Apathy Sketchpad

I start with three lists:

Things I hate about Windows Vista:

• The Start Menu no longer unfurls. It opens up in the original little panel (the one where your recently used and pinned programmes appear in xp), with a scrollbar if it’s too long! It’s neater on the screen this new way but it’s far less convenient to use. There’s no apparent option to change this without reverting to the Windows ’95-style menu. I can’t see why this change was made except for the sake of changing things. I suppose it means you don’t have to slide the mouse as far, but I don’t like to use the mouse for the Start Menu. I do that with the keyboard. Well, I used to…
• …because now, when the Start Menu appears (no matter how I called it up), focus is given to the search box, meaning there’s no keyboard shortcut to open the All Programs menu. This is decidedly inconvenient. Worse still, if I click this menu to open it then focus remains in the search box, so I still can’t navigate the menu with the keyboard. There’s simply no excuse for that. Sometimes I actually don’t have a mouse plugged in. The only way to get to the Start Menu by keyboard is to tab there from the search box, or to arrow key up to it. And when you’re there, it’s harder to navigate by keyboard as everything you’ve looked at is all in one long list rather than the neat hierachy of an unfurling menu.
• When I do click the “All Programs” button, it changes to a “back” button so I can get the pinned items back if I want. However, this also happens if I hover over it for a while. This means that if I hover for just the wrong time before clicking, I can activate “All Programs” by hovering and then immediately dismiss it by clicking “Back” the very moment it appears. That’s bad interface design, and it’s bad interface design to patch up a problem caused by the bad interface design I was just discussing, which itself is bad interface design which has directly replaced some rather good interface design! At no point in that chain did Microsoft apparently think that some people might not like the result.
• The “run” command is hidden by default. This is inconvenient for advanced users, and makes providing tech-support over the phone that little bit harder. Win+R still works, but it breaks compatibility with old instructions and it’s harder to explain to people less tech-savvy than average.
• It keeps pestering me for permission to do every little thing. “Yes, you may copy the file. Yes, you may copy that one too. Yes, you may create a folder to put it in…”
• One last Start Menu thing, before I move on: in the bottom right of the menu is a little button marked with the internationally recognised “on/off” symbol. I pressed this button assuming it would shut down my computer, or at least bring up a menu allowing me to do so. Instead, it put the computer into standby mode. Not helpful.
• I did find a way to change this so that that button shuts down the computer properly, but I still can’t find a way to hibernate the PC without assigning it to that button, assigning it to the main power button on the case, or putting the computer into sleep mode and waiting for it to timeout. Hibernation (the thing where you can shut down your PC properly but have it remember what was running and in what state) was one of the best new features in Windows xp, and in Vista it’s all-but gone.
• I don’t like that the new look can’t seem to decide if it wants to be Sleek And Black or Lovely And Blue. Also it has a sharp horizontal edge on the sides of active windows that always looks like it’s a real interface object when it’s in my peripheral vision.
• Old software, even xp software, doesn’t (in the general case) work on Vista.
• The icons. They’re realistic and all, but that’s not really the point of icons. They’re less informative than the old ones.
• If I click the DVD drive in Explorer when it’s empty, the drive opens so I can put a disc in. There’s no way to close it from the software. That’s annoying, especially since 90% of the times I browse an empty drive it is by mistake. And it’s a pointless feature anyway, since the kind of granny-user this kind of thing is aimed at will have Autoplay turned on. They don’t need to browse the drive.
• File search is gone. It’s just gone! Windows Explorer has a search box, but it’s wired up to some strange indexed search, which appears to be a not-as-good version of Google Desktop Search. The only way I’ve found to search properly, by filename, is to call up a Console window (using Win+R as all other methods of getting to it without a mouse have been all-but removed) and use DIR /S /P. What possible excuse is there for removing that? That’s one of the basic things you expect an OS to do! They’ll be removing Windows Explorer next. Or at least stripping it back until it only browses the Documents folder. It’s strange that every year Linux becomes more and more an OS that anyone could use and every year Windows becomes less and less an OS that any serious computer user can work with. It seems to me that soon Linux will become the de facto OS for professional settings and Windows will be purely the reserve of the so-called ‘silver surfers’ who just want to write email easily.
• I don’t like that the Start Button encroaches onto the main screen space. It looks nice, I suppose, but there’s no need for it. It stops doing this if you resize the taskbar.
• The shortcut icon overlay is far larger than it should be.
• It’s too easy to turn a folder view into a search results view in Explorer. When you do this you lose your place on the directory tree. Sure, there’s a back button to help, but I don’t want to have to use that. That’s not where that functionality normally is, so that’s not where I will look. If you want to add “stacking” (which looks like it might sometimes be useful, but not anything like often) then damn well implement it properly.

Things I like about Windows Vista:

• It’s a little smarter about grouping Taskbar buttons than xp was (see below).
• It has a “no to all” button in large file operations.
• The Start Button now expands downwards when you resize the taskbar, to ensure the bottom-left pixel of your screen (or whichever corner you keep it in) always calls up the decidedly unsatisfactory Start Menu. This is good, as the corner pixels are the ones you can’t overshoot with the mouse, and are therefore the easiest to reach. (This is why Macs have the menu bar along the top of the screen. It’s a clever usability feature.)
• Unlike in Windows xp, the modern-looking windows can be coloured any way you like. That’s always a good thing.
• The Alt-Tab functionality is much better.
• The word “my” is gone, as is My Network Places, the most useless fake-folder ever.
• I like the idea of blurring things behind transparent windows (presuming it doesn’t do it to all translucent windows, which is something I’ve not had chance to check).
• The user account folder is neater now.
• The fade-to-black when you log in is nice.

Things I hate about Windows in general which Vista should have fixed but didn’t:

• Taskbar grouping is too automated. I should be able to right click a group and force it to break up into separate buttons. I should be able to drag buttons from groups onto the main taskbar. I should be able to drag buttons onto each other to combine them. This action currently does nothing and my suggested functionality would pose no danger of the user breaking anything, so there’s no reason not to implement this change.
• It’s just shockingly bad at estimating how long things will take. I appreciate it’s hard, but once it did give me an ETA that was longer than the total age of the universe.
• Internet Explorer, the world’s worst browser, is still inextricably linked with the shell.
• The recycle bin is still nothing more than a poorly-implemented version of a genuine file undelete/shred system.
• The Fonts folder still won’t let me access my actual *.ttf files. Similarly, I still can’t arrange a folder of *.mp3 files by size: only by artist, album, length and so forth. That’s not useful if, say, I want to see what I can get in the last 3.2MB of my (non-iPod) MP3 player. I can work around this by lying to Windows about what kind of folder it is or using the console, but I shouldn’t have to.
• File extensions still default to “hidden”. I suppose the rationale for this is that Average Joe User doesn’t understand file extensions and might break something by pissing about with them, but really, the warning box when you changed one was fine. All that needed changing was that the buttons on that box should have read “use original extension”, “use original filename” and “change anyway”, rather than the single “OK” box that deleted the lot. That would have been fine.
• A lot of work has been put into the new Minesweeper game, and it still gives unsolvable games (i.e., games where you can end up with a 50/50 chance there’s no way to resolve without guessing).
• The system tray expand/collapse button points and animates sideways even when the taskbar is vertical.
• Folders like “Documents” still have a kind of non-canonical path. I can browse in Explorer to “Public”, but I can’t access that path in the Console. I can, however, access “C:\Users\Public” which refers to the same folder. That annoys me. It also makes designing applications that bit harder.

Things I hate about Windows which I haven’t had a chance to check in Vista:

• Windows Update reboots the computer without my permission. That is unacceptable. I can think of very little Microsoft could do to more pro-actively ruin my day, with the possible exception of their existing anti-piracy measures.

Changes in Windows Vista which I am indifferent to:

• The new Windows Explorer. It has the “details view”-style headers there all the time, for fast sorting, and the folders bar has been collapsed into the “related places” box, with file information appearing in an oversized new status bar. I declare this about exactly as good as the old Windows Explorer, though to be frank neither are great. Also, it no longer has a menu bar. What’s with that? And the window has no title, except in the taskbar button. That’s weird to me.
• When you minimise or restore a window, it animates very nicely from one place to another, but it doesn’t do it if you maximise or unmaximise it. I would like this change if it was consistent, but it’s almost exactly offset by the annoying inconsistency of it.

While I’m on a similar subject, I’ve been getting increasingly frustrated lately at Microsoft Office Outlook. I’m using version 2003 at the moment; I have no idea how much of this is fixed in later versions, but it’s infuriating. It has a major identity crisis, that program. The interface has evolved, but the use of it hasn’t. Where before we had a list of emails which you double-clicked to read, now we have a Preview Pane where they appear after a single click. This is a definite improvement, however the controls haven’t been updated to reflect it: double-clicking an email still opens it in a new window, so now I have two copies of the email. Double-click should open a reply window. GMail’s web-based interface gets it pretty-well exactly right, so I don’t see what’s stopping Microsoft doing it.

The search annoys me as well. If I click a folder after doing a search, particularly if it’s the folder I just searched, it should be obvious I want everything in that folder to appear, not just those that match my old search term. I’m done searching now. I want to go back to normal use, but no, I have to click “clear” on the search bar to make my search go away. It’s so unintuitive.

It baffles me that Microsoft can make programmes with so many amazing features and never ask themselves what a good way to arrange them on the screen would be. Periodically they’ll do something crazy like overhauling IE until nobody can use it, but then they try to innovate! I don’t want innovation in the user interface. There’s a fine line between an innovative interface and a difficult one — if you’re doing new things, they’d better be either really subtle, really obvious, or just so much better that it’s clearly worth investing the time to learn them.

It frustrates me that Microsoft focus so heavily on making the new version of Windows prettier and simpler and so forth and they do nothing for people like me: people who know how to work a computer and would very much like to be allowed to do so. It’s as if Microsoft just aren’t interested in us. From my point of view, their OS has got steadily worse since about 1998, while the competition has got steadily better. If enough advanced users switch to Linux then it’ll get software support, and then there’s be no reason for Average Joe User, browsing Dell.Com, to shell out the extra £60 for a different OS that he isn’t allowed to reinstall if it goes wrong. That would be crazy. And if that happens, Microsoft will lose the OS monopoly.

I can’t see that happening. Not at least for a good long time. But it’s looking far, far more plausible than it did ten years ago.