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Microsoft UI has officially entered the realm of self-parody

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Re: Microsoft UI has officially entered the realm of self-parody

#281

Post by danssig »

pointyhat wrote: post #264
oemera wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You sure are a "Mac power user" who just don't have a clue what the menu bar in OS X is for and for it... Apple is crap and theire products are overpriced and the OS is a piece of crap too because you can't figure how to use it. Are kidding me? I bet that you only once used Mac OS X in an Apple Store for 1 minute. I understand that a lot Microsoft people don't like Apple and Mac OS X but to say to be an power user of…

I've had more Macs recently than hot dinners. I don't like them. Software...................... Firstly, the menu bar is awful. Even the shortcut to find stuff is nigh on useless (Squashed-bug + slash). You have to know what you are looking for and the terminology is terribly inconsistent between applications. There are no access keys to navigate around either. If the mouse is easier to use then it's a shit menu. Als…

Not only are you not an Apple power user, you're a clueless Apple user. I think, if anything, you're a unix/linux user that assumes "mac console" = "power user".

Re: Microsoft UI has officially entered the realm of self-parody

#282

Post by jrockway »

cellularmitosis wrote: post #255
jrockway wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But airplanes have wifi now, so you can still want the cell radio off and have the wifi on. Yup, it's complicated. The world is a complicated place.

That misses the point of "airplane mode". Airplane mode is for use during take off and landing. Ie, you'd need to turn wifi off too. The only reason to turn off the cell radio but not the wifi radio is to conserve battery, which again puts you well outside the use case of the typical apple user.

No. For takeoff and landing, no power should be applied to any of the electronics. You have to turn the phone off.

(In fact, I just got off a plane, and the announcement is "electronic devices must be off, not in airplane mode. that's for after we're in the air.")

Re: Microsoft UI has officially entered the realm of self-parody

#283

Post by super_mario »

shabble wrote: post #201
archgoon wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the idea of the parent poster is that there would be no file system (at least not in the sense of a tree hierarchy of directories), just a large database with some SQL like language exposed through the GUI.

All manner of people have suggested and planned ways of doing this, but as yet, none of them are really any good. See: http://nascent.freeshell.org/programming/TagFS/ https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/WinFS and many more.

Even though Mac OS X filesystem is not a relational database, it does support a query language that allows you to search for built in or user defined attributes and their values.

This search functionality is available system wide (Spotlight search box), from any file open dialog or from the command line. For example things like this are possible:

Find me all pictures I tool this year and where I used flash, and aperture f4:

kind:image fnumber:4 date:"this year" flash:1

You type this in either spotlight or search box on open file dialog. You can do the same from the command line

mdfind -interpret "kind:image fnumber:4 date:"this year" flash:1"

The nice thing about the mdfind command is that you can restrict the search to a directory of your choice only.

Some people pay good money for photo organizers on Mac OS X, not knowing they already have this functionality built in. And finding what attributes are available is not that hard either:

mdimport -X

prints the entire metadata schema.

Re: Microsoft UI has officially entered the realm of self-parody

#284

Post by danssig »

eliben wrote: post #232

Although I'm (very very) far from being a MS fan-boy, I find an inherent flaw in such reviews written by programmers/hackers/power users. What they all miss is the real target audience for Windows - i.e. my Grandpa.

What is your Grandpa doing with a desktop? Get him an iPad, it's all he'll ever need.

Re: Microsoft UI has officially entered the realm of self-parody

#285

Post by danssig »

siromega wrote: post #123

The simple answer is that MS had to add all those buttons in the ribbon to make the UI more touch friendly. You cant right click on a tablet with your finger.

If they want to go touch they should be getting rid of the file system, not making it easier to manage. Touch devices are appliances. The reason I left windows in the first place was because I was sick of managing it. I'm certainly not going to pay money for the joy of managing an appliance.

Re: Microsoft UI has officially entered the realm of self-parody

#286

Post by _ea1k »

cellularmitosis wrote: post #255
jrockway wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But airplanes have wifi now, so you can still want the cell radio off and have the wifi on. Yup, it's complicated. The world is a complicated place.

That misses the point of "airplane mode". Airplane mode is for use during take off and landing. Ie, you'd need to turn wifi off too. The only reason to turn off the cell radio but not the wifi radio is to conserve battery, which again puts you well outside the use case of the typical apple user.

In the US, airlines require that electronic devices be turned completely off during takeoff and landing.

In my experience, this is rarely enforced.

Re: Microsoft UI has officially entered the realm of self-parody

#288

Post by bane »

mitjak wrote: post #238
bane wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Work in support sometime." Spending 2 years in hell doing phone tech support for an ISP after high school was probably the most valuable career experience I've ever had bar none. Nothing has prepared me for making and selling software to regular people better than this experience. Entire assumptions about how users interact with computers, ones based on my own experience, were rendered useless. The ways regular peop…

Sounds like a potentially useful experience but, what does a development lead have to do with designing good UI?

In small companies, people often fill multiple rolls. Our dev lead happens to be our lead UI designer as well -- but we all provide feedback. Sticking him on part-time tech support duty was a creative way of both giving us another tier of support while simultaneously forcing him to deal with our regular 'ol user.

Experiencing the mind of the typical user day after day has caused some major changes in his UI design philosophy. Don't bury things in menus, limit the number of ways you can do something, walk users through set procedures, etc.

There's a bunch of different approaches to interface design and many of them don't work well. We've all seen the beautiful but hard to use designs made by professional designers, and the control-panel-of-a-spaceship design made by developers.

It seems that what both cases miss out on is spending time working with and understanding the average guy on the street. Or rather, good interface design means spending lots of time optimizing for regular users.

Re: Microsoft UI has officially entered the realm of self-parody

#289

Post by pointyhat »

danssig wrote: post #281
pointyhat wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've had more Macs recently than hot dinners. I don't like them. Software...................... Firstly, the menu bar is awful. Even the shortcut to find stuff is nigh on useless (Squashed-bug + slash). You have to know what you are looking for and the terminology is terribly inconsistent between applications. There are no access keys to navigate around either. If the mouse is easier to use then it's a shit menu. Als…

Not only are you not an Apple power user, you're a clueless Apple user. I think, if anything, you're a unix/linux user that assumes "mac console" = "power user".

Possibly right. However that doesn't give the equipment the right to catch fire.

Re: Microsoft UI has officially entered the realm of self-parody

#290

Post by dhimes »

bmelton wrote: post #134
dhimes wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then why are the ipad and iphone taking off? It's really hard to learn to do things on those devices. It's cumbersome to turn off wifi and bluetooth to save battery. The control location makes no sense in the settings menu (to my mind, anyway). I was a HUGE Apple fan for the early Macs. I totally get what you are saying. But we LOST in the workplace. It was just too slow for the other folks in the office to use (of c…

I don't know why you got downvoted, and I upvoted to try and offset, but ignoring that... I think that you overstate the importance of turning off wifi and bluetooth. Those are power user options, for sure. When you're trying to conserve battery power, you're trying to streamline how you use the device, which to me, smacks of 'power user'. The flipside to that argument is that it is ridiculously easy to browse a web…

I agree with you- that example may not fit everybody's problem. When I switched from a simple phone to a smart phone it was important to me, but now I don't bother (never too far from a charger).

And you are right, of course, in that ios allows most people to do the things they most care about very easily-- that's probably the takeaway. If you do that, then, apparently even if the other stuff is hard, people will probably figure out how to do it when they need it. Somehow.

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