Really hoping, but also expecting MS is doing this too internally right now, it's the only pain point left for me on Windows.
Great to see how this sort of thing could feel.
Files UWP: An enthusiast’s take on what Windows File Explorer explorer should be
121–130 of 187 posts
Re: Files UWP: An enthusiast’s take on what Windows File Explorer explorer should be
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree. I would have been fine if the new control panel superseded the old version but since Win8 we have this schizophrenic situation where we have two control panels that both have features the other version doesn't have. Win10 is a little better but you still need the old panel for plenty of things.
At the very least, can we have the same font size on the control panels... This junk that's inherited from Windows 8 has random huge fonts all over.
Same font? How about starting with having the same font renderer that actually respects font rendering settings?
I mean, it is ridiculous. I have disabled antialiasing so most GUI text uses crisp aliased fonts as i like them. Then i open the settings app and it ignores the setting while using some font rendering with blurry antialiasing without even subpixel antialiasing. If i open an Explorer window (with, e.g., Win+E), it uses the settings i've set and has antialiasing disabled but if go to the address bar (This PC) and type "Control Panel" and press enter to open it, it uses antialiasing and this time it is subpixel antialiasing! WTF!
And the cherry on top? There is a "View by:" (Category, Large Icons, Small Icons) list at the top right where the "View by:" text is not antialiased (as i have set it), but the selected option right next to it uses subpixel antialiasing!
Come on.
Re: Files UWP: An enthusiast’s take on what Windows File Explorer explorer should be
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
What about notebooks with touch screens?
They are rare compared to every other desktop/laptop computer, they still have touchpads and really why would you smear your screen with your sweaty fingers when you can avoid that?
I was saying the same thing but once you have one it's actually quite nice from time to time.
Re: Files UWP: An enthusiast’s take on what Windows File Explorer explorer should be
#124This is an amazing design exercise, but the thing about Win10 that really pushes my buttons is the Control Panel/Settings conundrum. Each version it seems another feature gets added into the real settings app but still needing to open an old-themed dialog to change mouse settings of all things seems odd. It's not like mouse settings are an obscure feature. I'm not sure why a higher emphasis on cohesiveness isn't note…
The bit-by-bit migration of control panel to settings is iterative if not anything else. Else you'd need to wait years for them to migrate all things. Still, I don't believe everything is eligible for migration. Take the network adapter TCP/IP settings, I don't a migration happening for that. I don't think UWP is suitable for such information density. And in my opinion the UWP panel is less discoverable.
" I don't think UWP is suitable for such information density. "
This may be true but it doesn't speak well for UWP.
Re: Files UWP: An enthusiast’s take on what Windows File Explorer explorer should be
#125It's funny to see the gradient in the title bar, contrasting with the bland borderless-sea-of-whiteness of the rest of the UI. > FilesUwp.Package_0.5.0.0_x64.zip 54.4 MB Nearly 55MB, compressed , for something that attempts to mimic some of the functionality of the regular explorer.exe, is quite frankly ridiculous. I don't have a system to check right now, but I believe even latest Windows 10 has an explorer.exe http…
You're just talking about 'explorer.exe' being 5 mb? You're discounting the numerous DLLs which the explorer uses, or even other shared resources which are used system-wide. And 55 MB for a native app is paltry. Even the 'Google' app on Android is 285 MB, the Gallery app of OnePlus is 70 MB.
http://html-notepad.com - distribution 2,5 Mb (compressed)
http://notes.sciter.com - 2.5 Mb and on all platforms.
And these applications are not using "numerous DLLs" - just two files: app.exe and sciter.dll (and that one can be linked statically into executable).
So "yes", 50 Mb for an Explorer thing is too much.
Re: Files UWP: An enthusiast’s take on what Windows File Explorer explorer should be
#126This is an amazing design exercise, but the thing about Win10 that really pushes my buttons is the Control Panel/Settings conundrum. Each version it seems another feature gets added into the real settings app but still needing to open an old-themed dialog to change mouse settings of all things seems odd. It's not like mouse settings are an obscure feature. I'm not sure why a higher emphasis on cohesiveness isn't note…
In the touch-enabled world of devices Metro was envisioned for, yes, mouse settings should no longer be relevant. Meanwhile, in the real world, Windows phone died, just one colleague I know uses Windows on a tablet, yet Microsoft is still attempting to replace the control panel with an optimized-for-touch-only app. This is Apple- or Gnome-level pretentiousness: "that use case doesn't fit our brand, let's act like it'…
I don’t see them now that I’ve moved to New Orleans but when I was in Seattle I saw a lot of people using Surfaces in cafes and regularly poking at their screens with a finger. I don’t think this was necessarily a dogfood thing either, I was rarely in Redmond.
Re: Files UWP: An enthusiast’s take on what Windows File Explorer explorer should be
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your standards are unfortunately warped by modern trends. Almost all popular apps are hugely bloated because the developers just don't care, the focus is on UI re-design and feature churn and the illusion of ease of development. Some counter examples (compressed installer size for convenience): 7-zip for 64-bit windows: 1.4 MiB Winamp 5.8: 7.8 MiB mpc-hc: 13.5 MiB (open source media player with many built-in codecs)…
It's probably not OP's code itself but usage of UWP. The apps you mentioned here are all written in pure Win32 API. HWND, HANDLE, HPEN, HDC, anyone? Just pure C (or pure C++) and some functions... Those were the days!
FWIW Total Commander's EXE and DLLs are around 8MB (the installer is 4.2MB) and uses around 6MB of RAM right now (for comparison, the new UWP Calculator uses 18MB of RAM). It is not written in pure C/C++ nor uses Win32 directly but instead it is written in Object Pascal/Delphi or Free Pascal/Lazarus (depending on the version you use) and uses VCL or LCL (well, it probably does use some Win32 directly too). Also runs on any Windows PC from Win95 to Win10.
I mention this because Delphi and Lazarus are quite high level environments to work with with rich frameworks and libraries yet you can create very lightweight applications with them (the executables will be a bit fat compared to what you can do with pure C/C++ or even pure Free Pascal, especially with Lazarus, but resource consumption is still low).
You do not need to use C/C++ with pure Win32 API to create lightweight applications and even if you use those there are frameworks that allow for easier development (e.g. WTL, Win++ or libui to mention some).
Re: Files UWP: An enthusiast’s take on what Windows File Explorer explorer should be
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's probably not OP's code itself but usage of UWP. The apps you mentioned here are all written in pure Win32 API. HWND, HANDLE, HPEN, HDC, anyone? Just pure C (or pure C++) and some functions... Those were the days!
Unfortunately those APIs seems to be kind of obsolete nowadays. All the nice things are with UWP. I think that WinAPI is not even hardware accelerated. That's a pity, but what can we expect, when Microsoft themselves botched WinAPI in their own products long ago. Windows could be so better with their old Windows 2000 style, without all those design jumps around.
What nice things are with UWP? I haven't seen any UWP application i'd consider "nice" :-P.
And IMO WinAPI not being hardware accelerated (although i think some parts of it, like filling and blitting, are hardware accelerated) isn't really a big issue - if anything, requiring hardware acceleration from you UI might be a hint that you are making it a bit too flashy. But that might be me preferring plain and compact UIs like those made with Win32 as opposed to website/mobile-like stuff.
Re: Files UWP: An enthusiast’s take on what Windows File Explorer explorer should be
#129It's funny to see the gradient in the title bar, contrasting with the bland borderless-sea-of-whiteness of the rest of the UI. > FilesUwp.Package_0.5.0.0_x64.zip 54.4 MB Nearly 55MB, compressed , for something that attempts to mimic some of the functionality of the regular explorer.exe, is quite frankly ridiculous. I don't have a system to check right now, but I believe even latest Windows 10 has an explorer.exe http…
I’m curious why it matters to you. 55MB is a trivially inexpensive amount of storage and bandwidth in 2019. It simply doesn’t make a practical difference to the vast majority of people who will use this whether it’s 55MB or 5MB.
It is a hint that the code sucks.
Re: Files UWP: An enthusiast’s take on what Windows File Explorer explorer should be
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
As awesome as the Win2k source leak probably is from an educational standpoint, I don’t want to taint myself with illegal source code. I hope they eventually decide to open source more things, even if it was just older things.
Taint yourself with illegal source code? What does that even mean?
I did not expect this to be such a controversial point, but I am referring to the fact that even having seen the source code would make me a legal risk to employers and open source projects. Whether this is ridiculous or not is not my point, it’s the reality I live in.