Let's see how they fare on the high end with the Lumia 1020. I don't know the exact figures, but I think they can afford more breathing space when they don't have to compete head-on for Android users. Instead, they went for a segment which may get users with preferences, taste and so on. Money from Microsoft doesn't hurt either.
It at least had the virtue of making some logical sense. And it's certainly better than the atrocious toolbar "ribbon" scheme of Office 2007/2010/2012
Odd, I find the ribbon organization more sensible and easier to navigate. But then again, there are plenty of people for whom the perfect way to use a computer is the one they have once learned. If that's the issue, just say it up front and stop mixing common sense and usability into this.
and the clusterfuck of disorganized colored tiles to find your applications arrayed for a TOUCHSCREEN that is Windows 8x...
Forget about the touchscreen, it's completely optional. Just organize the tiles the way you like and drop the ones you don't use. It's really easy, way easier than managing that dumping ground known as the Start menu.
By late 2010, Maemo/MeeGo was a once-promising OS ruined by swelling incompetence and lack of focus. I know it because I worked on it. Android won that battle. But switching to Android would get Nokia squeezed between Samsung and 500 cheap shops in China. They'd probably sell more units than they do now with WP, but the margins would have been atrocious.
Microsoft pretty much had the UI down when they released Windows 2000 and Office 97. Everything they've DONE to their UI since has been a step backward.
What do you know, overpopulated three-level menu clusterfucks and the institutional separation between menus and toolbars were the pinnacle of UI design accordingly to some people.
I dunno. Today I have installed Yelp with an augmented reality mode courtesy of Nokia (called, get this, "monocle"). The app is awesome. My bank has been providing an app since WP7. Even the oft-invoked Instagram has got a bunch of third-party apps that work with it. One is reportedly better than the first-party apps for other platforms, another is officially supported by Nokia. Even the Google PIM services are sort of supported, and I don't care that much about Google+ to need it on the phone (I'm planning to buy the new Nexus tablet to get my Android fix, after the kids broke the old one).
At this point, I'd stand to lose if I switch my phone to Android or iOS. Fully usable offline maps from Nokia are the biggest thing. Google only offers "OK maps" after their latest regressive update. Don't get me started on Apple maps.
when one member of your team decides to not play nice with the rest of the team.
If this is the case, you have bigger problems than a possibly poor choice of an SCCS.
With git, it's actually much harder for an asshole to wreak havoc, as the entire project history is cloned between all developers' machines and is cryptographically protected from being altered in ways that are hard to notice.
If you find a bug on a release, you fix it on the trunk, test it on the trunk for a while, then merge it out onto the (supposedly stable) release.
This is one of the few things where git's way of revision management actually gets in the way. You can't simply merge the trunk onto the release branch, because the trunk has all sorts of in-development changes that you don't necessarily want applied to the stable branch. You either have to cherry-pick the fix off the trunk, thus multiplying it in the history. Or, more cleanly IMHO, you base the bugfix branch off the stable branch, and merge it into trunk (all earlier changes reachable from the stable branch should already be reachable from trunk, so you should not get unwanted changes piggybacked this way). After you are happy with how it works in trunk, you can also land the bugfix onto the stable branch (sans the master merge commit), test it there, and release.
You must be the target audience then. The rest of the planet, or most of us anyway, are not.
For some specific definition of "us". I find little to no trouble using Windows 8 too, for the purposes I use Windows anyway. Some of the Metro stuff feels undeveloped, but they are working on it, and the classic alternatives are still there.
Many people complain that familiar, simple ways of doing things (such as shutting down by clicking Start -> Shut Down) have been removed, and they were forced to learn new, more complicated ways (hitting the power button).
Or take the Start menu. Since 1995, people have trained their muscle memories to find their favorite apps in the two- to three-level popup menu hierarchy. Now all they have is a dreadful start screen where everything is laid out in 2D in big whopping tiles. There is absolutely no sense of achievement in learning to navigate these. And the Metro app tiles also show a glimpse of the app state. Who could possibly find that useful? All it does is it makes my ADHD act up.
In therms of fostering app developers who fail to properly tombstone, if android ecosystem has taught us anything is that developers are content to churn out shoddy work and never care. A platform that *forces* the developer to do more work isn't a defensible feature when an alternative model has existed for decades without a lot of issue.
A vision of a platform, however niche, that prioritizes quality over quantity and penalizes writers of shoddy software appeared before my eyes for a moment... Can it be? From Microsoft? That would be delicate irony.
That's a different issue. I'm not defending the quality of the Current metro apps, some of them really leave a lot to be desired. I like Bing News and another news app, though.
Getting back to the (non-)problem of closing apps, this can actually be done manually through the application list.
So you are suggesting that Metro should foster shoddily written applications that cannot properly tombstone themselves and require manual lifecycle control? Then people who got used to apps exiting seamlessly on the mobile platforms get back to Windows and wonder why they need to bother with task management like it's still the 1990s.
What do you expect from people who miss a three-level menu of 1995 design vintage. They probably still think that the power button causes a hard power-off, like it did back in the days.
Fedora has done a couple of WTFs that alienated a large portion of the user base, and more importantly, the admin base.
Thanks for beginning with this statement. This is where I knew you are full of shit, so I have stopped reading. People making unsubstantiated claims about "a large portion of the user base" can always safely be ignored.
Slashdot Mirror
Cool theory, bro.
Let's see how they fare on the high end with the Lumia 1020.
I don't know the exact figures, but I think they can afford more breathing space when they don't have to compete head-on for Android users. Instead, they went for a segment which may get users with preferences, taste and so on. Money from Microsoft doesn't hurt either.
It at least had the virtue of making some logical sense. And it's certainly better than the atrocious toolbar "ribbon" scheme of Office 2007/2010/2012
Odd, I find the ribbon organization more sensible and easier to navigate. But then again, there are plenty of people for whom the perfect way to use a computer is the one they have once learned. If that's the issue, just say it up front and stop mixing common sense and usability into this.
and the clusterfuck of disorganized colored tiles to find your applications arrayed for a TOUCHSCREEN that is Windows 8x...
Forget about the touchscreen, it's completely optional. Just organize the tiles the way you like and drop the ones you don't use. It's really easy, way easier than managing that dumping ground known as the Start menu.
Have you already seen the beautiful software, or are you "dreaming out loud" on this too?
By late 2010, Maemo/MeeGo was a once-promising OS ruined by swelling incompetence and lack of focus. I know it because I worked on it.
Android won that battle. But switching to Android would get Nokia squeezed between Samsung and 500 cheap shops in China. They'd probably sell more units than they do now with WP, but the margins would have been atrocious.
No. With Symbian, they couldn't get things developed fast enough in their own damned organization.
Ahhahah. Slashdot, where Tomi Ahonen is still the "#1 influencer" in mobile industry speculative fiction. Stay classy.
Do you realize that the chart shows how Nokia fucked itself up before Windows Phone was a thing?
Microsoft pretty much had the UI down when they released Windows 2000 and Office 97. Everything they've DONE to their UI since has been a step backward.
What do you know, overpopulated three-level menu clusterfucks and the institutional separation between menus and toolbars were the pinnacle of UI design accordingly to some people.
I dunno. Today I have installed Yelp with an augmented reality mode courtesy of Nokia (called, get this, "monocle"). The app is awesome. My bank has been providing an app since WP7. Even the oft-invoked Instagram has got a bunch of third-party apps that work with it. One is reportedly better than the first-party apps for other platforms, another is officially supported by Nokia. Even the Google PIM services are sort of supported, and I don't care that much about Google+ to need it on the phone (I'm planning to buy the new Nexus tablet to get my Android fix, after the kids broke the old one).
At this point, I'd stand to lose if I switch my phone to Android or iOS. Fully usable offline maps from Nokia are the biggest thing. Google only offers "OK maps" after their latest regressive update. Don't get me started on Apple maps.
"But the humanities remind us that we have an enormous capacity for deluding ourselves."
That's pretty much what I got out of my getting acquainted with philosophy.
Noooo! Slapping a French name on a shitty American product is why Americans think Chablis is terrible wine that comes in big glass jugs. Or boxes.
Well said. Now, where's my bourbon...
when one member of your team decides to not play nice with the rest of the team.
If this is the case, you have bigger problems than a possibly poor choice of an SCCS.
With git, it's actually much harder for an asshole to wreak havoc, as the entire project history is cloned between all developers' machines and is cryptographically protected from being altered in ways that are hard to notice.
If you find a bug on a release, you fix it on the trunk, test it on the trunk for a while, then merge it out onto the (supposedly stable) release.
This is one of the few things where git's way of revision management actually gets in the way.
You can't simply merge the trunk onto the release branch, because the trunk has all sorts of in-development changes that you don't necessarily want applied to the stable branch. You either have to cherry-pick the fix off the trunk, thus multiplying it in the history. Or, more cleanly IMHO, you base the bugfix branch off the stable branch, and merge it into trunk (all earlier changes reachable from the stable branch should already be reachable from trunk, so you should not get unwanted changes piggybacked this way). After you are happy with how it works in trunk, you can also land the bugfix onto the stable branch (sans the master merge commit), test it there, and release.
This. Why people ever moved beyond twm and Norton Commander is beyond me.
The users largely hate GNOME 3.
The people posting on Slashdot are largely full of shit.
See, I can do this too.
Why would I want to use anything that has been abandoned by the founder?
You wouldn't, because you let your ignorance get in the way of researching the matter and making a decision on the basis of utility merit.
Hint: such things happen all the time with open source projects.
You must be the target audience then. The rest of the planet, or most of us anyway, are not.
For some specific definition of "us". I find little to no trouble using Windows 8 too, for the purposes I use Windows anyway. Some of the Metro stuff feels undeveloped, but they are working on it, and the classic alternatives are still there.
What I suspect really happens is, most people on both sides of the fence fail to share your anguish and go on using their respective new UIs.
Many people complain that familiar, simple ways of doing things (such as shutting down by clicking Start -> Shut Down) have been removed, and they were forced to learn new, more complicated ways (hitting the power button).
Or take the Start menu. Since 1995, people have trained their muscle memories to find their favorite apps in the two- to three-level popup menu hierarchy. Now all they have is a dreadful start screen where everything is laid out in 2D in big whopping tiles. There is absolutely no sense of achievement in learning to navigate these. And the Metro app tiles also show a glimpse of the app state. Who could possibly find that useful? All it does is it makes my ADHD act up.
In therms of fostering app developers who fail to properly tombstone, if android ecosystem has taught us anything is that developers are content to churn out shoddy work and never care. A platform that *forces* the developer to do more work isn't a defensible feature when an alternative model has existed for decades without a lot of issue.
A vision of a platform, however niche, that prioritizes quality over quantity and penalizes writers of shoddy software appeared before my eyes for a moment... Can it be? From Microsoft? That would be delicate irony.
That's a different issue. I'm not defending the quality of the Current metro apps, some of them really leave a lot to be desired. I like Bing News and another news app, though.
Getting back to the (non-)problem of closing apps, this can actually be done manually through the application list.
So you are suggesting that Metro should foster shoddily written applications that cannot properly tombstone themselves and require manual lifecycle control? Then people who got used to apps exiting seamlessly on the mobile platforms get back to Windows and wonder why they need to bother with task management like it's still the 1990s.
Man, how did it get so bad that a poorly designed clusterfuck of a menu is considered core OS functionality.
What do you expect from people who miss a three-level menu of 1995 design vintage.
They probably still think that the power button causes a hard power-off, like it did back in the days.
Fedora has done a couple of WTFs that alienated a large portion of the user base, and more importantly, the admin base.
Thanks for beginning with this statement. This is where I knew you are full of shit, so I have stopped reading. People making unsubstantiated claims about "a large portion of the user base" can always safely be ignored.