Windows Software Ugly, Boring & Uninspired 924
An anonymous reader writes "CPU magazine has written a very straight-to-the-point editorial on the lack of quality and innovation in software for the mainstream OS. They compare it to the Mac, which is found in a much different light. Where has all the innovation gone?" From the article: "There's too much coal and not enough diamonds within the sphere of downloads. The greatest pieces of software are plagued by unintelligent design, and very few rise to the level of ubiquity. Windows users don't have a strong sense of belonging; there's no user community rallying around the platform. We use the computer, certainly, or is the computer using us?"
Garbage (Score:5, Insightful)
There isn't one of them that gives you functionality that your browser doesn't already afford. Sure, they're pretty, but what's going to happen is that as people amass more and more of these widgets, the dashboard becomes cluttered and slow (it already is painfully slow on my MDD 1.25GHz G4, and that's just with the stock widgets, with the default set active only). Then there's going to be the question as to how to organize them all... the faux dock at the bottom is already insufficient. I know, let's stick a menu in there! Great idea!
Why not call it the Widgets Menu? And when you choose a widget from the menu, up comes the widget! Just like if you had chosen a bookmark from the Bookmarks menu from your favorite browser: up comes the web page containing the info you sought!
Or, we could create a page of little Widgets links, and then the user could click on the link and up pops the widget! Just as if it were a web page full of links, each leading to a separate page with different and useful functionality!
So my question is, why not just use the browser? IT ALREADY DOES THESE THINGS!
Not as pretty? Find a web page that has a decent designer/artist behind it. Between CSS and the GiMP, there's no excuse for ugly web pages anymore.
If you want to throw stones, throw them at a target that deserves to get hit: the Desktop Metaphor. Menus and windows with scrollbars and dialog boxes and lions and tigers and bears. The same constraints that Windows suffers under are also felt by Mac OS X, Gnome and KDE users too.
The branding has nothing to do with it.
BTW, Chris Pirillo, the guy who wrote this, he's the one who couldn't make the cut as a TechTV ScreenSaver, isn't that right?
It's a tool, not a piece of art (Score:4, Insightful)
Windows... (Score:5, Insightful)
Monopolies are strange that way.
Re:Garbage (Score:4, Insightful)
Didn't know an ordinary browser does this too! Which one? Where do I find that feature at? Again, which browser/web page has all this stuff all at the same time? You seem to know! Tell us oh wise one!
Just an idea, but (Score:5, Insightful)
Think about it, who do you think of when you think of a mac user? Granted, there are many out there, but when I think of a hardcore mac user I think of somebody who is into designing music, movies, graphics editing, etc. They are designed to cater to a group of people who are more creative and right brained.
How about your average PC user? Picture an office cubicle. You'r accountant, lawyer, and doctor all use a PC.
Let us never forget that pretty software does not automatically mean functional software, and please God let us never make well structured code and functionality less of a priority than UI "prettyness".
Re:Mac isn't boring and uninteresting?! (Score:3, Insightful)
Tabbed browsing is an extension for Safari? Strange, I seem to recall having the option to use tabs right there in the options immediately upon installing Panther (And later Tiger).
Bad optical design? (Score:3, Insightful)
If something looks bland, that probably means that it's finally being used for something other than just being decorative? I mean, it's not like the average can opener had variable transparency and a shitload of useless LEDs stuck to it... One of the best applications I use in Windows (other than games) is Daemon Tools which is basically a system tray icon, a standard MFC load widget and some configuration scerens. Best. Interface. Ever.
I can appreciate a certain blandness, it allows me to actually see what I'm doing. Damn, my pencil is playing Amazing Grace again.
Just wait, it'll come to Linux too. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Garbage (Score:4, Insightful)
Your "Widget Menu" is coming though, and although it's already available in the form of many third-party tools [versiontracker.com], Apple will be releasing one built into the Dashboard in their upcoming update: 10.4.2 [thinksecret.com]
As for the rest of your post, you clearly seem to have a very poor understanding of OS X. I suggest reading up on it [apple.com] to find out "a ton of examples as to how, say, Mac OS X is so much more beautiful, exciting and uplifting?".
Re:It's a tool, not a piece of art (Score:3, Insightful)
Inspired and exciting design makes people more productive.
The Biggest Problem (Score:2, Insightful)
The biggest problem with Windows is there are all kinds of inconsistencies. For example, last night I wanted to try the shortcut for creating a new Excel Spreadsheet. When I use the File menu, it shows me the "equivalent" shortcut is control-N, and it allows me to select a template on the right-hand side of the screen. When I use control-N, however, I can't select a template!
Another issue is that I can't find control panels and wizards that I've somehow wandered into earlier. For example, how do I roll back to a restore point? I know I've done it before, but yesterday I couldn't find a way to get there! I brought up the System control panel, and it only let me configure how much disk space to use for the system restore feature, not configure which restore point to roll back to! Argh!
Re:Garbage (Score:3, Insightful)
What if you want to know the 5 day forcast for this week? You could launch up firefox and go to an easily memorizable website like weather.com, navigate through it, and find your forcast among the puddle of advertisements, or you could just press F12 and instantly see it in a very clear, simple interface.
Need to do some quick multiplication? Instead of searching google for a bloody online calculator, press F12 and out of nowhere pops up a calculator instantly.
In class and listening to a boring lecture? Press F12 and quickly play a few games like Pacman, chess, and Snake, right in the dashboard - no internet connection required!
Umm... so how would you do all that with a web browser, especially if you have... no internet connection?
Picassa (Score:4, Insightful)
Shell Integration (Score:5, Insightful)
And don't even get started on annoying popups and those freaking MS Office icons like the paperclip guy. [whattofix.com]
To me, a big part of design is noticability: if I take my time to notice it, it's getting in the way of the work I want to do.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Windows... (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't need two machines or a dual-boot Windows/Linux box. I have my pretty, useful, friendly desktop (fully media-capable too, in a way that linux simply never has been) and if I want my unix-y goodness, I just pop up a terminal. Life is beautiful!
Re:Garbage (Score:4, Insightful)
Weather w/Quicksilver: Cmd-Space, W-E-A-T, enter, Safari pops up and loads my weatherunderground.com bookmark.
Dashboard: F12.... wait... wait... wait... wait... oh, here it is. I need more information... double-click... wait... Safari comes up.
I actually often use Meterologist, which is even faster then both Dashboard and my bookmark.
Calculations: Cmd-Space, 4+4, tab, C-A-L-C, enter, result pops up. Or, if I want the kick-ass full Apple calculator, Cmd-Space, C-A-L-C, enter, up it pops.
Dashboard: F12... wait... wait... click... wait... type calculation.
As an added bonus, I can do as fancy calculations as I want with QS, complete with parenthesis and layered calculations.
Games: Cmd-Space, POP (or BEJ or SCU or...), enter.
Dashboard: F12... wait... wait... click... wait... (as an unfortunate bonus, you only get to play in a little window.
I'm not saying Quicksilver is the end-all be all, but even when I don't use it cmd-tabbing to Safari and clicking my Weather bookmark takes less time then Dashboard. My computer isn't horrible either - things should not be this slow on a Dual 1Ghz G4 with 1GB of RAM and a fast Seagate 7200.8 300GB drive.
In Dashboard's defense, some of the widgets are genuinely fantastic, and once I activate it for the session (read: once every few hours) it usually isn't too bad to use... but the few times it is sluggish, it makes me wonder why I use the thing.
Re:Mac isn't boring and uninteresting?! (Score:3, Insightful)
As for OS X being rigid, I think an OS should be fairly rigid, in the same way that the laws of physics are rigid. It's a constraint, but one that we all understand instinctively. And if you don't like it, there are plenty of extensions to it. Check out www.unsanity.com
Show me a WinXX hack as cool as QuickSilver. Hell, windows doesn't even have hot corners.
As for windows theming, most of it is crap. Nice for eyecandy for a while, but totally lacking in consistency.
Want to talk about rigidity? How about the fact that in Windows you only have one command line interpreter? And cmd.exe can't even copy/paste like a normal app.
The one thing that bugs me in OS X is the lack of a quick route to executing a shell command, a la Start:Run in windows, but QuickSilver pretty much fixes this.
-Shudder- (Score:5, Insightful)
That's a feature, not a bug. I HATE the "belonging" aspect of the Mac community. I just want to own the freaking hammer, I don't want to join a hammer cult.
Windows rants: boring, ugly, uninspired (Score:5, Insightful)
The twin barbs of his attack: Dashboard (which has already been discussed to death; let's just say that as many people hate it as love it) and an application called "Comic Life", which this grizzled veteran of computing (look at the picture) thinks "is likely to drive even the most die-hard Windows user to switch to OS X." Yeah: I'm gonna dump my whole platform to make my digital pictures cuter. Uh-huh. I'm surprised he didn't sneak a 'BSOD' joke into his rant or spell Windows with 'BL' or a dollar sign.
One mark in his favor: clearly, he is an expert in boring and uninspired. A lame blog post about Windows software sucking? Wow. Next.
Yet Another Pointless "Mac's Rule" Article... (Score:3, Insightful)
Unless I'm mistaken, most of us here expect to discuss topics of actual intelligence, rather than repeatedly beating each other over the head with such pointless debates like Mac vs PC.
I'm not suggesting that all Mac-related articles are bad. If Apple manages to do something truly revolutionary for the computing industry, I'm sure we'd like to know about it. But please, for the love of God, stop polluting Slashdot with this kind of nonsense to satisify your own personal biases.
Thank you.
Re:Bad optical design? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What does he mean? (Score:4, Insightful)
who is this nerd? (Score:5, Insightful)
That is one of the dumbest things I have read all week. Normal folks use computers as a means to an end. Just because the author gets a hardon over extraneous features and eye candy that add nothing to productivity, and is apparently thirteen and in need of being part of a group, doesn't mean the rest of us give a flying shit.
Re:Garbage (Score:3, Insightful)
WTF??
Windows: right-click, 'sharing and security', click on 'share this folder'
OSX: Umm.. well.. it shares your home directory, provided you're not a nonlocal user.. if you are you're hosed.
Anything else means hand-editing smb.conf.
Re:Just an idea, but (Score:4, Insightful)
The only reason Sun employees are running around with PowerBooks is the fact that Sun doesn't have a decent notebook (at least not one that's reasonably priced with good battery life) and the fact that everyone else is seen as a competitor to Sun. HP, IBM, and Dell all have server lines that compete with Sun directly. Apple is seen as a non-threat.
It's the same reason that HP is selling the iPod. HP doesn't see Apple as a threat, so it's "OK" to partner with them.
That's why you have PowerBooks. Corporate politics.
Choice quote (Score:3, Insightful)
I'd like to thank the submitter for including that quote. It prevented me from wasting my time reading the article. I would have thanked them even more for not bothering submitting such a worthless article in the first place.
Dan East
Re:Garbage (Score:2, Insightful)
Ahh, the good old "code it yourself" answer. Howabout I don't and just keep using the widgets.
Even better, lets use the parents/grandparents example. Is it easier to show them F12 to get a widget for a phonebook, or get them to learn HTML/CSS/Javascript so they can code their own portal with the forecast, phonebook lookup and such?
Lastly, Widgets do more then act as something a web portal can do. Since they have access to local data, they can be quicker then opening the local application. For example, the address book widget. Or the stickies that I prefer to not have on screen all the time, just hwen I poke my head into dashboard a few times a day.
To me though the best part of Dashboard, and to some extent Sherlock 3 is the lack of ads. That, and the layout stays consisstent. In a year from now, when I go to look up a local pizza place in Dahsboard, the interface will be the same. USWestDex.com, sorry, I mean QwestDex, nono, now it is DexOnline.com hasn't remained consistant for 12 months.
Re:Windows vs. Mac (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Garbage (Score:2, Insightful)
How do I mod down front page articles? (Score:4, Insightful)
Uninspiring article (Score:3, Insightful)
There is too much of this bad innovation that's spurred by the fact that MFC/WTL isn't terribly exciting and doesn't have enough pictures of naked animé girls. As you might have guessed, I hate skins. I think they're a prime example of a breakdown between function and form. So-called "innovative" interfaces break away from the Windows look and feel and clutter the desktop. If I have my desktop themed the way I want it, I resent applications that do not follow that theme. I resent crappy software that makes the text in the titlebar huge, italic Times New Roman, for example. I resent Quicktime Player. I would (and pretty much do) resent Winamp but I let it off the hook because by default it's a good example of skins done right. There's no useless bloat there (see Windows Media Player for the other side of the coin). My basic rule is: if you have to break away from the standard set of windowing controls presented to you by WTL because you feel your interface is not ergonomic, this is a failure state.
There are some special cases where it's not possible to use standard Windows controls, such as cross-platform software. But even here, suites like wxWidgets exist to allow you to keep the standard look-and-feel of the target OS.
I guess what I'm arguing for is for my desktop to be consistent across applications. It may be fair to say that Windows does not satisfy interface designers because it doesn't allow them to customize as freely as they may want to, but I believe that some restrictions are good. I am more than certain that I prefer Microsoft's idea of what a basic user interface should look like (well, Microsoft's pre-XP idea anyway) to what a 15-year-old manga fanatic or an overly arrogant designer thinks would be a totally awesome interface. Microsoft's is generally clean and simple, as it should be.
Some notes before I go:
Yes, I know that Office 2003 totally deviates from the typical style of Windows, but Office products tend to give hints about which way Microsoft would like the general look and feel of the interface to go. It also still works like a standard Windows interface with all accessibility, tab order, and customisation and hotkey features available.
I also fully understand that Windows may not be the best interface out there, and that MFC/WTL/ATL/STL totally sucks dude lollers! It's pretty good and consistent though.
Maybe I'm getting old, but I just want something that fits elegantly into my desktop paradigm, accepts my chosen font sizes and theme, and doesn't look like a pile of ass compared to all my other apps. Longhorn does not look like it's going to help me much in this regard. I just hope they don't make everything look like WMP.
Re:It's a tool, not a piece of art (Score:2, Insightful)
There is a difference between a pleasant and stimulating environment and the tools used. Windows or any other OS on any piece of hardware are tools. Painting the handle of a hammer in warm pastels would be pleasant but doesn't make a roofer more productive (it just puts money in Martha Stewart's pocket). Having topless cheerleaders for that matter would be greatly stimulating, but would only make for the roofer falling to great injury or death.
You can rice up an econobox all you want, it is still not going to do the job of a vehicle built for racing. You can put twenty million candlepower worth of extraneous lighting on a fifteen year old Peterbilt and it still isn't going to make it carry any more cargo. Efficiency of the tool is what matters and Windows apps are exceedingly efficient tools thanks to a common and pervasive platform model of objects, interfaces, and methods. No dependency Hell, no willy-nilly everything is different and needs its own paradigm, no lack of interoperability. Use the IDE that embraces the architecture most fully, that everyone else uses, and everything fits.
Lastly, the IT/Internet sector had plenty of pleasant and stimulating environments. At companies which produced less than nothing and went utterly bankrupt after absurdly overvalued IPOs which were followed by everyone bailing with their ill-gotten gains. Leather couches, roller skates at work, and bar stools for seats in front of 21-inch monitors may have been stimulating and pleasant, but I don't recall them actually resulting in productivity of any kind.
Now in cubicle land where people do real work... Well, compare the average big corporation's IT department with the aforementioned "pleasant and stimulating environments". In corporate IT, more work is done before lunch every day than was ever done in anything more pleasant and stimulating surroundings because it needs to be done and there's a paycheck in it. A decent paycheck trumps any kind of pleasant and stimulating. Hooters girls giving me massages would be pleasant and stuimulating, but would not make me more productive.
Re:Windows vs. Mac (Score:3, Insightful)
The poof is not there to look cute. It's a visual cue to the user letting them know what just happened. If they accidentally dragged an icon off the dock, the poof tells them that they just made a mistake. If there was no feedback, they quite possibly wouldn't notice what they just did, and they would probably get frustrated when they couldn't find the icon anymore.
It's not about looking "professional," it's about a more intuitive UI experience.
Re:Mac isn't boring and uninteresting?! (Score:5, Insightful)
That's like complaining that the Federation ships in Star Trek are oppressively minimalistic in interior design. These are things which people actually prefer. There's nothing Orwellian about it. It's why New York City is so much easier to navigate than Atlanta, why ancient Rome looks so sane, why the Spaniards were blown away when they saw Tenochtitlan. These things were all planned. The Windows and Linux interfaces show the effects of suburban sprawl, OSX doesn't allow it.
The Apple interface is just as Orwellian as the Google interface. The reason you don't get this with Windows is that Windows has always used a half-assed copy of whatever Apple's doing with its interface. Unix grew up with interfaces that you had to just deal with, and Linux is in constant flux between feature creep and slimming down.
Re:It's a tool, not a piece of art (Score:5, Insightful)
Not at all. 'intuitive' and 'consistent' makes things easy to use, 'inspired' and 'exciting' makes people want to use them. All these factors contribute to productivity.
Re:It's a tool, not a piece of art (Score:2, Insightful)
I think this attitude is one of the things holding open source back, actually. Firefox is making inroads into the mainstream not by being utilitarian, but by being elegant and exciting at the same time as adding new functionality and utility.
While many get Firefox because it's supposed to be more secure than IE, many more, upon using it, note that it has customizable toolbars, a skinnable interface, and, darn it, it just looks cool!
It's not enough to be functional, you've got to look good doing it, too.
not innovatie, or the standard? (Score:2, Insightful)
However the fact that MS Office has become the boring standard lends credence to it, especially when other office suites are continually trying to catch up and vy for user's attention.
Sounds more like a name-calling excuse to me.
Re:Garbage (Score:2, Insightful)
1.gas prices in your area
2.Google maps that stays there to view a route, area etc etc.
3.animated weather maps from weather.com
4.Search for and view wikipedia articles, complete with pictures
5.view memory usage, CPU usage, network stats, uptimes, load averages of your computer
6.Shows significant historical events that took place on the current day or any selected day
7.Quickily search All Recipes.com from your Dashboard
8.See what's being shown on US TV right now
9.Play all the BBC's national radio streams from one minimal place
10.Track you packages from UPS/FedX
Those are just ten...shall I go on? Again, what single web page can do all these things at a glance?
No, yahoo can't. Google doesn't. And of course the ol "code it yourself" is such a weak argument it's not even worth mentioning. Sure, you can find all this stuff on the web, but you'd have to do a lot of clicking around where as these widgets float in the background not even taking up the same memory space COMBINED as a browser would. Dashboard makes it easy to find all these things that you want in a flash, in one place.
Got anything else? You don't seem to be making your argument. At least not to me.
Re:It's a tool, not a piece of art (Score:3, Insightful)
I fail to see how this is a justification for bad design. "Pleasand and stimulating" isn't about nice fluffy environments (or "Hooters"). It is about having a user interface where things are easy to find. Where menus are consistent. Where icons are designed by experts so that they are both easy on the eye and intuitive. Where the general operating environment does not make the user feel like they are struggling or being intimidated.
A good environment is exactly as you describe:
No dependency Hell, no willy-nilly everything is different and needs its own paradigm, no lack of interoperability.
However this does not mean:
Use the IDE that embraces the architecture most fully, that everyone else uses, and everything fits.
Having a good pleasant working GUI environment has no connection to 'using the architecture most fully' or using the system 'that everyone else uses'.
A decent paycheck trumps any kind of pleasant and stimulating.
I suspect that many would disagree with you. They would value good working conditions above extra pay.
Most Women: Ugly, Boring & Uninspired (Score:4, Insightful)
The media would have you believe 80% of the women are ugly, boring and uninspired based upon what they hold up as a reference model (heroin-addict thin, vapeous, self-absorbed, etc.) This does not make most women less productive than their "beautiful" counterparts in Hollywood movies or New York runways. In fact, most succesful families and productive careers are spearheaded by women who look nothing like Paris Hilton.
Likewise, there are a bunch of ugly Windows applications doing a lot of work. Like it or not, Microsoft made it possible for mediocre programmers to make boring apps that get a lot of work done. These programs may not be innovative with pretty UI gimmicks that suck up CPU cycles, they tend to use more resources than they ought to, and they are fraught with spaghetti and bugs, but they get the work done.
The lack of innovation may help minimize training when teaching new apps. Teaching new paradigms is expensive and time consuming.
Like it or not, ugly is what most work is getting done on.
Re:Garbage (Score:3, Insightful)
I think the UI in OSX is far more elegant and "blows away" the original Mac 128k. You see, that's an opinion, just like your statement above is an opinion. But will you also be one of those people that seems to think this opinion of yours is fact and show some website that also says that the original Finder was better because blah blah blah? Guess what, that's opinion also. There are people that think that a command-line interface is far more elegant than either one. Who's right, who's wrong? Opinion, remember?
You seem to blur the line between these two and you also seem to be very defensive. It's okay dude...just relax. You don't like the GUI, then don't use it. Or no no...here's a better option that you've used before: code a better GUI yourself!
Re:Windows... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Just because I can't resist... (Score:1, Insightful)
you may have coal software because owning dimond software makes no sense to you (and thats not a bad thing.) Windows may lack imagination and inovation becuase for some people thats good enough, they don't really give a flyin "F" about having the best. Look at Walmart, bigest retailer in the world, not because they sell dimonds but beacuse they sell cheap shit for cheap. That cheap is good enough for a lot of people and they go back for more. Why should Windows be any more than what "most" people are willing to pay for?
I am a Apple user and a Windows user and you see which one I listed first. I love Apple not beacuse it has the "fastest" CPU, or beacuse it had a huge rebate when I bought it. I love Apple beause I can do 10 things at once, and do them well. I hate wasting MY TIME - I don't want to f* around a computer all day. I want do something well and do it fast and get on with the next thing - and I obviously pay a higher price for that luxury. So is an Apple really more expensive to me? I think its just expensive to you.
All the design Apple puts into its products is just the icing on the cake. It takes a special person to really appreciate all that stuff - and be willing to pay for it. I hate how people always complain about the cost. A company that makes things out of Titanium or even Aluminum, which isn't cheap either, is not that concerned with making a Walmart cheap computer.
A computer is just a tool, and you should use one that is the best tool for you.
Your Saturn may get you from point A to B for 90,000 miles, my Ferrari will probably never see 50,000 but I'll have a grin every time I go from A to B.
PS - Sorry for any spelling mistakes, Windows doesn't have a global spell check like OS X (Just because I couldn't resist
No shit Sherlock (Score:3, Insightful)
In other news, there's no 'user community' rallying about around the world. I don't see people running around and screaming "HELL YEAH EARTH FOR TEH WIN!" at least.
When something's so big and so vast and there's no majority to keep oppressing you, there's no "user community rallying". People just accept it how it is. If Mac was the dominant platform, if the niche feeling was lost, there would be no 'macintosh user community' feel anymore.
Re:Quick, call the whaaaaaamulance! (Score:2, Insightful)
That's $12 for a single plugin. Add all the costs of all the little bits and pieces over time and see how much you've wasted on things that, everywhere else, are completely free. Christ, I'm surprised Apple included a "Shutdown" option in the menu, rather than leaving it out so that some developer could sell you one for $40.
I can't believe some of the silly crap that I've actually seen people charging for on this platform. Are they nuts?!
Re:Garbage (Score:3, Insightful)
I now see one of the differences - you're comparing a Windows SERVER to a Mac DESKTOP: The "Services" of which you speak aren't available on my win2k laptop (work provided), but I've seen them on win2k SERVER (or Server Advanced) builds.
getting file sharing to work on a windows desktop is a non-trivial PITA: look at the process you have to go through to add an IP printer, and you'll see what I mean (for Heaven's sake, why is an IP Printer a "local" device?)
Some of the other points you make are legit, and some aren't, but one of the primary differences between M$ and AAPL is that the desktop variety OSX includes a lot more "server" features out of the box.
-David
Re:What an utter crock of shit (Score:2, Insightful)
There's plenty of Windows (and Linux) software, much of it open-source and/or freeware, that I find to be extremely useful and practical. I don't give a damn whether or not it's pretty to look at.
I don't think the article is attacking the usefulness or the practicality of the software as much as its innovativeness. The Windows platform does not breed innovation - either in hardware or software. Windows is more historical than future-oriented because it has to be compatible with what people currently use. The sticker price on critical Windows applications are too much to not make the next OS backwards compatible with them. Hence, every version of Windows looks more and more like Windows. And the new ideas in Longhorn and IE 7? Yeah, two - three years after Apple.
Why? It can't. How innovative is Windows XP if the games I played on Windows Me, which also worked on Windows 98, also run on Windows XP?
Innovation is change - change in how we do things and how we build the tools we do things with. The Windows platform does not change, except in an increase in resource demands. If the tools don't change, the art doesn't change.
Re:Garbage (Score:2, Insightful)
Huh?!? (Score:4, Insightful)
Marketshare for Desktop OS
Windows ~90%
MacOS ~5%
Linux ~3%
That means that for every great app, there is likely to be nearly 100x more terrible apps for Windows than for the other operating systems. Its like the Playstation. Because Sony has the greater market, they also have the larger number of terrible games. An operating system does not make an application good or bad, regardless of whether pretty widgets are in the toolbar. Personally there are quite a few Windows applications that I could not live without that do not have any sort of linux equivalent good enough to allow me to switch.
Here are a few:
Mp3tag (Best tagger out there)
Photoshop
Illustrator
Reason
Ableton Live
Reaktor
Sound Forge
Picasa2
CDex
Alcohol 120%
GAMES GAMES GAMES GAMES
I could go on, but the fact of the matter is that at the very least Linux needs to start getting some serious sound applications for me to make the switch. I used to dual boot, but in the end it was such a pain anytime I wanted to play a game or work on some music that I gave up and stuck with the one environment that has all of my needs satisfied. MacOS is kind of interesting and has all the audio software I would ever need, but at what cost? More expensive hardware and about 0 games I'd be interested in. For what I didn't have to pay for my copy of windows, I'd be awfully hard pressed to start paying apple for an OS update every 6 months.
My point is that its not the platform that it is the problem its just that a lot of lazy and piss poor developers tend to flock to the platform that is the most popular. To be perfectly honest, if you want a great example of a platform that has a lot of god awful software, just take a look at linux and the bazillion apps that never got past their second alpha prerelease.
Hell, just look at how many system tools are included in distributions that are not even version 1 yet. Granted I've had very few problems with a lot of the console tools I've used, but after a while you start to realize that a little bit of polish goes an awful long ways. For instance, apt-get:
aptluna:~# apt-get -version
apt 0.5.28.6 for linux i386 compiled on Mar 22 2005 07:17:03
Granted apt is about as solid as a console tool can get, but version
I love how when I look for linux apps in sourceforge, a great deal of what I find that would be interesting to use is at version
I know people here resent it being called open sores software, but in too many cases, calling it open sores would almost be a compliment.
Boring, uninspired blog entry (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Just wait, it'll come to Linux too. (Score:3, Insightful)
So yes, great tools, but what a mess of languages and choices behind it. I'm not saying Visual Basic is even *good*, but it is *simple* (painfully so at times). And that's coming from a 15 year Mac developer.
Actually, a different idea came to my mind (Score:3, Insightful)
This is partly because design is not an easy process when writing software. Many of my early attempts at writing software suck too. Sometimes I chose the wrong technology to work with, and sometimes, I just made braindead choices. Sometimes, even, I relied on kludges because I didn't know the languages I was using well enough to do things right.
So the bast majority of software on all platforms sucks... Now my software is much better, but I still look at some of my software and say "What a horrible design choice. I better fix that."
Re:Unabashedly biased (Score:3, Insightful)
Nothing personal, but what a load shit. If the state of Windows software proves anything, it's that quantity does not mean quality. I've used both Mac and Windows extensively and Windows software in general is horribly designed.
I am a long-time Mac user (but not a Mac worshipper) and when I first had to use Windows professionally in 1999, I was absolutely appalled at how clunky a lot of programs were (including stuff from Microsoft) and how badly written many of them were. I experienced far more application crashes on Windows, far more memory leaks and far, far more instances of not having the slightest clue how to use a piece of software because it was designed with a user interface that only a mother could love.
At that time, NT had many theoretical technical advantages over the current Mac OS (OS 9), but because software for NT was so badly written in general, it pretty much leveled things. Until that point, I had been considering switching from Macs to PCs, but my experiences on the platform put a stop to those plans.
So no offense, but it's hard to figure out where you're coming from. Have you used other platforms extensively? You come off like some kind of Windows apologist.
Re:Garbage (Score:2, Insightful)
How much of that reported usage is shared libraries?
You say the total is 1GB usage...I'd bet it's closer to that 150MB reported for each client, because it's nearly all shared.
Re:Yes, and here's what MS did wrong... (Score:1, Insightful)
First, performance isn't really an issue unless your are storing very large quantities of data in the registry. The registry was not intended to store large quantities of data (like the huge list of GUIDs, or detailed uninstall information, or any of the other things which have been put there recently).
Second, how often should any program be reading it's configuration? If you have so many registry accesses that performance becomes a serious issue, you have a problem somewhere else.
Third, the layout of the Windows registry is hardly efficient. Even the crappiest of RDBMS systems would out-perform it easily. It just wasn't designed for performance. It was designed to solve the problem of programs spewing settings all around the system, and to provide a central configuration system (which never existed before).
Notice how Microsoft seem to be moving back to having application configuration files? Which are XML, no less. They obviously don't think performance is an issue, especially considering how painfully slow their XML parser is.
Yes, because a system encouraging manual configuration no input validation is such a better alternative.
Erm... The Windows registry has no input validation of any kind. Yes, you have data types, but they're pretty much useless. You can still enter garbage data quite easily. There are no constraints, no error checking, no documentation, and it's generally just a mess.
OK, it's intended to be modified by configuration programs, not directly, but there's nothing stopping those programs from entering invalid data either.
How are you planning on implementing per-user, per-value ACLs on lines of text in a file ? How about making sure modifications don't end up half finished ? Are you aware parsing text is an incredibly inefficient operation ?
It's not hard at all to design the thing so that you don't need per-user, per-value ACLs. If you ever need per-value ACLs, then you have done something severely wrong, and should probably re-think your design. ACLs tend to be overkill anyway, but that's another issue.
Per key security settings would be good enough, and then you can re-use the filesystem's security system. Not only would that simplify things (any tool that works on the filesystem can work on the configuration database, and all APIs are the same), it would have eliminated a lot of redundancy, additional testing, and so on.
This is about the only decent idea you've managed to come up with. Mind you, similar functionality is already available via System Restore points - but I imagine people like you automatically turn them off because you "don't like stuff going on behind your back".
The fact that it can (and does) restore the entire system registry from an ancient backup is quite annoying, yes. It can easily leave you with non-functional programs (because all the registry values are gone), and can't uninstall (because all the uninstall information is also gone, especially since Microsoft decided it would be a great idea to keep all of it in the registry).
If it were able to restore parts of the registry, there wouldn't really be a problem. But it can't - it's an all or nothing operation. You can't restore only parts of the registry.
Because I'm sure the user will understand the implications of modifying arbitrary registry keys and will give nearly two full seconds' careful and considered thought before typing in their password.
If your users are that dumb (and yes, I know that they are - the whole Windows culture, for lack of a better word, encourages ignorance and stupidity in users), then there is absolutely nothing you can possibly do to prevent their system from being compromised. So you may as well give up, remove all the security systems from the operating system, and put up with all the security problems.
The point is to stop programs from modifying system settings (and installing stuff like spyware, or whatever) without the user's consent.
It's plenty inspired.... (Score:2, Insightful)
iMovie and iChat AV (the poster forgot that one) (Score:3, Insightful)
You don't have kids, do you? iMovie is absolutely brilliant when it is time to send the grandparents a quick DVD -- attach the camera via Firewire, press the play button, and in less than an hour, you have something that Grandma and Grandpa just love. For free. Profession features would just be in the way at this level.
The original poster forgot to mention iChat AV, the replacement for the Microsoft Messenger and AIM. It is included with the OS, and is tightly integrated: When you start writing a mail in Mail, and your contact is online, it will place a little colored button next to his name. I have seen MSN and AIM, and am amazed that Windows users put up with ads on both -- no such thing with iChat AV. People who have the iSight camera says it kicks ass (at that price, it certainly should).
You forgot iDVD, by the way.
Just looking at the individual programs ignores how they cooperate: iMovie, for example, access iTunes and iPhoto and sends stuff to iDVD. Microsoft can't do that because a) they don't have anything comparable to the iLife suite included and b) they have been convicted for abusing their monopoly and are not allowed to combine stuff.
Their bad. Are you going to suffer for their mistake?
Re:Garbage (Score:3, Insightful)
Not so quick argument to base the question on:
HTTP is the most commonly used information transport protocol in current existance (people will argue Peer to Peer systems, but I'm not arguing bandwidth use, I'm arguing *use*, as in where has it been used). Every single waking day, us Internet users will use it for something (well, most converging to all of us; if you're one of those crazies who read Usenet and still use rlogin you might not...). Hell, I'm using it now to send this message to you.
So let's go on a foray into a hypothetical Web2 (to go along with Internet2). Here, HTP2 (finally someone removed the damned extra "t", it's Hypertext Markup Protocol, not HyperText...) is a stateful protocol, where when a connection is maintained on the server side for web pages that require it. Sites like Google come to a crawl because before they can even serve you, they've got to go through hundreds of millions of currently active sessions, discover that you aren't one of them, and then assign you a context on their system. Of course, this will warrant ugly hacks such as automatically assigning you a context, and then joining it with an active context later if it discovers that you've already connected (this will be a real nightmare for those who are on dynamic Internet address connections; going to Amazon and submitting a form to buy something could cause you to lose the form altogether). Then people will try ugly hacks like dropping a small piece of data on the client machine to assure the state of the connection is preserved next time the user logs on. Oh wait, this is the original problem dealing with Cookies in the first place, isn't it?
Let's replace this with HTP3, which requires a synchronous connection; all of the data is stored on both the client machine and the server side machine, and is generated in a concurrent fashion, visa vi SQL over IP. Transactions can be rolled back if one computer didn't send or recieve all of the data, and the world's fine right? Oh no, of course not! We're adding even more computational complexity to the WWW. Think once again of sites like Google, who now have to keep synchronous connections with every user in cyberspace. While this doesn't cause the "hack" problem we had before, this causes a worse problem of computational complexity. When you have traffic in order of a few *million* hits per second, even the fastest of database servers, IP stacks, routers, network cards, fiber lines, any equipment attached to this system come to a crawl.
So our foray causes people to flood back to the well established, generally working HTTP protocol.
Next, let's tackle HTML shall we? Okay.
HTML is bad because it allows editors to generate ugly pages, it allows users to fubar things by not correctly ending tags where they should be ended, etc. (Even though the latter is really a problem in web browser design; we'll get back to this).
So we replace it with a *better* markup language like RTF is; yeah, that'll work won't it? Hmm, let's see. I want to do complex embedding, like layering an image over an image. Nope, can't do that with RTF as it stands, so let's extend the protocol to allow it. And what about those poor blind and deaf bastards, we'd better make high contrast and voice playback a standard as well, let's tack that on. Oh, and let's not forget those crazy people who want to do absolutely insane things like "programming" in a web browser. Let's extend the standard a little more to encorporate the ability to run scripts and even executables.
Wait.. we're just back to where we started, once again. Ugly hacks for a problem we didn't originally contemplate. Let's try this again, keeping all of the above in mind as already implemented (and bug free). Now say WidgetMakerX want's to add a fancy new object to the protocol. Of course, the protocol supports the ability to add arbitrary new objects, and embeds just like any other application. But what happens
Re:Garbage (Score:1, Insightful)
It can include shared libraries and other files that are not in memory, or if they are, shared between several programs. Look at something like Safari - my Safari currently shows 760MB of virtual memory...
You really should only be looking at the real memory statistic.
Yes, memory usage statistics can be confusing. People often would like to know just how much memory something needs or is available on the system, but modern operating systems using demand-paging and caching as much filesystem data as possible have no simple answer to such a question.
I don't get it, (Score:2, Insightful)
what's the big deal about desktops. I'm useing FVWM2 everywhere with a small panel with pager, clock and net/temp meter. Everything else is in the menu, which comes up if I click on a free space (there's always free space, or you can just add more panels). I mean what's the point of having a nice picture of SMG as the background if I can't see her :)
Give your eyes a good time, check out Joss Whedon's Serenity http://www.serenitymovie.com/ [serenitymovie.com].
What a load of BS (Score:3, Insightful)
Software for Windows is generally uninspired
Computers are tools, not literature. If there is a need for a specific program, someone will make it.
generically cloned
It's called UI consistency...which the lack of is a major complain with Unix.
and overwhelmingly wrought with lackluster (read: lousy) user interfaces
Putting aside the fact that the basic elements of a GUI app are the same no matter what the platform, how's that the fault of the O/S? Why aren't app vendors blamed?
Windows users don't have a strong sense of belonging
I did not know I had to belong to somewhere to write letters and edit my taxes. Where do I register??? :-)
there's no user community rallying around the platform
Yeap, the millions of programs for Windows is the result of the ...non existent community.
One application that typifies the creative elegance that you can find on systems outside of Windows is Comic Life from Plasq (plasq.com). Be forewarned: It's likely to drive even the most die-hard Windows user to switch to OS X.
So port it to Windows then, and I'll buy it.
It runs well, looks amazing,
Kudos to the developers. What has Windows got to do with it though?
and does something so incredibly unique you'll find yourself wanting to take more digital pictures just to make another comic strip out of 'em.
I my entire life, it is the first time that I see an operating system being blamed for not having a 3rd party application that another O/S has. It's crazy!
Again, we come back to the concept that Windows software developers rarely develop any kind of pleasant UI.
Millions of happy MS Office users would disagree here.
There may be hope with Kapsules (kapsules.shellscape.org), although it suffers from a lack of useable widgets. Konfabulator (www.konfabulator.com) has an OS X and Windows version of its rendering engine with an extensive collection of sweet-smelling widgets
So now the problem is that Windows icons are not as beautiful as Mac OS X's are? Hire better artists then. Or download a better looking theme. It's absurd to blame an O/S for that, though.
Although I read /. a few years now, I've never seen such a lame column related to computers making /. headlines. There has to be a line somewhere on blaming Microsoft and Windows; after all, Windows is being used in millions of computers around the globe; they certainly can't be sooo bad!
Re:Mac isn't boring and uninteresting?! (Score:3, Insightful)