the term User Interface Friction to define the difference in fluidity and productivity that can be observed when running the same program or procedure on different computer systems, or when trying to achieve the goal on two similar digital devices. For a detailed discussion of User Interface Friction and its impact on productivity and efficiency, please refer to the User Interface Friction Research Report published by Pfeiffer Consulting in 2006. What were we looking for? These User Interface Friction benchmarks are not intended as a complete, all-encompassing assessment of Windows Vista or of the new Aero user interface: the key goal of these efficiency measures was to establish how Windows Vista impacts some key areas of User Interface Friction observed in previous releases of the Windows operating system. The benchmarks compared Windows Vista running the new Aero user interface to Windows XP SP2 on one hand, and to Mac OS X 10.4.8 on the other. The benchmarks covered three distinct aspects of User Interface Friction: Menu latency, common desktop operations, and mouse precision and efficiency, a factor particularly important in tasks that require precise positioning of the mouse. (Please refer to the full benchmark report for more details on this subject). Key Results There is no doubt that the Aero user interface provides a much slicker user interface than previous releases of Windows: Vista includes a much more sophisticated rendering engine that can scale both text and images in a much more aesthetic way than, for instance, Windows XP. In addition, some functionality provided by Windows Vista can make a user more efficient, since the operating system provides better feedback when several documents are open, and can speed up the process of switching between open windows. But while the graphics of the new user interface are more sophisticated, Windows Vista, and particularly the new Aero user interface design, fared less well in the User Interface Friction benchmarks than Windows XP. Mac OS X came out as the clear overall winner in these benchmarks. Problem Area 1: Menu Latency Menu Latency remains one of the key culprits of User Interface Friction on Windows: the slight lag that Windows imposes when displaying menus and submenus may seem minimal, but these delays add up, and they certainly can make working with Windows Vista less fluid than with Windows XP or Mac OS X. On average, Windows Vista was 20% slower than Windows XP in the menu latency benchmarks conducted for the project. Problem Area 1: Desktop Operations Benchmarks of common desktop operations (opening folders, deleting elements, etc) also show Windows Vista/Aero at a clear disadvantage over Windows XP. Some of these issues are linked to questionable user interface design decisions. As an example, Windows Vista does not simply display the new window when a folder is opened, but uses a fade-in effect. Amusing at first, the additional lag obviously adds to the perceived (and measurable) User Interface Friction, and can become annoying over time. Windows Vista with Aero was the slowest in these tests, scoring an average of 2.73 seconds per operation, compared to 2.34 seconds for Windows XP, and 1.50 seconds for
You are in a maze of twisty little message boxes, all alike.
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What the He11 are you talking about? Ive had a Mac Book Pro since they shipped and have no such issue. Several of my employees have them also and ive just asked and none of them know wtf your talking about. Either youve got something wrong or you've "got" something wrong.
. I love the sound of burning women and screaming rubber....
Are you using a wireless keyboard an mouse with your mac, if so it will probably be the keyboard/mouse waking from a sleep mode
I turned off that "ignore trackpad while typing" feature a long time ago. Didn't help. Besides, I have a bluetooth mouse and observe the same exact behavior. This is not a hardware problem.
When Windows Vista was released in early 2007, a significant amount of attention was given to the new user interface called Aero, that sets out to give Windows a slicker look and feel and promises more fluid operation.
But eye-candy aside, how does the new Aero interface stack up compared to Windows XP and Mac OS X in terms of low-level user interface efficiency? Given the previous lackluster track-record of Windows in terms of User Interface Friction, it seemed important to measure if the new release improved on some of the weak spots of previous releases, such as menu latency and mouse precision.
What is User Interface Friction (UIF)?
UIF is the resistance imposed upon a user-guided process through the operating system and the way the user interface reacts. In most cases, it has nothing to do with functionality: we use the term User Interface Friction to define the difference in fluidity and productivity that can be observed when running the same program or procedure on different computer systems, or when trying to achieve the goal on two similar digital devices.
For a detailed discussion of User Interface Friction and its impact on productivity and efficiency, please refer to the User Interface Friction Research Report published by Pfeiffer Consulting in 2006.
What were we looking for?
These User Interface Friction benchmarks are not intended as a complete, all-encompassing assessment of Windows Vista or of the new Aero user interface: the key goal of these efficiency measures was to establish how Windows Vista impacts some key areas of User Interface Friction observed in previous releases of the Windows operating system.
The benchmarks compared Windows Vista running the new Aero user interface to Windows XP SP2 on one hand, and to Mac OS X 10.4.8 on the other.
The benchmarks covered three distinct aspects of User Interface Friction: Menu latency, common desktop operations, and mouse precision and efficiency, a factor particularly important in tasks that require precise positioning of the mouse. (Please refer to the full benchmark report for more details on this subject).
Key Results
There is no doubt that the Aero user interface provides a much slicker user interface than previous releases of Windows: Vista includes a much more sophisticated rendering engine that can scale both text and images in a much more aesthetic way than, for instance, Windows XP.
In addition, some functionality provided by Windows Vista can make a user more efficient, since the operating system provides better feedback when several documents are open, and can speed up the process of switching between open windows.
But while the graphics of the new user interface are more sophisticated, Windows Vista, and particularly the new Aero user interface design, fared less well in the User Interface Friction benchmarks than Windows XP. Mac OS X came out as the clear overall winner in these benchmarks.
Problem Area 1: Menu Latency
Menu Latency remains one of the key culprits of User Interface Friction on Windows: the slight lag that Windows imposes when displaying menus and submenus may seem minimal, but these delays add up, and they certainly can make working with Windows Vista less fluid than with Windows XP or Mac OS X. On average, Windows Vista was 20% slower than Windows XP in the menu latency benchmarks conducted for the project.
Problem Area 1: Desktop Operations
Benchmarks of common desktop operations (opening folders, deleting elements, etc) also show Windows Vista/Aero at a clear disadvantage over Windows XP. Some of these issues are linked to questionable user interface design decisions. As an example, Windows Vista does not simply display the new window when a folder is opened, but uses a fade-in effect. Amusing at first, the additional lag obviously adds to the perceived (and measurable) User Interface Friction, and can become annoying over time.
Windows Vista with Aero was t
Don't know don't use it but is it possible that Windows is finally butting heads with its own complexity and the fact that it's a big object stitched together by lots of dissimilar design groups? Or maybe it's a problem that they wanted to create a Windows for everyone everywhere on every device from Cell phones to home theaters to PCs to who knows what?
After all they proudly trotted out their new SOUND that they took a few million dollars to develop. If that isn't pitching into the brambles and losing track of what you're doing, I don't know what is.
I got Vista on a Dell laptop, work related - don't start. And there is no way in hell I am paying an extra $10 for media, just so I can wipe my arse with it!
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
If I failed it, blame my sluggish Vista UI.
Spoken like someone who didn't read any of the material. Look and feel, menu styles, modal vs non-modal, etc. were not considered and Fitt's law, as absurd as it is, played no part in their claims of greater mouse precision.
"More precise mouse movements take more time, and that cuts into your productivity."
Funny thing is that they claim that OS X mouse movements are inherently more precise though they produced no definitive data to back that claim up. Anyone who thinks for a moment will realize how stupid a claim that is.
No, it's not a sleep issue. With the mouse clicks, I always do some kind of movement before clicking, so it's definitely awake. Also, I used the built-in keyboard, so that's not going to sleep when I lose keypresses.
That feature would be a little useless considering Windows apps gain and lose focus as a single window.
[RIAA] says its concern is artists. That's true, in just the sense that a cattle rancher is concerned about its cattle.
They are measure hardware accuracy and blaming the OS? Why?
If I use my precision gaming mouse I get much higher precision than with a standard old ball mouse, so how can I blame the OS?
The fundamental reasoning behind such a test suggests a desire to paint Windows in a bad light (like you need to go to such lenghts to begin with, lol), I mean, what kind of crap passes as a study today?
If I write a driver that interacts with my hardware and I get quality input from the hardware, I'll get quality results mapped to the screen. It's that simple.
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Yes, it works if all the bells and whistles are turned on. At least one of the launcher bar apps out there supports running video on Vista, also.
[RIAA] says its concern is artists. That's true, in just the sense that a cattle rancher is concerned about its cattle.
I also mostly use the keyboard, and one thing that a lot of people forget with OS X is to turn on the full keyboard control. Without it OS X is well behind Windows in terms of keyboard shortcuts, with full keyboard access enabled it is well ahead.
System Preferences > Keyboard & Mouse > 'Full Keyboard Access', change it to 'All Controls'.
With that enabled, OS X is much more controllable by keyboard and much more consistent than Windows. In ANY standard dialogue box ESC is always cancel, Spacebar is option and Return is default (for example, Cancel, Don't Save and Save in a save dialogue). In the same preference pane you can add custom shortcuts for any menu item you want or look up the nice hidden ones (i.e. hovering your cursor over a word in any app and hitting ctrl-apple-D pops up a dictionary definition of the word. Selecting text and hitting apple-shift-L does a google search of that text).
Add in Quicksilver and you'll hardly ever need the mouse.
I am at a desktop machine right now and not my laptop so I can't quite remember the setting. However, under the mouse/keyboard system pref there is a setting for 'Ignore Mouse while Typing' or some such thing. When I first got a powerbook with a trackpad, this annoyed me to no end so I turned it off and lived with the fact that my cursor would jump all over the screen while I was typing. The newer machines are much better than they used to be (even on a 17" where the trackpad is huge) but the main thing is just a matter of re-training yourself...your wrists have to be completely off of the trackpad.
As to why you might be losing mouse clicks, are you also having a battery problem? A coworker of mine was complaining about strange mouse behaviour and a couple of days later came in with a distended battery that had been growing and pushing on the trackpad from beneath. Apple is replacing the battery and when they checked it out, noticed that it had dislodged the trackpad connector.
A very subjective review with no hard facts about Vista... And featured on SlashDot, how could this be?
#1) What drivers were used? The optimized ones from NVidia or ATI? Vista has a new Video subsystem with a new driver model, and NVidia and ATI have had to write their drivers from scratch, something that maturity of the XP and other OS drivers just don't have.
#2) Was Aero left on to get the speed improvements? Turning off Aero reduces Vista video performance to XP levels, and turns off many of the accelerated features.
#3) Usability is addressed, but based on what grounds? MS spends millions on usability testing, are we all to be so stupid to conclude that their research in this area is not somewhat valid? Are they taking new users, old file manager type users, Mac users, or what? Facts please.
#4) File copy performance? Again based on what circumstances? Our internal tests show Vista can shove mass amounts of files in many settings several times faster than XP, also without exhausting the system RAM or cache as XP and prior NT bases would. I would like to see how these numbers were obtained.
#5) Menu lag? Again, was Aero turned off, how could they be showing numbers that are in direct contrast to our testing? If Aero is enabled, the UI is not only more responsive, but things like Menus and Windows opening are significantly faster than XP and especially OSX.
#6) Mouse precision? This has to be a joke right? The Windows Input model allows for extremely high resolution devices, and is SOLELY based on the input device used. If you pick up a high resolution mouse that obtains 10x the precision that a low end mouse provides in Vista it is very measurable and based upon the device. If you select another input device like a Wacom Tablet, your input resolution can be adjusted based on the device to scale in factors to several 1000 times the variances they use as examples in the article.
This can easily be demonstrated by a simple example, Ink Input in Vista is extremely high resolution, and captures at an extremely high rate.
Are they using a generic mouse and just hooking it up to the systems to get these numbers?
The mouse precision is the biggest joke of the article...
1) Icons: While extremely detailed icons are very pretty, it is a demonstrable fact that they decrease efficiency. Psychology research tells us that the increased visual processing required by a complex image guarantees that more time will be spent identifying that image. The older, visually uncluttered icons can be much more rapidly processed by the brain and thus make fast work easier. While this may seem insignificant, it is actually more mentally draining over the course of a day and when one adds up the losses for an 8 hour/day user per year, it becomes quite significant. I would observe that this same detail deleteriously affects the "graphically improved" card games.
2) Start Menu: The new system has some benefits and some detriments. In attempting to organize my start menu, I found that it was necessary to engage in a minimum of six key strokes in order to create a folder in the start menu and that does not actually include the strokes involved in actually typing the name. Further, while certain elements of the start menu seem to be nice initially, such as the explorer-esque way that folders are collapsed and expanded, in practice it actually requires more time to navigate when one has opened the wrong folder. A tree system like that on XP seems to be more efficient. I would note that the search feature which has been so praised is an efficiency nightmare unless one intends to memorize the start menu names applied to all of the programs they run.
3) My Experiences running vista: On a brand new laptop fresh from HP, I have now had it crash six times in 5 days. One of those crashes actually provided we with the blue screen of death, which screen I have not seen in the last three or four years of using XP. Further, upon "shutting down," my wireless capacity is lost. Upon resuming from sleep, not only does Vista fail to connect to networks, but it cannot even see those networks. The only solution that I have as of yet found is to reboot the computer.
Positives There are some features that I do like on Vista. I really appreciate the fact that services have been given a tab in the Task manager. I am quite happy that Microsoft changed the directory structure for user directories to include the desktop within the user's files. This makes backups which seek to avoid program state information easier. The search feature can in certain circumstances also be useful. While I have not used them excessively, the new navigation tools within folder windows may also turn out to be quite useful as well.
At work, I use a Intel Mac Mini for my programming, and one thing I noticed is how IMPRECISE the pointer is when I try to grab corners or click on the "traffic light" buttons. Now it can be the fault of my crappy Microsoft mouse, but it happens frequently enough that it makes me think that there is some lag between my mouse and the OS.
As for Vista, one my slow Windows box, it felt snappier than XP in terms of menus and selections, and the precision felt the same, except for grabbing corners of windows.
Good to know. My next computer is going to be a Mac, and I'd really miss the keyboard menu navigation. Windows has had "you won't always have a mouse" built into it from the earliest versions, when computers didn't regularly come with them, and it's something I've always appreciated.
what part of tweakXP do you not understand?
Furthermore that is a delay NOT lag. Lag would the time between when something is supposed to happen and when it actually happens.
User hovers over menu item -> Configured delay -> OS starts drawing the menu item -> Lag -> OS displays menu item.
Two seperate issues wich granted may be easily confused because without checking what the delay setting is it is hard to determine what causes the time difference between mouse over and popup.
The article should be clearer on this, and you should learn NOT to assume that a setting wich exists in XP is the cause of something in Vista.
Finally, if there is a delay build in (to prevent constant popups as you browse the menu) then any futher delay is unforgiveable as the OS should use that delay time to prepare the popup. Or is that a little bit too much to expect of a modern GUI?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Microsoft was never a brand associated with quality.
Who gives a fuck?
http://www.freebsd.org/
"Efficiency" in the UI in Vista is an improvement over XP. I find anyone that says otherwise has a bias opinion.
Though the changes to Explorer may take a little getting used to, they are nothing more than changes. If you can not adjust to changes, this does not amount to a UI or a non-user friendly user interface.
I do miss the drop down menu allowing me to select a drive/partition though as opposed to clicking in the left pane. You may be able to enable that in Vista. If so, I haven't checked on that. Either way, it's a few seconds of my life that I lose. Big deal.
Friendliness and efficiency is much improved over XP. One vast improvement that I absolutely love over XP is that you can copy a directory/folder structure into a similar structured set of folders and it will ask you how you want to do it. You have the option of writing over any existing files, but not destroying the entire existing structure of that folder and it's subfolders. This was not the case in XP.
Also, for example if you are deleting all files in your temporary folder and several files can not be deleted, because they are in use, you have the option of just skipping those files. The entire process does not bomb out forcing you to try again while not selecting the files that are in use (as you would in XP - which was an inconvenience and a bit retarded). It's lack of features such as this in XP that made me drop to a command prompt and use my DOS skills from the early days, because it was so much easier and faster to work with files in DOS (for some things) than any GUI has come close to in any GUI operating system. Of course, a lot of file work is easier with GUI, but certain things I can do 10x faster in DOS. Wildcards are a god-send in DOS.
that the menu is always in the same place. This way, I find myself actually using the "Window" menu on a Mac, whereas on Win/Lin systems I only use ctrl+tab, which is slower if there are many windows.
So you've also realized why Windows and Linux desktops & application UIs are fundamentally broken. Congrats.
I wish I'd bought a mac ten years earlier.
The irony of this is that one of my whinges about Windows is that menus and filesystem operations are slow when they shouldn't be. Expanding the control panel from the start menu. Put a CD into the computer and open windows explorer. It won't display because it is loading the CD, which blocks me from working with stuff on local drives. If you have a windows explorer window open to a networked drive that becomes unavailable (eg VPN closed), the window locks up for some time. Why mingle the processes to mount volumes with the processes to display them?
One would hope things like this would get better with time not worse. Obviously a vain hope.
meh
Before getting into a lengthy discussion regarding the pros and cons of the report, maybe we should consider whether the report is even a valuable source of information?
1. It was put together by http://pfeifferreport.com/, presumably by the principal Andreas Pfeiffer.
2. The website looks like it was created by a teenager using frontpage.
3. The Vista/MAC UI comparison report is, apparently, the only reports in the last 19 years this company has done as can be seen here: https://pfeifferreport.com/store/index.php
4. I can find no notable mention of Andreas Pfeiffer anywhere. He claims he's an industry expert, but I have no idea what he is basing that on. Contrast this by googling on John C. Dvorak, a real IT industry expert, and you'll see what I mean.
You decide, but for my money I wouldn't put too much weight on the report.
I like the menu at the top, because then it remains in the same place, and I can move my windows anywhere I like (and they take less space). This way, using the menu is always fast and consistent whether you have visual memory or not.
On Mac, the connection between the application and its windows is actually tighter than on windows: switching to an app shows all (nonhidden) windows for that application. This way you really don't need virtual desktops (I don't know why they bothered adding them to Leopard).
... if you use a keyboard instead of the mouse, you can't beat windows, both XP and Vista. OS X isn't as keyboard friendly. It's nearly there, but its pitfalls limit productivity as you have to reach for the mouse to click a control, or use multiple shortcuts to change windows. I've used OS X extensively (being an IT contractor for mainly marketing firms - sorry), I get exposed to many offices using plenty of Macs, and having to use what hardware they do, I've used it for months. And the non-standard keyboard layout, but I guess I'm getting off-topic.
Hey, I am not defending Vista at all, and these metrics do say something in terms of how "polished" the interface is, but give me a fucking break -- latency of menus? What a bullshit metric that is!
When was the last time you wanted to throw a shoe into the monitor because the menu had messed up latency?
I know it was long long long before yesterday, when I wanted to throw a shoe into the monitor because Windows Update rebooted my machine without saving my open documents. Now that's the kind of shit that matters.
These metrics are a bunch of self-important wankery. I bet I can come up with a set of metrics that will highlight the Windows Vista interface and make it seem better than the Apple interface (amount of fully obscured background information anyone? yeah, transparenty helps this metric)
OSX has the WORST mouse control EVER !!!!!!!!!!!! It is only passable by users who have never used Windows. I hate it ! Mouse acceleration is RETARDED. Why no check box for on off ? OSX is like a straight jacket. Plus OSX is a big fat HOG. Anyone who is running the same apps on XP and OSX with a Mac Pro will agree. It's indisputable. All those shinny windows an dumb window transitions are for children, plus they slow everything down. Personally I want to compute with my computer. Long live Win XP. (Vista should be a desktop plugin for Win XP, or at the most a tiny upgrade to Explorer.exe)
>
Sorry, this tells the story - typical french anti-American sentiments, looking for non-existing french greatness!
Dandy, with love from Germany.
This is a link to an apple centric web-site that talks about a company that benchmarks apple software. Independant yes, unbiased? hrmmmm....
I used to handle most of the graphics duties at my company. As Photoshop changed through version 2.5-7.0, the keyboard shortcuts and tool icon layouts changed as well. For instance, the Paint Bucket/Flood-fill tool used to be accessible with the "B" key, but in a major version change, it was available on a toggle with the Gradient tool attached to the "G" key. Also, version 5 let me toggle between the Pen and Pencil tools with "P", but that has changed (to "K", I think, and the pencil and pen are on different tool sets).
Thankfully, "Pan" is still accessible with the spacebar, the full-screen toggle is still "F", and I can hide all tool pallettes with a press of the TAB key.
I no longer handle the graphics duties, and the "B" key may or may not have been the actual shortcut key. The problem I'm trying to address is that of catering professional tools to casual or occasional users, and changing what professional users have integrated into their muscle memory. If someone relies solely upon their eyes and the mouse to accomplish their tasks, they will never achieve enough speed increase to affect their overall efficiency.
As an example, if I am working in a visual medium, be it page layout, a word processor, photo editing package, a video-editing suite, or even sight-reading music, as soon as I shift my focus from the visual input (to find a tool or some other click target, or to look at my fingers on the keyboard), I loose synchronicity, which directly impacts my efficiency/productivity.
Sorry for ranting. I love Photoshop, and I don't like the ability to position tool pallettes on a separate monitor, unless that monitor is a touchpad next to my keyboard, which it never has been.
Why don't I like it when a menu "slides" open? It's because I often already know what I want from the menu, and I will subconsciously start to move the mouse roughly in the direction where the item I want will be, while my eyes gather more information to position the mouse exactly over the correct item. If a menu "slides in" or "fades in" or whatever, the feedback I get to position the mouse correctly is delayed (fade in), or even wrong (when sliding in as the item is still moving).
Position is often the thing people remember the best. I don't need to know what most application icons look like, but I do know that a specific program or file icon is somewhere on the top left, or somewhere left halfway down the screen. Windows on my taskbar are exactly the same, I know roughtly where I left the window -- that's why I completely hate stacking of similar windows. I often have multiple browser windows open (even when using Firefox) and I know the "slashdot" window is somewhere on the left or whatever... stacking 5 other windows on that button and then forcing me to read the title to get the correct window is ludicrous -- especially because if I click wrong, I need to repeat the process again (and if I'm lucky the "stacked" order hasn't changed). If I click wrong with all the tasks simply unstacked, I go back with the mouse to the same area, click the wrong one again (so it minimizes) then shift slightly and click the right one. Stacking of similar items makes all of that harder... the sole benefit it has is that I can read (a very small part of) the title on the button (something I never do since I locate the window by knowing where I left it) yet obscures many other titles because they're stacked.
Not all effects are necessarily bad from a usability standpoint. Showing where a minimized window is going might actually be good (if subtle and fast enough). I usually find however that just turning off all animations/slides/fades/transparancy/you-name-it is a far saner default to start from. I even turn off gif animations in my browser... once you get used to the nice static pages without anything flashing or animating 50 times per second you'll really wonder how you could stand all that crap on web pages before...
But this isn't why. A lot of efficiency is lost for the sake of security, and an increase in CPU cycles needed is a given. If this weren't worth the compromise, we'd all be using Windows 3.0.
I hate grammar Nazi's.
Bruce Tognazzini has long taken Microsoft to task for their methodology. Tog, who used to work for Apple, believed in using real, objective metrics -- video of users, using stopwatches to measure time intervals, etc. Microsoft relies more heavily on questionnaires and other subjective criteria. In other words, to contrast the two approaches, Apple's approach is that the stopwatch never lies; Microsoft's approach emphasizes what users think makes them fast or more productive, rather than what actually makes the users faster or more productive.
But really, this all boils down to the logical fallacy of assuming that just because a corporation spends a lot of money on something, they spent their money well (instead of, say, spending the money as a smoke-screen to appear that they've done their homework).
The points about menu speed and mouse precision are actually valid ones, though the article probably doesn't explain these issues as well as it should. The mouse precision issue isn't so much a product of the mouse's resolution, but rather, the way in which Microsoft handles things like cascading/hierarchical menus, icon hit zones, and the like. Tog wrote an excellent article about Fitts' Law which gets mentioned every so often, and it's still a good article which really reams Microsoft on a number of points. Pay attention to Question 6 and its answer, for example; this directly bears on menu performance and indirectly on how the mouse is used by typical users.
For those too lazy to follow the link...
To be fair, Tog also takes Apple to task, especially since Apple broke some of its own UI guidelines in OS X.
All that said, my personal experience with Windows 2000, Windows XP, and the Vista previews I've seen seems to indicate a general negative trend with UI responsiveness. Menu rendering lag is especially bad in XP, though I will concede that some of the problem may be due to the insane system load imposed by my (corporate mandated) anti-virus software.
Of course, since you're a MS partisan, you'll deny everything I've just said, but I figured I'd inject something here just to try and add a little balance.
Closing note: Since TFA is lean on details, I actually followed the link in TFA to the source material only to find out that it's strictly for-pay. (You can download a PDF of the table of contents for free, but that's not very useful.) So I can understand why you'd find the article to be "a very subjective review with no hard facts." It's not even that -- it's an executive summary of someone else's work. I'm simply not willing to fork over the money to read someone else's analysis.
if you talk about "MS technologies", you are talking about ONE technology ONLY . This is named "MONEY"the buy everything the wants - parts of theyr Os'es(and still buying and even "exchange"-ing(w/some MS-sponsored Coder Competitions(The are outnumbered - here , in US ans overseas) for "shiny and new" SW boxes), office suite parts, SQL sever, - EVERYTHING ?!! 30000(or about) MS programmers - INCOMPARABLE w thousands of millions free-will programmers !! not scientology slaves inside "Scientology icebreaker", codenamed "Microsoft corporation".. the don't even worry about their profitability !! because theyr "Business" - blackfunded by cash !! yes !! yes !! MS unprofitable piece of junk !! wapon of mass destruction in hands of D. Miscavage - to brainwash Earth and turn them into Alienated Concentration Camp... to Enslave OUTER WORLDS !! FOREVER !! ironically - PR-ing self as "anticomunistic" and pro-american-style corp... founded by peoples, who's guided by Soviet Military intellygency agent - Hovard Habbard. Say (try say ;-) about theyr "treasures" to outnumbered(but top-sicret, of course :) Russian sailor, putted thousand of gold and daimond in hidded caches around world, mostly - undersea... still cursing G.H. , because - HArdworking such way - aqualing w overload - too risky...
what ?!!!
*knock-knock...*
I RTFA, it was an accident! Pfeiffer Consulting basically makes a claim, but without showing evidence. I am thinking about KDE, and Gnome in Pfeiffer Consulting's testing also. Can anyone show the anchor to Pfeiffer Consulting's test data? Is there a similiar test page that has all 4 Desk Top Manager GUI's tested?
"Slowly, one by one, the Penguins steal my sanity." - Unknown
I agree that Aero is more about selling software on "wow" than about selling software on "powerful or efficient interface". However, you don't even use a new sentence to make a generalized and above all false statement about the usability of a Macintosh, and about those who would say otherwise.
Your view is uninformed, is not born out by scientific research, and is clearly not even tempered by more than toe-in-the-pool experience with the interface you decry. People who study human interface design or ergonomics in general do not reach your conclusions, because empirical evidence points away from it. Despite the fall of MacOS's usability since MacOS 8/9 (arguably 7), it STILL makes fewer interface screwups and does more things right than any version of Windows THAT HAS EVER SHIPPED. How much state does the user manage in OSX vs take-your-pick among Windows? How visually efficient? How spatially efficient? How targeting efficient? How targeting accurate? And how stupid is a tiling environment in lieu of a true windowing environment? In every single case, The Macintosh interface remains measurably better.
Ah, but you said "productive". Maybe you even grant me my efficiency arguments, and still claim that the Macintosh environment on the whole is more limiting than the Windows environment. As I said, you've obviously never done more than dipped your toe in the Macintosh, and you just don't want to like it, and snob right back to the only environment you've ever known as well as you know Windows: Windows. I have what is apparently news to you: you've got it backwards. If you want to tally configuration options, you must omit those which are redundant or which work around non-UI-related design flaws, and this has hit ever version of Windows starting with 95 on quite hard. Meanwhile, MacOS's stupidities have ebbed and flowed and generally increased from the Classic to OSX versions, but remain more coherent.
"Oh, but the network configuration tool isn't exactly the one I'm familiar with!" "Where's the One Menu For Everything, Which is Dumb But I Don't Even Realize That?" Please. There are differences, but you are not hamstrung. Your unfamiliarity with an environment does not affect said environment's usability one bit. The fact that you've invested in a different, and less optimal if more widespread working environment is circumstantial and not indicative.
Your (annoyingly common) obliquely stated opinion that computers can only be more powerful if they are harder to use is demonstrably false because it's a special case and not a general rule for all possible systems.
They say you need 4 GB of RAM to achieve "RAM sweetspot" so what do you expect.... Kudos to Microsoft for producing another resource hogging masterpiece!
Yeah, I have no idea how they got 0.08 on the mac.
I tried it on my iMac with the old (but still very hip) round mouse. Best I could get was 1.72.
I use Xp Pro on a 2 Ghz Athalon with 2 Gigs pc3200 ram on the mobo. I built it 2 years ago. (I used to run Millenium till it crashed irrevocably on the internet one day.) User interface along with how much system resources get eaten up by all that eye candy has got to factor into Vista's alledged pokeyness. Of course, if someone got a Vista system with 1 gig of ram and went ahead with a cpu that had less ram on the die of the chip- say a Celeron or a Sempron, well- hardware is part of system resources and it must be accounted for when running a high overhead os.
You know I think I get the same thing while playing WOW. Either that or I just suck.
Two tears in a bucket. Motherfuck it.
1. *Cold Boot*, immediately holding down the Apple + Option + O + F keys. Your Mac will boot into Open Firmware.
2. Type reset-nvram and hit Enter.
3. Type reset-all and hit Enter. Your Mac will restart.
4. Immediately hold down the Apple + Option + P + R keys. Your Mac will start-up chime and then restart again. Continue to keep the keys down until you hear the start-up chime a total of 3 times and then release the keys to start up normally.
If your Adobe Suite still misbehaves, try deleting their Preferences and starting with Factory settings. If they still misbehave, try reinstalling them.
Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, START
Our user interfaces should consist of command areas and edit areas arranged in a nice fashion. A command area would allow the user to execute an action or change some other area to a different display. An edit area would allow the user to edit data.
For example, opening a file in a word processor should be like this:
1.the user clicks the 'open document' button.
2.the work area opens a list of documents. The previously open document is iconified as a button in a display area with the open jobs. The user can press this button and bring up the document at any time, even when selecting a file to open.
3.the user selects the file or files to open. The list of documents is removed and the document is opened in the work area.
Editing styles in a word processor should be like this:
1. select the text to apply the formatting to
2. select a style to be applied from a list of styles. If the list of styles is not open, then hit the button which says 'styles' to open the list of available styles in another area.
Editing options in a word processor should be like this:
1. hit the button which says 'options'. The main work area is filled with a set of command and edit areas that allow the selection of options.
2. edit the options. You can get to the documents or other tasks at any time, by clicking the relevant button.
3. when satisfied, click 'save options'. If not satisfied, click 'cancel changes'.
Exiting the word processor should be like this:
1. hit the exit button.
2. all open documents are saved as they are. There is no question to cancel changes. The system keeps previous versions and changes for all data, so if the user wants to go back, he/she simply can select a previous version. The system should even save the data automatically.
The first screen that the user should see is a list of commands that define activities that one can do with the computer. For example:
1. edit a document.
2. edit a spreadsheet.
3. play a game.
4. exit.
This screen should always be available with the click of a button.
Drag-n-drop is also wrong, because it forces the user to hold down the mouse button while paying attention to the little mouse icon to the screen while being very careful to select the appropriate area, all while the mouse buttons stay pressed. It requires hand-to-eye coordination that not all people may have. A better approach would be to have a button which says 'select data', and another button which says 'move data' or 'copy data'.
Double-clicking is also wrong. I have seen countless examples of older people not remembering when they should double- or single-click. As I get older, I even mix it up myself.
All commands and edit areas should be approachable/navigatable by the keyboard. The mouse would be available as an input device, of course, but all actions should be ultimately accessible by the keyboard, which is a much faster way of operating. All applications should have command mode and edit mode, with command mode being the default one. If it sounds like vi, it is because it is like vi, but with the exception that the options are visible all the time on the screen!
Ultimately, all screens should be touch screens where options can be selected with touching them. There shouldn't even be a keyboard: when text editing was required, a portion of the screen should display the available symbols (which may not be the alphabet letters in many cases).
You can run multiple commands in a for loop by using brackets after the do. Here is a stupid example. It will rename each file to "hi" and then rename it back again. See footnote 1 for information on the && and || operators.
C:\> for %i in (*.txt) do (ren "%i" hi && ren hi "%i")
You are not limited to doing it on a single line either. Try the following: (do not type in the "More?")
C:\> for %i in (*.txt) do (
More? ren "%i" hi
More? if not exist "%i" echo it worked
More? ren hi "%i"
More? )
To make things less messy, you can add a @ before the ( to turn echo off. This will prevent each line of script from displaying while running.
C:\> for %i in (*.txt) do @(ren "%i" hi && ren hi "%i")
The bracket blocks can also be used with if statements, can be embedded and can have the output piped to another program. For example:
C:\> if exist file.txt @(
More? for %i in (*.txt) do @(
More? echo hi
More? echo %i
More? )
More? echo Done
More? ) | sort
It is well worth having a look at the help of the for command using "for /?". It is amazing what it can do, even if the interface is a bit clunky. It would even help with your problem of parsing of the output of other programs. In this example, the for command iterates over the output of at, and if it finds an entry that will run today, then it stores the ID of the entry into the environment variable TODAYID. You can then use this to delete the entry.
C:\> for /F "skip=2 tokens=1,2" %i in ('at') do @if "%j"=="Today" set TODAYID=%i
/delete
C:\> at %TODAYID%
Of course, in this situation the variable in not required to delete the at entry. You would normally just do it on the for line itself.
Finally, have a look at the help for the set command with "set /?". There is some interesting stuff there, including text substitution of variables with %MYVAR:oldtext=newtext%. More importantly, it talks about the limitations of using variables inside blocks. Variables are processed at the parsing stage, so a command line of: set myvar=fish && echo %myvar% will display the old value of myvar because the substitution happens before the set command is run. The help text tells you how to get around this.
** Footnotes **
Footnote 1. The && and || operators work the same as they do in bash. && will call the next command if the previous one succeeded while || calls the next command if the previous one failed. They are shortcuts for doing "if errorlevel" statements. EG. Assume that you have a file called file.txt
C:\> ren file.txt file.txt.bak && echo It worked || echo It failed
It worked
Now do it again, but now file.txt no longer exists:
C:\> ren file.txt file.txt.bak && echo It worked || echo It failed
It failed
Footnote 2. If you want to rename all the files in the current directory to another name and then immediately rename them back again to exactly as they were (as my example code does), you can use the special "rename multiple" command, or REM command. Once again it uses some magic operators, but the usage would be:
C:\> REM (*.txt ;-)
Run this, and you will be amazed to find that your files are exactly as they were to begin with.
Do all Vista/Aero debates turn into Mac trumpet blowing exercises.
No, really !
Menus? That's sooooo Office 2003/IE6! We don't have menus anymore! Move along, nothing to see here...
Is games. For details, see Gears of War, Fable, Viva Pinata etc.
A man chooses, a slave obeys - Andrew Ryan.