351–360 of 402 posts
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"Joe Public" is a strawman people who make crap software prop up as the reason their software has to be crap.
It beats using "your mother" or "your grandmother" as the term for a stupid person.
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Except for three, humongous improvements that the Windows 10 start menu has over 95: * It is flush bottom right with the screen, making it a true "mile button". In 95, there was a tiny non-clickable border around it, so if you just slammed your mouse into the corner, it would not work; someone who worked on Mac OS described MSFT as "narrowly snatching defeat from the jaws of victory" compared to the mac's menu bar, w…
> immediately type the name of the program you want to run, instead of having to click the "Run" entry Why click anything at all if you're going to be typing anyway? Pressing Win + R has worked since the beginning, taking you directly to the "Run" dialog. > mousing over the wrong part of the menu and closing a sub-sub-folder The classic start menu (since Windows 98, or Windows 95 with IE 4) allows you to easily rearr…
Even fewer keystrokes, and less typing with Win 10: hit Win key, start typing Word (or settings, or mouse, or whatever), hit enter. The Start menu pops up, and is searched/filtered as you type. Compare this with the previous option (which still continues to work as well): Win key + R, type msword, hit enter. Not much in it with this example, but it's a neat way to access Start menu items rapidly.
For reasons I haven't yet explored, it occasionally fails to find an item, which is more puzzling than annoying. An item can be right there, and the keystroke search fails to find it. I miss the simplicity others have mentioned of the 95 Start menu simply being nested folders.
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Windows 10 actually supports this feature, still can't get used to it though... win+tab -> switch between virtual desktops, or ctrl+win+left/right arrows. and if you have many windows open (in win 10 at least) you don't have to press alt+tab 10 times in a row to choose your desired program, you can hold alt+tab and use arrows.
Yep. Curiously, though, you cannot share running programs or windows across "desktops" in Windows, although you can share them across Spaces in macOS.
It's hard to remember, but even though Windows 3.11 was extremely dominant at the time, it was by no means assured that Windows 95 would be the success that it was. The very first version missed wildly in some big ways (MSN was a folder integrated into the desktop, for example, and no TCP/IP support [*Edit: yes there was - I misremembered.]), but the core, underlying redesign of the GUI was so profoundly good it prop…
> I still get frustrated on OSX when I minimize a window and have to hunt around for it Windows user here. Honest curiosity: does anyone know why the minimize / maximize works on the Mac the way it does? I mean, what's the rationale to design it like this?
But seriously, minimising windows is a reflex learnt from Windows. In Windows you often need to minimise one thing to find something else. Especially the desktop. On a Mac you can usually find something more quickly in the dock. In Windows you’re far more likely to have an app maximised by default, and minimising is a natural way to switch tasks. On a Mac, minimising is not a natural way of task switching.
"not understanding how folders could exist inside of other folders" -- My mom is 70 years old now, and I easily get frustrated whenever she's stuck with seemingly simple tasks with her computer. I usually scold her and yell at her, "This is so obvious, how come you don't know?" -- I always regret doing that afterwards. After I'm calm, I ask her why, trying to understand it from her perspective. Every time I do this,…
And of course, bakckups weren’t properly tested and didn’t work.
"not understanding how folders could exist inside of other folders" -- My mom is 70 years old now, and I easily get frustrated whenever she's stuck with seemingly simple tasks with her computer. I usually scold her and yell at her, "This is so obvious, how come you don't know?" -- I always regret doing that afterwards. After I'm calm, I ask her why, trying to understand it from her perspective. Every time I do this,…
The term "folder" already annoys me. It's a (filesystem) directory...
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I'm predominately a Linux user and I switched away from Mac OSX specifically because of the underlying file system. I'll admit that it was annoying finding windows sometimes but the case-preserving, case-insensitive file system made no sense.
Case-preserving,case-insensitive is good for less sophisticated users: prevents accidentally misplacing or duplicating files with capitalization; and simplifies through this constraint media listing and sorting — no worrying about jpg vs JPG. What are the use cases that bother you?
Really, the only place case-insensitive filenames makes sense is when you are searching. It makes no sense for any other reason.
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> Compare it to other GUIs at the time, like CDE, IBM's Presentation Manager, or even Mac OS 8 and there's no comparison. Well, I agree that there was no comparison with System 8, but not in the sense you mean. I think that the Mac back then was head-and-shoulders a better system than Windows. It might still be, but they're both so painful to use now that it's very difficult to pick a winner. The Macintosh system was…
I was using Macs back in the late '90s, and none of the things you say ring true. Extensions could easily bring down the entire system because there was no memory protection. Full OS crashes (what modern macOS calls kernel panics) were a daily occurrence for the typical Mac-using professional who ran complex software. The window system was often difficult to understand because apps tended to use a plethora of little…
Yes, they were quite unstable. I didn't say that they were stable; I said that they were easy-to-understand and easy-to-disable, which they were: each extension had a distinct icon displayed at system boot; disabling one was as easy as dragging it to another folder; disabling all was a matter of, IIRC, holding down Command as you booted.
> Windows preferred large windows that contained the entire app UI, and users typically maximized them.
As a Mac user at the time, I much preferred the multi-window mode: it meant that I could customise my desktop as I liked. The Windows single-window mode was terrible, as it meant that I couldn't layer windows properly.
> You saved a JPEG file from Photoshop, and it forever insisted on launching the full Photoshop when you double-clicked on it, instead of your preferred lightweight image viewer.
We considered that a plus at the time: it meant that different files of the same type could be opened up by different apps by default. One could always, IIRC, Save As if one wanted to change the file type — or use ResEdit.
> Windows NT 4 and its next version Windows 2000 were just heads and shoulders above MacOS 8 and 9 in terms of performance, stability and usability.
Stability, probably. Performance, maybe. But usability? Never! That was back when Apple cared about UX.
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What Apple have done with both first and second generations of the Macintosh -- System 1 and OSX -- is pick a basic GUI metaphor and stick with it for at least fifteen years . The original Mac released in 1984 and was produced through 2000, sixteen years. OSX released in 2000 and is now in its eighteenth year. Whilst each system has seen some evolution over time, the general metaphores and interfaces have remained co…
Seem to me that Apple and MS focus on different kinds of change. While Apple may retain the UI across time, they are more than willing to change APIs etc on a whim. MS on the other hand may change the UI (though outside of 8.x, the core layout and behavior has remained much the same, and even 8.x could to a large degree behave like the older UI) but they bend over backwards to maintain APIs across time.
Microsoft was always more vendor / ISV / VAR oriented, and stable APIs matter there.
I've often thought Windows 95 borrowed ideas from Nextstep. Looking at this retrospective, I can see how it could be possible, especially if they started design in 1992. NeXT had been winning praise for their UI for years by that point, and Microsoft were consulting with Susan Kare (an Apple alum and NeXT employee). If you compare Nextstep 3.3 and Windows 95 or NT, you can see startling similarities in title bar size…