Archive for the ‘windows’ Category
Microsoft’s text-like interfaces
February 16th, 2010 at 9:34 pm
Following a link from Daring Fireball, I read this article by Luke Wroblewski comparing the user interfaces of the iPhone and the new Microsoft Windows Phone 7 Series [sic]. The gist of the article is that the iPhone’s information-dense interface makes the user experience more efficient than that of the MWP7S. I agree with Wroblewski’s comparison, but I think he has the cause/effect relationship backward. The inefficiencies of the MWP7S interface aren’t due to the low density of information MS puts on the screen; rather, the screen is information-sparse because Microsoft has an institutional preference for layered, multi-step, inefficient interfaces. This preference goes back to the DOS days of character-based displays.
Back then, the menu of “user friendly” programs typically consisted of a strip of words running across the bottom of the screen. You’d choose one of these words through a set of keystrokes. If you were lucky, choosing that word would actually execute a command. More commonly, it would lead to a new set of words at the bottom of the screen and you’d choose one of them to execute the command. (If you were unlucky, this second choice wouldn’t execute a command, but would lead to yet another set of choices.) This layered approach wasn’t exclusive to Microsoft, it was a pretty common way of writing menu-based programs.
The Macintosh was a huge departure. Considered in the abstract, it didn’t seem like it should be. After all, its menubar was just a strip of words running across the top of the screen, and you had to choose commands from the individual menus. But somehow in practice, this didn’t seem like a two-step process. After a few minutes, you didn’t think “I’m going to click on the File menu, then drag down to the Save As… item,” you thought “I’m going to choose Save As… from the File menu.” The click and drag on the menu became a single step in your mind and in your hand.
The early versions of Word and Excel for the Mac worked like other Mac programs, with almost all the commands in the menus, but as Microsoft further developed Windows itself and the Windows versions of Word and Excel, the Mac versions began to take on the characteristics of their Windows cousins. More menu choices led to dialog boxes instead of actions. Buttons within dialog boxes led to other dialog boxes. It was the multi-layered, text-based interface all over again, just tarted up with a GUI. By the late 80s or early 90s, two clever Mac programs had been converted into clumsy oafs.
And the conversion was Microsoft’s choice. They’d already written programs that were Mac-like, and they could have used that experience to make efficient Windows programs. Instead they made awkward Windows programs and backported the awkwardness to the Mac side.1
That great advance in user friendliness, the Windows wizard, is another example of Microsoft using what is essentially a text-based interface in a graphical environment. At heart, a wizard is a series of multiple choice questions, something every beginning programmer learns to accomplish with write and read statements. The wizard just puts these questions in a dialog box with a (sometimes animated!) picture next to them.
Obviously, Microsoft has hundreds, if not thousands, of really smart programmers and designers on staff. I can’t believe that such talented people would make such poor decisions over such a long period of time if it weren’t an institutional requirement.
Update 2/17/10
I forgot to add that Apple is not immune to clumsy, over-layered interfaces. For example, if you manage two or more email accounts on your iPhone, you know how inefficient it is to go from the Inbox of one account to the Inbox of the other: climb two levels up, then two levels down.
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I’m pretty sure Apple’s “look and feel” lawsuit was under way, but I doubt that’s the reason Microsoft took the clumsy route. “Judge, if we had copied Apple, we wouldn’t have such a shitty interface.” ↩
Tags: gui, iphone, mac, windows
Post #1176 in iphone, mac, software, windows | No Comments
We’ve secretly replaced your operating system…
July 29th, 2008 at 8:41 pm
I saw this banner for Vista tonight and immediately thought of those old ads for Folgers Crystals instant coffee.
You couldn’t get away with such obvious bullshit in today’s Starbucks-fueled society.
But anyway, back to the Vista ad. I wasn’t going to bother following the link, but after digging through YouTube to find the old coffee ad, I decided I owed it to the integrity of this blog (!) to actually see what Microsoft had to say. It takes you to a site called The “Mojave Experiment” and—I am not kidding—it’s the Folgers ad all over again. Fifty-five mini-interviews with people who just loved Vista when they didn’t know what it was.
The big question is: do you trust the opinion of people too stupid to recognize Vista when they use it?
Post #435 in entertainment, windows | No Comments
Dumping XP SP2
August 18th, 2005 at 12:13 am
After hestitating for a few weeks, and continually shushing the angry Windows Update popup balloon, I took the plunge and installed Service Pack 2 on my laptop at the beginning of the month. A few minutes ago I did a System Restore back to October 30 and sanity.
Most things were fine, but there was one annoyance and one showstopper. The annoyance was the little security shield in the lower right corner always telling me that I was running with scissors because my virus scanner, AVG, wasn’t scanning automatically. “Click here to fix things,” said the popup balloon, but when I clicked there the security setup window that came up gave me
No way to start AVG’s automatic scanning, which I really didn’t want to do, but would have at least been consistent with what the popup promised.
No way to tell it that I was running things the way I wanted and please shut the hell up.
Worse, though, was the new wireless connection software. The visuals were improved: nicer little icon in the bottom strip and bigger boxes containing more information on the wireless networks available. (There’s lots of wireless in my neighborhood. I can usually see 3 or 4 available networks.) But the software doesn’t work. It kept telling me that I wasn’t connected when I clearly was. Worse, it would periodically drop the connection that it didn’t think it had and then reconnect. That wasn’t so bad with web surfing—which is all about connecting, disconnecting, and reconnecting—but it was horrible for SSH connections to other machines. PuTTY would announce the connection was lost and then die, killing my login session to my computer at work.
The wireless software did have a sense of humor, though. When I would open the Available Wireless Networks window (I may be misremembering these names, but since I blew SP2 away I can’t check them) it would show my home network and say it was disconnected. When I clicked on it, the only option I was given for the network was “Disconnect!” Pretty funny, MS.
Post #14 in windows | No Comments