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Celebrate Your Next Birthday At the Microsoft Store
theodp writes "Chuck E. Cheese, meet Bill H. Gates. A leaked PowerPoint posted at Gizmodo provides a glimpse of what Microsoft's retail shops may look like, noting that you'll even be able to pay to celebrate your birthday there. Some of the stores that were profiled for ideas were Nike, Nokia, Sony, Apple, and AT&T. Microsoft's take on the Genius Bar is the Answers Bar (aka Guru Bar, Windows Bar)."
I'd say it's more that Apple is Geek Chic and Microsoft is more like a bunch of fucking nerds.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
It made me want to post a nigger joke just for contrast.
Menus with modal dialogs are inefficient and stupid. And they always were. Button bars are even worse for software where you mostly use the keyboard.
You are just being used to that horrible joke that MS Office used to be.
The new concept is a bad copy (as usual) of the InfoBox of Lotus SmartSuite programs (like WordPro). Not as bad as what they had before thought. But still worse than the original.
The idea is to see menus, icon bars and property dialogs as one thing. So you make them one thing. Which means you can change the state of your selection, run functions on it, etc. All with just one click. (Here is where it is bad, and where Lotus did it wrong too.. switching to the mouse? in a text editor? wtf?)
Not three clicks and then a stupid modal dialog. Not this pointless separation of menus, buttons and dialogs.
Of course, somehow, the MS Office variant still is some mutation of a menu concept, with everything thrown in there without a proper basic philosophy behind it.
But hey, at least it's a step into the right direction. I bet OpenOffice will imitate it soon. Just as unfortunately every open source software is imitating existing products. (KDE and Gnome both are nearly indistinguishable from Windows if you do not look closer, Firefox is taken from Opera, OpenOffice is the son of what MS Office imitated but nowadays it's the other way around, Amarok is a copy of iTunes, Thunderbird wants to become an Outlook, Compiz was made to get the visual FX of MacOS X and Vista, etc, etc, etc. Don't get me wrong. I love open source and fully support it. But that argument, to make it "more similar, so users will understand it" sickens me, because of its needy, weak, non-leading-and-never-will-like and chode-like (the PUA term) mindset.)
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Wait, what? You have a very poor grasp of history.
In any event, I don't even own a Mac, I'm a Linux user.
You know, a fucking nerd who lives in their parent's basement.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!