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Vista Shell Team now Blogging
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Wed Sep 20, 2006 10:55 AM
from the wonder-what-they-had-for-breakfast dept.
from the wonder-what-they-had-for-breakfast dept.
davevr writes "Have you ever wanted to ask the people behind the Vista UI exactly what they were thinking when they did things like Flip 3D or the windows that turn black when maximized? Want a last chance to complain directly to the source about your favorite Vista UI glitch before it is foisted on you and the rest of the world? Just wondering what sort of people work on Windows all day? Well, look no further. The Windows Shell team now has a blog site for your reading pleasure. Head over to Shell Revealed and check it out. "
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Just forget it (Score:2, Insightful)
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I bet the RIAA and MPAA could name a few.
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Well, that's largely because there simply isn't anything new that needs to be done for such basic, single-purpose tasks. If all you want is a dumb terminal to run a handful of applications now and then, ther
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Huh? What? Are you actually claiming to speak for everyone on the planet? Pretty arrogant if you ask me. I remember the same thing said about the WinXP theme. It was different, but I actually like it over the old Win9x win2k style buttons.
Re:Just forget it (Score:4, Insightful)
Its impossible to speak about something like this in any sort of definitive, because in essence, it all comes down to opinion. But there are alot of definatives that surround the issue of the XP theme.
One thing that more of us might agree on is that it's definately an interface designed to appeal to a wider audience. Microsoft likes its bright colors because those appeal to the older generation who are still of the mindset: "more colors = better." There are two problems with this. First, here in a slashdot context, we are not the general population. Most of us found this new "candy" style pretty condesending. Second, the "more colors style" goes starkly agains conventional wisdom of almost a full cenury of futurism and the expected styles that are contianed therein. People generally don't see bright colors as a sign of "futuristic high tech," a trait that our society would see as a positive when they're dropping money in a computer store.
Another big problem with the XP theme is that it added very little, if anything at all, to the actual unsability of the the user interface. It was just an ugly coat of paint, like that one fucia house two blocks over. (You know the one.) All functionality was still in the same place, at best just rearanged within the same window.
Definatives aside, if we do come back to nothing more than opinion, we can only turn to experts in that particular field to find some sort of authority. This again turns out of favor of the older interface over the XP one. In my 6 years working in various design houses, I've yet to see a designer, web or otherwise, that prefered the "candy" interface over the clean greys of the old Win2K style. Outside of my personal experience, we can turn to the design comunity as a whole. While I can't ask for their opinion personally, their works reinforce my point. Clean lines and muted colors abound, curved edges are easily found but large swatches of garish primary colors are not.
Now none of this is about Vista, (which from the couple of screenshots I've seen apears to at least be a step in the right direction), but I just had to point out that while an argument like this might seem based in only opinion, anyone with a little art training will realize that that there are definative "rights" and "wrongs" in the art community, and even more so in the design world. The XP style is mostly "wrong." It's the result of an ill-advised corporated campaign to make computers seem less indimedating to Grandma, and we ended up with very little aestetic value.
Parent
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bash in windows? (Score:2, Funny)
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Don't they say: "The only thing worse than X windows is Windows without the X"?
Shell... (Score:2)
I little bit bigger than it needs to be?
Yes.
A little bit cool and worthy of inspection and use?
Yes.
Cool?
I guess that remains to be seen.
It is however, not like any other shell.
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My Internal Struggle (Score:5, Insightful)
But when it comes to some windows issues... I'm at a loss. I actually have to ask myself how, in good faith, a developer implemented something that either works poorly or not at all. Why keep that "feature" in there (espeically when talking about a GUI) when it doesn't work as adertised?
I think my answer lies somewhere in management.
Re:My Internal Struggle (Score:5, Insightful)
Most people action in what they, perhaps subconciously, perceive to be the best interests of themselves. It just happens that being a dick to people is usually not in a person's best interests. BOCTAOE [boctaoe.com]
Parent
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If that were true mankind would die out very quickly. Nobody would have kids.
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Ahh, so that explains why so many geeks download copyrighted music, movies, and software they haven't paid for.
Yes, it's offtopic, but I thought your analysis was most interesting.
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Well, ignoring modern copyright laws is technically in the best interests of others (i.e. society as a whole, as opposed to the big media companies) since modern copyright law stifles the progress of the sciences and useful arts.
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I think you're probably right. However, it is a sad fact that this isn't true of most people that get into positions of power - you generally don't get into a position of power by thinking of others.
I think my answer lies somewhere in management.
Bingo.
Re:My Internal Struggle (Score:4, Funny)
Man, if you have this much existential angst over unreleased software (have you even used a beta of Vista?), I sure hope you never get near Lotus Notes!
Parent
A 1990s answer... (Score:5, Informative)
A developer was proudly showing off his spiffy new application. I started playing with it, and discovered that there were _three consecutive screens_ each containing the same field, into which the user was required to type the same entry, manually, three consecutive times. And there were no "copy" or "paste" functions. You actually needed to type your phone number or your SSN whatever it was three times in a row.
When I asked about this, he pulled a 150-page functional spec out of a drawer and showed me that he had implemented that the spec called for. It had slipped by. It's not that easy to previsualize how a UI will work based on a paper description.
When I suggested he change it, he said "No way. It took nine months to get that spec approved. Any change would require a review cycle and several meetings to get it approved. And if I change it without getting the spec changed, it won't pass SQA. This project is already behind schedule. I'm implementing it exactly the way this piece of paper says."
Another source of UI weirdness at another company I worked at was a CEO who fancied himself a UI expert. Or at least felt entitled to have the UI tailored to his personal tastes. He was always dictating changes in details of UIs. Unfortunately, he sometimes didn't previsualize how that change would interact with other details, and if you wanted to ask him "Say, now that we've done this thing here hadn't we better change this other thing there so that thus-and-such-bad thing won't happen," his secretary would schedule the appointment for a date a couple weeks from today.
I don't say this is how incomprehensibly strange UI happens at Microsoft. I say these are two ways in which it can happen.
Parent
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This goes against social order. People act in the best interest of THEMSELVES FIRST, and if the individual isn't sociopathic, they excercise empathy towards others and generally will act in others best interests unless it impacts their own self interests anbd goals.
So applied to a corporation, the corporation is always going to do what IT THINKS is in ITS best interest first and then, if they feel any empathy towards you, you may get tre
Bad name (Score:5, Funny)
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Eye Candy Good, Need for super computer bad (Score:2, Interesting)
___________________________
Free iPods? Its legit [wired.com]. 5 of my friends got theirs. Get yours here! [freepay.com]
100% correct (Score:5, Interesting)
Have you seen OpenGL? All the eye candy, and it runs on my old laptop.
I think you mean Xgl [wikipedia.org], but your point is still valid. For anyone who has not seen Xgl in action, head over to YouTube and search up some videos.
I have Xgl running on my Xp1800 computer with a Geforce2MX video card from 2000 in it, and it is *smoking fast*, and the effects are far beyond anything that Vista does. The parent is really 100% correct - why does Microsoft need this much CPU power to do it's (relatively simple) GFX in Vista? Seems like they are a bit behind the times in terms of software here.
Parent
Re:100% correct (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, I have seen Xgl in action, I have even used Xgl for a while on my box. While the spinning cube and the wobbling windows are nice and all, it is simply hell when you try to simply resize a window. I don't know the inner-workings of Xgl, but how can they make such 3D stuff and wobbling windows so efficient, while totally killing the actual usefulness of managing windows by resizing them? They don't show *that* in the videos.
I'll use Xgl again when I see a video of a window being resized as fast as it is with a regular 2D desktop.
Parent
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hey, i'm an Xgl fan myself, but let's not blow smoke, ok? There's the useless jello windows that i'd gladly switch for Aero's ability to draw stuff underneath transparent layers with a distinct Gaussian Blur. It's good because that way things are not so confusing: you can read first plane stuff without writings underneath getting in the way. OTOH, it's bad because of the same thing, for control freaks...
granted, putting Gaussian blur in Xgl doesn't se
Kitchen Computer? (Score:2, Funny)
Everytime I see this I can't help but chuckle. I can just imagine a family with their Kitchen, Bathroom and Basement Computers. I can just see the kitchen computer sending a message to the bathroom computer telling the person in there that their microwave burrito is ready...
Out Of Order (Score:3, Funny)
I can just see the kitchen computer sending a message to the bathroom computer telling the person in there that their microwave burrito is ready...
You've got things reversed there. The microwave burrito comes first, then the bathroom.
About the picture... (Score:2)
OK, so I haven't read TFA.
But take a look at the pic... both the Before and the After... now, why, oh why the two buttons?
Call them join and Rename, call them Network ID and Change, however you put it, you'd get a cleaner interface with just one button.
Or am I missing something?
If... (Score:2, Insightful)
OK, what were ya thinkin? (Score:2)
What was that about eye-candy?
My Question (Score:2, Interesting)
random response (Score:5, Funny)
No.
Excessive Requirements (Score:2)
Dear Win32 developers, why is the API so ugly? (Score:5, Interesting)
Here is a short temp list of problems:
1) why did you force an object-oriented system on your window system? why each window has to be an object? why didn't you separate the windowing system from the widgets library? the OO system you have adds an additional overhead for languages that want to have their own OO system.
2) why only one message queue? why not multiple message queues? why each windows message can not have an arbitrary amount of data?
3) why do I have to register a windows class? the API could have been much simpler if I simply passed a set of attributes in the creation routine.
4) why the return value of WindowProc is so strange? sometimes the valid return value is 0, sometimes it is 1.
5) why the function GetMessage returns a BOOL which actually has 3 values (TRUE, FALSE and -1)?
6) why your widgets are not autosizing? I have to manually resize each widget when its content changes (for example text or font). Why there isn't geometry negotiation as in MOTIF?
7) why every window has to have a frame? why didn't you separated window frames from windows? all the messages like WM_PAINT, etc are duplicated as WM_NCPAINT etc.
8) why didn't you use a property system for windows and you had to use the problematic 'set values' interface?
9) why the text resources of a GUI app can not be changed on the fly? why text is not a separate file?
There is no doubt that the Windows Shell is and has always been eye-catching...but to program it, one needs to use an API on top of it that abstracts its ugly details. And don't tell me it is because system-level programming of GUIs is difficult, because there are many window systems around that prove you wrong.
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UI as important as stability and security??? (Score:3, Insightful)
"Some folks I talk to say that the UI is just as important as performance and system stability. Others say performance, stability and security come first.
For me - the UI is just as important as performance, stability, security and everything else."
http://shellrevealed.com/blogs/externalnews/archi
http://www.mstechtoday.com/2006/09/18/so-just-how
That explains *many* things.
Don't blog, CODE (Score:3, Insightful)
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Didn't you read the fine print? Microsoft only leases software now, they don't sell anything.
Enjoy,
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That's what the EULA says, but often the law doesn't agree. It doesn't matter what Microsoft or any other company puts in their EULA if it's illegal to begin with -- and disclaiming all responsibilities for their products' working or not may very well be illegal in your state or country. But no one has had the clout
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Monad blog is here (Score:3, Informative)
http://blogs.msdn.com/powershell/default.aspx [msdn.com]
To the parent, MS spends a lot on usability testing; geeks and programmers are the LAST ones I'd ask to comment on UI. I'll take real world testing over what programmers/geeks have to say about UI, thanks.