Memo to Microsoft: More info, less screen space

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Alan Kirk
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Memo to Microsoft: More info, less screen space

Post by Alan Kirk »

What is WRONG with those bozos in Seattle these days?

http://www.smh.com.au/news/digital-life ... 98192.html

Check out the screenshot of Windows Explorer. Not only have the Fisher-Price icons survived... they seem to have EXPANDED.

Is there anyone (who has the first clue about using a computer), anywhere, who hasn't immediately changed the default "We designed it for 4 year old computer users who like big, colourful building blocks" icons in Explorer to "Give me useful information like when the file was saved, how big it is, what its file extension is, etc, etc"?

Is there anyone who prefers a dozen big, chunky icons to 30 or 40 smaller ones with relevant information?
Michael Silver, an analyst for Gartner, said a smoother debut for Windows 7 is critical for Microsoft.

"The real hurdle is to get Vista's reputation behind them," he said.
Well, it's good to see Gartner still making a living by stating the bleeding obvious.
In an interview, Julie Larson-Green, a Windows vice president, offered one small example: In Vista, Microsoft took the "add printer" feature out of the Start menu, but is restoring it in Windows 7 after users complained.

Larson-Green said some changes in Vista made sense to developers but weren't fully tested on actual PC users - a misstep she seems committed not to repeat.
Weren't... fully... tested... on... users.

Right.

I mean, why bother testing it on users?

Suddenly the genesis of Vista is a whole lot clearer to me.
Building on a broader strategy to meld the best elements of web and desktop software, Microsoft also showed off lightweight versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote software that work in web browsers and look as they normally do, but don't have to be installed on a PC.

The new programs were running "in the cloud" on the new Windows Azure system Microsoft unveiled on Monday, a move aimed at helping it catch up with Google and other nimbler web companies.
I know that this is supposed to be the Next Big Thing, but I still don't buy it. My notebook spends more time off line than on line, and is often used on the move. The last thing I want to have to worry about is whether "the cloud" will evaporate when I hit a train tunnel. The second last thing that I want to have to worry about is a wireless internet bill that looks like the GDP of a Central American country.
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Re: Memo to Microsoft: More info, less screen space

Post by jim wood »

It looks like windows 7 is another operating system that I will avoid like the plague. Long live windows XP I say.
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Re: Memo to Microsoft: More info, less screen space

Post by Alan Kirk »

jim wood wrote:It looks like windows 7 is another operating system that I will avoid like the plague. Long live windows XP I say.
I'm not far removed from that sentiment. I'm sure we'll need to move on eventually, but I'm in no hurry.

Windows 7 does have (what sound like at least) a couple of decent features:
Microsoft also showed off "jumplists," a quick way of organising recently used files or popular program features.
One of the daftest "paradigms" in the Windows arsenal is the "Favorites" concept. Born of the idea that "a file is a file, whether it's on a local network or a hard disk or... {ooooooooh! gassssp!} The Innn-Terrr-Net", it ignores the harsh reality that for most users an Excel file sitting on their desktop is NOT an HTML page somewhere out on the web and, "clouds" notwithstanding, never will be. My "Favorites" list at work (at home, of course, it's BOOKMARKS thank-yew-very-much) is already so congested with organised web page links, literally hundreds of them, that to store file shortcuts as well would be over-congesting the thing... not that getting the shortcuts to files added in the first place is as straightforward as I'd like anyway. (Certainly not compared to adding a web page to the Favorites list.)

If jumplists are done right (and breath is not being held; hint MS, it means having shortcuts that the user selects, not that the system selects for them based on some new "Wizard" algorithm), they could be useful.
And it introduced a concept called "libraries," which automatically collects similar files scattered across PCs on a home network and displays them together in a single folder. That could be handy for organising a family's digital photos stored in disparate places.
Yup, that's also a good idea. I have just such a situation; I'm creating a library of shots of a building under construction over time. The natural homes of those shots are date-tagged folders, but I'd like a way of having them also in a single virtual folder so that I can work out which ones to use in the photo sequence. Of course this sort of thing has already been done. In Adobe Bridge 2 (part of the CS3 family, primarily but not exclusively used with Photoshop CS3) you can save "collections". These are in fact search results which are saved in a named file, a file which can be opened in the Bridge to reveal the individual images that match that search. You can open them as if they were in a single folder. Bridge 3.0 in CS4 goes even further than that in that it lets you add any images you want to a collection (they don't have to match search criteria), and all of your collections can be brought up in a single panel.

I think that the concept exists somewhere else too, lemmie see, where have I seen it...

Ah yes, Applications, introduced in TM1 v8.3. :D

An excellent, and almost perfect idea. Now if they'd just allow you to link to non-Websheet application files in Web... :evil:
Last edited by Alan Kirk on Mon Nov 03, 2008 9:43 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Reason: Bridge 3.0 in CS*4*, not CS *3*.
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Re: Memo to Microsoft: More info, less screen space

Post by jim wood »

While these features sound promising I have no doubt they will come with a performance overhead.

One of my friends said to me yesterday that he is thinking of moving over to Vista for DX10. I told him not to bother. He came back and said that XP was dodgy at first. My reply was that XP was sorted with SP1. Vistas SP1 has been and gone and it didn't fix very much. I think Vista is in line with good old windows millenium. It was meant to be a step forward, but it didn't succeed. I also think windows 7 will be better as it will remove some of the issues found in Vista. (Well I hope so anyway.)
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Re: Memo to Microsoft: More info, less screen space

Post by Eric »

I'm never going to Mac, but UNIX might be in my future.......Waiting for everything to be internet based and then I don't have to worry about this. Ohh wait that woudl mean I would have to use TM1 Web..... :x
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Re: Memo to Microsoft: More info, less screen space

Post by Steve Vincent »

Win7 is still based on the current Vista tho. As the saying goes "you can't polish a turd"...

Rip up the form book and start again. Forget adding to the existing framework, build a new one from scratch and learn from the mistakes of the past. Its what they did after moving from Win 3.1, its time they did it again.
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Re: Memo to Microsoft: More info, less screen space

Post by jim wood »

Eric wrote:I'm never going to Mac, but UNIX might be in my future.......Waiting for everything to be internet based and then I don't have to worry about this. Ohh wait that woudl mean I would have to use TM1 Web..... :x
I'm stuck with either windows or Mac as WOW doesn't work on anything else!! :cry:

I did think about moving to Mac at one stage. The thing that puts me off is the inflated hardware price. I did try the apple intel project software though. It worked well on my laptop.
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