Microsoft Plans Big Windows 10 UI Refresh in 2021 Codenamed 'Sun Valley' (windowscentral.com) 145
Windows Central reports: Microsoft is preparing a major OS update for Windows 10 in 2021 that sources say will bring with it a significant design refresh to the Windows UI. I'm told that Microsoft is planning to update many top-level user interfaces such as the Start menu, Action Center, and even File Explorer, with refreshed modern designs, better animations, and new features. This UI project is codenamed "Sun Valley" internally and is expected to ship as part of the Windows 10 "Cobalt" release scheduled for the holiday 2021 season. Internal documentation describes the project as "reinvigorating" and modernizing the Windows desktop experience to keep up with customer expectation in a world driven by other modern and lightweight platforms.
Windows 10 has remained much the same these last few years, with little to no changes in its design or feature set. Many other platforms on the market have gone through entire redesigns or UI refreshes in the last five years, and while Windows 10 has gone through minor design iterations with the introduction of Fluent Design, we've not seen a significant refresh or rethinking of its UI. The Sun Valley project appears to be spearheaded by the Windows Devices and Experiences team, lead by Chief Product Officer Panos Panay, who took charge of said division back in February. Microsoft announced in May that the company would be "reinvesting" in Windows 10 in the 2021 timeframe, and my sources say that Sun Valley is the result of that reinvestment.
Windows 10 has remained much the same these last few years, with little to no changes in its design or feature set. Many other platforms on the market have gone through entire redesigns or UI refreshes in the last five years, and while Windows 10 has gone through minor design iterations with the introduction of Fluent Design, we've not seen a significant refresh or rethinking of its UI. The Sun Valley project appears to be spearheaded by the Windows Devices and Experiences team, lead by Chief Product Officer Panos Panay, who took charge of said division back in February. Microsoft announced in May that the company would be "reinvesting" in Windows 10 in the 2021 timeframe, and my sources say that Sun Valley is the result of that reinvestment.
You fucking assholes (Score:5, Insightful)
Let me spell it out for you: major UI changes require your users to learn and relearn skills. This pisses them off, and loses you customers.
You'd be better off firing the UI manager/persons who pushed for this. You'll make more money that way.
Re: You fucking assholes (Score:2, Interesting)
Let me spell it out for you: major UI changes require your users to learn and relearn skills. This pisses them off, and loses you customers.
This is why macOS is such a far better user experience that Windows.
I am not Trolling here. I have plenty of experience with both, and, although there have certainly been some changes to the macOS UI over the years, most have been quite gradual and incremental, and certainly never anything so ridiculously jarring as The Interface Formerly Known As Metro.
As the Parent says, it does little other than to piss off and disorient experienced Users, while providing questionable improvements.
Oh, and BTW, what ever
Re: You fucking assholes (Score:5, Interesting)
I wouldn't quite go that far.... I use both Mac OSX and Windows (both 7 and 10) pretty much daily, and have been for 7ish years (my work machine is a Mac, with a Windows VM for productivity since the Mac version of Office still sucks horrifically compared to the Windows version).
MacOS does have some things going for it, and the relative consistency of the UI is nice. However, I'm not convinced this is due to anything other than sheer laziness, as the things that are awful in MacOS have also stayed awful for those 7 years. "Home" and "End" keys still do bizarre things, and require one to mash some combination of other keys to replicate the same function. Multiple monitor support is still absolutely awful as well; more recent updates have *mostly* fixed the tendency to switch my monitors at random when I plug them in (I have 2 monitors, one on either side of my laptop, and which one came up as left and which one as right was a total crapshoot for years), but it still happens occasionally. The ability to scale the monitors differently from each other is completely missing. Plugging in to a projector and deciding if I want to mirror or extend my display is a lengthy process, instead of a simple Win+P and select the right option. Pulling up a complete list of devices attached to the computer is completely unintuitive, instead of having a simple device manager.
But, the UI does stay consistent, which I mostly like. Having the WIndows (and Office) UIs constantly changing (and never for the better) is a constant annoyance, and if there were a better desktop OS and productivity suite out there I would be using it (and don't even suggest Linux / LibreOffice... I said "better". I like Linux a lot, but not for my desktop where I need to get regular work stuff done.)
Re: You fucking assholes (Score:3)
The inability to copy out of the address bar in OS X (or the fact that it's completely not intuitive maybe) is a struggle.
On Windows I keep an explorer window for each open project, when I need to place an image or save out a file I copy its address and paste into the save as it place duologue boxes.
In OS X I curse and browse to them.
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That is an interesting feature, but I wouldn't call it "intuitive". What happens when you drag a folder into an open Finder window? Does it move the folder you were dragging there? The open/save dialog, at least on Windows, looks very much like the File Explorer interface. I don't really like that you can do file operations in an open/save dialog, but it is convenient sometimes to be able to do things like make folders, or even rename them or move other things around. But more importantly, it looks lik
Turn your geek card (Score:3)
I use both Mac OSX and Windows (both 7 and 10) pretty much daily, and have been for 7ish years
Been using Linux at work and at home, started more than 2 decades ago.
(my work machine is a Mac, with a Windows VM for productivity since the Mac version of Office still sucks horrifically compared to the Windows version).
{...} (and don't even suggest Linux / LibreOffice... I said "better". I like Linux a lot, but not for my desktop where I need to get regular work stuff done.)
This is /., this website is supposed to be for nerds: what "work stuff" do you have to get done that doesn't require running complex (e.g.: nuclear) simulation on a giant (Linux-powered) HPC, while bragging with fellow /.ers about each other's work's cluster's position on the TOP500 ?!
Turn in your geek card now !
Now please excuse me, I've got a pandemic to solve.
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Not only do you no longer need X11 modelines, most of the time you don't even need a custom xorg.conf at all. It completely self configures most of the time now.
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Re: You fucking assholes (Score:5, Interesting)
Uh, sorry, no. As a Mac owner since 1994, and user since before, Mac OS usability is getting worse and worse, due to Apple's delusion that we want our Macs to work like iPhones.
The exceptional HIG (Human Interface Guidelines) that made the Mac so good, so easy to use, went out the window about the time Apple rebranded from "Apple Computer" to "Apple". The decay has gotten worse with every release.
Scrolling works backwards. Scroll bars (and their job as indicators of how much there is to scroll) have disappeared. Bottom bars from windows, which let the user know whether the bottom of the window is offscreen, or at the edge of the screen, have fallen out of fashion. Devastating breakage of the full-screen green button, that now requires holding "Option" on EACH CLICK for it to work the way it had since Mac OS X's debut. Information hiding. Non-obvious gesture controls, vs. clear signifiers of affordance. There's tons more.
Even crazy shit like making the volume control go side-to-side instead of up and down. Why make the volume control go side-to-side? Because it does it that way on the phone screen. Never mind that it's gone up and down for over 20 years, and that I'm on a 4k monitor and not a shitty phone screen.
Sorry, Apple is just not the bees knees for usability any more, and if it's a poster child, it's a poster child for what happens when you take your eyes off of the user experience, or worse, try and replace actual experience designers and usability practitioners with graphic designers.
I'll get off for Linux if I'm able. I've got most of the parts in place.
Rust never sleeps. It's a real thing.
Re: You fucking assholes (Score:5, Interesting)
I partly agree. I'm only on High Sierra, and cannot upgrade past that without breaking the ability to do my work. I haven't seen it get too bad. The flat look is fine with me. I NEVER use the launchpad, that's as dumb as using the Windows 10 Start Screen. My problem is that it's slowly turning into a iOS developer platform; xcode now requires an Apple Developer Id, command line tools are not installed by default, but header files do not exist in normal places until you install xcode and then run an obscure command. 32-bit support is vanishing, it won't even exist as an optional feature, so a VM becomes the primary workspace. You can't run a debugger without a permission popping up (debugging is clearly something only evil crackers do), and if you build your own gdb you need to self sign it or it won't run.
MacOS used to be a nice mix of both a decent unix platform that was also able to run the mandatory Microsoft Office crap that everyone demands. Except even the Office stuff isn't good anymore, the OSX versions don't work the same and they're buggy, and you can't get Visio or Project for the Mac, so you're forced to use a VM. So I have a Linux VM and a Windows 10 VM, just to do work. It makes me wonder why I need the Mac underneath them.
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One story is when somebody tried to get their photos off their iPhone. They thought sync would do the trick, syncing from the phone to the mac. Instead it sync'd from the mac (which had no music or photos) _to_ the phone, effectively wiping media off the iPhone. There was no warning that this was a destructive operation with no undo. It just go on with it. And there is very limited ability to copy files off an iDevice. And don't get me started on the mess that is iTunes^H^H^H^H^H^HMusic.
But it just works, right? (Score:2)
Humiliations aside, I haven't used any IOS since V4 so we took his problem to another co-worker who uses a Mac and iPhone. He farted around for a while and couldn't get the guy's file out. He came to the conclusion he needed to run iTunes which he has neve
Re: But it just works, right? (Score:2)
Re: You fucking assholes (Score:2)
âoeWhy make the volume control go side-to-side? Because it does it that way on the phone screen. â
I havenâ(TM)t used the newest MacOS (pre-Mojave is the end of my experience), but the volume on iOS goes up and down. If they changed that it certainly was not to match phones.
Re: You fucking assholes (Score:2)
Scrolling works backwards. Scroll bars (and their job as indicators of how much there is to scroll) have disappeared. Bottom bars from windows, which let the user know whether the bottom of the window is offscreen, or at the edge of the screen, have fallen out of fashion.
I think this article (below) addresses most of the above objections.
Took 5 seconds to find that.
https://www.webnots.com/how-to... [webnots.com]
Re: You fucking assholes (Score:2)
Off course you can customize your system to make it more usable. Thing is, people shouldn't _have_ to.
Apple destroys it's system's usability, it's not incumbent upon purchasers of expensive commodity PCs wrapped in aluminum to make it better.
It's supposed to "just work", not "be able to be made to work".
Please understand. My initial post was not about my own preferences in a UI. It was about Apple's abandonment of its own human interface guidelines, which had been validated through extensive testing decades
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Um, yeah, no. My home computer is Windows 10, my work computer is a Macbook with two external monitors. Since COVID, I've had the two systems side by side (it takes every inch of a corner desk.)
I Ha-aa-ate Windows with a white hot hate, yet I find that for things like online classes and basic research, it's easier to do it on the Windows machine than it is to try to figure out what bizarre choices Apple has made in what they're going to show me and not show me, and what weird choices they've made with the
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>I find that for things like online classes and basic research, it's easier to do it on the Windows
I find the reverse, since my research generally involves writing code to model physical behavior or try out analysis algorithms I'm developing.
On windows - fight with visual studio that takes fifteen directory layers of cruft to compile one C program.
On MacOS - open a shell terminal, vim , then gcc/g++/python
On the other hand, when it comes to streaming video from my Canon DLSR to OBS, windows can and mac
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Ok that's a point, and in fact, should I write in Bash or Python or C, the Mac wins hands down. I just wish they hadn't screwed so much with the GUI.
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Ok that's a point, and in fact, should I write in Bash or Python or C, the Mac wins hands down. I just wish they hadn't screwed so much with the GUI.
Yep. I prefer the UI, mostly the settings, remain consistent. I hate when you dig into the settings to find the all important tick box, to find that they moved it.
I spend most of my mac time in iterm2 or chrome. I do a little bit of video for training purposes as well.
Video editor application writers seem to revel in creating hard to use interfaces. But that's common to both PC and Mac.
Install Git, MinGW-w64, and Python on Windows (Score:2)
On windows - fight with visual studio that takes fifteen directory layers of cruft to compile one C program.
On MacOS - open a shell terminal, vim , then gcc/g++/python
Try installing Git for Windows (which includes a GNU Coreutils port), MinGW-w64 (GCC port), and Python for Windows on your Windows PC. That might help you replicate the favorable aspects of the Mac experience.
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On windows - fight with visual studio that takes fifteen directory layers of cruft to compile one C program.
On MacOS - open a shell terminal, vim , then gcc/g++/python
Try installing Git for Windows (which includes a GNU Coreutils port), MinGW-w64 (GCC port), and Python for Windows on your Windows PC. That might help you replicate the favorable aspects of the Mac experience.
Oh I have. MinGW-64 was problematic (32 no problem, 64 lots of problems) and python on windows is ok, but the support for parallelism is poor compared to linux. That's Windows' fault not python's. VS offered ready access to OS things that minGW didn't mostly around stopping the OS using hardware features I'm testing. VS does not support getopt which is inexcusable. Some application specific chips only run windows. So I need to compile to Mac, windows and Linux. One of these things is not like the others. I
Re: You fucking assholes (Score:2)
As someone else pointed out, the mere elimination of the scroll bar makes everything just a little more difficult on a Mac, to use just one example, although I'm sure it makes the GUI look cleaner and more stylish.
No need to pine for the scrollbars. You can choose between three visibility behaviors:
https://www.webnots.com/how-to... [webnots.com]
Re:You ... (Score:2)
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BASH still works fine. Your point?
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Let me spell it out for you: major UI changes require your users to learn and relearn skills. This pisses them off, and loses you customers.
You've overthinking this. The only people who truly re-learn major UI changes are experts and serious pro-users. The average user doesn't care. It's quite ironic to see people who have been power users for years complain about being unable to find X when their grandma can get to it in two clicks because they suck at unlearning.
No every UI change does not piss off all users. If the UI were actually perfect that may be. But it's not. We've tolerated it. Grown accustomed to it. At best we have Stockholm syndro
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They are also dumb and wrong for not changing it because it shows they don't listen to what their users want but aren't getting.
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I'm also told that for some features, users will be able to switch between the new and old experiences, giving users a choice rather than forcing it upon them. Sun Valley is all about improving and modernizing the familiar Windows UX, and not radically changing it up.
Which seems the exact opposite of "A complete overhaul as a forced replacement"
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users will be able to switch between the new and old experiences
If it's anything like Atlassian's dicking around with the Jira UI, it'll last a few months at most before it's only accessible by some obscure technique, and another month or two and it's gone.
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What's done is done. They ain't going back to 7, or 2000.
With *everyone* seemingly complaining about what a dumpster fire Win10 currently is, I guess I don't understand the hate for fixing things based on user feedback - listening to customers, seeing what works on other platforms.
I mean they could hardly f*** it up further, surely?
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Let me spell it out for you: major UI changes require your users to learn and relearn skills. This pisses them off, and loses you customers.
You've overthinking this. The only people who truly re-learn major UI changes are experts and serious pro-users. The average user doesn't care. It's quite ironic to see people who have been power users for years complain about being unable to find X when their grandma can get to it in two clicks because they suck at unlearning.
No every UI change does not piss off all users. If the UI were actually perfect that may be. But it's not. We've tolerated it. Grown accustomed to it. At best we have Stockholm syndrome when it comes to it. But shit man the Windows UI has a lot of room for improvement.
Here's hoping they actually make improvements rather than screwups. I have my doubts about that but will reserve judgement on it.
Up until a couple of days ago I probably would have agreed with most (alll?) of what you said but then I installed the October release of Windows 10 on a new hard drive. I was doing this for a customer whose old drive died and I wasn't sure if they had updated the original Windows 7 to Windows 10 yet. During the install I was asked for the Windows 10 key and just skipped it so that Windows could check the machine code once I was connected to the Internet.
Once the installation was complete I tried to pull up
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Windows' interface sure has room for improvement. Undoing pretty much every change they've done the last decade would be an improvement. But I doubt they'll do that.
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Windows' interface sure has room for improvement. Undoing pretty much every change they've done the last decade would be an improvement. But I doubt they'll do that.
Again you're speaking as an expert who had their cheese moved. No the evidence is clear that changes over the past decade have very much been in aid of improving user friendliness.
Next time you want a setting changes, ask your grandma. I'm sure she can find the setting faster than you can now. Sorry but powerusers stopped being a target market when the world realised that every power user already had a PC. The improvements aren't for you.
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And isn't the H2 release supposed to be just a patch rollup and no major new features? Spring updates get the big updates/improvements. They keep changing their story.
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Re:You fucking assholes (Score:5, Insightful)
Windows 2000 had the optimal UI - not too complicated or flashy. It was all business.
Re:You fucking assholes (Score:5, Insightful)
I was very happy with Win2k Pro. Shame we moved away from lean and fast to toddler toys, spyware, and bloat.
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Ditto. Frak newer Windows and many others.
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Hear, hear! Windows 2000 +/- 1 was the best. Ever since then, they have done nothing positive, and have only broken things that I habitually came to depend on to get my work done faster. Please stop making the desktop OS work and look like a phone!
I think it was Windows 7 that first required extra concerted mouse clicks when expanding a folder in File Explorer. Used to be that when you expanded a node, it would keep the level you clicked on fixed in place, and expand the sub-dirs. beneath it. Starting
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I'm pretty sure when Edge opens it's never an accident.
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Add in random meaningless icons and grey text on a grey background and you almost have the modern UI specification in full.
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We're still not used to the "modern UI designs" in the current Windows 10.
Seriously, I use it at home and I'm fine with it, but yesterday I got onto a work Windows 10 VM and I was confused by a lot of things in it that I don't see at home.
I laughed at the security "warning" it popped up that said I need to backup files to OneDrive in case of ransomware, felt more like Microsoft Marketing intruding where it doesn't belong.
And then some IT malware decides that I am required to have Edge and it installed it fo
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They won't be losing customers. MS has the corporations by the neck, they'll suck it up and parrot how they just l u u u v e e the new interfaces.
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The interface changes provide the illusion of progress. Business type love that because innovation.
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My post was going to be about anticipating these types of responses, but I was too late! Not only has it been posted already, but it's already modded to 5 and it's even angrier than I expected. Thank you for not disappointing me!
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I think their logic is, there's no way you're not going to use Windows. So whatever we do with the GUI, you're going to complain about it but you'll ultimately keep using it. Because it's Windows.
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Let me spell it out for you: major UI changes require your users to learn and relearn skills. This pisses them off, and loses you customers.
Yes, MS lost so many user because of Windows 8. /sarcasm
People use Windows because that is what comes on the computers they buy or that is what they have to use at work. Most users don't even know there are alternatives other than Macs.
I stopped trying to tell people about Linux when they complained about Windows this or Windows that. It wasn't worth the effort.
Until the computer distributors give the option for a different OS when a system is sold AND software companies start providing well known
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Codenamed 'Seven Valley' (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh, I think a lot of folks would be happy to see Windows return to the 7 interface . . .
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My VM still has the Windows 7 interface... of course, that's because it's still running Windows 7. The main reason I haven't upgraded it it because of the UI, in fact. 7 was clean, functional, and didn't get in my way. It didn't have notifications popping up incessantly despite my best efforts to make them all go away. It mostly "just works" for everything I need.
Re:Codenamed 'Seven Valley' (Score:5, Informative)
I installed OpenShell on Windows 10 just to make Windows usable again.
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7 had too much glass effect and lacked a dark mode.
Amiga OS was pretty good. Default for most apps was black text on grey background, not too much contrast and while not an actual dark mode it wasn't burning your retinas out either.
"modernizing the Windows desktop experience" (Score:5, Insightful)
"modernizing the Windows desktop experience to keep up with customer expectation in a world driven by other modern and lightweight platforms", so plenty of white-space and with information density suitable for a two-year old...
Re:"modernizing the Windows desktop experience" (Score:5, Funny)
/Oblg.
Microsoft Windows, noun: A 64-bit compilation of 32-bit extensions and a graphical shell for a 16-bit patch to an 8-bit operating system originally coded for a 4-bit microprocessor written by a 2-bit company that can't stand 1-bit of competition with 0-bit of understanding good UI.
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with information density suitable for a two-year old...
A true untapped market. Everyone else already uses Windows, we need to bring in the toddlers too.
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so plenty of white-space and with information density suitable for a two-year old...
Ahh yes, the exact thing I fear EVERY SINGLE TIME some website I regularly use decides to do a UI refresh.
Do I think UI refreshes are inherently bad? No.
Do I think clunky older sites have room for UI improvement? Absolutely.
But why do they ALWAYS assume I want my desktop browser to behave like a bad tablet with an unusable-but-flashy interface?
Next version after will be called "Death Valley" (Score:5, Funny)
"Let's take a so-so UI and make it even harder to figure out or use.."
This approach worked so well for Ubuntu.
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No, Death Valley is too DRY [wikipedia.org], and MS is all wet when it comes to this. Maybe they'll add AI and make it Uncanny [wikipedia.org].
FTFA (Score:3)
"Windows 10 has remained much the same these last few years, with little to no changes in its design or feature set."
That's funny. Go on, tell me another one!
The one thing MS is *constantly* doing, is fiddle fucking with Win10. The only one that doesn't seem to change is Win10 (Enterprise) LTSC...
Calling it now: more ads (Score:5, Insightful)
There will be more ads. Ads everywhere. Ads in the menu bars. Ads in the toolbars. Ads in taskbar. Background ads on your desktop. Audio ads replacing the Windows start-up sound. Whenever you install a new program, an ad will pop up for the Microsoft branded version. This will be the "all ads, all the time" release.
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...Ads in the menu bars. Ads in the toolbars. Ads in taskbar. Background ads on your desktop. ...
Reading your post I couldn't help but think of "Rock Island" from "The Music Man". See this URL for a performance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com] .
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No problem, good luck serving me ads when you don't know the proxy password.
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They will come in disguised as updates. "Want to update Windows? Well, We want to UPDATE you on these great deals!"
Why don't they finish the current UI first? (Score:5, Insightful)
Great so we get a third or fourth set of UI elements and styles haphazardly strewn thought the day to day windows experience then, I assume?
Its been about 6mo since I dug around in win10 but last time I was there you'd still do things like look at setting widgets and some control panel form would pop that clearly had not been updated since XP or earlier.
Not that its a big deal from a usability standpoint but that sort of incongruous stuff makes the product seem really unfinished.
why? (Score:2)
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For young people who haven't used classic desktop UIs it might be fine to just use the same UI everywhere but us old people know how much we'll be losing.
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So you're asking why they are doing a thing that you are only assuming they are doing, gotcha.
Well the assumption is pretty sound when you look at all the animated tiles nonsense in the start menu.
I've got my own list of Improvements I'd like (Score:5, Insightful)
Windows has been going in the wrong direction for years. Here's what I'd like to see implemented:
- Streamline animations (as in smoother, faster, and less obnoxious. Strictly used to help me (the user) keep track of what is going on.)
- Give me the option to disable animations when I don't need them.
- Give users the option to get rid of everything not directly relevant to running the computer.
- Allow administrators to completely remove "features" from the computer (like candy crush and all those other built-in apps)
- Prioritize optimization and streamlining the system. The most important thing that Windows can do is help me get to the program I need (and it get it running) faster.
- Eliminate background stuff as much as possible. If it might hinder my foreground work, restrict it.
- Better universal local search. And by universal, I mean EVERYWHERE on my computer. These days, it seems like an awful lot of my programs like storing stuff in appdata and other unusual locations. Especially as a developer. And it is a real pain to get Windows search to reliably search everything including these "invisible" locations.
- Let us ditch the internet. If I'm searching on my computer, I NEVER want internet search results. Never, ever. I realize some people might want to, and sure, let them. But give us the option to disable it, please.
- Fix networking! It should not require a dipoma in IT networking to get three Win 10 computers to share access to a few drives.
- Less dependency on "always-on" internet. I don't have reliable internet; lots of the world doesn't. Stop expecting us to always have it. Even when we do have it, there are generally data limits. Let US control what does and does not get access to the internet.
And above all else: Optimization and performance. Shrink things down, build them to run faster and take less resources. Window's value is in how little I see it. The less I see of Windows, the more valuable it is to me, because it means it is doing its job of letting me do my job instead of staring at my operating system.
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Windows has been going in the wrong direction for years.
Windows has been going in a direction you and other users do not like. That may be the right direction for them -- if their goal is to introduce more ads (...oh, I am sorry, "suggestions") and to host the contents of your computer off-site tied into your MS account.
The Smeared Entrails of Windows 98 (Score:5, Informative)
They said the top-level interfaces - start menu, action center, etc., but wtf? When you dive deep into Windows 10 you see Window 10 UI's, Windows 7 ghosts, Windows XP remains, a few Windows 2000 cadavers, and although I can't figure out where I've seen it, maybe even some Windows 98 entrails smeared on the wallpaper. How about a single, consistent UI? How about starting with the basics before you thrust another ill-advised hodge-podge of UI "improvements" on us? A little less new-age sugar, a little more walk-before-you-run would help us all.
Fix your scaling instead (Score:3)
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Exactly. But doing practical things like fixing scaling apparently is hard, whereas doing freaky things to the UI is much more satisfying.
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I found another annoyance this week. If I use remote desktop to connect to a Win10 system with a fullHD display, and I'm using a nice 4K display, it scales everything up, and it looks really nice. But if I disconnect and then go to the other system to use it directly, all the applications retain the scaling, and everything is massive with no way to revert it back to the original scaling for the fullHD display. Not the end of the world, but it's just another weird scaling defect.
Oh, no. (Score:2)
There's a reason the typewriter UI (i.e., the keyboard) stayed substantially unchanged for more than a hundred years: To change it would have required the re-training of every customer and, in a competitive, non-monopolistic environment, no company wanted to be the company with products every user had to be retrained in order to use.
That, of course, is not the situation in which Microsoft finds itself.
Rather, it finds itself in a situation in which its products are standardized utilities; there are few fun
Oh God no (Score:2)
Here we go again. How do I turn off updates again?
Do not want (Score:3)
No customers are asking for this. No customer wants it. Why is this a thing?
I suppose we should be thankful for the unusually long run of iconoclast free Windows desktop releases. Let's hope the urge to "fix" the desktop doesn't spread to the few Linux desktop environments people actually use. I honestly believe KDE would be the only mainstream one left right now if they hadn't shit all over themselves with 4.x; the recovery from that is long complete but it took years and the haters are still angry.
I blame Adobe (Score:2)
No, I did not mistype.
The ONLY reason I'm still on Windows is because Adobe Creative Cloud runs on it, and I'm not a good fit for Apple culture. (Apple Fanboys creep me out, and Apple wants too much money for generic hardware sheathed in trendy silver plastic.)
The MOMENT Adobe ports the Creative Cloud to ANY Linux flavor, Microsoft has seen the last of me. Everything else I do can be done on Linux.
(Yes I know about WINE. It doesn't work with Adobe CC. The people who say they've gotten it to work are gen
Run Adobe in a VM on a Linux host (Score:2)
Windows is best confined to VMs with the few exceptions (gaming etc) actually requiring bare metal.
I treat OS as apps that run apps and virtualization keeps getting better every year. It's easy to revert to a previous snapshot if a "change" (no point in confusing random fuckery with "updates") is irksome. VMs are easy to back up and they're portable.
Uhmm... (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Modern in the 21st century usually means maximizing advertisement exposure.
To do User Experience correctly you cannot do it like Open Source people do. You cannot expect people to be able to use something just written by you for you. You have to sit other people down and watch them use your product. You have learn from how users actually use your interfaces. User testing, and lots of it, are invaluable and obvious when missing. You have to push that feedback into the system with those "Quality of Life"
Noooooo! Do *this* instead (Score:2)
MS's history of UI overhauls shows it's better to leave them mostly as-is. If you F'd up the last 10 overhauls, what makes you think you'll get #11 right? Go with stats, not your ego.
Dear Microsoft, your army of PHB's habitually suck at UI's and will probably stay that way. It's NOT your forte. I'm just the messenger.
The Windows 8 desktop-mobile Frankensteinian hybrid is probably one of the most extreme examples. The "ribbon", another fail, is my pet peeve. They changed one arbitrary screwy layout for a new
Future (Score:2)
Just stop! (Score:2)
Who cares what the OS looks like, I don't want a refresh.
Acutally just found this link... (Score:2)
If we can get enough people to complain maybe we can get them to stop:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-u... [microsoft.com]
Meh (Score:2)
I'm just gonna reset the UI back to Win7 style any ways.
Give me TABS!!! (Score:2)
Update to the Start menu? (Score:2)
Cool! Now we'll only see the top three items in your list instead of five. Even better, they'll remove the scroll bar (instead of hiding it like they do now and which doesn't always work) to force you to waste even more time searching for something instead of being able to go straight to what you want.
Just wait, in a few more iterations the only thing W10 will have is a search box. You won't know where anything is, how to get to it or even if you have it. You'll have to beg and grovel for Microsoft to fi
Sun Valley (Score:2)
Sun Valley, CA, is like an industrial wasteland and automotive scrap wonderland. Sounds like a Windows refresh, waste and scrap.
Change for its own sake isn't progress. (Score:2)
Every dog wants to piss on its own tree and this tendency makes for terrible UI choices. We communicate by the somewhat standard method of typed characters but fools would fubar that if they could just to signal power.
I welcome all the self-damage MSFT does because I want their OS to become irrelevant but FOSS US designers should take note because tablets and phone UIs are inherently crippled for portability considerations.
A desktop is the ideal work station for ergonomic reasons. Human ergos aren't changin
Re: (Score:2)
If it doesn't improve productivity it shouldn't be delivered.