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."
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
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?
"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
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 recently downloaded Media Player 11, which shows off a bit of the Vista/Aero interface. Specifically, the minimize/maximize/close buttons in the upper left corner are done Vista-style. What I've noticed through use is that even though these buttons are physically bigger, they very frequently don't recognize my clicks, requiring me to go back and click it again, sometimes 3 or more times. Also, when I hit Alt, F, X (the sequence to exit using the menus in Media Player 10) about 4 times out of 5 the menu refuses to respond to my keystrokes, requiring me to stop, find the mouse, and click the appropriate action.
Obviously, because this is running on XP, I can't make claims as to the overall usability of Vista. However, if my experience is any indication of the way Vista behaves, I'm not suprised that such an article has been written, and I'd expect many more complaints as time goes on.
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! --
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
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.
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.
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.
"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 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.
You are realising Apple's seemingly successful strategy. Cancel or Allow?
You are in a maze of twisty little message boxes, all alike.
[ Cancel ] or [ Allow ]
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.
Loading...
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...
Microsoft was never a brand associated with quality.
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
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...
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.
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.