I open the full bloody GNU Octave instead. I just timed it. Calculator: 13s Octave GUI: 5s The worst thing is that the calculator pretends to be running after like 2s but is unresponsive.
I will gladly hate on the calculator redesign, but 13 seconds feels like there is some other underlying issue.
Ye, probably architectural problem that somehow surfaces on my work laptop.
I googled abit and there seems to be people that have problem with load time of these system UWP apps.
"I just tested out the calculator again. Took 7 seconds to be usable."
I guess it's because in web context, it's easier to do web calls async than sync. While it's perfectly possible to do async web calls in something like C++, or at least move stuff to a different thread, people just somehow don't. Maybe out of lazyness since the first Google result was sync, or because lifecycle management is harder if raw pointers are involved, or whatever else.
It's because the default program structure in C and C++ makes functions blocking, with the caller assuming that if the callee returned it completed . Jamming a non-blocking program structure smack in the middle of a blocking system is never pretty, and most people prefer not to deal with the additional complexity. For the same reason, even though Windows has overlapped IO and other asynchronous IO mechanisms, most pe…
For disk IO you usually get away with it, especially now with SSDs. For networking you don't even have to use overlapped IO, sockets can be used with window messages, winhttp can be used async, etc. I think "it's more involved" is a really shitty excuse, especially if we're talking about a Microsoft product, not some obscure shareware software a guy is developing in his shed in the middle of nowhere.
Across 2 different machines, 100% repo, the start button on my keyboard only opens the start menu every other time I push it. It has been that way for 4+ years, it went away for a bit after an update, then came back again. Microsoft never has recovered from their dismantling of their test organizations.
Do you have a gaming keyboard? Weird keyboard glitches on Windows were happening to me due to switches on the keyboard, but from a UX perspective it always seemed like Windows was the issue.
Well it repos on my laptop, so no. :-D
I have seen it across multiple machines, different keyboards, different video cards. Super annoying, but at least it is consistent so I can get used to it...
I think search is hard generally. I switched to an M1 Mac pro recently, and it has its own set of challenges. For instance, there is no start menu but a search bar called Spotlight. You do your quick math in there (where you'd call calc.exe in Windows). However, it only accepts your query as math... sometimes. Like 50% of the times. Otherwise it searches the web. If you search for a program, it takes just that tiny s…
Adding software can help. Alfred can either replace spotlite or run along side it. I’ve found it much faster and easier to use. You can customize it pretty well. (Just don’t download the Mac App Store version as it’s multiple versions behind) There’s a ton of windows managers out there that help you setup hot keys or modify windows to work how you want. Mac overall is much better with native software not doing its ow…
shouldout to sizeup for window management. Keeping me sane since 2012.
Great article. I love Windows deep dives—both because of the supposed inaccessibility of Windows (clearly not true), and because Windows is something I've daily-driven for 23 years, and I've come to really appreciate. If only MS could get its act straight, clean up its UI framework mess (WinUI, WPF, WinForms, Win32, WinRT, MAUI... sheesh) and stop applying stupid regressive updates and dark patterns.
MS desperately needs a strong QA department back, but they seem uninterested in doing so.
Why the hell does windows think it's ok to secretly phone home with crash reports by default, especially when sending those makes the problem worse by slowing down the crash recovery? In this case the problem would probably have been insignificant if not for super slow, blocking, error telemetry. At least store these and send them later, sheesh.
Woah woah woah, who said this is "secret"? Were you expecting a big red skull and crossbones to take over your screen whenever a phone home occurs?
Overly obvious question, but: Why TF is there nobody on the Windows team who does exactly this type of work? Why are these things even slipping through QA over and over again? The user-facing layer of Windows is so full of similar problems, yet nothing ever improves, it only ever gets worse.
The Windows team probably has laptops with high-speed SSDs, and tons of RAM, a fast CPU, and a fast internet connection. So now already with that, 13 seconds is probably down to 3 seconds, and they are probably also okay with (sometimes) waiting 3 seconds while the search box opens after pressing the windows key.
The web stuff on Spolight is one of the first things I turn off on any new Mac. Siri is disabled, suggestions from the web are disabled, spotlight is only allowed to look at apps and files, etc. My mac works wonderfully after so that it returns results of what I expect when searched. Search is a lot less hard when you restrain it to searching only what you care about.
Does anyone know how to get a similar configuration with Win11? The setup described here is exactly what I want.