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Windows 10 Design: Getting the balance right

blogs.windows.com

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Re: Windows 10 Design: Getting the balance right

#41

Post by cturner »

pjmlp wrote: post #39
nandhp wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can install telnet via the add features option from the control panel. Who wants to have such insecure program available anyway? There's no security problem with the telnet client, unless you're using it to log into remote hosts without encryption. But OP, and presumably many other people (like me), use telnet as a simple TCP client for troubleshooting. On Linux, one can use netcat (though I never remember to t…

There are better GUI tools for such purposes.

It's important to have something to be installed by default, and not require admin privileges. This is what you need need if you're supporting people over the phone. That is - something dependable that you can use to check that they don't have TCP obstacles for whatever they're trying to do.

Telnet-for-Windows was a terrible interface for this purpose (if it succeeds, you get left at a meaningless command prompt) but it was possible to talk people through that, and that was enough. (You can't trust the proxy configuration of their web browsers.)

Re: Windows 10 Design: Getting the balance right

#42

Post by Encosia »

mattkevan wrote: post #37
Encosia wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> PDF viewer. Chrome is the only non-awful PDF viewer I've found for Windows. Requires third-party install. The built-in viewer that shipped with 8 is no-frills (like Chrome's), but works well enough. If you have touch/pointer input, you can annotate and sign PDFs in that viewer too, which is great on a Surface. > It'd be useful to be able to mute an application from the OS interface, and to see an indicator for audi…

Argh, the Win8 PDF viewer is so infuriating. It seems to only have two zoom levels: 100%, and grid of thumbnails. Great if I want to only see a bit of a page or all of then very small, but not so much when I just want to view a whole page on the screen. Which I would have thought would be a fairly basic task. For a document viewer. Happy to hear if I'm wrong though.

I only have Win10 handy right now, but the built-in "Reader" app there has an option for fitting a single page, two pages side-by-side, and continuous vertical pages. It's missing an automatic option to fit the page width-wise, which is what I'd prefer, but zooming in to that level is easy enough with the "+" zoom button overlaid in the bottom right corner.

Not sure if that's a lot different than the Win8 version. It's been a while since I've used 8 now.

Re: Windows 10 Design: Getting the balance right

#43

Post by pjmlp »

cturner wrote: post #41
pjmlp wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are better GUI tools for such purposes.

It's important to have something to be installed by default, and not require admin privileges. This is what you need need if you're supporting people over the phone. That is - something dependable that you can use to check that they don't have TCP obstacles for whatever they're trying to do. Telnet-for-Windows was a terrible interface for this purpose (if it succeeds, you get left at a meaningless command prompt) but…

Back when I was doing UNIX (big boys UNIX, not GNU/Linux) I remember there were lots of tools that weren't available on those systems.

And even the common ones lacked lots of useful options from the GNU land.

All comparisons of GNU/Linux distributions with Windows, have the fallacy of comparing a distributions with an OS targeted originally for consumers.

Normal users just don't go telnet into their local networks.

Server editions usually have the proper services in place.

Re: Windows 10 Design: Getting the balance right

#44

Post by Aleman360 »

brianpgordon wrote: post #33

> We want to deliver an experience that flexes elegantly across a continuum of devices And there's the punch to the gut. Just like with Windows 8, if you want to use Windows 10 on the desktop your experience is going to be degraded by sacrifices made for mobile. I was really hoping that Microsoft would learn their lesson, since DirectX 12 is going to be exclusive to Windows 10 and I'm going to have to upgrade. They'r…

The Windows 10 UI framework is resolution-independent and built-in controls are responsive. App devs have everything they need to provide a good UI for every device type. Or you can use HTML/JS.

disclaimer: I work on Windows 10

Re: Windows 10 Design: Getting the balance right

#46

Post by jenscow »

Aleman360 wrote: post #44
brianpgordon wrote: post #33

> We want to deliver an experience that flexes elegantly across a continuum of devices And there's the punch to the gut. Just like with Windows 8, if you want to use Windows 10 on the desktop your experience is going to be degraded by sacrifices made for mobile. I was really hoping that Microsoft would learn their lesson, since DirectX 12 is going to be exclusive to Windows 10 and I'm going to have to upgrade. They'r…

The Windows 10 UI framework is resolution-independent and built-in controls are responsive. App devs have everything they need to provide a good UI for every device type. Or you can use HTML/JS. disclaimer: I work on Windows 10

Despite this, we still have a 2x19" mouse driven non-touch tablet.

disclaimer: I use Windows 8 at work.

Re: Windows 10 Design: Getting the balance right

#47

Post by realusername »

Aleman360 wrote: post #44
brianpgordon wrote: post #33

> We want to deliver an experience that flexes elegantly across a continuum of devices And there's the punch to the gut. Just like with Windows 8, if you want to use Windows 10 on the desktop your experience is going to be degraded by sacrifices made for mobile. I was really hoping that Microsoft would learn their lesson, since DirectX 12 is going to be exclusive to Windows 10 and I'm going to have to upgrade. They'r…

The Windows 10 UI framework is resolution-independent and built-in controls are responsive. App devs have everything they need to provide a good UI for every device type. Or you can use HTML/JS. disclaimer: I work on Windows 10

I still did not have got enough time to test the new updates on windows but I sincerely hope they learned by now that what work for tablets does not necessary work on a desktop machines even if the screen size is roughly the same. Not everything is related to the screen size. I remember the full screen calculator on my laptop which was a clear example of the problem.

Re: Windows 10 Design: Getting the balance right

#48

Post by RaleyField »

brianpgordon wrote: post #33

> We want to deliver an experience that flexes elegantly across a continuum of devices And there's the punch to the gut. Just like with Windows 8, if you want to use Windows 10 on the desktop your experience is going to be degraded by sacrifices made for mobile. I was really hoping that Microsoft would learn their lesson, since DirectX 12 is going to be exclusive to Windows 10 and I'm going to have to upgrade. They'r…

> the desktop your experience is going to be degraded by sacrifices made for mobile

Or you can view it as mobile being enhanced by commonality of OS with one found on the desktop. If the same UI works in both environments you can see it as harmful influence of mobile on the desktop or you can see it as Microsoft not forcing you to buy and carry around two devices where one would suffice.

Disclaimer - I love my W8 transformer.

Re: Windows 10 Design: Getting the balance right

#49

Post by titanix2 »

cturner wrote: post #19
wahsd wrote: post #5

I'm going to lose it if Win10 does not integrate automatic time zone adjustment like OSX. What, does no one at MS mind having to manually change the time zone with 7 clicks every time they travel? Why is it not just two clicks to change the time zone at least? Maybe something like right-click time, select from list of preset "favorite" time zones. That doesn't even requite a time network, let alone being able to read…

PDF viewer. Chrome is the only non-awful PDF viewer I've found for Windows. Requires third-party install. Copying and pasting text causes weird characters to be carried around (e.g. emdash), and I haven't found a reliable way to sanitise it. Does notepad handle \n separated lines correctly yet? Something about excel breaks the behaviour of the alt+tab stack. (if you have multiple documents open) Also, it's annoying t…

> I think it's a shame Windows doesn't ship with devtools out of the box, also. If it came with devtools, would be one less hurdle to getting newbies into programming. Offer good tools at every level - an assembler, a C compiler, c#-level tools, javascript debugger, visual basic. Microsoft's grew from a successful devtool company.

It does. Since Vista the framework .net is bundled with Windows and it contains a C# compiler (csc.exe in one or more subfolders of %WINDIR%\Microsoft.NET\Framework). That's how I started C#: notepad and compiling in command line. But I agree it is not at all user friendly and I'm pretty sure it isn't here to be used by final customer anyway.

That being said, bundling WebMatrix or put a download link in the Start Menu could be a nice idea for creating vocations.

Re: Windows 10 Design: Getting the balance right

#50

Post by shitloadofbooks »

joshuapants wrote: post #26
fl0wenol wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The console was broken for a long time primarily to make it possible to do full-screen VGA text modes for NTVDM-requiring apps. Enabling either or both required elevated hardware privileges so they shoved the whole rendering thing into CSRSS and it gave us the shatter attack and (later) no cut/paste as thanks. I think we're paying for a mistake made upon the alter of backwards compatibility back when asking someone t…

> I think we're paying for a mistake made upon the alter of backwards compatibility There's a book called The Old New Thing (I think I heard about it here on HN, haven't had a chance to get it yet) that discusses a lot of quirks that Windows has and how they came about. Usually there was a purposeful decision behind it, like you suggest with backwards compatibility. It'd be interesting to see if this particular case…

The Old New Thing is Raymond Chen's blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/ and the book is excerpts and articles from his Blog (with some additional content no doubt).

Raymond is/was a compatibility engineer at Microsoft. He was responsible for "shimming" a bunch of hacks into Windows to ensure large applications which relied on undocumented API calls wouldn't break when they overhauled libraries in a new version of Windows.

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