I wonder how quickly this Mr Duncan-smith would change his mind about lacking 'imagination' if he had to choose between picking up trash on the street and cleaning urinals at subway stations. Fuck people like this.. I call stuff like this the 'cry of the successful.' It's full of just as much bullshit as the 'cry of the entitlement princess' and deserves just as much derision.
No thanks. I shouldn't have to add hackneyed bs for basic functionality. I might've considered this if I hadn't had over 15 years of having the desktop shell as the default in the first place. I'll just stick with windows 7 for now and see what windows 9 brings..
because they break up those pretty anti-aliased lines and dropshadowed boxes. Aesthetics before functionality has always been the motto of 'designers' everywhere. In the old days, applications were laid out by the developers. This resulted in a mixed bag of usability, but at least the developers were tied to the original point of the software: they were writing the code to get something done. Today's UI designers are a new breed that have no such ties.. they just try to make things look nice, and in the process realize they have to cut corners in order to make their paradigms work, so they flatten the learning curve to the point where it's ready for the fisher price logo. The phbs love the idea of 'accessiblity' because they see dollar signs and don't realize that it kills any chance of an entrenched user base that depends on their tool for critical complex tasks.
He said while he was moving the mouse to click on something, it would assume he was 'swiping' and switch to the weather app. That has nothing to do with having his palms on the touchpad. Figuring things out doesn't make them easy, and easy things shouldn't really have to be figured out. They should be findable intuitively. His statement about the control panel is a good example.
Why would you want to pan over your entire 2560x1600 monitor to click huge tiles to start applications? While it's true many people use two or more monitors, they aren't wasting one of them with a full screen start 'pile' that has to be scrolled through anyway.. Whether you have one monitor or 4, a little menu in the corner is far better than metro. Just have the taskbar on each screen, and applications started on a particular screen appear on that screen by default. This isn't hard to do and would be a sane default.
The uselessness doesn't come from the desktop. It comes from metro and how it was (poorly) woven into the usual windows workflow for marketing reasons instead of usability. It is not 'a little bit different than the one in windows 7.'
Actually, the unintended implication is just that. If anything this highlights just how much it sucks for the tasks competent adult users need to do. I'ts not that it's impossible to do 'adult' things, just that they're a lot more cumbersome and difficult.
right.. then you have tons of annoying context switching between metro and the desktop whenever you want to start any new programs.. just give me a damn little menu already.. all this flickering flashing gesturing bs is counterproductive.
no, it's unintuitive for people who use computers for actual work, and not watching episodes of jersey whore and sharing justin bieber pics with their friends on failbook..
here in reality land I've seen a ton of devices designed with this mentality, and they're almost impossible to use after a few days/weeks. All that shit running in the background basically makes it necessary to reboot it and get a fresh start. Where have I seen this before? Oh right, dos, and windows 9x. Today's developers need to quit telling me what I do or don't need. That is not their prerogative.
examples include.. 1. I don't want it eating bw on my rip off cellphone plan. 2. I don't trust its behavior or the developers intentions with it enough to have it open 24/7. This is a big one. 3. Battery life. All that shit running in the background eating up cycles doing who knows what is just irritating. 4. I need the ram/cpu for something I'm doing? Not everyone just uses their desktop as a glorified media player. We want to remove the installed crapware on new computers for a reason.
metro apps are not immune from bad code or just plain shitty design.. Sorry, I want control over what runs or doesn't, the same reason I want control over who parks in my driveway or eats from my fridge. It's my hardware and my resources. I decide. Designs that assume you should never ever want to close anything are one of the worst things to come out of the 20xx's technology wise.
Yeah because clicking the X button (or doubleclicking the left corner) is just so much less intuitive, right? Seriously, having to click and drag and hover over everything is irritating as hell. It's a clunky emulation of tablet behavior because well, metro was designed for touch interfaces and not desktop workstations. It often gets in the way of window positioning for those of us who actually want more than one or two applications running side by side and visible at once. All that's really needed here is a snap to edge feature, not the predefined convoluted behavior mandated by metro.
Fine.. replace metro with powershell then.. That would be a fair comparison.. oh wait, powershell is a.NET application and slow as hell, so nevermind. Imagine if bash (or your favorite unix shell) was rewritten in java. slashdot never had a problem with guis, just their misapplication.
1. more secure than what? every version of windows gets hacked to ribbons even before RTM comes out. Long ago I assume that all windows machines are full of holes by default when I use them. I've been right every time. 2. It's marginally faster than 7, but not so much that I'm willing to give up a useful environment.. In fact, even if windows 7 was dogshit slow compared to 8, I'd still use it. 3. 'interesting use cases' that are not the desktop computer I'm running it on! so who gives a shit? Would you run an embedded OS designed for home automation on your desktop computer as your productivity environment? why not? Oh right, it's designed to control and automate house equipment, which is great and interesting if that's what you're doing with your hardware, but not much else.
Fact is watching video for gathering how-to information is slow as hell. Reading, or learning intuitively (which is what's supposed to be the method on a good UI design) are both far more efficient.
1. Complaints != lack of understanding or lack of ability to learn 2. The default should be sane such that most users can be as efficient as possible with only minimal tweaking. explorer shell was a lot closer to this than pretty much anything else. 3. Guessing at what one should type into a search box is a horrible design. With a gui the whole point is to minimize typing arcane commands (or in this case, arcane searches) into a terminal.. Actually, metro is worse than that because it's neither a good UI nor a good terminal. It's a tablet UI! Having to switch between typing and clicking all the time, whenever what you're looking for isn't exposed, is retarded. 4. It's not about knowledge. It's about workflow. With enough time and 'knowledge', one could get all his work done in microsoft bob, but that doesn't mean it's suddenly the best way to do things.
because if I don't want to use 'apps' then why do I have to keep looking at 'metro' and be subjected to its flagrantly different tablet derived interface design every time I want to start a program? Compared with a little menu in the lower left, the 'experience' is obtuse. Apps as desktop widgets I could understand (though I never used that either in vista/7), but this is a whole new level of stupid.
Except this is irritating.. I'd rather just go to ONE corner that has a little menu that pops up, allowing me to go anywhere I want to go today.. Seriously, that's all that's needed.
If you have to do that the interface has already failed. Ideally speaking you shouldn't have to search for anything on a gui. Ever. slapping search boxes all over everything like they did with windows 8 just proves how bad the design is. This is ok for input constrained devices, but not desktop computers.
So you have a common place to both find and update applications from a trusted source, rather than www.coolutility.ru?
define trust? I can guarantee that the most empowering 'cool utils' will never find their way onto the store because they will directly compete with some obtuse middleman business strategy.
The rest of your post avoids the point.. If none of those things are updated, then why the hell should we upgrade the OS at all? The 'windows store' is hardly interesting or consumer friendly, nor does it require a new OS. If anything it's consumer hostile. You'll never find the best of anything on a walled garden system because it takes extra effort to get your app published there, and, even if posted, it could be revoked anytime. Most programmers writing software that's not intended as fly paper for more user money won't want to bother. Their users know how to open zip files or run setup.exe, so why pay the 30%? Then there's the DRM crapola, including after purchase app revocations and such.. yeah no thanks. app stores suck.
There are plenty of shortcuts in previous windows as well. Of course that wasn't really what he was talking about. It's switching between touch/mouse and keyboard that's time consuming and frustrating. A good gui will minimize this.
Metro reminds me of playing superman 64 on N64. How many rings would you like to fly through today to get where you're going?
Except that on windows 7 you don't have two interfaces with different rules competing for your attention. It wasn't just that the weather app was full screen, it was that it went fullscreen unexpectedly because metro took over when it decided his mouse movements were swipes. Metro should've been an install or control panel option... Metro or explorer. choose.
The problem is having two different interfaces competing for your attention the whole time you're working. That is not the same thing as occasionally hitting the maximize button.
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder how quickly this Mr Duncan-smith would change his mind about lacking 'imagination' if he had to choose between picking up trash on the street and cleaning urinals at subway stations. Fuck people like this.. I call stuff like this the 'cry of the successful.' It's full of just as much bullshit as the 'cry of the entitlement princess' and deserves just as much derision.
Last BSOD I got was sometime in 2001. The fact you get them every month suggests there is more wrong in your situation than your choice of OS.
No thanks. I shouldn't have to add hackneyed bs for basic functionality. I might've considered this if I hadn't had over 15 years of having the desktop shell as the default in the first place. I'll just stick with windows 7 for now and see what windows 9 brings..
because they break up those pretty anti-aliased lines and dropshadowed boxes. Aesthetics before functionality has always been the motto of 'designers' everywhere. In the old days, applications were laid out by the developers. This resulted in a mixed bag of usability, but at least the developers were tied to the original point of the software: they were writing the code to get something done. Today's UI designers are a new breed that have no such ties.. they just try to make things look nice, and in the process realize they have to cut corners in order to make their paradigms work, so they flatten the learning curve to the point where it's ready for the fisher price logo. The phbs love the idea of 'accessiblity' because they see dollar signs and don't realize that it kills any chance of an entrenched user base that depends on their tool for critical complex tasks.
Yeah.. metro is fine for that.. It should be an alternative shell that's selectable from within the control panel. It should not be the start menu.
He said while he was moving the mouse to click on something, it would assume he was 'swiping' and switch to the weather app. That has nothing to do with having his palms on the touchpad. Figuring things out doesn't make them easy, and easy things shouldn't really have to be figured out. They should be findable intuitively. His statement about the control panel is a good example.
Why would you want to pan over your entire 2560x1600 monitor to click huge tiles to start applications? While it's true many people use two or more monitors, they aren't wasting one of them with a full screen start 'pile' that has to be scrolled through anyway.. Whether you have one monitor or 4, a little menu in the corner is far better than metro. Just have the taskbar on each screen, and applications started on a particular screen appear on that screen by default. This isn't hard to do and would be a sane default.
The uselessness doesn't come from the desktop. It comes from metro and how it was (poorly) woven into the usual windows workflow for marketing reasons instead of usability. It is not 'a little bit different than the one in windows 7.'
Actually, the unintended implication is just that. If anything this highlights just how much it sucks for the tasks competent adult users need to do. I'ts not that it's impossible to do 'adult' things, just that they're a lot more cumbersome and difficult.
right.. then you have tons of annoying context switching between metro and the desktop whenever you want to start any new programs.. just give me a damn little menu already.. all this flickering flashing gesturing bs is counterproductive.
no, it's unintuitive for people who use computers for actual work, and not watching episodes of jersey whore and sharing justin bieber pics with their friends on failbook..
here in reality land I've seen a ton of devices designed with this mentality, and they're almost impossible to use after a few days/weeks. All that shit running in the background basically makes it necessary to reboot it and get a fresh start. Where have I seen this before? Oh right, dos, and windows 9x. Today's developers need to quit telling me what I do or don't need. That is not their prerogative.
examples include..
1. I don't want it eating bw on my rip off cellphone plan.
2. I don't trust its behavior or the developers intentions with it enough to have it open 24/7. This is a big one.
3. Battery life. All that shit running in the background eating up cycles doing who knows what is just irritating.
4. I need the ram/cpu for something I'm doing? Not everyone just uses their desktop as a glorified media player. We want to remove the installed crapware on new computers for a reason.
metro apps are not immune from bad code or just plain shitty design.. Sorry, I want control over what runs or doesn't, the same reason I want control over who parks in my driveway or eats from my fridge. It's my hardware and my resources. I decide. Designs that assume you should never ever want to close anything are one of the worst things to come out of the 20xx's technology wise.
Yeah because clicking the X button (or doubleclicking the left corner) is just so much less intuitive, right? Seriously, having to click and drag and hover over everything is irritating as hell. It's a clunky emulation of tablet behavior because well, metro was designed for touch interfaces and not desktop workstations. It often gets in the way of window positioning for those of us who actually want more than one or two applications running side by side and visible at once. All that's really needed here is a snap to edge feature, not the predefined convoluted behavior mandated by metro.
Fine.. replace metro with powershell then.. That would be a fair comparison.. oh wait, powershell is a .NET application and slow as hell, so nevermind. Imagine if bash (or your favorite unix shell) was rewritten in java. slashdot never had a problem with guis, just their misapplication.
1. more secure than what? every version of windows gets hacked to ribbons even before RTM comes out. Long ago I assume that all windows machines are full of holes by default when I use them. I've been right every time.
2. It's marginally faster than 7, but not so much that I'm willing to give up a useful environment.. In fact, even if windows 7 was dogshit slow compared to 8, I'd still use it.
3. 'interesting use cases' that are not the desktop computer I'm running it on! so who gives a shit? Would you run an embedded OS designed for home automation on your desktop computer as your productivity environment? why not? Oh right, it's designed to control and automate house equipment, which is great and interesting if that's what you're doing with your hardware, but not much else.
Fact is watching video for gathering how-to information is slow as hell. Reading, or learning intuitively (which is what's supposed to be the method on a good UI design) are both far more efficient.
1. Complaints != lack of understanding or lack of ability to learn
2. The default should be sane such that most users can be as efficient as possible with only minimal tweaking. explorer shell was a lot closer to this than pretty much anything else.
3. Guessing at what one should type into a search box is a horrible design. With a gui the whole point is to minimize typing arcane commands (or in this case, arcane searches) into a terminal.. Actually, metro is worse than that because it's neither a good UI nor a good terminal. It's a tablet UI! Having to switch between typing and clicking all the time, whenever what you're looking for isn't exposed, is retarded.
4. It's not about knowledge. It's about workflow. With enough time and 'knowledge', one could get all his work done in microsoft bob, but that doesn't mean it's suddenly the best way to do things.
because if I don't want to use 'apps' then why do I have to keep looking at 'metro' and be subjected to its flagrantly different tablet derived interface design every time I want to start a program? Compared with a little menu in the lower left, the 'experience' is obtuse. Apps as desktop widgets I could understand (though I never used that either in vista/7), but this is a whole new level of stupid.
Except this is irritating.. I'd rather just go to ONE corner that has a little menu that pops up, allowing me to go anywhere I want to go today.. Seriously, that's all that's needed.
If you have to do that the interface has already failed. Ideally speaking you shouldn't have to search for anything on a gui. Ever. slapping search boxes all over everything like they did with windows 8 just proves how bad the design is. This is ok for input constrained devices, but not desktop computers.
So you have a common place to both find and update applications from a trusted source, rather than www.coolutility.ru?
define trust? I can guarantee that the most empowering 'cool utils' will never find their way onto the store because they will directly compete with some obtuse middleman business strategy.
The rest of your post avoids the point.. If none of those things are updated, then why the hell should we upgrade the OS at all? The 'windows store' is hardly interesting or consumer friendly, nor does it require a new OS. If anything it's consumer hostile. You'll never find the best of anything on a walled garden system because it takes extra effort to get your app published there, and, even if posted, it could be revoked anytime. Most programmers writing software that's not intended as fly paper for more user money won't want to bother. Their users know how to open zip files or run setup.exe, so why pay the 30%? Then there's the DRM crapola, including after purchase app revocations and such.. yeah no thanks. app stores suck.
There are plenty of shortcuts in previous windows as well. Of course that wasn't really what he was talking about. It's switching between touch/mouse and keyboard that's time consuming and frustrating. A good gui will minimize this.
Metro reminds me of playing superman 64 on N64. How many rings would you like to fly through today to get where you're going?
Except that on windows 7 you don't have two interfaces with different rules competing for your attention. It wasn't just that the weather app was full screen, it was that it went fullscreen unexpectedly because metro took over when it decided his mouse movements were swipes. Metro should've been an install or control panel option... Metro or explorer. choose.
He means when you're selecting something.... ..way to misrepresent his statement.
The problem is having two different interfaces competing for your attention the whole time you're working. That is not the same thing as occasionally hitting the maximize button.