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Microsoft's ex-UI chief is shocked about the Windows 11 start menu

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Re: Microsoft's ex-UI chief is shocked about the Windows 11 start menu

#111

Post by npteljes »

pveierland wrote: post #22

Tested out the screen recording feature in Windows 11 yesterday. Thought it was nice to have this built into the OS - it can be activated using Win+Alt+R. It worked fine until I minimized the current window - this made it stop without giving any hint. Turns out "Gaming features aren't available for the Windows Desktop or File Explorer" - but it works fine for recording Chrome. Experiences like this just feels user ho…

Win+Alt+R recording is sporadically available in Win10 too. It worked well for general desktop recording for the colleagues who tried it, but it produced huge video files.

Re: Microsoft's ex-UI chief is shocked about the Windows 11 start menu

#112

Post by npteljes »

svnpenn wrote: post #6

I work in IT. The Windows 10/11 "settings" are a hole pile of shit. It seems like Microsoft almost purposefully took the 10 things you would most often use, and nested them so deep that you cant even memorize how to find them anymore. So you get forced into using the god awful search, which returns results FROM THE GOD DAMN INTERNET. If I am in Windows setting, or hell even on just the normal Start Menu, I DON'T WANT…

Control Panel has been horrible since Win XP, and even then, you were better off with a third party settings app I'm forgetting the name of. The settings were in a tree structure, and hover text described every feature helpfully.

Re: Microsoft's ex-UI chief is shocked about the Windows 11 start menu

#113

Post by tinco »

sph wrote: post #106
tinco wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What usability/interaction pattern is that? The number of spaces in tabs is not a debate, that's just personal preference in your editor. The debate is if tabs should be used at all. That tabs are not a multiple of the character width in a fixed width font is insane of course. But if any character should have that property as a feature, it would be the tab.

Each line starts at the same place, right? Each pipe character is the same width, right? Monospace characters are unaffected by their surrounding characters, right? Unless they're ligatures, in that case their width is a multiple of the single character width. The only possible way for "\t|" on consecutive lines to be misaligned is either for tab not to have a constant width, or any of the axioms above to be wrong. I…

I am not defending them. If a programmer makes the mistake of having any character in a monospace font be anything other than a multiple of the monospace character width.. sure revoke their programming licence. Straight back to kindergarten, have them make a turtle draw lines on a blank canvas for a couple years.

But that's not a very interesting discussion. If any editor I ever would write would have a fancy feature to mess with the sort of idiot that would use tabs for alignment, maybe I'd make tabs be off by a couple pixels. If it was intentional I would applaud them.

Re: Microsoft's ex-UI chief is shocked about the Windows 11 start menu

#114

Post by npteljes »

notRobot wrote: post #3

I would pay so much money to just be able to use Windows 7's UI with Windows 10's performance improvements. Try spinning Windows 7 up in a VM sometime. Using it is such a wonderous experience. It's almost perfect. I miss it so much. To me, Windows 8/8.1/10/11 have all been massive downgrades to different extents.

Win XP sp3 was also great, usability-wise.

I'm not paying them shit though. For the gaming system I use, I'm running my own activation emulator and point the system there.

Re: Microsoft's ex-UI chief is shocked about the Windows 11 start menu

#115

Post by npteljes »

aatd86 wrote: post #68

Does W11 still force auto reboots? W10 was a scourge with this... Rebooting overnight even though I tried everything to disable auto reboots.

W11 Home auto-reboots for us by default, but I think there's a toggle to disable it. Until they reset that setting of course :)

Re: Microsoft's ex-UI chief is shocked about the Windows 11 start menu

#116

Post by namaria »

notRobot wrote: post #3

I would pay so much money to just be able to use Windows 7's UI with Windows 10's performance improvements. Try spinning Windows 7 up in a VM sometime. Using it is such a wonderous experience. It's almost perfect. I miss it so much. To me, Windows 8/8.1/10/11 have all been massive downgrades to different extents.

Windows 7 was the last MS operating system I've used on a personal computer of mine. Once I did some work for a local ad tech company, they dictated I should use a windows computer for work. I discovered the hell of WSL and lasted about 12 weeks on that gig. The fact that I had to train tech leads on Git and was having arguments about "pushing directly to production is bad, we should have a staging environment at the very least" did not help.

Re: Microsoft's ex-UI chief is shocked about the Windows 11 start menu

#117

Post by hulitu »

sph wrote: post #106
tinco wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What usability/interaction pattern is that? The number of spaces in tabs is not a debate, that's just personal preference in your editor. The debate is if tabs should be used at all. That tabs are not a multiple of the character width in a fixed width font is insane of course. But if any character should have that property as a feature, it would be the tab.

Each line starts at the same place, right? Each pipe character is the same width, right? Monospace characters are unaffected by their surrounding characters, right? Unless they're ligatures, in that case their width is a multiple of the single character width. The only possible way for "\t|" on consecutive lines to be misaligned is either for tab not to have a constant width, or any of the axioms above to be wrong. I…

> Each line starts at the same place, right?

> Each pipe character is the same width, right?

> Monospace characters are unaffected by their surrounding characters, right? Unless they're ligatures, in that case their width is a multiple of the single character width.

Yes, but not in Microsoft products.

Re: Microsoft's ex-UI chief is shocked about the Windows 11 start menu

#118

Post by MagnumOpus »

amanzi wrote: post #64
petilon wrote: post #2

This article quotes Jensen Harris... the guy responsible for Windows 8 UI, which was a disaster.

I think he also did the Office ribbon menu, which is far better than what was before it.

It is not, especially not for power users, and those who want to become power users - discoverability of keyboard shortcuts is absolutely shit now. And unlike even the Reddit devs, they made it worse and made it impossible to keep the old menu bar setup.

The ribbon is part of the lamentable drift in Windows UI towards intentional dumbing down and not even allowing the power users to do what they could before -- see also the new Windows Settings menu...

Re: Microsoft's ex-UI chief is shocked about the Windows 11 start menu

#119

Post by ChrisRR »

tinco wrote: post #85
jiggawatts wrote: post #82

The biggest travesty IMHO is the updated Notepad that was rewritten using the modern Win UI. It now takes 2 seconds to start on an 8-core computer with a PCIe 4 NVMe SSD. Oh, and a tab indent and four spaces are almost… but not identically aligned. They’re like… one or two pixels off. With a fixed width font! This is just sad: https://paste.pics/aacb91eda1bfb46f968bed2004ad2328 Notepad can also no longer open large t…

4 spaces and tab not being perfectly aligned sounds like a feature, not a bug to me. In what scenario would you want them to be aligned? Surely any scenario would be improper use? 100% agree with the rest of course, it's always been a shock to me how little love the essential tooling gets in Windows. You'd think with all the budgets and the fat salaries they'd simply have a competent engineer or two on every (categor…

In most of the programming world tabs and 4 spaces are synonymous, and so should be displayed the same with a monospace font

Re: Microsoft's ex-UI chief is shocked about the Windows 11 start menu

#120

Post by hulitu »

simfree wrote: post #76
imperialdrive wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Getting better all the time? Yes, so do wounds. Microsoft wounded technology for so many with Windows 11. It's gotten to the point it auto installs even without elevation, so many of us are home with family for Thanksgiving only to spend hours with confused parents trying to navigate the mess of broken 'features'.

Forced OS upgrades should be regulated. Microsoft, Google and other operating system vendors should not be using dark patterns to "encourage" upgrades when users aren't paying attention.

But sir, it is for your security. That's why we don't fix bugs , but introduce new features.
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