tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11573761.post8891171074442375232..comments2023-09-23T07:38:46.925-07:00Comments on Chris Quirke's Blog: Vista UI AnnoyancesChris Quirkehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05538828571660803875noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11573761.post-58178531751663380382009-05-27T23:20:46.667-07:002009-05-27T23:20:46.667-07:00Hi, Dan!
I think it's nothing more than fashion. ...Hi, Dan!<br /><br />I think it's nothing more than fashion. There's an element of mac envy, sure; Microsoft often gets distracted away from the strengths of its own platform, to what others are doing that is working for them - think Apple "style", Google's search, etc.<br /><br />There's definitely a hangover of that "make it easy so the huge market of folks who haven't used a computer yet, will join the market" from the 286 era. Silly, really, because by now, folks are either already using computers (and want to apply what they already know, so hate UI changes) or never will, for age or economic reasons.<br /><br />XP was definitely "toy-like", but Vista's styling was intended to be more serious, efficient to use, and beautiful. And indeed, there are aspects of Vista's UI that I severely miss in XP; breadcrumbs navigation, renaming that excludes the extension from initial selection, easy column sort in List view, a Start Menu redesign that sucks less than the previous one, etc.<br /><br />In fact, some of the usability glitches I noted in that post apply equally to XP, such as letter case hassles when renaming drive volume labels. It's not always Vista, where things first went wrong :-)<br /><br />As to Aero, I think it's the usual thing of software finally using hardware (even if it doesn't really have reason to). I have a book on the 386 processor that details how a modern OS could leverage the new chip to multitask programs while isolating them from each other, and it took until Win95 for that to reach us consumers - the MacOS of that time was still mired in the "co-operative" multitasking model of Win3.yuk, and if you think competing software vendors will give away program speed to help other software run better, I have a bridge to sell you.<br /><br />What Aero does, is finally acknowledge the presence of modern graphics acceleration hardware, which had been lying around unused by the OS (aside from game APIs and some OpenGL screensavers) since the first Win95.<br /><br />The trouble is, just because one has resources to make things bigger, doesn't mean the overall result is worth it, especially when you consider the big picture. <br /><br />We're big enough for the planet to become a zero-sum game, and do we really want to squander that on hardware to power background indexing etc. we may never use to do anything useful?Chris Quirkehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05538828571660803875noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11573761.post-31780713725694731362009-05-26T13:55:06.328-07:002009-05-26T13:55:06.328-07:00Do you think this trend towards fancy graphics by ...Do you think this trend towards fancy graphics by Microsoft is to make computers appear more friendly and toy like or is there another motive behind Microsoft's reasoning? Windows Vista Aero interface is nice at first and pretty but does not seem very practical after a while.Dan W.noreply@blogger.com