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State of the Windows: How many layers of UI inconsistencies are in Windows 10?

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Re: State of the Windows: How many layers of UI inconsistencies are in Windows 10?

#191

Post by bennysomething »

andyjohnson0 wrote: post #161
azinman2 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Now it could be done to maintain backwards compat and have everything completely up to date, but the juice is not worth the squeeze and there are more important things to focus on You state that as fact, but I believe the poor UI situation is holding windows back from gaining market share. It’s not just the way things look, but uniformly communicate a single experience. Microsoft used to be very integrated and had…

> I believe the poor UI situation is holding windows back from gaining market share. I'm having a hard time believing that. While some Mac users who are used to a more integrated user experience might be deterred, I'm not sure that the os's ui esthetics really affect windows adoption. My feeling is that most people who use Windows do so because they're either (a) told to use it or (b) they choose to use it because it…

I use it because it supports any bit of hardware thrown at it, with little fuss.

I tried to go all Linux many times, gave up, I just wanted something that works.

Re: State of the Windows: How many layers of UI inconsistencies are in Windows 10?

#192

Post by whoopdedo »

TrianguloY wrote: post #112

I will always find it funny that you can use the windows 95 alt+tab switcher by: - Pressing alt (don't release) - Pressing altgr - Releasing altgr - Pressing tab

While experimenting with this I also discovered another unexpected quirk or the switcher. AltGr+Tab makes it "sticky".

Also, I realized that despite being initially liking the beautiful 3D animated Win+Tab switcher when it was introduced in Vista, I never use it anymore.

Re: State of the Windows: How many layers of UI inconsistencies are in Windows 10?

#193

Post by filchermcurr »

lucumo wrote: post #175
Flockster wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a TreeStyleTab user in Firefox with always >200 Tabs open. But I never got the idea of Tabs in Explorer (or Finder for that matter). When I use multiple Explorer Views, most of the time I do it, to interact between them. This is not the case for websites. So for drag and drop interactions, two windows always beat the drag, hover over the other tab until it catches my intend to switch to this tab, and drop it ther…

> I'm sure there is a corresponding command to cycle through the tabs, but alt+tab is deep muscle memory, that it beats this command always. It's ctrl+tab. And shift will reverse direction in both. It's nice and related. And then there's MacOS, where cmd-tab doesn't cycle through windows, but through applications. Cmd-` cycles through windows of the same application. Because apparently, using multiple applications an…

Weird, I never saw it as a punishment. It's actually a lot faster to get where you need to go, in my experience. Not having to filter through both application and window makes it take slightly less thought and effort than flipping through just one application's windows. Plus switching between applications is a lot easier when there are only five listed instead of five + 20 windows.

I guess it's dependent on the number of applications and windows you have going at any given time.

Re: State of the Windows: How many layers of UI inconsistencies are in Windows 10?

#194

Post by aasasd »

azinman2 wrote: post #106
meowkit wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work on the core OS. This is the answer. Now it could be done to maintain backwards compat and have everything completely up to date, but the juice is not worth the squeeze and there are more important things to focus on (such as making the OS work/build in such a way that there won’t be inconsistencies in the future).

> Now it could be done to maintain backwards compat and have everything completely up to date, but the juice is not worth the squeeze and there are more important things to focus on You state that as fact, but I believe the poor UI situation is holding windows back from gaining market share. It’s not just the way things look, but uniformly communicate a single experience. Microsoft used to be very integrated and had…

> creates a very low bar for third parties

The bar for third parties was always nonexistent. That was precisely the advantage of Windows which permitted the boom of development for it in the 90s–2000s.

Re: State of the Windows: How many layers of UI inconsistencies are in Windows 10?

#195

Post by jiggawatts »

simion314 wrote: post #139
jiggawatts wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stating that the UI consistency issues are due to backwards compatibility is stretching the truth to the point of outright deception. Backwards compatibility is not what stops Microsoft from updating the GUIs for their own components. It is not the reason that the components that have been updated failed to carry forward 100% of the features of the components they're replacing, necessitating the ongoing use of the le…

>Stating that the UI consistency issues are due to backwards compatibility is stretching the truth to the point of outright deception. I am not familiar with Windows APIs but I can see this be the truth if MS made it possible for developers to plug inside this dialogs, like a printer driver would plug soem GUI changes in the panels , changing this would break a lot of devices.

Sure, and hence the logical thing to do is to create the new GUI side-by-side with the old one. That doesn't explain the non-extensible GUIs being left behind, or why the new uplifts are so piecemeal, or why they randomly leave out critical features.

Re: State of the Windows: How many layers of UI inconsistencies are in Windows 10?

#196

Post by dkarras »

Razengan wrote: post #177
neelc wrote: post #36

Disclaimer: I work at Microsoft, but not on Windows (and I deal with a SaaS at MSFT). I am a FreeBSD committer and help maintain FreeBSD's GNOME packages and (very recently) the graphics drivers. The reason why Windows is full of UI inconsistencies is (largely) because of one thing: backwards compatibility. While backwards compatibility has it's perks, it also means having lots of old code in Windows that can't be to…

> Apple, et al. is more willing to break things than Windows is. They aren't as bound to legacy compatibility, so old UI elements can be shed easily. macOS has actually been pretty good at seamlessly adding new features to old apps, with just a recompile against the latest SDK, like all the NSDocument-derived stuff (auto-save, auto-recover, iCloud etc.), Dark Mode, accessibility etc.

Not to mention they pulled two complete arch changes.

Re: State of the Windows: How many layers of UI inconsistencies are in Windows 10?

#197

Post by molasses »

bennysomething wrote: post #191
andyjohnson0 wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I believe the poor UI situation is holding windows back from gaining market share. I'm having a hard time believing that. While some Mac users who are used to a more integrated user experience might be deterred, I'm not sure that the os's ui esthetics really affect windows adoption. My feeling is that most people who use Windows do so because they're either (a) told to use it or (b) they choose to use it because it…

I use it because it supports any bit of hardware thrown at it, with little fuss. I tried to go all Linux many times, gave up, I just wanted something that works.

It doesn't always work. I have two machines, one that has issues with a north bridge, which initially prevented shutdown and prohibits, suspend and hibernate. And another where the Bluetooth dies until reboot on an Intel wireless card. Another machine wouldn't upgrade due to a wireless card, that took about three days of troubleshooting. My Linux boxes glitch too. I rarely have stuff that just works.

Re: State of the Windows: How many layers of UI inconsistencies are in Windows 10?

#198

Post by bennysomething »

signal11 wrote: post #130
andi999 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What market share is left there to gain? Ok 17% Mac OS, maybe 5% would switch to Windows?

Strategically, worrying about the low end “worse” competitor is more worthwhile than the higher end competitor. Eg IBM were not undone by a better mainframe. In Windows’s case the “worse” competitor is ChromeOS and Chromebook, and Microsoft’s basically thrown in the towel when it comes to native apps, so with time everyone who doesn’t need pro Photoshop or AutoCAD could just use a Chromebook. Note that you can run Wo…

I doubt anyone in finance will be moving off excel anytime soon. Yeah it's on Mac, but why pay more for that.

Re: State of the Windows: How many layers of UI inconsistencies are in Windows 10?

#199

Post by Razengan »

dkarras wrote: post #196
Razengan wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apple, et al. is more willing to break things than Windows is. They aren't as bound to legacy compatibility, so old UI elements can be shed easily. macOS has actually been pretty good at seamlessly adding new features to old apps, with just a recompile against the latest SDK, like all the NSDocument-derived stuff (auto-save, auto-recover, iCloud etc.), Dark Mode, accessibility etc.

Not to mention they pulled two complete arch changes.

Ah yes, and maintained almost seamless compatibility with the previous archs for a while.

Re: State of the Windows: How many layers of UI inconsistencies are in Windows 10?

#200

Post by molasses »

rocqua wrote: post #129
andi999 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What market share is left there to gain? Ok 17% Mac OS, maybe 5% would switch to Windows?

I think this inconsistent experience is what is opening the door for competitors like Apple and Linux.

Oh come, Linux's UI is completely inconsistent, between toolkits, desktops, distros and the like.
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