I actually forgot where it works because
- if I try to open a file `i:/foo/bar/test.txt` I get `The file name is not valid` (from Notepad)
- if I try to open a folder `i:/foo/bar` I get `The folder name is not valid`
- if I try to `cd /foo/bar` I get `The system cannot find the path specified.`
Windows really should have just one file open dialogue, etc.
Each of these has its own special list of "favorites" on the left, so if I want to add a shortcut to a commonly used folder, I find myself doing it in 8 different places. Or in some cases I can't; Acrobat has a sidebar with large icons of Recent Places, Desktop, Libraries, Computer, and Network. If you wanted to add somewhere more useful, you're shit out of luck.
Anyone know why this happened? Was there a period around Windows XP where the built in dialog was just godawful and everyone said "Fine I'll make my own" and then they never went away?
Compare to OS X where any time someone rolls their own dialogs for system features (especially Open and Print), I immediately assume the developer is an asshole. And for the most part, nobody does it. The only one I can think of off the top of my head is printing from Chrome, and theirs even includes a "Print using system dialog…" button.
Then Windows Vista came along and we were introduced to the "Common Item Dialog" [1] which is now the recommended way to File Open/Save.
> Acrobat has a sidebar with large icons of Recent Places, Desktop, Libraries, Computer, and Network.
Possibly your version of Acrobat is either older, or Adobe haven't bothered themselves to get with the present and implement the Common Item Dialog, or if they do they're customising it...or even worse it's a subclassed franken-dialogue. But I feel and appreciate your pain.
These two (fairly old) blog posts discuss the maddening situation with Windows file dialogues:
http://insanecoding.blogspot.co.uk/2007/03/file-dialogs.html
http://insanecoding.blogspot.co.uk/2007/04/file-dialogs-take...
[0]: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ms6...
[1]: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/bb7...
Thankfully not one I run into regularly.
To add to the sibling comments...
From MSDN "Windows continues to support the old-style Open dialog box for applications that want to maintain a user-interface consistent with the old-style user-interface"
No, no and thrice no. If I'm on Win 7, everything should look Win 7 consistent. Likewise if I'm on 10 it should all look 10, perhaps with necessarily reduced functionality if it's a deprecated call.
If I'm running Visual Studio on 7, I don't want all my icons, and GUI to be of 10. No matter how diligently you upgrade, there is always something visually out of step. Even with only MS software.
I suspect it was the very late arrival of a Windows Style Guide made a lot of developers get the habit of doing their own thing. Then they'll start faffing around with variations so you can have preview in open. Hell, might as well do our own everything. The rules didn't say you shouldn't.
Mac always had a pretty tight, and extensive, Style Guide with apparently thought down to individual pixels; Windows seemed not to care, or not understand when it did care. Around XP Windows started caring more about UX, but probably far too late.
I had a quick skim, Elementary talk good sense. It's this apparent trivia that makes the experience. Like can dialogue text be copied, or how a menu opens, and why. Or what shortcut keys to use and when. Or always use the default file open as it'll automatically upgrade visuals and at least some capability when the next OS release comes along. :)
Play along and the user will know how to print, open, copy, preview and a hundred other things on the first ever use of your new program leaving them just to learn the unique new thing.
I kept my Amiga Guidelines phonebook[1] for years after the machine was effectively dead as the principles and explanations were still sound. The Apple Guidelines[2] were worth owning whether you used a Mac or not, again for the principles, and would often get recommended. I had a copy years before I ever touched a Mac! Life got simpler when they were all online.
I don't think it matters where you take cues from, so long as you are internally consistent, and apps carry on that consistency.
[1] http://www.amazon.com/AMIGA-User-Interface-Style-Guide/dp/02... [2] http://www.amazon.com/Macintosh-Human-Interface-Guidelines-C...
This is a big difference, and in the end a classical one, in the way companies typically work compared to open source projects (not just open source code, I'm really talking about the whole project being open): in companies teams or individuals just don't collaborate as much, because projects are often extremely closed even within the companies, with all kind of access rights. And also some app team might want to support really old OS (who uses a Linux distro of 2009 today? Well, OTOH tons of people are using a Windows version from 2009...) for a few more years and that OS certainly won't add any kind of support for the UI the app guys want, and the app guy might not want to use loads of resource to make their app look neatly graphically integrated in old OSes.
In summary, for proprietary stuff, this is an hard problem both at the technical and at the organizational level, especially if you like to change your graphic experience so often like MS does. And now everybody is used to seeing widely inconsistent stuff on the same screen anyway, so old on new / new on old / different on different cases will remain, I guess. Plus converging UI from vastly different devices is also a hard problem in itself, and UWP is actually not bad at it -- but the price is obviously that it must be irrecoverably different from old Win32 programs.
I understand a lot of the baggage they're carrying for keeping compatibility and suffering 20 year old choices etc. I can't help but feel that 7 or 8 should have drawn a hard MacOS/OSX like line under things and given us a modern windows with newer choices. Add a VM for running your old XP app. Throw cmd and dos away entirely.
I actually respect MS for being brave enough to experiment with the GUI as much as they have, yes and get it terribly wrong sometimes. A classic fallback, or a 7 fallback for 8 would have made the 8 fail easier to bear.
Not entirely sure the company / open comparison is the whole story. Someone somewhere designed metro (or 7, or 10), figured out a UI and design language, and had some principles behind it. Those could be made the contract for the team's software being seen in the world. Again Windows has it more complex as so much of the GUI ends up in the .exe, so what you see is when it was made not what it runs on.
I think you're right in that having got where we are, it's unlikely to easily improve.
This was easy to do: after opening the dialog but before it was displayed, you just walked through its child windows to add your own controls where you wanted them, and increased the dialog height to make room.
But Windows didn't know you would be doing this until it was too late. The modifications were done after you called the Windows API to create the dialog.
If it weren't for this compatibility issue, Microsoft would have been delighted to just replace the old dialogs with the new ones wholesale.
It is commands at the command line that insist on the difference.
1st and 3rd examples work from PowerShell.