171–180 of 421 posts
I am still looking forward for the option to ungroup task bar buttons, preferably with titles. Again! Something that was there before, worked, and was useful. But some designer decided we don't need that, to the bin with it!
I am still looking forward for the option to ungroup task bar buttons, preferably with titles. Again! Something that was there before, worked, and was useful. But some designer decided we don't need that, to the bin with it!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In fairness, MSIX is very different to MSI and ClickOnce was primarily a way to bootstrap MSIs from the web. MSI (long since deprecated) is essentially an ad-hoc relational database serialized to a file with embedded blobs that tells a generic engine how to install files and update the registry. It was written for Office in the 90s and was therefore dominated by the retail model of physically shipping CDs. MSIX is a…
Why are they so into XML? Move on to json or yaml please
There are similar schema languages for JSON these days, but without any equivalent to namespaces. Microsoft uses versioned namespaces heavily in the AppX Manifest. It's got a bit crazy, a typical manifest might have 10 different xmlns declarations, but it means that if you mis-name an element or (more likely) put it in the wrong place that won't be silently ignored, it'll trigger a validation error. To get that you need to able to assign each element to a specific fixed schema and then compose them. If you just have a single schema and evolve it without any concept of namespaces, old software can't tell the difference between a mistake and a new extension from the future.
What's more embarrassing than UI is that after 10+ years Win10/11 Settings still don't have the functionality parity with Win7 Control Panel, evidenced by the fact you find links everywhere in Settings to officially ask you to open their equivalent in Control Panel to adjust "advanced" settings. And even at the places they do, arguments can be made about if their UX/UI are actually better; but that's kinda subjective…
Also, i think spotlight in mac is way better than Search, and i dislike that it is Win+S instead of Win+Space. I also think that the default itl layout is a smidge better for dev on Mac, but at this point it's too late.
Also to be fair as i mostly use linux: search is way worse and the default are even shittier than windows, but since i can import "my" defaults in 45s, basically the time to type `sudo apt install git make; git clone XXXXXXX/my_default.git; cd my_default; make && sudo make install && reboot`, i'm not too cross about it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you're willing to tweak your installation, you can revert to the Windows 10 taskbar using the free third-party ExplorerPatcher utility. It has an option to not combine taskbar items and a lot of other goodies.
Wasn't this corrupted by one of the Windows updates? Or was that the other product? Got the whole UI frozen or such. I read about third party apps that hack back features this way or the other but I am still hoping a bit that MS will get back their senses and not some - potentially fragile to underlying OS structure change - third party app is required to make things functional again. But I am around the breaking poi…
But after a week of Windows 11's "grouped" taskbar buttons I risked reinstalling explorer patcher and it worked fine.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree, but I do want to point out that some of these "not updated" things are still heavily used and offer a bad user experience. For example the Services (or any mmc based) UI with no filter/search integrated is absurd. Heck they just "redesigned" Task Manager and none of the tabs have filter/search functionality which is annoying to say the least. I suppose you can start typing with the inner tab having focus, an…
Task Manager not having a modern filter/search for the gigantic list isn’t only an annoyance and a productivity killer but also a security issue. If I suspect a nefarious app is running in the background somewhere I have to manually read the list to find it and kill it. End of the day one of two things is happening, either no one influential at MS uses Windows or their structure is so broken that pointing out somethi…
In Win 11 22h2, if you start it as a regular user, you get the new interface. If you run it as administrator, you get the old one.
It also somehow manages to often maximize behind the taskbar. Or cut the output on the righ-hand side of the info in the performance / memory pane.
With a label in the Windows 3.x system font.
Never change, Windows. Never change.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Linux user here as well. The thing that upsets me with windows in the inconsistency in the OS not the applications. Take Fedora, Manjaro or Ubuntu with any major flavour like Gnome or KDE and you get a very consistent way of how your OS works and responds to common tasks. It's kinda easy for non experienced user to find the right settings with no UI change on a modern Linux Desktop.
I think with Linux, the amount of OS-level GUI screens is much more smaller compared to Windows. The main OS level GUI screen I interact with is the Settings screen and that basically has been a left-side tree showing the content on the right side or a grid that points to the individual sections. That is comparatively a much easier change in terms of UI level changes. Other OS-level screens are usually separate appli…
You could build thousands of KDE environments with the amount of money MS spends on Windows, yet KDE has managed to update everything across 5 versions of their desktop environment. In fact, EVERY common operating system GUI with the exception of Windows manages to update all the things.
If MS had spent some of those billions on updating those legacy apps each generation, they wouldn't be stuck with so much legacy garbage today. It's also telling that MS has never bothered to stick with a framework that would allow them to upgrade UI themes in-place. I'd also note that "complexity" isn't a good reason because MS could have gone with other solutions that were both more simple and more usable, but chose a convoluted design instead.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In fairness, MSIX is very different to MSI and ClickOnce was primarily a way to bootstrap MSIs from the web. MSI (long since deprecated) is essentially an ad-hoc relational database serialized to a file with embedded blobs that tells a generic engine how to install files and update the registry. It was written for Office in the 90s and was therefore dominated by the retail model of physically shipping CDs. MSIX is a…
Why are they so into XML? Move on to json or yaml please