Microsoft UI has officially entered the realm of self-parody
seldo.tumblr.com
seldo.tumblr.com
Secondly, the actions are being moved from the context menu to the ribbon. Most new computer users find it very hard to remember additional, non intuitive actions like right clicking & context menus. Each of these is a 'modifier' that power users are used to, but which make the mental model of file manipulation much harder for beginners to wrap their heads around. They have to remember to apply these modifiers to see if the functions they want exist. Moving the functions into a contextually aware ribbon will make life much easier for these users.
Third, Move, Copy, Delete & Rename occupy the center of the ribbon. These are the most used commands (by far) and rightfully occupy center stage. Power users will call it clutter, but it will be extremely helpful for beginners.
[Disclaimer: MSFT Employee, but I do not work on Windows]
I didn't realize this. In fact, if I were asked to guess, I would have answered that most new users would pick up pretty quickly how to use context menus, especially if the context menus had related commands like file manipulation if in Windows Explorer (is it still called that?), or formatting if in a text document, etc.
Hell, rats in a cage can learn what to push in order to eat, so I would have thought that people would be able to learn this. Of course, it would help if they were told somehow and didn't have to discover it.
I would argue that THIS is what made Apple's OS hang on all those years it was in the severe minority. There is a segment of the population that wants only one mouse button to click, not 3, not 3 plus CTRL or ALT or etc. Apple did end up having to rely heavily on their option key to extend functionality but at its root the UI was designed so that the average user could do things in a simple, straightforward way. MS sees visually exposing commands to the user as their way to do it and while I may not entirely agree, I don't think it's without merit. My kudos to them for also letting me as a "power user" collapse the "newbie visual noise" off my screen and drop what I want on a custom quick access bar.
Remember: don't let your status as a power user cloud your view of how your grandmother might want to use her computer. There are FAR more 'grandmother' grade users than there are us.
I was a HUGE Apple fan for the early Macs. I totally get what you are saying. But we LOST in the workplace. It was just too slow for the other folks in the office to use (of course, the real death blow was having only a graphics mode to the display so the typing was dreadfully slow-- and the secretaries wouldn't use them- but that's another story).
But I get your point. That's why I phrased my response as I did. I have never done UI/UX testing- maybe the parent has and was sharing his insight.
But if we are all just speculating, I've got to throw out a shout for the other point of view. Yes, too many (how many is too many? I don't know) and it gets to be like using VIM. But two buttons? Seems like it should be ok.
Trust me, I agree that this new ribbon is very cluttered and contains too much visual noise, but in turn I don't mind exposing things visually to the end user. I hate MS Office with the ribbon, but I deal with people all the time who love it. Just let me turn it off :)
Well she no more typical a computer user than you are I would think. I like to see a curve of typical computer users age distribution (but I understand it would be a little skewed if it's hard for the older generations to use computers).
I feel that ribbon is designed for a select group of new users who need that kind of help. And I hope it's easy to disable it. It's fine for Microsoft to use something like this as a default mode as long as power users are able to turn that stuff off.
This is what turns me off on OS X, there is often no way to do certain more advanced things. Or it's hidden so well it requires hours of searching on the web for what plist to modify.
That reminds me of the first few times I tried to learn vim.
Now though, any other editor that's not Vim or Emacs feels like that...
Just double click on one of the tabs.
In a desktop OS, you have a seemingly infinite set of modifiers (Ctrl, Alt, Double click, click, right click, Ctrl + Shift), which are not 'logical' operations like tapping and swiping - they must be learned and remembered.
I'm sure there's a few more buried in there that I haven't discovered. (Like swipe backwards to delete an item from a list)
And now even those are getting out of control:
http://www.apple.com/macosx/whats-new/gestures.html
Pretty soon I'm going to run out of fingers, and these certainly aren't easily discoverable.
This same pattern continues on iOS devices. They don't ever use complicated gestures, certainly not as the only way to accomplish something. The most complicated gesture you need is pinching.
The new iOS 5 has gestures to switch apps and get home, but those are really like keyboard shortcuts since the home button is still there and offers a simpler alternative.
Easy? Maybe for some. I bet the same people who have to be told to right-click also have to be told how to work their bluetooth/wifi connection (and never bother to turn it off to save battery).
But I'll grant you this point if s/easy/possible/
I think that you overstate the importance of turning off wifi and bluetooth. Those are power user options, for sure. When you're trying to conserve battery power, you're trying to streamline how you use the device, which to me, smacks of 'power user'.
The flipside to that argument is that it is ridiculously easy to browse a web site, check your email and play Words with Friends and Angry Birds. These are the things that the majority of people care about... not whether or not a given physical interface is active or not.
And you are right, of course, in that ios allows most people to do the things they most care about very easily-- that's probably the takeaway. If you do that, then, apparently even if the other stuff is hard, people will probably figure out how to do it when they need it. Somehow.
Android devices on the other hand, need constant fiddling. My Droid would barely last a day with everything turned off, and with wifi, etc. turned on, it would die after only about 6 hours.
Disclaimer: I don't own an iOS device, so don't know how intuitive it might or might not be.
The actual removal of abstraction (mouse) have made it much easier to use it. This is why my son at 2 can use the ipad and he can't use the mouse and keyboard for the desktop and laptops.
ie there's an inductive leap between "I want to delete all files except this one" and "I can select that one file and then invert selection before deleting". At minimum it requires you to know what "invert selection" means. Ordinary users may take a different, more fiddly, path.
I don't know if that's the case here. My intuition says it is. However, in my optimistic heart I hope Microsoft did a bunch of usability testing and determined that ordinary users do grasp an "invert selection" concept more often than not.
That's how design for mass-use user interfaces works, right? By evidence-driven testing, not by what the programmer/designer thinks makes sense? Clings to idealistic belief.
Or maybe two. One to go from selected file to all other files, and another click to get back.
Selection only comes handy when you will be doing something to several items at once. Thus, the selection function could be turned on via a menu item or a button: it's a totally different operating mode where you click on or drag around the items to select them.
For new users I might agree that they could figure out a right click because everything is new. But for users where everything is familiar ("I've always done it this way"), it gets much harder to break those expected actions.
Second part is about explorer itself. While it might seem like a common utility (even necessary), I find it very rare for a general user to know about it (my wife does not, nor my parents, siblings, their friends,...but my wife's father does). Once they see it, they have no idea what to do. Copy a file? Really, they have no idea.
Spending 2 years in hell doing phone tech support for an ISP after high school was probably the most valuable career experience I've ever had bar none.
Nothing has prepared me for making and selling software to regular people better than this experience. Entire assumptions about how users interact with computers, ones based on my own experience, were rendered useless.
The ways regular people think about technology is endlessly fascinating because it very rarely has anything to do with how I think about technology.
At my day job, we eventually decided to put our development lead as tier-2 tech support because we couldn't get this across. He receives every single piece of support mail we get and is asked to respond to a pretty good percentage of them.
It's been a 2 year, very difficult, education for him.
Experiencing the mind of the typical user day after day has caused some major changes in his UI design philosophy. Don't bury things in menus, limit the number of ways you can do something, walk users through set procedures, etc.
There's a bunch of different approaches to interface design and many of them don't work well. We've all seen the beautiful but hard to use designs made by professional designers, and the control-panel-of-a-spaceship design made by developers.
It seems that what both cases miss out on is spending time working with and understanding the average guy on the street. Or rather, good interface design means spending lots of time optimizing for regular users.
Seconding. Especially before Windows 7 added Explorer as a pinned item by default, the less-technologically-literate persons I know would simply called it "My Computer", and used it in the large-icon, single-paned view. On one occasion while helping a friend find a file, I opened Explorer and switched it to the Details view option. Between that and the folder hierarchy in the left pane, I guess it looked different enough from "My Computer" that my friend was used to and I was given the reaction "Wow, you're really in the guts of the machine, now."
Now the idea that you actually have more problem with experienced users is interesting. I can see that in myself (damn new microwave!). But I still feel like it's no harder to learn, however, than what a bunch of icons are supposed to represent. But once it's shown, then is it really hard for them?
Seems like the problem is one of discoverability, not complexity.
Their old MacOS Finder was clear and simple - my wife would spend hours arranging her work in coloured folders, each of which opened in a window whose shape and position she had chosen, and was meaningful to her. It was a powerful tool that enabled her to arrange and group her work.
Now, both Apple and Microsoft compete with each other over how bad they can make their file system interface. Microsoft wanted to do away with the filesystem in Longhorn, and Apple have actually done so in iOS.
Is this progress??
You're absolutely right. I don't have the citation on me right now, but spatial mode has been found to be easier to grasp for new users in every single test ever. The only reason it was dropped was because (1) Windows Explorer, (2) power users whined about too many open windows and (3) a lot of people got used to URLs opening in the same window thanks to web browsers, so people sought to apply the same principles to file browsers.
Spatial mode used to be default on GNOME for a long time. There, too, it was dropped because of the same reasons.
See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spatial_file_manager and http://www.bytebot.net/geekdocs/spatial-nautilus.html
You can easily have two Finder windows open on the same folder, meaning you lose the immediate recognition that spatial mode gives you. My personal take - they should have two types of Finder window - a spatial "folder contents" window and a folder-browser (probably in column-view) that only shows folders and maybe a preview of the files within.
So you can navigate quickly/enter file-paths in the browser, but to actually use a folder, you enter spatial mode, so you have the instant recognition of where you are.
The problem is that there's no global switch to force Finder in spatial mode coming from anywhere, anytime. This results in a messy affair when suddenly a non-spatial Finder pops up because you never opened that folder directly and previously put it in spatial mode.
Disclaimer: I believe the best UI for a filesystem manager was Windows Explorer 98, the last iteration with perpetual, irrevocable and non exclusive root access, with Norton Commander as its only rival.
From the moment we cared about maintaining our system's safety from the user's "big fingers syndrome", it all went down (starting with hiding file extensions) to the atrocities we now have to deal with. And yes, I put Seven's Explorer in the same basket as Finder and the likes of Nautilus, mostly due to /that/ horrible folder scrolling bug that MS refuses to hotfix.
Wonderful though Linux is, it's applications are not consistent or mature enough to support a totally document-centric UI. Microsoft could achieve that with Office, but they would probably be accused of over-integration, and hit with the anti-trust stick.
All of those actions require knowing how to [delete], [open folders], [drag and drop].
As someone who has done a fair amount of tutoring seniors on basic computer usage, I have a large amount of anecdotal evidence to indicate this is definitely not the case for them. Depending on the person, I would sometimes try to not show them context menus or keyboard shortcuts at all and just teach them how to use the File, Edit, etc. menus.
There are people who just want to learn the correct order of incantations so that they can check their mail and do things with their photos. And that's okay! Trying to show them that that there is more than one way to do a given action often just leads to confusion as they meld them together (right click on Edit..)
I have seen a fair amount of people with a similar approach as well, but my largest body of personal experience comes from the tutoring, which is why I mentioned it.
I have been seeing the same thing with research colleagues.
What a lot of us in IT or related fields do not "get" from normal users is that the way they "see" the icons and pictures in the computer is completely different from what we do. We have a "mental model" of what Word or Excel or Firefox is doing. Some of us have a more accurate and detailed model than others.
But "normal" users only know what they see and what will happen after they do something (either because they have done it before or because we told them, and they trust us). For them, there is no more meaning to "click on the File menu" than if a Scuba diver told you to "check your SPG every 10 minutes".
Apple has learned a lesson here. They are now heavily optimized for ease and comfort of purchase.
(since we're on topic: I'm an MS employee. I do not work on Windows Explorer)
It seems to me that a lot of people here on HN are simply using this issue to talk about how much better they are at using a computer than the ordinary person, who is apparently quite inept. Unless there is convincing evidence that people that incompetent are still a significant fraction of the userbase, we should stop designing desktop software to accommodate people who are not able to master the use of an iPad.
This is the danger with reading too much into simple data - just because 85% of the people do X, it doesn't mean that X is good. Do you expect the data to show that people don't copy paste because its not intuitive? No, in most cases they 'have' to learn it, and figure it out by asking a friend, but they don't enjoy the learning process (and indirectly, resent the platform itself).
Everyone who struggled with the concept of right clicking eventually learnt it - the problem is not that right clicking or context menus are impossible to learn. It's that they're not a natural way of interaction, and should be eliminated whenever possible.
You shouldn't have to learn to use a menu to do what you want, especially when 80% of the time you just need 4 actions.
The simplicity of modifiers (tap, double tap, swipe) is what makes touch platforms like iOS very intuitive. A direct, clickable button ensures that novice users can accomplish simple file management tasks by learning a single modifier (the click).
Editing is also a pain in the ass on it. It is a wonderful os for very simple tasks, but as the complexity grows it is very limiting.
Maybe that's the moral of this thread.
What this may show is that it is mainly experienced users who use Explorer. And based on my personal experience, I believe this to be the case - most people do not know what Explorer is for, let alone how to use it efficiently.
The reason for using the context menu use in my case is that most options are available only from the context menu...e.g. "edit", "extract [from zip] all", etc. and it is only through many years of trial and error that I have developed any efficiency with the context menu - this is because the problem with context menu operations is that they require enough experience to recognize the context and remember what [hidden] commands will be revealed by a right-click.
The advantage of the ribbon is that context menus are made visible when the context is entered, thus allowing less experienced users explore options more easily. Also, the issue with traditional context menus is that they are a mixture of fixed elements [cut, copy, paste, properties] and context specific items [extract all].
Besides touch-friendliness, ribbons have huge benefits in discoverability. People can't use features they don't know exist; ribbons organize features into browsable, meaningful panels so they can be found, related to each other, and used. The article seems to entirely miss this point.
Nobody knows about them for one reason - they are useless.
Screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/5e5xN.jpg
Edit: Vista/7 may not be completely true, but it's certainly that way on my untechnically-minded mother's laptop - probably the result of context (e.g. in a library of pictures) or a setting somewhere.
Personally, that's an command that I never use; not sure how popular it is with the Windows userbase in general.
In XP, there's a folder that you can put folder and program shortcuts in, that will populate the send to menu. In fact, this essentially is my quicklaunch method when using XP. Just put a link to notepad2 in there, and you can view anything in ascii. Rinse and repeat.
It's so useful in fact, that they might have been able to bring it into wider usage, and maintain continuity with older Windows, by adding a context menu such as 'Make me a send to place', which would add a shortcut to the clicked folder or application into the send to menu.
To me on OS X, the Finder sidebar and Dock are the rough equivalent. 90% of my Finder work is selection and dragging to the sidebar, or Dock, the same thing I would use send to on Windows for.
The "send to" email, however: I don't think you can use it with any web-based email, correct? Do people usually have Outlook set up on their machines these days?
There's one more: if you have a bluetooth adapter (or a laptop with embedded support), it shows a 'Send to Bluetooth device'. I find this very useful for sending files to my phone.
But they had to be put there by the user. :)
Methinks that kind of summarizes the issue: Microsoft doesn't seem to realize it's not 1995 anymore. "Beginners" are no longer a big market, and people are more comfortable with "discovering" software interfaces, as proven by the success of web apps, Apple, etcetera.
Things like moving files around directories is black magic to them. Directories are black magic to them. The problem I see with this solution is two-fold:
1. The people who understand this stuff will be comfortable using context menus.
2. The people who don't understand this stuff will be just a stymied by the "move to" being in the ribbon versus being in a never-seen context menu.
However, what I would imagine MS is hoping with this is that the people in category two will gradually slide up to category one (well, more like 1a) because these things are in their face all the time.
Microsoft's solution is more akin to the way animal researchers teach apes to recognize arbitrary symbols. It's a subtle and pernicious form of vendor "lock in", because when you try to move those users away from their comfort zone in Outlook or Windows Explorer, they feel lost.
Personally, I think Microsoft and "people who can't be bothered to learn their tools" deserve each other.
The actual user story is always: find what I'm looking for. Google got it right with GMail and informal searching - screw manual organization. Power users should be able to set up structures, but typical computer folks don't need that.
For me, the problem with the ribbon has been (the times I tried to use Office 2010) that there are some more "advanced" commands (like, inserting a cross-reference to a Figure or Table) which became quite hidden away in the Ribbon. Specially, since in the old toolbar mode, I could add buttons to the actions I used most (I actually have a button for text-to-columns in Excel, or to bring the "insert cross reference" in Word, among others).
From my experience, the ribbon does not give you that ability.
Actually, every time I have to use the ribbon (my institute's laptop has office 2010) I start imaging an addon which "learns" what are the most used commands and configures the "Home" (or another) ribbon tab showing icons to access those commands. Surely, someone must have already thought of that no?
Also, do you realize that the Ribbon is customizable in Office 2010, in the same way toolbars were customizable in Office pre-2007?
This is similar to what MS did with pulldown menus in the pre-Ribbon days. It sounds like a great idea but it turns out to be a terrible one in practice. During the critical "newbie" phase, as a user begins to work with the program, the UI never seems to look the same twice. Tasks that should become reflexive never lose their dependence on the brain. At the same time, more advanced users are left wondering what interesting features they might be missing.
You really, really do not want a UI that changes behind your back, or in ways that aren't explicitly commanded. Resorting to discrete novice / expert modes is a venial sin in UI design, but "personalized menus" is a mortal one. It's about the worst thing you can do, and IMO there's no reason to think it would be any better in a ribbon-oriented model than in a menu-driven one.
(Edit: I do agree that restricting the adaptive menu scheme to a specific ribbon tab might be a more promising approach than monkeying with the structure and layout of the standard tabs.)
Tons of people struggle with things as simple as sending emails, or adding music.
Because of users like this, Microsoft is where it is. Any big revamp, and they'll just get millions of confused customers who suddenly can't make sense of the most basic functionality. It is Microsoft's own doing that they made their users get used to interfaces like this, but it's not as easy as just scraping it and throwing up something new.
It's also easy to forget that Windows has a userbase 10 times its nearest competitor (which is to say this brings in challenges which competitors might not face).
Jesus, the amount of Microsoft-bashing in on this article is insane.
Remember, its not that user's cant remember right clicking, its that they shouldn't have to. Why should you need two different types of clicks, and 2 sub menus to Send a file to a drive, when you can accomplish it with a single click and a single sub-menu (as is demonstrated in the ribbon)
Making the initial learning curve simple will have implications on the overall feel & appeal of the operating system, but this is something that is difficult to quantify with simple software metrics.
Ok, but the file system metaphor with its files and folders is unintuitive. New users get lost or just don't get that metaphor. You won't make anything easier for them by putting bigger buttons into the toolbar when they can't imagine for what those buttons might be used.
Alone the metaphor of "copying" a file is so unintuitive. If my mother wants to take a look at the photos she took with her cam she sure won't think about "copying" them.
My point is: MS is trying to fix the wrong problem. They should think about getting rid of end user facing file systems instead of bolting bigger and brighter buttons onto a horribly user unfriendly application like the explorer.
People who use Windows are, for the most part, not new computer users. More and more the new users go to a Mac, tablet or smartphone.
The point of that article is that people already use hotkeys and context menus. So building a bigger menu and toolbar is crazy.
Seriously, it's overwhelming. The UI is constantly shouting commands at the user, regardless of what the user is trying to do. UIs like these are exactly where the problem my parents have with computers come from. They go in with an idea of what they want to do, let's say they want to find a note they wrote previously. As soon as they open the window, they are bombarded with commands. Move! Copy! Save as! Select! Select all! It's a cacophony of nonsense to them. Copy? Copy what, where? Nothing in there helps them find their note.
Really. "Easy access." What does that button do? I have no idea what might happen when that's pressed. It sounds a bit dirty, but accepting that it's probably accessibility related and not an invitation to intimacy, I still can't figure out what it might do. Ridiculous.
>What? Most users are familiar with CTRL+C, CTRL+V these days? LALALA NOT LISTENING!! ADD MORE RIBBONS!!
It's hard to claim that the context menu is good UI. The fact that so few people use the menu bar means that it's currently useless and needs to be reworked. It's not as if they're replacing the context menu with the ribbon, they're replacing the currently-unused menu bar.
WRONG!
For the hundreds of nerds complaining that they don't have access to the file system on their iPads, there are millions of normal people who are delighted by a computer that they can use rather than manage.
How much longer can Microsoft keep making a 20th century operating system? What's going to be the great innovation of Windows 9? Yet another reshuffled toolbar driven by all of their wonderful data?
Open almost any Windows laptop, and you'll see users who basically think of the hard drive as a file dumping ground. You'll see files stored on the Desktop, or everything just goes into one big directory. How many conversations have you had where you ask "Where did you save the file?" and the reply is "I don't know, just the place that it says when I press save"?
Windows should have had a services infrastructure, where programs explicitly define an export (how to access files the program has generated) and import (which files the program can handle). Users don't really think of files by directory but by type, either Word documents or photos or whatever. The file system should just be a dialog box which is essentially a search. "Show me Word documents I edited in the last 5 days." "Show me all my photos that I took in Hawaii." That's how users think about data.
When I hit "Save" on a Mac, the file picker shows me a field where I can type a file name, and a drop down where I can choose between "Documents", "Pictures", "Movies", etc. or the last directory this particular program saved a file to. Most of the time the application will even pick a sensible default location. Only if I click the small arrow at the right of the drop down to I see the advanced file chooser.
On Windows, when I hit "Save", I get the advanced file picker by default. Unless the application is smart enough to set a sensible default location -- which most Windows applications are not -- the Windows file picker defaults to Desktop. This is the reason most people have all kinds of shit on their Windows desktops.
I can search for files on Windows now, so at least Windows has one thing right.
See: http://nascent.freeshell.org/programming/TagFS/ https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/WinFS
and many more.
This search functionality is available system wide (Spotlight search box), from any file open dialog or from the command line. For example things like this are possible:
Find me all pictures I tool this year and where I used flash, and aperture f4:
kind:image fnumber:4 date:"this year" flash:1
You type this in either spotlight or search box on open file dialog. You can do the same from the command line
mdfind -interpret "kind:image fnumber:4 date:"this year" flash:1"
The nice thing about the mdfind command is that you can restrict the search to a directory of your choice only.
Some people pay good money for photo organizers on Mac OS X, not knowing they already have this functionality built in. And finding what attributes are available is not that hard either:
mdimport -X
prints the entire metadata schema.
http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2010/06/the-beos-fil...
First of all, they designate only one part of the visible filesystem as "safe", when it should be the opposite. Everything that's obviously accessible should be safe, and system-critical stuff should require going elsewhere.
Secondly, there is nothing personal about "My Documents". Every program routinely dumps files there that you can't do anything with directly. Game saves are the worst offenders here. They're cryptically named and you can't double click them like every other file.
And then people complain that normal users don't understand files.
But MS is a highly engineer dominated tribal culture. I don't see how they can overcome that. I guess the windows explorer will survive another decade.
On the iPad, I can use the official Photos app (or any of the other photo apps) to get my photos where they need to go, whether that's a phone, computer, website or printer.
I don't read my email by going into the "My Emails" folder on my C:\ drive, I access my email through a UI specifically made for accessing email.
I don't manage individual contact files, I access my contacts through an address book app.
I don't manage individual music files, I use iTunes.
Most operating systems already encourage separating files by type, I'm taking it a step further by suggesting that 90% of users would be better served by many type-specific file browsers than a single general purpose one.
And last week I managed to score 2 32gb touchpads at the $150 price -- with the thought that we'll play with one for a week or so and see if it fits in our family. If not, we'll give both away at Christmas.
The touchpad just made me love my iPad2 more. It's nice enough, and will be a great gift for my mom and her dad, but it doesn't hold-up to the iPad2.
All that being said -- I sorta think of my primary computer as an oven to my iPads toaster-oven. The iPad can do a lot of the same things, and several things it can do far better than my oven and far easier.
And apple doesn't even want me to replace my oven -- they're producing toaster ovens by design.
What that means to me is that there's a lot of design decisions that work on a toaster oven that just don't make sense on an oven.
:) Now please forgive a somewhat clunky analogy.
How do I tell iTunes (or any other music player) to import some of the music on my USB drive? iTunes doesn't even allow you to do that with iPods...
There are a lot of things I'm used to doing on a computer that I can't do on an iPad. Everyone has their examples of things that make X inferior to Y. Apple has shown that they can be successful by offering less of "business as usual" while slowly introducing new ways of doing things.
The only way to advance the state of the art is to let go of a lot of the notions of what we think a computer should be. Is rearranging toolbar buttons really going to bring delight to people around the world? How does this help the guy who is miserable at his job because he's forced to use a 10 year old PC running Windows XP? How does it help the person who lost all of their vacation photos because they downloaded a photo editing app that turned out to be a virus? How does it help a four year old that's learning to read?
I have a really nice app to read them called Media Player Classic -- I just don't have an app to manage them. Writing apps to manage every single file type I have is very inefficient compared to using a general purpose file manager. You abstract out often-used code rather than copy-pasting it all over the place, don't you?
The only way to advance the state of the art is to let go of a lot of the notions of what we think a computer should be.
The fundamental definition/theorem/axiom/whatever of computer science is the Church-Turing thesis. We haven't come up with a practical notion of computability more general than that, so it is by default the state of the art. Following from that, I think a computer should be a real-life manifestation of a universal Turing machine -- something that can run anything computable (taking into account resource bounds but also providing all the resources it can) without being beholden to another entity. Anything less is an appliance, a toy, and is not fit to be called a computer.
With a dedicated file manager, you open the one program and do it all in one step.
What is interesting is that Apple and MS have two totally opposed philosophies in handling the issue of the user not understanding the file system.
And judging by the popular success of the iPad I have to disagree with the suggestion that Apple is less inclusive.
Well, they might have fixed it then. All I know is that I balked at the 1GB OS X update waiting for me.
And judging by the popular success of the iPad I have to disagree with the suggestion that Apple is less inclusive.
The iPad is only popular in rich first world countries. You will find tons of PCs running Windows in not-so-rich countries, orders of magnitude more. That is exactly my point.
At very least in Bangkok, which is obviously not belongs to rich first world countries, I can see iPad (and Galaxy Tab) everywhere on a train or even in a not-so-expensive restaurant. My not-so-rich neighbor bought an iPad few weeks ago and ask if I could help him setup Wi-Fi, etc.
Maybe I have an Apple-fan Attraction Field turned on or something, but I've found iPad-availablity around me to be pretty amazing. It's hard to deny that Windows-running PCs are still orders of magnitude more but it's still amazing.
New technologies tend to be adapted by first world countries first. This was as true of the original IBM PC as it is today for the iPad.
I have a set of documents, a subset of which I'd like to copy onto my USB drive. I also have a set of pictures, a subset of which I'd like to copy onto my USB drive. My USB drive already has a set of documents and a set of pictures, and I'd like to get a subset of the documents and a subset of the pictures onto internal storage so that I can plug out my USB drive afterwards and still access them. Can you come up with a way of doing all that that doesn't involve a filesystem or a poor imitation of it?
Plug an SD card with photos on it into the iPad camera connection kit, and plug that into the iPad. The Photos app opens, you tap the photos you want to import, and you're done.
Your other cases are simple extensions of this example. The fact that an iPad can't do this right now with more file types or with a USB drive is not an inherent limitation of the approach.
-> Write code, -> Dump logs to app.log, app.err -> Is there an err browsing app you're aware of ?
If that ever happened to someone on HN, the consequences:
-> If apple implemented something so broken, some nutter would explain to me what extension to use. -> If MS implemented it, there would be a #1 post on HN with the title "MS file management is broken beyond repair and company is irrelevant"
I expect to be downvoted for this but it is impossible to have a fair discussion about Microsoft products.
Aha, therein lies the rub. These documents could be essentially arbitrary files, and there's no substitute to a general purpose file manager for them. Writing an app for every single file format that could be present on the USB drive is highly inefficient compared to the usual file manager.
My basic point is that filesystems are a well-established standard, and practically everything on your computer supports them. If you'd like to deviate from such a standard, you'd better have a very good reason for doing so.
If that doesn't work for you, then okay. You're not most people.
This is interesting. For example, my mom knows the document she wants to open is her 2009 tax return document. The fact that it is a PDF or she reads it with Adobe Reader -- I'm fairly certain she doesn't know. If I were to layout every application she has installed and told her to find the one to open to access her tax documents I honestly don't think she'd have a clue. She'd probably try Word. I suspect she's not alone on this.
Maybe you can provide a practical example of a case where you need to move files onto your system that can't be opened by any of the applications installed on your system. I can't think of a single time I've needed to do that. Files don't have inherent value. They're only useful if you have software that can make use of them.
MS says, "Only 2 of the top 10 commands customers invoke in Explorer are available in the Command bar, the main UI element for invoking commands."
And have this picture, http://blogs.msdn.com/cfs-filesystemfile.ashx/__key/communit...
The takeaway from the data isn't that you should focus on people using context menus, because all commands haven't been available in other places. But they used their data and said, "there are the most common desired actions" coupled with their own design sense that said, "if we moved them to the ribbon they'd be easier to use".
To me that makes a great deal of sense.
I feel like this person, Seldo, who wrote this blog post attacked MS without either reading the full MS post or not understanding it. Statements like, "But the more important thing is that the remaining 50% of the bar is taken up by buttons that nobody will ever use, ever, even according to Microsoft’s own research" (which she bolded) simply aren't in the data MS presented. It's as if she misunderstood the distinction between location and action.
And later she says, "Again, this is Microsoft’s own research, cited in the same post: nobody — almost literally 0% of users — uses the menu bar, and only 10% of users use the command bar." Again she seems to not understand that the most common actions were only available from the context menus.
I actually think that overall this a big improvement. Minimalism can go screw itself when it costs me hours of free labour :)
The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste. And I don't mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way, in the sense that they don't think of original ideas, and they don't bring much culture into their products.
It takes a certain level of skill using a system before you're capable of appreciating higher level constructs such as "beauty". As an analogy, we all have seen poor coders whose code is poorly formatted, sloppy looking, and just plain ugly. But when you ask them they're just not capable of noticing this. Its that their minds have not elevated past the details to see the big picture. It's the same way with most computer users.
If Microsoft has no taste, Apple certainly has rotten taste in my opinion.
The problem comes in the implementation. The graphic design is just horrible. Where is the grid? Where is the white space? What the hell is that round button that replaces the file menu? The title bar just looks awful.
If they could clean it up graphically I really think it could be just as nice as anything on Mac OS X. Ask yourself this, if Apple had come out with the buttons on tabs in the exact same groupings but done it in a gorgeous way, who would be complaining about it? We'd all be heralding it.
How is the ribbon any different to a hierarchial menu bar? (See the Gnome drop-down menu or the iOS Settings Menu).
You know, I just checked Finder and realized that not only does it not have the things showed in this mockup, but that I have never missed them.
Strange.
I can give you the steps, if you'd like.
The Finder has a lot of places you can perform operations on a file: the menu bar, the toolbar, the Get Info inspector, and the context menu. All the Ribbon does is turn them into buttons and put them in the same place. There's no remembering how to do stuff - and yes, some people can't remember how to do basic file management - because it's all done from the same row at the top. I could say the same thing about "Every function in the Finder I can do without having to use menus".
Maybe MS did extensive usability testing, maybe they didn't. But that CTRL-F study was so surprising to me that I don't trust my instinct when it comes to judging the effectiveness of a user interface for hundreds of millions of people
Small nitpick: "Burn" doesn't show if you click on the main options of the left tree ("Favorites", "Libraries", etc).
I find it interesting because it clearly shows something changed on the last couple of years, we still remember how important burning something was, right?
If you don't have anything selected you only get Organize and New folder. If you select a PDF you get Open with X, Print, and E-mail added.
Because every file can technically be "burned" when you have a CD burner it shows up all over the place.
- It's ugly as hell
- A beginner is bombarded with way too many things to click on
- An expert is annoyed by useless buttons and waste of space
Sure, you can turn it off, but who wants to configure and reconfigure UI preferences for the rest of their lives (sidenote: reminds me of eclipse)? Sensible defaults, please.
Contrast this with Apple, whose designs often define what good design and usability means. In their apps:
- The appearance is simple, well-designed, elegant
- The only actions present are those deemed most necessary to the user
- Tons of functionality is hidden under shortcut keys, modifier clicks and context menus for expert users (after years on OS X, I still discover hidden elegance as a result of their zealous attention to detail)
Are these two statements different or restating the same thing with a different perception:
>> after years on OS X, I still discover hidden elegance
and something like:
"It takes me years to find some features because they're so well hidden, and perhaps unintuitive."
A few examples: http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/400/got-any-mac-os-...
"Microsoft Designs the iPod Package:" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9HfdSp2E2A
[1] http://www.ipodobserver.com/ipo/article/Microsoft_Confirms_i...
Shouldn't there be more intuitive ways of doing these things? Why is there a need for a move button or copy (one or the other) when you have drag and drop? I know it is very much in vogue to abstract the file system away from the user, and it strikes me that this is exactly the opposite, and just might be just a little over engineered.
Also, what is up with those suspension towers and all those cables? Does anyone actually cross the bridge at those great heights? I say cut them up and stick them underneath as support piers, so that they're not obstructing the view or (more likely) sticking out of a fog bank and creating a hazard to passing aircraft.
Games have the best UI; ideally a game will only show you the bare minimum of information required, and make the play experience as smooth and intuitive as possible. But games also have very narrowly defined win/loss conditions, and even in sandbox games (like Grand Theft Auto) success means that that players in the middle of the normal distribution are able to complete the game and interested enough to spend time doing so.
For creative or productivity software, the definition of success is open-ended, because while designers can anticipate the kind of tasks/problems users will want to perform/solve, the end product of their labors is fundamentally unknowable, rather than waiting within the software to be discovered by the diligent user (player). Sure, Michaelangelo used to say that the statue already existed within the block of marble and his job was simply to reveal it, but you should probably see that as an early example of successful branding rather than a design document. A game is like a theme park ride insofar as the riders may change but their interaction with the ride is highly constrained. An application is more like a civil engineering task insofar as it has to bear a substantial amount of traffic, but its job is to facilitate rather than fulfill. You want those things available on the toolbar, even though many of them may not see regular use, because it's the easiest way to signal the availability of such functionality. The relative utility distribution of toolbar buttons or menu items follows Benford's law just like everything else.
That was probably the largest amount of psychobabble condensed into 2 paragraphs I've ever seen. Seriously, your first point was extremely over-simplified and you were called out on it, rightfully. I could make your first argument about anything. Watch: "Only 50% of people went out to eat this weekend. Clearly, we should get rid of 50% of restaurants." or "Only 50% of cars are driven on any given day. Clearly, we should just git rid of 50% of the cars."
Your first point was a miss, and chetan called you out on it. Then, you insult his intelligence and go into a psychobabble rant about little to nothing that applies. Jesus dude, come down a peg or two.
I stand by my point above, though. Call it psychobabble if you like, but I like my metaphors. Shoot me.
There's a reason that I included qualifiers like 'I wouldn't want to overthink it' and 'ideally...' and 'players in the middle of the normal distribution...'. The reason is that I'm sketching out a philosophy of UI design in only a few sentences, and want to signal this to people who are reading. You seem determined to interpret my remarks in the most literal and narrow sense possible, to the point of completely overlooking the contextual qualifiers that accompanied them.
Every button or command on the Ribbon can be accessed via polymorphic hotkeys. Every command can be accessed as a chain of key presses. There is zero need for mouse usage -- even in PowerPoint.
This is huge. This was not doable in previous versions of Office! There were some commands you could not access via anything else than the menu, and to those of us that are vim users, you know how bad that can be! I do a lot of PowerPoint presentations and besides designing arrows or shapes I have no need for a mouse. And PowerPoint is a WYSIWYG editor!
The other reason is that you can hide the Ribbon. See the screenshots? That chevron symbol (^) means that you can essentially auto-hide the Ribbon and bring it back, while still retaining its usability via hotkeys.
I'm by no means an all-guns-blazing MSFT fanboy, but I need Office at work, and instead of jumping on the silly bandwagon of bashing all that is Ribbon, I found my inner vim user and learnt to god damn power use the hell out of it.
To those that actually need Office daily, I recommend opening it and pressing Alt. Let the funny stuff unfold.
"Not enough people are using this feature" can lead you to think "Let's make that feature's UI more prominent" instead of what it (normally) should: "Let's scrap that feature". Simplicity, minimalism, and elegance seem to be completely elusive to Microsoft, even with their brand new developments.
Having said that, I think the author of the post seems to ignore the fact that Microsoft's research shows that not many use the menu bar currently (because currently, the menu bar is hidden by default). By adding the ribbon, I assume their goal is to improve that statistic, and in turn make it easier for users.
Moving to this design is a step in the right direction. They need to do more - like ax the filesystem altogether (rendering this step meaningless), but that's another story.
Discoverability is a prime way to keep things elegant (ie, don't push it in a user's face - let them find it easily).
Of course, if Microsoft wants to address BOTH touch and desktop, then I wish them well... that's a herculean task and I don't think any solution work well for either.
"We knew that using a ribbon for Explorer would likely be met with skepticism by a set of power-users (like me), but there are clear benefits in ways that the ribbon:
-Exposes hidden features that they already use but which require third party add-ons to use in the Explorer UI today.
-Provides keyboard shortcuts for every command in the ribbon, something many people have been asking for.
-Provides UI customization with the quick access toolbar, taking us back to a customization level that is basically equivalent to Windows XP."
The newly-added buttons on the ribbon are there to address the most-requested features (by actual customers) as well as some of the missing features users most-often go to third-party plug-ins for, per the actual blog post from the Windows 8 Engineering Blog.
As for whether the UI is stream-lined or not - while simplification has its place, it is not always a good thing. The OSX Finder is surprisingly devoid of things even basic users can find useful - in many cases it isn't easy to find the appropriate menu option or shortcut to perform these actions - personally I think it goes too far by way of simplification.
It is good to make computers easy-to-understand - but by attempting to remove the learning curve COMPLETELY you can also damage the productivity a computer can provide. The sweetspot, of course, is somewhere in the middle.
Typical use based on their research has used the context menu. On Windows that is typically a right click (IIRC). Now Windows 8 has claimed to moving towards more touch capable user interface. I'd imagine anything that is directly touchable with common controls being larger targets is a huge improvement from right-click simulation. These controls, while ugly, I could see as an improvement to usability in those scenarios.
Additionally, I haven't seen any effective file management interfaces for touch devices yet. Most of them shun the filesystem in favor of flattened document collections, so it will be interesting to see how this plays out on upcoming tablet devices. Personally, I was looking forward to stepping away from filesystems and lessening their role in my regular interactions, but time will tell where valuable experiences will be spent, so I'd say we wait and see for this one.
In 7 you have to "Shift + Right Click" to see "Copy as Path" in the context menu. Now how many users (even power users) actually know about this? So many of my friends were really pleased to find this out when I showed them.
There are lots of other features such as you can actually copy a file and when you try to paste it to a "File Open Dialog" 7 will automatically paste the path of the file, so that's why "Copy Path" was quite hidden, because for common usage it's just easier to do copy & paste.
We have to understand that just like everyone know what is Ctrl + C all power users eventually gets rid of menu bars and just uses hotkeys. New Ribbon interface (with hide/customise features) provides a nice infrastructure for that while not punishing the normal users.
Hate the ribbon. Hate the iPad.
But for the majority of users, those are massive improvements in UI.
Right-Click, Double-Click, ... arcane commands only people like and love that are good at memorizing actions. And if those memorized actions are gone, the rage begins. You need to be anal to love the old Office UI or the command line. Do you remember the hate the old Office UI got in the past from the very people who now praise it?
Personally, I think the ribbon UI was the ballsiest move that MS did in a decade. It showed real guts, real vision. In Office 2010, they improved upon it, making Excel, Powerpoint and Word actually more usable. Exposing new functions and teaching me about them, from within the UI.
But at this stage it looks so very very bad, and remind me the open office mouse with 30 buttons.
We're living in a world where digital technology more and more becomes the dominant driving force of our society. We already lost the ability to change hardware to a - relatively small - group of people (yes, considering the amount of people using the stuff, the group is tiny).
So what now? Make sure there's only an elitist circle of high paid, influential "technology gods" left? While I definitely consider my self as a geek, I would not like such a society at all. It can be the target of humanity that ordinary people get even "dumber" than they're now.
Sorry, but I think people should strife for new knowledge, they should keep their spirit of discovery. By simplyfing the whole world around them, at least in my eyes, it becomes harder and harder for kids to figure out all these things on their own. And once all the knowledge is locked away from them, the elitist will choose who gets insight into the then "magical" workings of the world.
Yeah, maybe my picture of the future has a little bit of a dark taint, but well that's what you get when even your colleagues, which are the same age as yourself, are light years behind in terms of thirst for knowledge.
The "helpfulness" of providing "n" ways of doing the same thing is an illusion and only undermines the ability for users to establish a shared context which can be used to make user actions more automatic for the experienced and easier to teach to the inexperienced.
Plus, I agree with the other users. Our viewpoint is skewed. We are top tier users. We're not the ones that need disclaimers on the side of our hair-dryer that says, "Do not user while bathing."
Here's the key sentence,take note:
It's not how OFTEN you use it that matters most but how USEFUL it is.
Browser makers, please take note when you remove 99% of the UI. Thanks.
Beside I know most "noobs" look for these functions in menus and will love the buttons. Even on OSX many just don't know how to move/copy. They can do it in iPhoto or iMovie, but when it comes to the finder they're lost.
This hits the nail on the head when discussing the UI decisions made. If Microsoft had included the top 10 commands in an organized manner, plus a few more from their data, it'd probably be fine.
It would be interesting to find out how many people say "I never knew the file manager could do that" when they fire up Windows 8, even when the feature has been there since NT4.
I think this is hideous crap UI design. Fortunately, it can be shut off (at least in the leaked betas).
I'm not aware of anything good that's come out of Microsoft and usability tests. Apple didn't seem to use them and it turned out well for them.
Microsoft, go with the Windows Phone paradigm, full force. It is your (successful) future.
The current tab appears to be the Home tab, based on the highlight. But this has nothing to do with your "Home" directory - it is merely the "default" page for the most common operations. These operations are used to manage your files - the names of two other tabs in this hierarchy. What would the user expect to find there?
The layout of the Home tab is visually confusing. There is no grid or use of whitespace to guide the eye, and it presents a non-uniform 2-dimensional array of controls of different sizes. At least the old toolbars being 1-dimensional meant the user could easily remember approximately how far along the toolbar to look for the icon - now the user must scan a far more complex terrain to find what they're looking for.
There are two different sizes and layouts for action icons. So Copy and Paste are large icons with text below, while Cut is a small icon with text to the right. Why? Presumably it is less frequently used, but the inconsistency is visually jarring and non-obvious to the user.
While some buttons cause immediate actions, others have a small down-arrow next to them, suggesting they will probably pop up a menu instead. This introduces another variation to the two button types, giving a third type. But some have a default action when clicking on the button itself (a fourth type), and only reveal a menu when clicking on the arrow - yet there is no visual indication of which behaviour a button has. (This is apparent in IE and Office also.)
A user may wonder what is the difference between clicking on the dark blue File toolbar tab, versus clicking on the menu button in the very top of the titlebar, versus pressing Alt to reveal the hitherto hidden menubar?
While the Manage ribbon tab appears at the same hierarchy level as Home, Share and View, it has a brightly coloured tab _above_ it labelled "Library Tools". Vertical lines suggest it is superior to the Manage item; yet presumably it is also higher than Home, given its placement and urgent red/orange background? What is the difference between pressing Manage and selecting Library Tools?
A user not trained in the intricacies of the Office Ribbon UI will IMHO be utterly baffled by the complexity exposed in this UI and the inconsistencies therein.
While it is laudable that Microsoft is attempting to refresh the design of this venerable component of Windows, this work seems to be little more than a reshuffling of features and shortcuts, rather than a rethinking of file management.
Also most "normal" users do not have a single __init__.py I like the new Finder but I rarely use it... ack FTW!
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/windows8-file-copy-win8-win...
I still think, it's too crowded, and will benefit from a mode selection (i.e. Advanced with all these button, Basic with only the most used ones and Custom )
i've been using Classic Shell to keep my sanity on W7 and the 'Super Bar' is big step back in productivity for me.
my search for seamless Explorer replacements continues...
I'm a proponent of the Ribbon UI and I fucking hate toolbars in OS X.
I use Outlook, Word, Excel and Windows Live Mail extensively. All of which have the ribbon UI. It turns out that for the sake of actually getting stuff done, this is incredibly useful. I genuiely hardly ever need to use the context menu because what I need is there "in my face" and "obvious". While this fits newbie usage patterns perfectly, it also helps us power users who don't always switch back to the keyboard shortcuts (mouse already in hand) and don't want to jump through several hoops (like faffing with context menus) to get stuff done.
On the other hand, I have absolutely no fucking idea what the hell the toolbar buttons do when I'm using Finder or Mail on OS-X (Snow Leopard and Lion). The icons are crap, there are no visual cues and I always end up dropping to a terminal to get stuff done because I simply can't be arsed to figure it out or piss around with right clicking or the awful keyboard shortcut system on OS X. I don't think people usually get that far with OS X without getting "shiny I paid $2000 so it must be good Apple mental block" as I call it.
I'm fed up of so-called self-proclaimed experts chucking out blog posts criticising user interfaces while masturbating over Apple's efforts. Microsoft's UI allows you to get shit done and get it done quickly. So it might not be as aesthetically pleasing, but it works and works well for those of us with shit in our eyes.
Also, Microsoft research what you want rather than tell you what you're having (like Apple do).
(I also have a Mac and prefer it to Windows, but I interact with it mainly through the terminal, the browser, and emacs - and I can't be arsed to learn powershell or whatever in order to do the same thing on Windows)
I also use the shell for almost all file system manipulation, on OS X and on Windows (via Cygwin) so I know that puts me in a small minority of users.
I feel that's one contributing factor to the bloat of Microsoft Office applications. Instead of having some governance around what features to include you have them including feature after feature that may not align to something more cohesive. As a result after the nth version you have a piece of software with features buried deep within the menus. The Ribbon does help out with this a lot but I still have trouble keeping track of which feature is buried within which sub-menu of an icon on the Ribbon.
As for Apple I completely agree with this. I really wish they had a unified experience like Ribbon UI. It really is a thing of beauty to use it in Windows Live Mail, Office, and even adopted by newer programs like Bizagi Process Modeler.
While it seems a large step backwards to folks like me who were expert users, the ribbon apparently makes it easier for "average" users. However in helping the average Microsoft seemed to forget about the power users, with the result that my speed in Excel is slower now than it was in 1995. Indeed there is almost no tangible improvement in Excel for over 10 years. The basic functions are the same, the program still crashes frequently and now the usability is worse than it used to be. No wonder I turn more and more to Google Docs and Scirvener.
I'm a power Excel user and I can tell you that Excel 2010 is a vast improvement over 2007. 2007 a vast improvement over 2003. There are many things you can do in 2010 that are literally not possible in 2007. 2003 feels like a barebones spreadsheet now.
There are still lots of things missing in Excel, and as a VBA developer I know you can appreciate missing things like the lack of a unified event hierarchy. But its getting noticeably better each release.
You're probably used to using the Alt-F-S type key shortcuts. The rest have pretty much been left unchanged (Ctrl+S) for example. Also don't forget the clusterfuck that was the menuing system from Office XP -> Office 2003 where every time you opened a menu, everything was in a different place.
Google Docs is no good for me when I have to deal with sensitive data that has to be kept in-shore as I have no idea where the hell in the world it's being stored.
Speaking hypothetically, as an attacker I'd much rather see you keep your sensitive documents on your own computer where you browse flash-enabled web sites, open and edit PDFs, and download email attachments. Trying to get to your Google Docs through a Google Account with 2-step authentication would be much more painful.
That's assuming your enemy is a malicious, non-government actor. If you're hiding your documents from other threats (read: 3-letter agencies), maybe your aversion to Google Docs is more understandable.
In the UK, we have data protection and financial services regulations to adhere to which clearly state where the data must reside. That means we legally can't keep our data offshore in certain industry sectors and applications.
Some "cloudy" providers help us with geographical affinity (Azure and AWS for example) but Google Docs is a big bag of mud with everything stored "somewhere" so it's useless.
1) Why the anger?
2) What specific tasks are difficult for you to accomplish in Finder or Mail? The default icon set in Mail (seen here: http://i.imgur.com/zYmaw.png) do not seem to be difficult to parse. Ditto the Finder icons.
2) Just about everything from the awful toolbar icons (the labels are turned off by default on my MacBook) to the fact that it makes an awful mess of the messages and it's impossible to stick an image attachment in it without it trying to rape you in the eye socket with iPhoto.
It's getting to the point where the use of the word "fanboy" in a thread effectively ends all rational discourse.
See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2940569 for further rational discussion about my hatred of Apple products and how a Macbook Pro nearly burned my house down.
Click "Attach a document" rather than "Photo Browser" - it's literally 2 icons to the left, visible by default, and uses the universal "Paperclip" motif. Done. The other is even called "Photo Browser" rather than "Attach Photo" because, you know, it uses the system wide photo browser (i.e. iPhoto).
Mac Power User? Power troll, perhaps. Sigh.
However, with iPhoto, unless you store your photos in iPhoto at which point when you hit the iPhoto library in the filesystem you are chucked into a mess of virtual filesystem. I know the file name but it's in my iPhoto library so I have to use the damn iPhoto VFS to get to it. That's a crock which means I usually a) get a mac ... b) reinstall the damn thing without iPhoto so I can get to my beloved FILES.
I understand that a lot Microsoft people don't like Apple and Mac OS X but to say to be an power user of both systems and only use the terminal in OS X cause it is too complicated is little bit too much of it, isn't it? I can tell you the exact difference: I used office 2003 for a very long time and since we at work switched to 2007 I can't find anything. Ribbons everywhere but not one Ribbon is self explaining. Not even ONE. Sure you get used to it and after a lot wasted time you know where those things are now BUT getting used to it doesn't speak for a great UI design!
But maybe the complicated stuff fits you better but I doubt such thing!
Software......................
Firstly, the menu bar is awful. Even the shortcut to find stuff is nigh on useless (Squashed-bug + slash). You have to know what you are looking for and the terminology is terribly inconsistent between applications. There are no access keys to navigate around either. If the mouse is easier to use then it's a shit menu.
Also Apple's compiler toolchain is a POS and varies so reliably between releases.
XCode is buggy as hell and the multi window UI sucks (although I hear this is being fixed now).
I could go on but I really want to get onto...
Hardware......................
With regards to my hardware usage, I've had 8 Macs now and three extremely bad experiences:
a) Mac mini failed in 2006 after owning it for 2 weeks. Took Apple 2 weeks to sort it out after denying there was anything wrong with a 100% dead box. I had to threaten to throw the fucking thing at the idiots in the apple store before they'd even think about replacing it.
b) 20" polycarb intel iMac. Crashed regularly with 10.4 on it. After 2 months of arguing with Apple, they replaced the logic board and it was fine for about 6 months then the display failed. Claimed it on the insurance then.
c) 2010 MacBook Pro. Absolutely dangerously retarded stupid design. Can't remove the battery. This is just dangerous. My daughter spilled water on the table (just enough to touch the side of the unit). Due to capillary action, the seam around the base of the machine sucked up all the water. On most machines, you yank the battery quickly if that happens to protect the electronics. You can't on a MacBook. Turned it over and all the liquid that had been sucked inside rained onto the logic board and shorted a few things including the battery. Whilst trying to find some damn mini screwdrivers to get the back off, it CAUGHT FIRE and was promptly chucked in the garden before it burned my house down. It burned for 10 minutes before the LiPoly cells calmed down. The inside of the machine was black and burned, the keyboard had melted and the screen had cracked due to the temperature.
As a qualified electronics engineer, I can assure you that's just a shit and dangrous design. Isolating power is a fairly fundamental aspect of electronic design.
This is why I hate Apple. Bad, dangerous products with shiny happy marketing.
Having been absent from microsoft office (or any office like application for that mater) for many years, I recently got to use recent versions of microsoft products such as Word, Outlook, etc. The ribbons were a big facepalm, I didn't know such bad things exist, a few co-workers of mine said that they find them practical. I spent an average of 20-40 seconds each time I needed to click one of those buttons, even after many months of usage.
The buttons are jammed together in a rectangular area in ridiculous amounts. Some ribbons have close to 20 buttons, this will never be intuitive, it's just not visually easy to identify the buttons. Also, often a button is on the other site, all the away across the window in a far far away ribbon.
I never managed to use any microsoft OS after XP. Did the users really need other MS OS after XP? Quite frankly, I cannot find sinigle advantage of using vista or seven.
PS: The screenshots have something of a 1998 charm, I think it's that overlayed info. mspaint?
On a side note, the quality of comments has gone down while the know-it-all undertones have sky rocketed.
Simple usage statistics aren't especially valuable if you don't look at the overall picture as to why features are used (e.g. who would cut and paste if they understood how to move?). I'm not sure if either side is properly analyzing the available information.
Dragging files into directories is also cognitively expensive - e.g. you have to make certain that you are dragging exactly into the right folder which can be about 15 pixels high, depending on what view you're using. It requires hand-eye coordination which becomes unnecessary with simple copy/paste operations.
BUT, for beginner users, I agree: users have a hard time grasping the concept of a copy/paste buffer anyway, and with files it gets abstracted one more level. For more advanced users, they use keyboard shortcuts, so the buttons don't really need to be there.
Do you expect an UI designed for someone that's never heard of HN and who is unaware that you can copy and paste pieces of text SHOULD seem attractive to a technohipster blogger?
So many times HN seems like the next incarnation of the Library of Alexandria and then posts like this make it seem like a bunch of silly stupid cyber bullies stuck in myspace and high school WHILE guffawing at the teacher's assignment for the day.
Microsoft is often times silly, stupid, evil, whacked out. But don't go projecting myopic mamby-pamby "critique" like you knew something.
Love them or hate them or think they're falling off of the face of the earth Microsoft gets enough right to still pull in the pennies, a tad bit more than I think this poor chap manages with his blog.