151–160 of 185 posts
Ha, I remember the Windows 3.11 File Manager [0], it was always anoying when you accidentally clicked on the drive A: icon and the explorer would hang for a few seconds as the drive spun up and checked whether a disk was inserted. [0] https://gekk.info/articles/images/wfw311_explorer.png
Sorry for offtopic, but I'd like to share a tip I can't imagine living without. You can type cmd in explorer address bar and it'll open cmd in that directory (probably works with any other program in your %PATH%). Also you can type `explorer .` in cmd to open explorer in the current directory.
Starting in Windows 8 : > The Ribbon is unspeakably messy, and unspeakably large, and as I said I am not going to attack it in detail because this is a long-running Microsoft hobby horse. Suffice to say I feel it is a usability disaster and does not belong in any program let alone Explorer, however, it has the one saving grace that it is both collapsible, and defaults to that state, so most users almost certainly nev…
I find the Ribbon's contextual options perfect. When I'm at the root of My Computer, it's useful to see "Map Network Drive". When I'm in any other location, I don't care about that, so it's gone. When I click on a ZIP file it's useful to see options for extraction, etc. The Ribbon is far more useful for new users. It's true that if you memorized the Excel 97 menu layout you may not find things exactly where they were…
The article says that Windows 95 file explorer is not that deeply altered from File Manager. While this might be somewhat true in visual sense, it is completely different beast in what it does. File Manager was just what it says on the tin and showed directories and files, while Explorer displays what is essentially an arbitrary graph of COM objects and allows you to call methods on them. One particularly notable poi…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm reminded of the Acorn Archimedes: instead of a save dialog, saving produced a tiny "explorer" window containing the file, which you were expected to drag-and-drop to its save location.
RiscOS had some other interesting features, such as all menus being context menus. RoxOS was a short-lived experiment in bringing some RiscOS concepts to Linux, including AppDirs, only having context menus, and even the drag-to-save functionality.
Replacing the menu interface with the ribbon interface in Win10 and Office... I am not sure what the thought process was for Microsoft to have done that. Sometimes you already have something solid and it doesn’t need change. I liked being able to navigate the explorer UI with the keyboard with hints provided directly in the UI. For example, Alt+T O opened the tools menu, then the Options dialog box. But now, there’s…
I understand the frustration at having changes work against muscle memory, but you can still navigate the UI as you described - it's just that "Options" is bundled under "View" now. alt,v,y,enter or alt,v,y,o will open the options dialog. The hints are now hidden until you hit alt now though =/
Starting in Windows 8 : > The Ribbon is unspeakably messy, and unspeakably large, and as I said I am not going to attack it in detail because this is a long-running Microsoft hobby horse. Suffice to say I feel it is a usability disaster and does not belong in any program let alone Explorer, however, it has the one saving grace that it is both collapsible, and defaults to that state, so most users almost certainly nev…
Sorry for offtopic, but I'd like to share a tip I can't imagine living without. You can type cmd in explorer address bar and it'll open cmd in that directory (probably works with any other program in your %PATH%). Also you can type `explorer .` in cmd to open explorer in the current directory.
The Ribbon gets a lot of flak for seeming complex or ugly (including from this article), but it added a lot of sweet Power User tools in easy to find places, and everything keyboard shortcut-able, if you give it a chance.