Slashdot Mirror
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."
"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.
(...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.
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
I think what to include or not include in a study like this is the key. Apparently it's focused on mouse accuracy and menu clicking latency. If I had my druthers on how to improve my chosen OS (Linux), it would be nothing like that. Rather, it would focus on the number of minutes or hours (not milliseconds) required to perform tasks that still fill me with dread, such as network printing, or power management, or burning a video file to a DVD that a standalone player can read. Granted it's much harder to make meaningful measurements of such things, but I still think they're more important that mousing.
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.
An OS should be first and foremost both secure and fast. It should have a very small footprint and...
[...]
It should but does one modern OS have this?
OpenBSD
Trolling is a art,
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! --
That, and also, what kind of options did they have turned on?
I turned of menu fade in any system I'm on, be it Windows XP, BSD -w- KDE, whatever.
All of them display menus virtually instantly like that. Depending on which (KDE, Gnome, Windows), you start to notice slowdowns at various cuttoffs, KDE and Windows tend to slow down faster with decreased memory than CPU, Gnome with decreased CPU more than memory.
That being said, if Windows has a menu fading effect turned on and OS X does not, then there is a lot of bias right there. Also, if XP's fade is set to a shorter time, that's bias too.
Also, there's system information:
Did they compare systems with identical or close to identical hardware?
Did they compare systems with identical costs?
Ex:
Both systems had e6600 Core 2 Duo CPUs with 2GB of DDR2 800 and a 200GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0GB/s drive,
or
Both systems were $1800 from the leading manufacturer (say Apple and Dell for OS X and Vista/XP respectively)
I guess what I'm getting at is I'd really rather see the methods of the experiment rather than just the conclusions. It's not that I find it all that hard to believe (well, the mouse precision seems a little odd, I've never had an issue with the mouse selecting any pixel except that which I told it to click, even on precision stuff where actual pixel mattered - I can believe the menu performance potentially).
I didn't see an actual link to the report in the article, is it pay to read, or did I just miss it?
34486853790
Connection too slow for X forwarding? Try "ssh -CX user@host"
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.
No offense, but I see a lot more built-in bias in automatically discounting any article that says you can be productive on a Mac.
Anybody worth their salt will agree that the pretty widgets, animations, etc. on OS X are nothing but eye candy. But there are plenty of solid arguments for why OS X's interface still does a better job of facilitating productivity. Here are a few that come to mind. (Note that all of these points are orthogonal to cosmetic issues such as the particular bitmap that is used to draw a button.)
The standard Mac OS widgets offer a wider range of functionality than most equivalent Windows widgets. I find that I'm much more likely to feel the need to develop custom interface elements on Windows in order to get the behavior I need for exactly this reason. This leads to less consistency among applications, since different people tend to come up with different solutions to the same problem. Cocoa has done a much better job of cutting this off at the pass. A strong example is tables and tree views on Mac OS versus Windows.
OS X's interface doesn't condescend to the user as much or demand as much attention. There's also a much stronger culture of consistency for dialog messages. When using Windows, I spend a lot more time dismissing unnecessary dialogs and trying to figure out whether to click "yes" or "no" on a confusingly-worded confirmation dialog. (Like I said, this is largely cultural, but I put a lot of blame on Microsoft for this since they set an exceedingly bad example in their own OS - it's not uncommon for me to have to read a warning from the OS itself two or three times to figure out exactly what Windows is trying to say.)
OS X's interface is much more stable. For example, the sidebar in the Finder is static. The sidebar in the Explorer is constantly rearranging itself, adding and deleting items, etc. based on what folder or whatever-the-hell it is (control panel, network places) I'm looking at. It even changes when I select items. This leads to a lot of time spent scratching one's head trying to figure out, say, where the "Create New Folder" sidebar item went, or wondering why the Desktop link went away.
Apparently it's focused on mouse accuracy and menu clicking latency.
Sorry, no.
br> Mechanical aspects are just that - strictly mechanical. An 800dpi mouse with a crummy interface is better than a 300dpi mouse and a good interface and has nothing to do with strict user ability. This testing wasn't about ease of targeting based on mouse mechanics - it was about humans and how they make decisions. What is meant is how long you hunt around with the mouse trying to determine the next event that will serve your interests as defined by the current state of the OS, assuming the OS has accurately understood and reacted to you.
As you work with a new OS, you begin to establish a defined set of basic expectations. These are simultaneously calibrated against how reliable they appear to be to you, the wet ware. At some point, you have been trained by the system enough to move from experimentation and doubt as to what will or won't happen next, to Pavlovian reactions which are subsequently modified only as needed.
The original Mac OS was determined, by the US Govt., to take an average of 17 hours of initial use by an operator before they could be labeled trained and basically productive. In contrast, the Windows OS of that time required no less than 7 days before a hapless user was considered an asset.
Want to test yourself and your present OS? Close your eyes, or change the menus to another language and see if you can still hit the right button with the mouse as you operate the system, opening and saving files, etc. Nothing about shear mechanical accuracy or latency involved. It is just you and how well you know and trust the OS, reflecting how well the system was able to train you back when the two of you first met.