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Windows XP Professional

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Re: Windows XP Professional

#201

Post by anthk »

bombcar wrote: post #176
int_19h wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Better hardware support. Taskbar grouping. ClearType. Remote Desktop. More games ran on it (mostly thanks to higher DirectX version). From developer perspective, XP was the first version of Windows with registration-free COM and side-by-side assemblies, which (if used properly by app devs) fully solved the "DLL hell" problem.

A huge percentage of XP drivers worked just fine in w2k - sometimes you had to edit the ini or inf file or whatever it was.

They often just shipped the same driver for both.

Re: Windows XP Professional

#202

Post by sireat »

Fun but its Python REPL broke the immersion for me.. Python 3.13.2 (main, Aug 4 2025 20:25:58)

I was expecting Python 2.2 or 2.3 ... not sure what was the earliest version of Python on Pyodide

Re: Windows XP Professional

#203

Post by guappa »

eru wrote: post #179
jackero wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was an economies of scale back then with OS-level UI components. If Microsoft spent money on UX research that improved its UI controls, it would benefit a lot of people. Essentially the cost of that research was bore by all application developers. The problem now? Every company is designing their own UI components. Every company has to bear the cost of UX research individually. It’s a lot of wheel re-inventing.…

Are UI libraries no longer a thing?

They are, essentially the current mess is just a privately funded welfare program for UX designers.

I wish we could pay them to do something useful instead.

Re: Windows XP Professional

#205

Post by pndy »

easton wrote: post #50

If you want the real thing: https://lrusso.github.io/VirtualXP/VirtualXP.htm (takes less memory than Miro, at least in Firefox :D)

Looks like it's some Windows PE release - still more real than this thing in OP

Re: Windows XP Professional

#206

Post by fithisux »

MrGilbert wrote: post #159
OptionOfT wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love reading about old UI interface guidelines, and how much research was done to make it useful to the user. Now it's all about how to make it useful to the company. Anyway, the links in that post have deteriorated. Here's the link to Raymond Chen's blog: https://web.archive.org/web/20190218080905/https://blogs.msd... (shame on MS for redirecting you to another page when showing you a 404, which make it harder to…

As a side note: With the Internet (and myself) getting older and older, I appreciate the effort of the Internet Archive more and more. So many links I was able to revive thanks to a cached version. So many of my own works I was able to retrieve. It's a blessing, and not praised enough. (Only ignorant fools would start to fight it.)

BTW I decided for my personal/hobby projects to look back to abandonware

and give them a modern touch or rewrite them to some modern language D/Zig but exactly.

I think this is what as a community should be also doing. It should be also a curriculum in universities.

Thanks to Internet Archive.

Re: Windows XP Professional

#207

Post by wibbily »

metalliqaz wrote: post #94
wibbily wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Man nothing drives me further up the wall than when a nice progress indicator with discrete segments gets animated with a lazy `to { rotate(360deg); }` etc[1]. It is my molehill to die on [1] https://cdn.dribbble.com/userupload/41647820/file/original-8...

you just don't like how it looks, or is there something else wrong with it?

I second everyone talking about fake progress bars, but yeah I was just talking aesthetics. Having a progress indicator with obvious segments and animating it with a smooth tween looks wrong. Compare the above with [1], which is how Apple does it -

[1]: https://cdn.dribbble.com/userupload/20351752/file/original-b...

Re: Windows XP Professional

#209

Post by ed_elliott_asc »

userbinator wrote: post #199
mmastrac wrote: post #17

How can you tell that any Windows or Mac clone UI is a re-implementation? Easy: try to move your mouse diagonally into the Send To menu after letting it pop up. If the send-to menu closes as you mouse over the item into the submenu, it's a clone. If the menu stays up even if you brush over another menu item, it's either real or a Good Clone. :) For the fun history, @DonHopkins had a thread a few years back: https://n…

I don't have an appropriate machine (virtual or otherwise) at the moment to check, but I believe this is another one of those things they screwed up around Windows 10 or so --- right-clicking on the Start menu and trying to get to the submenu that has the shut down / logout options was made significantly more frustrating because of it.

Have you considered that you can actually right click the start button, open a window, throw machine out of window? (I’ll get my coat!)(it’s cold out here collecting discarded pc’s)

Re: Windows XP Professional

#210

Post by kmoser »

rzzzt wrote: post #123
CrimsonCape wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know talking about progress bars, it takes a lot of confidence to program a linear progress bar. You think you know when loading will be complete and think you know can break down the incremental progress made during loading. Instead we get these spinning wheels that are like "maybe in the future this wheel will stop and we will have a return value." No confidence whatsoever. I know this is true because Apple tri…

There's also the "Achilles and the tortoise" solution where the progress bar consumes the remaining 80% of unclaimed space in each iteration.

Also known as Zeno's Progress Bar
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