Coding Horror Strikes Again (RE: Windows 7 UI) | Hacker News Reader

Coding Horror Strikes Again (RE: Windows 7 UI)

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40 pointstdavis18 comments

I nominate "Coding Horror is an entertaining, sometimes even educational blog. Be careful diving in headfirst, though, as the technical depth is generally so shallow you'll be hitting the bottom before you've even broken through the surface tension" for Quote Of The Day.

"I don't think you should get too worked up about what Atwood says. He's like the Rachel Ray of computer science." - icey (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=400916)

I don't really know when this flame war started but what I got out of Jeff's article was that sometimes users don't realize something changed inless there was a visual improvement and modification. Makes sense to me, why do you think dreamweaver and photoshop look slightly different each version. The visual adjustments indicate adjustments under the hood.

Also - there is something to be said for consistency... If you had an Operating System where every app had a different L&F, and a different UI metaphor - that would be a pain to use.

OS X is pretty good on this count (even for non OS apps). (To grossly generalise,) Linux does well in some areas, very poorly in others. W7 bringing it's UI into line seems like a good win.

Linux does extremely poorly. Every distro has its own UI guidelines (if they have one at all) that very few projects follow. How can you blame them? They're cross-distro apps that run just as well on Ubuntu as Suse - there's absolutely no distro-specific UI.

So what you get is a mess of apps that each do what they think is the best UI... except consistency is one of the keys to usability.

That's odd. I find Gnome apps mostly consistent and the occasional differences are there mainly when it makes good sense to be different. Not to say there is no occasional weird app that is less than usable, but, for the most of my time, they all get high marks.

Yes, BUT, _that's within Gnome_. Gnome is a unified desktop environment of sorts. If you go outside of that (or KDE, XFCE, etc.), things are more ad-hoc. Some things use GTK, some use Qt, some old stuff uses Athena widgets, etc.

While using Vista, one experiences programs that expose Vista controls. Some others show XP-ish controls, while some others still look a lot like Windows 95/98/2K and, still, there are others that break away completely (Office 2007, Nero) and present a completely different user interface with weird shaped windows and menus that look like nothing else in the OS.

OSX is somewhat better organized, but, still, programs, even Apple ones (Safari? iTunes) have a variety of looks that get presented without much coherence. Apple is too guilty of this.

Linux does extremely poorly

I agree, the reason I qualified it is because I thought Linux is way too broad - e.g. the metaphor when in a terminal is usually pretty good and quite consistent... or, Gnome, KDE do well in certain contexts.

> "To many, Vista was 99% visual changes and 1% detrimental functional changes. But at least it brought the unwashed masses a calc.exe that had shaded buttons and a translucent title bar!

Conversely, a lot of the excitement about Windows 7, relative to Vista, is that it fixes stuff "under the hood" (better, strong, faster.)"

In reality, it's almost completely the opposite. Vista had a lot of under-the-hood tweaks. I've installed the Win7 beta, and most of the noticeable changes are in the interface.

To me, Vista was about visual changes that didn't matter, and visual non-changes where they should have been changed. What's under the hood did not affect most users.

The login screen was improved, but the XP one wasn't bad either. But for some reason those god-awful balloon popup notifications were not scrapped like they should have been ages ago. Your system tray will constantly plead for attention for the most inane, least interesting news, like a puppy wanting attention.

Great, thanks. Fix what ain't broke and don't fix what is.

"Anyways, Windows 7 will invariably make a big impact, so I do plan on taking a look at it soon. But I'm certainly not motivated because calc.exe got some minor changes."

And suddenly I flash back to the hosting-reviews.com story.

It's funny that how author simply ignores the massive underlying changes in Vista such as UAC, integrity levels and outcome of all these changes. and believes that Vista was mostly about GUI.

They didn't say that. They said it was mostly GUI with a few detrimental changes under the hood.

While UAC and integrity levels may be a step forward, it's only so because Windows XP is so horrible when you look it from under the GUI.

And, of course, it's quite unremarkable from atop the GUI.

In fact, they didn't even say that - they said that many people perceived it as largely about GUI changes

I've solved this problem once and for all with a permanent personal boycott of coding horror. His content is a waste of my time.

Wow, your time is obviously a lot more precious than mine! I find that even things I disagree with or find 'shallow' are great for getting me thinking. I found the debate itself about fundamental under-the-hood changes versus superficial but easily noticed ones very fruitful, even if the article itself wasn't perfect.

I don't mind reading things I disagree with. But it's a waste of time reading opinions that a trivial amount of thought reveals are obviously simplistic if not downright wrong.

Just because I avoid this particular blog doesn't mean I don't get thought-provoking discussion elsewhere. We all filter what we read. Repeated posts that are mostly trollish traffic generators, prodding me into time wasting discussions of no value (http://xkcd.com/386/), have convinced me to filter this one.

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