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Microsoft Ignores Usability With All-Caps Menu in Visual Studio
mikejuk writes "The recent release of Visual Studio 2012 contained a UI element that few believed could make it into the final version — ALL-CAPS menus. After lots of user criticism and disbelief, Microsoft has moved swiftly to do something about it — by tweaking the typography. '... we explored designs with and without uppercase styling. In the end we determined it to be a very effective way of providing structure and emphasis to the top menu area in Visual Studio 2012.' This must be a new meaning of the word 'structure,' because putting the menu items into all-caps means that they are all the same height. When each menu items starts with a cap then there is structure because you can see the change in height, marking the start of the next menu item. The idea that putting a menu into all caps adds structure is something that is very difficult to see. If you wanted to put structure into a menu, well how about color? Oh wait, I forgot the design department dumped color in favour of the 'everything-is-grey UI.' Developers are the people who invented CamelCase to make sure that the structure of run together words would stand out better — and now we are asked to believe that making a menu all-caps adds structure. I don't think so."
You see, MS is so hip, so ahead of the curve, that they know already that COBOL is about to come back into style in the developer world. Soon everything will be in all caps, mainframes will be all the rage, and GUI's will be passe. Apple will be behind the times with their over-designed software, and MS will be out in front with their all caps, command-line interface only version of Windows 9--renamed "DOS 9 FOR TERMINALS."
GOOD JOB, MICROSOFT!
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
Iâ(TM)m horrified. Absolutely shocked. I tell you, this is the final nail in Microsoft and Visual Studioâ(TM)s coffin. Oh, and âoeMy eyes, it burns! The goggles do nothing!â
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Previously barring a lot of eye candy that could be turned off , MS did generally get their UI about right. Now with spillover effect from Win8 they seem to have completely lost the plot and this is simply an example of them reloading the gun once more to take aim at whatever is left of their feet.
This is the company that gave us the ribbon. Otherwise known as the chaos strip, since it seems to randomly rearrange itself to ensure that function you're looking for is never less than half a dozen clicks away. It's a bit like a supermarket, where they deliberately move stuff around in order to make shoppers seek out the things they usually buy in the hope they might chance across - and end up buying - things they haven't seen before.
It seems that all of the newest UIs - whether they are from Microsoft, Google, Apple, etc. - all suck. They are flat, colorless, abominations where you can't even tell what the user interface elements do or if they are even supposed to be user interface elements. I spent a good amount of time yesterday and today in Visual Studio 2010 and it has a very nice UI. I know they need to "newify" everything in order to say "new and improved" - but damn. All upper case, all grey, all lame.
As I understand it road signs (or many of them) in the UK used to be in caps but studies showed that mixed-case was much easier to read (which mattered more as cars got faster) since we're looking for familiar patterns.
Looks like Microsoft will need to re-learn this lesson...
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge"
- Charles Darwin
Only someone who has a website with such bad usability can truly see horrible usability in others' work.
When each menu items starts with a cap then there is structure because you can see the change in height, marking the start of the next menu item.
Call me blind. But this rant is blown out of proportion. He's complaining about structure, yet there is a very clearly delimited blank space between menu items a blank space which is much large than present in the mixed case version. In fact, I find it a lot easier to read the menu item word in the all capital version compared to the mixed case most based on the large spacing alone.
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
"Developers are the people who invented CamelCase"
I think chemists has developers beat by a century or two. Now please pass the NaCl.
Maybe we can come up with backronyms for each of them, that way, like the SQL menu, they can all be acronyms that require capitalization.
... desire to migrate my team to Eclipse.
Sock Puppets: damn_registrars=pudge_confirmer=jimmy_slimmy=raiigunner=cml4524=a_klavan=red4men=ronpaulisanidiot
Regardless of one's feelings on Microsoft, that company has consistently and continually tried to make their user interfaces as attractive and easy to use as is possible. They've gone through the effort to develop fonts, to determine how to add pseudo-3d effects, how to space things and how to define icons and sizes. Whatever your beef with Redmond, the UI is the one thing that I will wholeheartedly disagree with you about in almost all circumstances.
If they dropped the ball here, then that's absolutely amazing. Literally amazing. They've built a company and made some of the richest people in the world on how pretty and easy to use their software products are, at the expense of what those interfaces run on for lower level code. If they're losing touch with UI now, that doesn't bode well for them for the long term. They certainly won't disappear, but their non-OS products would lose market share and once people stop being locked in to their non-OS products, they have little reason to stay with the OS itself if other vendors have multiOS versions of competing products.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
The answer is simple, the person that was dictating the names of the menus was a very loud one. So his assistant wrote exactly what he was DICTATING!!!
At what point did Microsoft need a justification for anything they do? They just do what they want and expect others to live with it. Look at Windows ME. Look at Vista. It is only when users won't pay they back down.
The article, which is based on a blog post, mentions that it is not obvious how to change the case. If you read the blog post it says they haven't settled on how Microsoft will expose a change of case feature. My guess is you'll have to customize the menu, just like what's been done in Visual Studio for years.
=================
Unix is very user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are.
This is such a laughably bad decision, I can't see it making its way into the final product. I even tried to type this post in all-caps, but /. reminded me that it was wrong. When it comes to something people have known and taken for granted for years, it seems very odd that Microsoft would go backwards and decide on this. Exactly where is the leadership for this project?
Historically speaking, you really could have stopped right there.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Of course it may be that they put an idiot in charge of the look and feel for their developer tools. Given how they've already been one through one firestorm of criticism for using monochromatic icons that could well be the case too.
How come they haven't created a 'ribbon menu' for Visual Studio? Perhaps this is tacit admission that the Ribbon Menu sucks and is inefficient.
love is just extroverted narcissism
This guy here somehow has managed the feat to have both... and then has the gall to pontificate about usability!
Congratulations!
Somebody nuke it from orbit before the madness spreads to the rest of the country.
I'm no Apple fan, but somebody on another forum made a great point... Apple doesn't force iOS-like interfaces on desktop users... so WTF is Microsoft so hell bent to do this? It's like they have a perpetual hard on for anything Metro now.
Is there something I'm missing here? I do not want Metro on my desktop. Windows 7 does everything pretty well, and Windows 8 adds NOTHING that I would care to add to Windows 7.
Windows 8 is not an enhancement, it's a terrible compromise that isn't needed in the first place.
Now we developers are being forced to wallow into the mind-numbing Metro-style crap, just to use the latest tools, even if we stick with Win7. Really?
Regardless of one's feelings on Microsoft, that company has consistently and continually tried to make their user interfaces as attractive and easy to use as is possible.
Which only proves that trying hard does not mean you will necessarily succeed.
Circumcision is child abuse.
it's been circulating on teh internets _atleast_ since late May.Once VS start reporting back that more and more people are reverting back to regular style menus they'll make it an option inside VS itself, albeit hidden behind some rarely used obscure menu. Nothing to see here, carry on.
Seriously?
What happened to the "if it's not broken, don't fix it" motto? Did anyone complain that the menu list, that everyone knows where it is and what is there to expect, did not stand out enough? Or that it lacked any other visual property? At least with the ribbon they tried re-thinking the topic "menu" and took a shot at providing something different (whether you like it or not is another topic). What exactly were they trying to achieve with this modification? What a horrible waste of resources...
For the record, I find it a bit childish and old-fashioned in caps, but, actually, I couldn't care less.
Mod up! This is absurdly true. Office got a new interface that it didn't need that seems no better (just different) from its last interface. Now the same thing is being done for windows. Why not just add a "Tablet/Phone Shell Mode" and be done with it? I'd me much more interested in a faster file system, fast, usable search (still waiting, Microsoft), fewer blue screens, Azure presented in such a way that anyone can host any windows application, legacy or not (Once again, they miss the obvious).
In the last 20 years, Microsoft has been busy solving problems nobody I know seems to have had. I guess they're just going to continue the tradition.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
This is going to break compatibility for most modern screen readers. "EFF EYE ELL EE" is going to old pretty quickly.
Developing software for a global bank many moons ago, the software recipients preferred/required capitalized menu items and input fields. As English was not their first language, they explained that CAPS were easier for them to read.
So either Microsoft's focus group is global or their developers are
"Obligatory" bash quote
I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of killer sig, which this margin is too narrow to contain.
The blink tag never left, just like the marquee tag. Seriously, try them out. They work in almost all browsers.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
Author of notorious blog "I Programmer" ignores usability and readability by cramming entire articles into a fixed-width page and using only 1/4 of that fixed-width for content.
The all-caps menu is irksome and MS has gotten plenty of vitriolic feedback about it. Why does /. feed that horrible blog's hits with this pointless article?
I wonder if a simple adding can fix this. Just walk the menus and change the labels?
The are trying to pull off an Apple - they think if they impose a UI of some "stylish artsy type" and enforce it (eg. Metro), that then somehow that will translate into their stock prices going up 100x.
They forgot that Apple's UI has that thing called usability while being "stylish artsy type" too.
Sounds like someone forgot to take there OCD meds.
They make change for change's sake, like car companies. I still hate the icon-based Office 2010.
The pictures are meaningless for user "discovery", AKA the process where people figure out what is where. So it offers nothing over purely text-based menus and just uses up valuable screen real estate. I love having all those fat bars taking up a grand total of almost 50% of the screen space, crowding out the actual data.
"Oh! You can reduce them! Just go into blah blah blah cmd prompt tar -xvf..."
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Next up: They are going to replace Clippy with a flying chair.
Have gnu, will travel.
My fucking tools and workbench are not you damn designer plaything Microsoft
As long as you continue to purchase your tools from Microsoft, that's exactly what they are!
I went to eat some animal crackers and the box said, "Do not eat if seal is broken." I opened the box and sure enough..
If you go to the source, http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudio/archive/2012/06/05/a-design-with-all-caps.aspx, they note that there will be an option to disable it.
There's also a blog post that shows the registry key that works today to disable it.
True, but their consistent domineering market share in OS and productivity suite markets does speak to their general success. Even their arguable failures like Microsoft Bob and Windows Vista have given them things that could be integrated in to other products or could be revised as whole products.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
The uppercase is deck chairs. The uppercase does make it look a little cleaner; yes, and the tradeoff is a little harder to read. Not a big deal either way. But if you've read any of the Windows Metro philosophy papers, the "chrome" was supposed to go away and be replaced with blank panels, clean typography, images, and animation -- in short, give desktop apps the same clean appearance as iPhone apps. Then why is there still a strip of little-used icons? Does anyone really click the floppy icon to save? No, of course, not. You either click CTRL-S, or, since it's Visual Studio (and I don't know why Borland and Eclipse don't do this), you just click "Build" and it saves automatically. And all the other icons, I still don't know what they do after 20 years of using Visual Studio.
After reading the Metro philosophy papers, I was initially excited. I was eager to see how Microsoft was going to adapt its products to the new philosophy. Now I see that has gone the way of Longhorn WinFS. And besides, I've since realized that it's better to target HTML5 (with Canvas -- pixels finally come to HTML) than Metro anyway.
> In the last 20 years, Microsoft has been busy solving
> problems nobody I know seems to have had.
That's not entirely fair. In the last 10 years, Microsoft has been very busy solving problems they themselves created in the previous 10 years.
That being said, Windows 8 is looking like they're ready to start another 10 year cycle of creating new problems.
Log in or piss off.
THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH ALL CAPS TEXT!!!!!!! IT DOESN'T MAKE IT SHOUTING!!!! NEITHER DO EXCLAMATION MARKS!!!! THEY ARE JUST EXTRA PIXELS ON THE SCREEN AND DON"T GENERATE ANY NOISE!!!!@!$!# YOU IDIOTS!!@!%!*!(!)p0!-!!!
loppity loppity lpooity loppity loppity loo loppity loo tru-da loo bopppity boo boppity Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Aenean augue est, venenatis nec porta a, pellentesque commodo quam. Vestibulum elementum velit commodo mauris accumsan tempus. Ut sagittis feugiat dui ac vestibulum. Morbi ut mi eu nunc fermentum lobortis. Pellentesque vitae est arcu, id vestibulum lorem. Ut nibh felis, semper vel lobortis sed, fermentum in dui. Etiam nec lacus viverra nisl varius fringilla a et tellus. Suspendisse vitae purus eget leo vehicula euismod eget quis metus. Proin dapibus velit non turpis aliquet adipiscing. Aenean in pharetra dolor. Morbi hendrerit dolor nec tortor laoreet sagittis. Proin vel tempus enim.
In the 90s, when mass computing was new, software from Microsoft was designed by young, arrogant 20-somethings with no thought for usability or the needs of customers, usually business customers. It's 2012 now, not 1992. The world changed - Microsoft hasn't. Users got older and less tolerant of giggly nonsense and unstable systems. They don't want to learn new stuff. They want to get their tasks done. Period. Businesses need results, not the latest and coolest anything. Cobol still exists for a reason.
Apple got this, and succeeded, and even stayed culturally cool. Their software is about the task, not the software itself. Microsoft still hasn't got it. The culture of arrogant, don't-give-a-shit-about-you-if-you-can't-figure-it-out, cool, 20-something males is still very much in evidence in each release.
Grow up Microsoft. Nobody cares about you or your software. The moment there's a better, equally affordable alternative (which Linux could be if marketed correctly), there we all go. Make it easy, be polite and never, never patronize and you might have a chance at survival, but I'm not betting on it.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Define "Mainframe". From what I can see, "mainframe" is a term for very expensive ultra performance hardware.
Nah, it's more than that. It's about redundancy, high I/O relative to compute power, optimization for throughput rather than latency, and high availability.
"Regardless of one's feelings on Microsoft, that company has consistently and continually tried to make their user interfaces as attractive and easy to use as is possible."
Are you talking about the same Microsoft I know?
Oh, right, they're "trying".
Does it make you happy you're so strange?
Not everyone does the job for fun.
I have been doing all my development work in Eclipse for the last 5-6 years. However for this specific Windows C++ project I needed to use Visual Studio. Like it or not I have a life to manage. Otherwise why would I do programming day and night at the age of 40, with a PhD in computer science? Salary of a PhD university staff is less than $1500/month and that's not enough (considering that I spent savings of 10 years of my hard work to reach the PhD dream of mine).
When I turned into Visual studio 2012 RC hoping that it will provide better compiler, error messages, error preview and editor, I could not bear it even for 20 minutes:
- The error list uses dark gray texts on gray background (my almost old eyes could not bear it...). ...
- Clicking on an item in errors list would open the source on bottom output/error dock! in a new tab.
- Tabs were on bottom (like the class and solution explorer), now they occupy additional space on top.
- Menus are caps
- You feel bored in a gray and flat environment after 12 hours of programming daily
Meh, using mere ALL CAPS is so ASCII. Can't they at least use CJK doublewidth ("fullwidth") characters (U+FF00..U+FF7E) for yelling? Everything but Slashdot can support those.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
"Metro" seems to have a very loose definition within Microsoft.
It's like "Sandwich". Unless you explicitly define the types of bread, types of filling, types of condiments, and way of cutting it, each department is going to end up with their own very different sandwich. Ham and cheese on a bun, PB&J on white bread, possibly some pita wrap, and eventually some bizarre abomination from someone with no kitchen skills whatsoever.
The problem is that the corporation is too large and unwieldy to properly enforce the design goals throughout.
Does it make you happy you're so strange?
Clearly, whoever wrote that article is not a designer. Capital letters are NOT inherently more difficult to read. They're more difficult when you've got a paragraph of text. But when you're talking about buttons and menu items they can aid in legibility and emphasis.
In my experience programmers make for the worst designers. Admittedly they have specific needs, but like anyone else they're slaves to habit. So just because they want something a certain way doesn't necessarily make it right. There's always backlash when someone deviates from the expected, even if it's for the better.
I actually like the all caps approach. The menu items are very clear and legible. They're a lot more distinct than in the traditional initial caps approach. Now, you could argue that it makes them too prominent. It may also have the side effect of de-emphasizing the Application title too far.
So to suggest that this approach somehow ignores usability is ridiculous.
I notice that the article also takes a jab at the all-grey interface. If they're going to knock Microsoft for this then they should take aim at the worst offender of all: Apple. I've always found that Windows provides enough contrast between windows, using distinct borders and colored headers, that it's fairly easy to pick them out. In OSX, however, everything blends together.
I do find it amusing that this I Programmer site is dumping on Microsoft for something so minor when the site itself looks like total shit. Look at that freaking logo of theirs.
We all know VS is and always has been the worst IDE in the world.
Knock, knock.
WHO'S THERE?
The Worst IDE in the World.
Oh, hi, Apple's XCode! Now GTFO.
Sock Puppets: damn_registrars=pudge_confirmer=jimmy_slimmy=raiigunner=cml4524=a_klavan=red4men=ronpaulisanidiot
As much as I loathe Microsoft and everything they do, it’s silly to post this as a news story. Who’s Mike James, a.k.a. “mikejuk”? What’s this other than his opinion? Does he have any design and usability chops to speak of, so we can treat this as anything other than trolling? I’m willing to believe that they actually conducted real usability studies and decided to try this because it worked better. Even the Ribbon, which I personally hate, was a hit with most users.
Is it generally considered appropriate for authors to submit their own “stories” to Slashdot?
. Like it or not I have a life to manage..............after 12 hours of programming daily
You need to manage that better.
Also, you can use Eclipse to edit Visual Studio projects, if you like that better.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Actually, look again. It does take up more of the screen. They even moved an element to a different row to make up for the loss.
Nah, it's more than that. It's about redundancy, high I/O relative to compute power, optimization for throughput rather than latency, and high availability.
Well, in the banking industry, e.g., all these things actually do qualify as performance.
Ezekiel 23:20
Speaking of Windows 8, maybe they should just get rid of the menus altogether! Instead, you should have to point to an invisible, 2-pixel-wide area of the lower-left corner of the window to see a full-screen page of active tiles representing what Visual Studio can do with your project. Each tile should move, spin, twirl, or change color in some way to keep your eyes busy while you look for the item you want. And since it's hard to do multi-touch on a desktop, it should require two mice to operate!
Change for it's own sake? Surely not! M$ has to give people some reason to buy new licenses. They've run out of innovations, so they've turned to... whatever this is.
Indeed. We have reached a point where the current GUIs cannot be taken much further, so all there is left to do is to wank over little things like this.
But then again I don't really like Metro. The design changes are consistent with the new UI for the OS IMHO. Capital or "block" letters are boxy like metro tiles. Lack of colour makes the code stand out more which is consistent with the whole content not controls idea of a metro app. That said when I'm looking for a control it damn well be clearly visible which one I want to click on which is what I don't like about the new UI. They added a bit more colour since the beta but still kind of dull.
A work around could have been to have the colour "pop out" if you are moving the mouse over the toolbars (actual mouse movement not just having the pointer happen to be on a menu).
All uppercase menus simply looks amateur. Reminds me of a typical Geocities web page. How many commercial applications (besides Visual Studio) have you seen with all uppercase menus and dialog text....
I'm surprised at all of this. While I agree that the mixed case menu looks better, I don't see why this is a big enough deal for someone to write an entire article about. I certainly was surprised that the editors would deem this submission interesting enough to select. I'm even more surprised by the huge interest posters have in it. When I saw the menu, I thought it was not as good as the old one but then immediately said "well, whatever" and moved on with trying out the new visual studio. It didn't really get in my way or anything like that. While I think the mixed case menus are more appealing, the whole time I read the article and the comments here on slashdot the word "nitpicking" kept coming to mind.
If developers really don't have anything better to worry about, then times as an IT dev are even better than I thought they were.
I just wanted to say M$ isn't the only one 'solving' problems nobody but a loud-whining-few had.
We can looks to scores of changes to many OS' and respective UIs, only half of which real people wanted or even needed. Yet simple things we asked for that actually affect our lives seem to never get addressed properly.
Decades later, we still have the notion that in order to eject a cd, you need to throw it into the trash bin! Regardless of the used-to-be-functional button on the drive itself, which of course is disabled because....."we know better"
Or, point your finger at ANY linux distro and claim multiple monitors works right, I dare you. But hey, taking UI element control OUT was the way to go there right?!
Yes Gnome, staring at your collective asses. I won't even go into the other poor attempts some have made.
What gets me, is the ideas in computing now seem to be as lame as the ideas coming out of Hollywood. "Let's make it all shades of grey, you know so it looks hip!" - who here honestly didn't see that in their heads? These ideas are being fed to us as if they are new, as if they help us somehow, they aren't and they don't, unless of course you are trying to do work on some underpowered toy with no real input options designed for work, speed, ergonomics....shit, anything that drove peripheral improvement over the last 20 years.
Newest version of FF is an example....now on what used to be a clean start page, I have monstrous buttons for things I almost never use.....all to make some future tablet user happy. Thanks for the awful waste of space guys! Rock on!
I swear this shit looks like it was developed over at Playskool.
UK road signs were changed to their current style after testing in 1958, there's a nice summary on the BBC. This new mixed upper and lower case style became legally required on 01 January 1965.
So yes indeed, typographical designers understood this in the UK quite a while before it was a widely discussed computer interface debate..
the all-caps version is considerably wider and I'd prefer if my menus weren't YELLING AT ME.
Nah. Ribbon is objectively better than the previous office UI, just look at all the usability studies they did. Watch Jensen Harris's talk about it.
On the other hand, this is just another fad. People have been capitalising letters in every possible way over time. We had the WordPerfects of the world, we had iPods, we had flickr and finally the obvious next step was to try FILE EDIT VIEW PROJECT BUILD DEBUG TEAM SQL DATA DESIGN FORMAT TOOLS TEST ARCHITECTURE ANALYZE WINDOW HELP.
I personally believe the problem is that they themselves are so blind to their own UI through oversaturation that they will do anything to make it temporarily noticeable. Give them time and one by one they will suddenly snap out of it and go ugh.
I prefer the mixture of case, but regardless of that argument.... 17 menus? I thought the whole idea of the "The Ribbon" was Microsoft's way to counter the excessive amount of menu items and text heavy nature of reading everything. (I'm not advocating for the Ribbon here! We need as much screen real estate as possible!) Perhaps categorise the menus better and turn some into icons? Window and Help could be shoved over to the right. Then give Architecture and Analyze a toolbar, not a menu bar. I don't imagine everyone will use them frequently (I may be wrong). Perhaps the Data and/or "deployment" options could be put on a side panel. Or who knows, perhaps small icons next to the items, like the "yellow database cylinders" next to data. Dear Microsoft When You Have Lots Of Menu Items Your Eyes Get Tired Reading Every Change Of Case On Small Words You Must Do Better!
The other problem is that Apple's UIs really are stylish and attractive. Sure, they cost too much and are basically like electronic prisons, but it's hard to deny that they really know their aesthetics. Microsoft, OTOH, keeps trying to be stylish, but usually ends up failing badly at it, and making something that looks comical or just plain ugly.
Well, they have certainly managed to implement the "fewer blue screens" feature. Can't remember the last time I've seen one. Must be a few years by now.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
Why would you want main menu to stand out? It's on top of the window precisely so that you always know where it's at without it shouting for attention.
Besides which, in an IDE, main menu is a control mechanism of last resort. For most common actions, you'd use a shortcut, with toolbar second next.
Bactrian vs Dromedary
(My main environment is Eclipse supplemented with emacs/gcc/autotools).
The thing with a pure editor / makefile / compiler environment is the lack of refactoring tools.
For example, with eclipse, I can rename a method / class or add parameters / remove them and the IDE with auto-update all classes I have opened in the workspace with the new signature / name.
Sure, it's dangerous, but isn't using sed /awk or perl to do the same thing equally dangerous (gotta write a regexp every time...).
Then there is also the gui for debugging. I can gdb session with the best of them, but remembering the various incantations to walk structures and examine memory is far more time consuming than a few clicky clicks.
These tools alone are worth it, not to mention not waiting for ctags to rebuild.
It is pretty clear to a lot of us that MS has suffered what all other major corporations have, the stratification of their management. When you are told, paid, and treated like you can do no wrong then dammit you can do no wrong.
Being an independent contractor I can say that when I tell such execs that they are wrong about something I can see their eyes light up with anger. How dare I correct them. But then they realize they can't abuse me like they do their other employees and its a crap shoot as to if they are going to listen to me then. If they don't well I just double my fee and work around it.
However I much prefer to work at my normal rate and work with people. It not only lets me work better but my work product also tends to be better in such an environment.
Really, I know what I'm doing...Ohhhh, look at the shiny buttons!
I installed the German language pack and now I think visual studio is very angry with me.
The long-ago meaning of ^Z (end-of-file on CP/M and Heathkit's HDOS) is nearly lost in the mists of time, but ^H and ^J are still wired into Real Geeks as Backspace and Linefeed... it would be difficult to overwrite those meanings with any other shortcuts.
Actually, it speaks more the success of their illegal and anti-competitive practices than anything else. Microsoft had to prevent the competition from being pre-installed on computers for Windows to succeed. Then they used the monopoly rents from Windows to outspend Word Perfect and Corel. Even then, they also engaged in underhanded sabotage of their competition to ensure their victory.
Frankly, the Xbox 360 is about the only Microsoft product that I can think of that may have succeeded mostly on it's own merits.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
Maybe the crappy people moved to their UI division.
You are kidding me right? They've consistently went through and pushed their shit out to us without caring about what we need. Windows 7 has that snap to open full screen windows bullshit. *I FUCKING HATE AND LOATHE IT*
It was never default in the past 25 of windows. So in Win7, gratuitous change. I know a lot of windows people do not understand the concept of multiple overlapping windows, each showing only the data you need to see, but instead, have to maximize every single window. BUT TO TURN THAT INTO DEFAULT?! WTF?!
Microsoft has always been about pushing their shit to you (ribbons? *puke* Metro? *double puke*), and if it happened that it was something useful, well, as a user, you were just lucky.
I still say no, what Visual Studio has done is created to many modern day programmers who can't use a terminal and have no efficency. I only focus in C and ASM programming and the last thing I would ever use is Visual Studio, in fact is passes it's C through a C++ compiler which works but it a really really bad idea because it allows weak programming. Eclipse is okay and if you wanted a feature to auto refactor just write it and build it in, That way your editor has all the feature you want and nothing more. There are also many good GUI's to gdb if you want to go that way.
Reminds me of this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUXnJraKM3k
Note: apparently this video was made by some people in Microsoft. So those bunch might actually have a clue when it comes to taste... But wouldn't that make their work rather painful for them?
Illegal tying of OS to hardware, etc etc (go read how BeOS signed a deal with a laptop manufacturer to offer BeOS as an alternate OS, and how Microsoft forced them to "hide" that option.
They dominate not because they were good (go read how early Office versions would have access to secret APIs that competitors did not have), but because they pulled a shitload of dirty tricks.
And then people like you conveniently forget or gloss over those facts.
VS 2012 is the first VS version I will skip because it is an epic fail in UX and UI design on almost every significant level.
Lets all party like its 1989!!
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
oh, how I wish I hadn't commented earlier... i need modpoints! :)
Heh. Did you ever see this? How Microsoft could redesign/reimagine the iPod packaging. Created by Microsoft's own marketing dept.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUXnJraKM3k
For me, the best example of how crappy the Notes interface is was a time when I had to use it back in the late '90s. I accidentally bumped my hand against the numeric keypad and deleted a local mail archive. The "." key (with Num Lock off because I was still using DOS) did a Delete command on the currently selected icon, and the Enter key next to it confirmed the delete. Also, it didn't just delete the database file containing the mail. First, it overwrote the header to delete all records, and then it deleted the file, rendering an un-erase useless. Thanks, Bloats! Fortunately I didn't really need what was in that file.
And I had to use Bloats again for a few months in 2008 or so. The UI was generally no more better, except now it had some HTML stuff grafted into it.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
Oh listen to the Johnny Trustbuster, Neckbeard esquire. I'm only surprised you didn't use the risible term "convicted monopolist".
You ignore the fact that they had already been overwhelmingly chosen by users at that point, and in addition they only did that for a very short period of time.
They are the standard because it was natural that there be one dominant OS due to applications being tied to platform.
Let's see if they falter in the next decade, because you whiners can't even use that excuse now. You can run all sorts of apps online, or on various platforms so the only reason now to choose Windows is you prefer it.
Either you have literally no idea what you're talking about or you are an incredibly sarcastic person. Take your pick.
Yes, it's basically true, though I've not seen every issue on the page.
The interface got better over the years, such as on v6, but there are still numerous poorly designed features. Yes I say design, not bugs. For example, the lack of horz scroll bar that has to be enabled in a menu. Someone or multiple someones went out of their way to fuck that up *on purpose.*
Many of the "features" persist I believe out of spite. The one that bugged me the most was the fact that preferences were spread out over multiple places. To change a setting, you'd have to search all of them.
#6495ED - cornflower blue
1995 called, and the System Admins who write scripts in Bash and Perl called. They indicate they want their outdated complaint back.
This "debate" was settled long ago, in most cases for any serious software you are officially a clueless dinosaur if you don't use an IDE if one is available.
What's funny is you have no idea how ridiculous you sound to most professional software developers (except crusty old farts writing device drivers and a few other valid exceptions).
You're doing dinosaur development, and your opinion is invalid for other types of software such as anything written in Java, C#, most script languages, etc...
The cost of trying to satisfy every need is chaos. That's what Microsoft is. Apple is the opposite and that is why most businesses can't adopt it. It's simply too confined and cost too much. Then you have the Unix, BSD and Linux of this world that are no different than Microsoft in many ways but aren't as popular as an end user OS.
All this to say I'm sticking to VS2010. :)
Trololo
Well, since you're an anonymous little troll, you're probably just looking in the mirror.
Like not being able to use a second screen while fullscreening an app?
Sorry, but "usability" for me means to be able to do stuff. Ans not having everything smooth around for up to 3 seconds until i can work with it again.
WTF did Apple do to XCode's Find/Replace in the past couple of years? That in-window pane thing that steals focus all the time is absolutely horrid! And that flashing color thing on the found text is really distracting, too.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
> Mod up! This is absurdly true. Office got a new interface that it didn't need that seems no better (just different) from its last interface
This is due to their business model. Thet must change things every couple of years (make things slightly incompatible or inconsistent) to drive revenue. If they stopped breaking thins then they lose a lot of money. That is why hey drop their techologies for "teh new shiney" every half-decade. Which means everyone investing in their tech will get shafted and loose a lot of the value of their investment. The old adage, "In order for Microsoft to win the customer must lose" is as true as it ever was.
This is one reason I'll always prefer Java to C# (plus, only the former is truly portable, and I live on Windows, Mac and Linux at various stages of my day). Java tech changes very conservatively - people see this is as a flaw but it actually means the 17 years of code your have accumulated (that is, invested time and effort in) still works nicely and is still supported by the tool creator.
what Visual Studio has done is created to many modern day programmers who can't use a terminal and have no efficency.
Using a terminal does not equate to efficiency.
Visual Studio, in fact is passes it's C through a C++ compiler which works but it a really really bad idea because it allows weak programming.
I have no idea why passing C through a C++ compiler "allows weak programming", given that C++ is generally more strict about things (e.g. it won't implicitly cast void* to any other pointer type).
But VS doesn't do that, either. If you give it a .c file, it'll compile it as C. In fact, it will compile it as C89, and it's rather anal retentive about it - for example, it won't even allow // comments, or variable declarations in the middle of the block.
Every version of XCode has been awful.. and it's actually getting worse, not better. XCode 3 would let you quickly reorder your source files alphabetically, XCode 4 - well, it's possible, but it's a pain in the ass.
Like everything else in XCode. A giant pain in the ass.
Sock Puppets: damn_registrars=pudge_confirmer=jimmy_slimmy=raiigunner=cml4524=a_klavan=red4men=ronpaulisanidiot
"Regardless of one's feelings on Microsoft, that company has consistently and continually tried to make their user interfaces as attractive and easy to use as is possible."
Are you talking about the same Microsoft I know?
Oh, right, they're "trying".
Lest ye not be too quick to judge, that mayest thou consider: a physician engages in the art of "practice!"
Boot Windows, Linux, and ESX over the network for free.
Decades later, we still have the notion that in order to eject a cd, you need to throw it into the trash bin! Regardless of the used-to-be-functional button on the drive itself, which of course is disabled because....."we know better"
The eject button on my CD/DVD drive works. Of course, if a file that is on the CD/DVD is open, ejecting is inhibited.
Don't try to out wierd me, three-eyes. I get stranger things than you, free with my breakfast cereal. --Zaphod Beeblebr
God bless all the nerds working on Wikipedia! Her name's Margaret Calvert and she has her own page, although they don't mention the uppercase / lowercase discussions. But yes, she talked on Top Gear about shape recognition and uc/lc issues.
Previously barring a lot of eye candy that could be turned off , MS did generally get their UI about right. Now with spillover effect from Win8 they seem to have completely lost the plot and this is simply an example of them reloading the gun once more to take aim at whatever is left of their feet.
It's not so much spillover from Win8 as the Ribbon UI and their general direction for UI design. It's all bad, and not in the bad ass kind of way - just plain bad.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
Ballmer's communication style (mostly screaming until you are hoarse and jumping around to get attention) is finally starting to assert itself in Microsoft's UI. Expect the next version to include characters that turn red and jump around, chanting when you mouseover them and screaming "GIVE IT UP FOR ME" when you click them:
FILE!
FILE!
FILE!
EDIT!
EDIT!
COPY!
YEAH! GIVE IT UP FOR ME!!!!
(Then you wait several seconds for your operating system to catch its breath.)
I for one am thankful that I know keyboard shortcuts.
Everything mentioned in the article was a problem (if you can call it that) in the beta but has already been changed in the Release Candidate. They listened to the criticisms and fixed it before the product shipped, what is the problem exactly?
--- CatsCradle
Which is how it should work, just backward. If a file is opened and you ask the system to eject the media the file should be forcibly closed and the media should be ejected, after at most a confirmation (preferably one that can be switched off by default).
Regardless of one's feelings on Microsoft, that company has consistently and continually tried to make their user interfaces as attractive and easy to use as is possible.
Attractive? Yes. Windows is the prettiest desktop out there. Useable? Hardly. Changing where the damned menu items are in every release is NOT useable. Having mouse setting other than in the control panel is not useable. Windows only seems useable to those who haven't used anything else.
They've gone through the effort to develop fonts, to determine how to add pseudo-3d effects, how to space things and how to define icons and sizes.
None of those things add to useability. Pretty? Yes. Useable? Hell no.
Free Martian Whores!
Mainframes are for reliability. They measure their uptime in years if not decades. They tend to emphasize I/O performance over computational. Virtualization is a given (and has been since the '60s). They also go to extremes for backward compatibility often implemented as a combination of hardware features and an emulator that uses them. It's not that uncommon to run an old emulator inside a newer emulator in order to be compatible with very old software.
These days, there are mainframes built up from commodity PC parts but with extra glue and a different architecture to preserve the mainframe characteristics.
Visual Studio and before that, Visual Basic and Visual C++ always had really lousy interfaces. When I first used VB I wrote exactly the same program in Delphi, and Delphi was easy to learn and pickup while VB was a constant struggle due to the design. Ie, put all of the hundred or so properties into a menu, sorted alphabetically, so that you use maximum mouse movement to set the 3 properties that you need. It was almost as if the UI for Visual Basic was designed by the typical Visual Basic user. Now I'm not a GUI developer at all, but even I can tell when something is messed up in the UI.
I can sounds ridiculous, doesn't matter to me. I don't need an IDE to do my development, I've writen an entire control systtem using Vim and Gcc and that was it, it was a massive code project for the college I'm at. ( Massive on the order of 100 000 lines of code )
How is C and ASM dinosaur development? C is still one of the most widely used developmentt languages.
You might be right, how ever the last time I tried that ( last week ) it would not let me use a .c extention or provide C standard flags.
how ever the last time I tried that ( last week ) it would not let me use a .c extention
How would a compiler prevent you from using a .c extension?
Or do you rather mean the IDE? I believe it doesn't have a .c file template in the Add New File project dialog, but you can add a .cpp (or a .txt) file and rename it.
or provide C standard flags.
What's a "C standard flag"?
_Shrug_.
To each his own. I know I personally am more productive using the IDE and not doing the boring repetitive refactoring by hand (renaming files, recompile, oops, missed one).
I have my eclipse C++ environment setup so that on file save of the .cpp files, eclipse simply calls "make -j 3" and I get nice coloured syntax highlighted problems I can click on to get to the file.
I get all the goodness of clear, documented build (autotools), with the benefits of modern code refactoring and syntax/error highlighting.
Debugging shows similar gains.
Doing these things by hand in emacs (which I do still do for performance critical parts needing SSE) is much more time consuming.
Work smarter, not harder .-)
If you wanted to put structure into a menu, well how about color? Oh wait, I forgot the design department dumped color in favour of the 'everything-is-grey UI.'
How do you determine if this writer was American or English? (Pause) -- That's correct, it's time for a horse race!
If you wanted to put structure into a menu, well how about color?
They're out of the gates, and "American Author" sprints into an early lead!
American: 1
English: 0
Oh wait, I forgot the design department dumped color
Ah, an obstruction in the track! "English Expositor" got its hoof stuck on a sodding large crumpet and is now clomping along alone like a Billy No-Mates! With such a slowdown, it may never catch up, just like the train schedule!
American: 2
English: 0
in favour of the
But wait, "American Author" has smelled the crumpet and is circling back to investigate! It looks like the rider is shouting to "American Author" at the top of his lungs that its going the wrong way, but he refuses to use his riding crop or otherwise take action to correct the problem.
Now "European Expositor" is gaining ground fast! A more in-depth genealogy analysis may very well reveal that Bob is, in fact, his uncle!
American: 2
English: 1
'everything-is-grey UI'
"European Expositor" has shaken off its handicap and they're on the home stretch! They're neck and neck across the finish line -- it's a tie!
American: 2
English: 2
To finish the story, the riders then dismounted and decided to play a tiebreaker match of football. It ended in another tie, one team scoring two touchdowns and the other netting twelve goals.
C standard flag as in -c89, -c99, c11 or what ever the compiler wants. I tried renaming it once and Visual Studio was pissed. I've never had luck using it so I gave up, everytime I try to use it there is some issue in the way and it's not worth my time or engery to change.
Hey if it works it works :-)
Some people can fly in terminal faster then a GUI, others can't. If your comfy using it then it's all up to you.
C standard flag as in -c89, -c99, c11 or what ever the compiler wants.
There's no standard form of these flags, so every compiler does their own thing. If you try to pass --std=c99 or something like that to VC, it will certainly be surprised.
Anyway, for C, it doesn't have any such flags because it only supports the original ANSI C89 / ISO C90. It does not support C99 or C11.
It's really because Orapple* patented lower-case
* They merged
Table-ized A.I.
I know they have different forms, I actually didn't know Visual Studio didn't support 99 or 11 but thats not a good thing so thats now another reason I don't see it's value. In either case to each there own.
The trash in the Dock turns into the international eject symbol when you start dragging something ejectable, on OS X. I'm not sure exactly when that started, at least a release or two ago.
(Decade_s_? I'd say you're at least 1.5 years too early... but I'm nitpicking here.)
Yes, they did that crap to preserve their dominance not to aquire it. I've heard it's very difficult to abuse a monopoly if you don't have one.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Wait a minute... Isn't 'CamelCase', really "camelCase" as in the hump is in the middle (with the first word always lowercase)? I was taught that what the author is describing is 'Pascal Case' -- where each word begins with a cap.
I really like Eclipse, it's my favorite IDE in fact, but VS is hardly the worst. Ever use XCode? I always have a good chuckle when I see the fanboys scramble to defend that monstrosity.
Fanboy Status: Apache Flex, C#, Eclipse, KDE, Pirate Party, Ron Paul, Slackware, Windows 7
I thought the definitions were like this:
A mainframe turns an I/O bound problem into a compute bound problem.
A supercomputer turns a compute bound problem into an I/O bound problem.
I can't remember where I found that.
It's never too late to have a happy childhood.
The other problem is that Apple's UIs really are stylish and attractive. Sure, they cost too much and are basically like electronic prisons, but it's hard to deny that they really know their aesthetics.
Maybe in hardware... but not in software. The Mac's software is not stylish and attractive, and I find it difficult to use sometimes.
Microsoft paid a pretty penny for this: http://www.theregister.co.uk/1999/11/05/how_ms_played_the_incompatibility/
yet, because of this, they captured the DOS market.
dlgOpen, because I don't know to what type of UI element the menu option is bound.
When ever I see someone using ALL CAPS in csr apps, I know we are not dealing with the brightest bulbs. There are very good reasons for punctuation let's innovate and use all lower case!
That was Bill Gates' avowed corporate strategy. I remember reading about a Gates interview in a 1990-something issue of Computerworld (I looked for the article but couldn't find it online) in which he said words to the effect that "I can't think of a worse reason to release new software than to fix bugs. People want features, not bug fixes." I was stunned by this (trying to run a 120-person IT shop on Win95) and reading it, I came to understand why MS products are always buggy and always different. "This changes everything" was corporate policy! It always seemed intuitively obvious that if a UI is a little messed up, you tweak and tune it. You don't toss it out and start afresh, thus pulling the rug out from under your installed base.
1997 called. It wants its complaint about Microsoft back.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
I have to say that I never thought I'd be applying the phrase "angry fruit salad" to a Microsoft UI, but Windows Phone/Metro is exactly that.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
I've also had to pick up VS2010 (for professional reasons) after a long time of using Eclipse, and the process has been painful.
More painful due to the fact that I'm also moving from Linux to Win7 at the same time.
Now, Win7 is nicer than XP, and VS2010 is nicer than the previous one I'd used some 6~8 years ago, but it's all the little details and annoying "features" in VS which make it so hard to pick up:
Document tabs now open on the left instead of the right. There's an option for that, but once the tabs overflow, their order becomes random.
No quick way to toggle code commentting (a-la eclipse's shift-ctrl-c). There's ctrl-k-c/u or something, but it's much less usable, it's much less intelligent in how it comments the code and it was crashing VS2010 so much I started just commenting manually.
Crappy automatic code formatting for c/c++.
Cryptic c/c++ error messages.
And others I can't remember now.
My theory is that they either designed it like this on purpose so that you can't easily jump to another IDE, or that it was designed in an echo chamber by past VS users who are (poorly) reinventing the wheel.
UI Churn.
Social Credit would solve everything...
If you can pay for "Visual Assist" it adds most of the features available in eclipse and makes life many times easier (Refactoring is the most important one).
Besides the strength of VC++ is the great visual debugger. I really like that and that alone is an important parameter why I may stay with that for development of Windows software.