281–290 of 421 posts
I never quite understood the point of redesign. The only reason I can think of is marketing. Other than that, it's always, always a big mess. Why does everything need to be freaking round which makes it very ugly in low resolutions?
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20040525-00/?p=39...
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One universal solution that works for all apps - you render the app in an off-screen buffer and pass that to AI to re-render it in the new style. This way you don't need to touch the code. AI could also translate mouse clicks/coordinates accordingly if it moves stuff around. You could even have "UI themes", tell the AI to re-render in Windows 2000/XP/11 style. EDIT: the downvotes I'm getting with no comments are funn…
Sometimes in my career I wonder: Is this finally it? Have we finally hit the point where software will stop getting slower and chonkier every year? I can’t think of sensible sounding ways to justify making software run orders of magnitude slower than it does now. And yet, I don’t know how but every time … it happens. Java came out when I was young, with a huge JRE installation, slow startup times, GC pauses and Java…
There's plenty of reasons; it's a compromise like everything else. You trade away some performance for portability; the ability to run the same code and know your environment is identical each run is a significant pro.
Docker wouldn't have gotten to where it is for no reason.
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> 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. I still remember the day I found out the envvar configuration screen had been updated, and finally: * could be resized so you could see more than 4 envvars at a time, and had a scrollbar taller than 5mm to scroll through the list * could be resized so you could actually see the entire…
I haven't used Windows in almost 13 years and I still remember that shitty env var config screen. Wow, this is bringing back memories.
The codebase goes back to nearly 40 years. It would be more shocking if it there weren't legacy code hanging around. Windows is one of the most impressive pieces of software I have ever seen. No other platform boasts the kind of backwards compatibility that is seen in this operating system. There are shim layers on top of shim layers and the developers seem to have gone through great pains to keep the operating syste…
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I am still baffled by the whole Windows 8 drama. All they did was they replaced a menu with another one. Everything else was the same or better. Supposed power users freaking out about something completely inconsequential. What the hell is wrong with people
Metro was wonderful on Windows Phone and tablets . Garbage on the desktop. All Microsoft had to do to suppress the outrage was give people back the start menu on desktops like Windows 7 and allow a setting to turn on tablet mode if auto detection didn't work. Instead, probably because at that time they brought in people with no history in the Windows org to manage the Window org, we got a 10+ year decline of Windows…
macOS I posted this yesterday, macOS is also at fault. Here’s an interest blog post from a former Apple UI employee talking about the growing inconsistency in macOS UI. https://www.corbinstreehouse.com/blog/2021/10/macos-12-monte...
Funny how the more the screenshots go back in history, the more 'useful' the UI looks like (even though they no longer adhere to the current fashion fad - which should actually be handled through a user-accessible themeing engine, no need to pay some UI designers big bucks to come up with rounded corners). For instance right in the first Task Manager screenshot, I have no clue what those tab icons on the left side ac…
> o need to pay some UI designers big bucks to come up with rounded corners). It’s really unfortunate how dismissive of the entire ui design profession so much of HN is. Not a great look IMO
If the new design was adequate, it would probably be adopted in a release or two. If it were better, there would be demand to get it to all the well used components. There might still be some components left behind, there's a lot of components.
A truly inspiring design might pull everything forward automatically... But that's asking a lot.
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I work as a “contractor” and when I sit down to work with some sysadmin they watch me and ask out I bring up the old style config windows. One of them had started a sheet while watching me with all the run commands and helper phrases (North Carolina PennsylvAnia). Run commands are great for me, but it sucks when I have to walk someone through something over the phone. It’s gotten to the point where I can’t walk peopl…
I have been doing this my entire career. IMO its always been much easier to tell someone to hold the Win key and press R and enter a short command than it is to guide them through the UI to whatever setting needs interacting with, especially over the phone.
I wonder if they kept the ODBC driver installer window with the win3.x-style file tree unchanged, just so they could be compatible with random old legacy odbc driver installer program that might try to programatically automate interactions with that UI? I don't know first-hand of any such program, but it wouldn't surprise me if there was some old important enterprisey installer that expects the file chooser dialog to…
That's why they have to leave a lot of this stuff alone. It's why there is both a Settings application as well as a legacy Control Panel. There are thousands of applications in the wild that still do all sorts of insane hooks deep into Windows controls, expecting them to be "just so" and would break if they weren't. So every screen rewrite is a dance with all of the legacy software, and sometimes you end up with a mo…
Yes, legacy software is a big deal for Windows, but legacy software is not literally clicking buttons in these old archaic menus.
A shim or compatibility layer should have been added, and all settings migrated into the single Settings menu. There is no reason to have multiple versions of the same thing... especially when one of them is permanently hobbled and users have to guess which version exposes the buttons they need.
How long has Win10 existed? Nobody smart at Microsoft has figured out how to unify Settings and Control Panel in all that time? Literally means they have not tried. All of these things hack on the registry when you get down to it...
What probably actually happened was someone found out all the deeply nested menus and ad-hoc buttons in Control Panel didn't cleanly port into their "elegant" Settings app, so they just stopped there and left it to rot.
We want to look beautiful more than we want to be functional, apparently.