171–180 of 303 posts
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There IS a magic search tool, I've been using it for years. https://everything.en.softonic.com/ "Everything" is a fantastic lightning-fast system-wide search that's tiny and can run standalone.
Despite your glowing review, I cannot bring myself to download and install anything from sites like these. I'm sure it's a great program.
No MS I don't feeling spending half an hour figuring out what the hell is going on in that UX. That pretty much says it all about how intuitive it is dear designer...
Every single interaction I've ever had with Cortana has been complete garbage. It's worse than the old-school "simple string match on installed applications and files on disk" in every way, yet has somehow supplanted it?! I wish there were some easy way to completely uninstall this frustrating garbage in Windows 10 and go back to the simple interface that just worked. I cannot even begin to count how many times I've…
See, I thought Cortana was Microsoft's name for their voice assistant on Windows 10 or something. Now everything is starting to make sense. I kept having issues using the Windows menu search in Windows 10. I'd type "remov" and it would show the menu item for uninstalling applications. Great. But if I accidentally finished and typed "remove" the result would disappear. I felt like I was going crazy or something. Comfo…
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I have seen fuzzy search work in a few cases, but they are sparse. Most notably, I never remember what the name of Windows' built-in screenshot application is. It's "Snipping Tool". I often mis-remember it as "Clipping Tool". But anyway, it comes up when I type "screenshot", "clip", or "clipping" into the search bar.
Here's the crazy thing: Type out "clipping tool" and watch. It matches all the way to "clipping t". Then it stops matching, then matches again at "clipping tool". So even if you know a phrase which it matches on, you might or might not get a patch from an exact partial of that matching phrase.
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Just to be fair: I installed a copy of IntelliJ IDEA on my macOS. It was the trial version. I use Spotlight (and a year back, Alfred) to launch my all applications. However, Spotlight couldn't find the app for it's life, even if it found all the other apps in the same directory. After I upgraded to the paid app, the problem suddenly fixed itself. But I keep having shivers. It shouldn't be Spotlight's business.
I've experienced similar. My most pleasant experience with finding and launching applications is, surprisingly, in Linux. I think it's best in breed now. If you'd told me this 15 years ago I wouldn't have believed you, but it's gotten much better over the years and everything else has somehow gotten worse. I spend more time using Linux as a desktop OS than anything else these days, and it "just works".
Linux is vastly superior in stability, package management and just basic productivity.
There are of course still trade-offs such as drivers which, although so much better than what they used to be decades ago, are still not quite on par with the ones released for Windows in most instances. That being said, if you plan ahead a bit with your hardware purchases you'll have a great experience under Linux.
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I use a nice little utility called Launchy[0]. It is invoked by Alt-Space (or whatever shortcut you like), is lightning fast and finds the right application 99% of the time. Based on your problems, I think it could be worth checking out. [0] https://www.launchy.net
https://github.com/Wox-launcher/Wox is very similar but has a more active community.
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Windows used to be optimized around user experience. Are you sure that wasn't MacOS ? I can't think of a time in recent memory I would describe windows as focused around user experience, it has always had dark corners.
Update as I can't edit original. This was not meant as a comment on the preference between MacOS and Windows, or the user experience. What I am questioning was the assertion that UX was the major engineering driver for MS in building windows. i.e. "optimized for". While I can buy the argument that apple's engineering was driven by UX (for good or for ill) it doesn't seem to me that this was true for Microsoft. Not th…
It is not as beginner-friendly as apples products, but far more user-friendly.
Every single interaction I've ever had with Cortana has been complete garbage. It's worse than the old-school "simple string match on installed applications and files on disk" in every way, yet has somehow supplanted it?! I wish there were some easy way to completely uninstall this frustrating garbage in Windows 10 and go back to the simple interface that just worked. I cannot even begin to count how many times I've…
My favorite thing is when I search for a program, it comes up, I go to click on it or press enter, and then the web search finally comes back with the results and now I'm opening some browser with a random fucking web search. ARGH.
I can see Microsoft put a lot of work into making Win10 user friendly, but it seems like their designers don't understand their users or something. OSX has some bizarre interactions as well (like Finder, wtf is happening there), but for the most part it just works.
I guess I don't really know what I want my operating system to do precisely. I want it to be smooth, I want it to open programs quickly, I want it to move files around without hassle, and I want it to be secure while also be easily extensible. Unfortunately there's a lot of different interpretations of what those things should be. I can appreciate that making a world class operating system on top of decades of legacy code is difficult, but I also need to say: WTF is half of this shit?
Windows doesn't even come with a simple key reassignment. I had to download SharpKeys to set Caps Lock as Ctrl. That sort of thing just comes with OSX.