Microsoft Ignores Usability With All-Caps Menu in Visual Studio 415
mikejuk writes "The recent release of Visual Studio 2012 contained a UI element that few believed could make it into the final version — ALL-CAPS menus. After lots of user criticism and disbelief, Microsoft has moved swiftly to do something about it — by tweaking the typography. '... we explored designs with and without uppercase styling. In the end we determined it to be a very effective way of providing structure and emphasis to the top menu area in Visual Studio 2012.' This must be a new meaning of the word 'structure,' because putting the menu items into all-caps means that they are all the same height. When each menu items starts with a cap then there is structure because you can see the change in height, marking the start of the next menu item. The idea that putting a menu into all caps adds structure is something that is very difficult to see. If you wanted to put structure into a menu, well how about color? Oh wait, I forgot the design department dumped color in favour of the 'everything-is-grey UI.' Developers are the people who invented CamelCase to make sure that the structure of run together words would stand out better — and now we are asked to believe that making a menu all-caps adds structure. I don't think so."
All part of their retro-COBOL strategy (Score:5, Funny)
You see, MS is so hip, so ahead of the curve, that they know already that COBOL is about to come back into style in the developer world. Soon everything will be in all caps, mainframes will be all the rage, and GUI's will be passe. Apple will be behind the times with their over-designed software, and MS will be out in front with their all caps, command-line interface only version of Windows 9--renamed "DOS 9 FOR TERMINALS."
GOOD JOB, MICROSOFT!
Re:All part of their retro-COBOL strategy (Score:5, Funny)
(Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING. Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING. Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.)
Re:All part of their retro-COBOL strategy (Score:5, Insightful)
I'll bet it's Ballmer's doing. If he can't throw a chair at least he can YELL
Re:All part of their retro-COBOL strategy (Score:4, Funny)
Re:All part of their retro-COBOL strategy (Score:5, Insightful)
alas mainframes (or at least - thin clients attached to remote processing power somewhere on a network) are back, only they called them "the cloud" this time round to make it sound a bit cooler.
Re: (Score:2)
Well, regardless of the 'control' people want it is the right way to do things, if you do it properly and have the bandwidth behind it to push all the pretty pixels around that is.
Tho its true that back in mainframe days bandwidth wasn't a real issue.. but the last time we try the cloud thing the bandwidth wasn't there and it left a bad taste in a lot of peoples mouths.
Re:Mainframe is really a marketing term. (Score:5, Insightful)
Define "Mainframe". From what I can see, "mainframe" is a term for very expensive ultra performance hardware.
Nah, it's more than that. It's about redundancy, high I/O relative to compute power, optimization for throughput rather than latency, and high availability.
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah man. It reminds me of my Commodore 64 days..... no, even that had lower-case menus. Um. The 70s computers??? RETRO is back baby! Yeah baby, yeah! ;-)
BUT AT LEAST IT HAS A MENU.
Freaking Office 2010 with the ribbon crap confuses the heck out of me, because I can never find the function I want. Where's the undo function? Find-and-replace? Full justification? I know they're in that mess of Egyptian hieroglyphics, but I have no clue where.
Re:All part of their retro-COBOL strategy (Score:4, Funny)
Freaking Office 2010 with the ribbon crap confuses the heck out of me, because I can never find the function I want. Where's the undo function? Find-and-replace? Full justification? I know they're in that mess of Egyptian hieroglyphics, but I have no clue where.
CTRL+Z, CTRL+H, CTRL+J?
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Freaking Office 2010 with the ribbon crap confuses the heck out of me, because I can never find the function I want.
You need to install UBitMenu [howtogeek.com]. It creates a new tab with the old 2003 menus, so you can at least find things. Their main site is down at the moment, but if you google it you can find it on a download site.
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Yeah man. It reminds me of my Commodore 64 days..... no, even that had lower-case menus. Um. The 70s computers??? RETRO is back baby! Yeah baby, yeah! ;-)
BUT AT LEAST IT HAS A MENU.
Freaking Office 2010 with the ribbon crap confuses the heck out of me, because I can never find the function I want. Where's the undo function? Find-and-replace? Full justification? I know they're in that mess of Egyptian hieroglyphics, but I have no clue where.
Let me start a stopwatch and see how long it takes me to find each one.
Undo
Tab: Title Bar
Location: Third icon from the left, between Save icon and Redo icon
Time to find: 0.5 seconds. No, seriously, it's one of the first things you see if you start looking from the top of the window and it's showing no matter which tab you're on.
Find and Replace
Tab: Home
Location: far right
Titled: "Find" or "Replace"
Time to find: 3 seconds.
Full Justification
Tab: Home
Location: Paragraph section, bottom row, fourth icon
Time to
Re:All part of their retro-COBOL strategy (Score:5, Interesting)
Part of GP's complaint is that he doesn't necessarily know or can discern the meaning of the symbols. Also, it took me roughly 20 minutes to find the icons on the title bar the first time I used 2007 because I was not expecting there to be icons on the title bar.
Re:All part of their retro-COBOL strategy (Score:5, Interesting)
The ribbon bar in Office 2010 is the most unusable piece of crap ever. I had to memorize where all the stuff was before, now I have to re-memorize where all the stuff is because everything is in a new location that is not very intuitive.
How hard is it to make an interface where I can just TYPE what I want to do? I want to type "line spacing" and have it bring me to the place where I change line spacing. Microsoft with their billions of dollars can't figure out how to do that? Is this a joke? So instead I have to press F1, type "line spacing" and have it show me the tips on how to do the special dance to get to where I want. In a world where the computer has 3 billion cycles per second I shouldn't have to waste my cycles trying to remember what awkward button sequence I have to perform to get the reward.
Re: (Score:2)
They're just taking the Federal CIO seriously -- "Federal CIO Steven VanRoekel quipped, 'I'm recruiting COBOL developers, any out there?,' sending Federal CTO Todd Park into fits of laughter (video)... So what are VanRoekel and Park looking for? 'Bad a** innovators — the baddest a** of the bad a**es out there,' Park explained (video), 'to design, create, and kick a** for America.'"
BAD A**!!!!!!
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/12/05/26/1658227/us-ciocto-idea-of-hiring-cobol-coders-laughable [slashdot.org]
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Tell me about it... I play sitting 8-10 feet back on my TV and it's really hard to see. WoW had an option right on the chat window to increase the font, which was essential for me. It's not that I have bad eyes, quite the opposite in fact, but it just gets really tiring trying to read the unnecessarily small print.
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Do people playing Diablo III have anything to say worth reading?
Iâ(TM)m horrified. (Score:5, Funny)
Iâ(TM)m horrified. Absolutely shocked. I tell you, this is the final nail in Microsoft and Visual Studioâ(TM)s coffin. Oh, and âoeMy eyes, it burns! The goggles do nothing!â
Re:Iâ(TM)m horrified. (Score:5, Funny)
Iâ(TM)m horrified that you canâ(TM)t seem to find a simple apostraphe button on your keyboard. (here's one you can borrow ' actually, here's a bunch ''''''''''')
Re: (Score:3)
What keyboard does he have that doesn't have just the plain ' on it?
Have you people considered that the key is broken?
I don't know about YOU and your ability to throw away money like it grew on trees, but I canât afford to go out and buy a new kewboard âoewilly-nillyâ when people steal the keys out of my keyboard when Iâm not in my cube.
Re:Iâ(TM)m horrified. (Score:5, Informative)
Oh great, another interface screwed up by the design department.
Someone should fire a few UI designers stat!
At least it's not the worst graphical interface sold at retail.
That honor goes to Lotus Notes [mac.com].
Re: (Score:3)
Pardon my ignorance, but is that link for real? Does this Lotus thing you speak of really work like that? It was just a joke, one-time thing that never made it past beta testing right?
Right?
Re:Iâ(TM)m horrified. (Score:5, Funny)
http://www.wikihow.com/Detect-Sarcasm-in-Writing [wikihow.com]
Re:Iâ(TM)m horrified. (Score:5, Informative)
IÃ(TM)m horrified. Absolutely shocked. I tell you, this is the final nail in Microsoft and Visual StudioÃ(TM)s coffin. Oh, and ÃoeMy eyes, it burns! The goggles do nothing!Ã
Your post burns my eyes.
I assumed the joke was that he typed that text into Word, then copy-pasted it into his web browser and submitted it.
MS are fully into change-for-its-own-sake mode now (Score:5, Insightful)
Previously barring a lot of eye candy that could be turned off , MS did generally get their UI about right. Now with spillover effect from Win8 they seem to have completely lost the plot and this is simply an example of them reloading the gun once more to take aim at whatever is left of their feet.
Re:MS are fully into change-for-its-own-sake mode (Score:5, Insightful)
Mod up! This is absurdly true. Office got a new interface that it didn't need that seems no better (just different) from its last interface. Now the same thing is being done for windows. Why not just add a "Tablet/Phone Shell Mode" and be done with it? I'd me much more interested in a faster file system, fast, usable search (still waiting, Microsoft), fewer blue screens, Azure presented in such a way that anyone can host any windows application, legacy or not (Once again, they miss the obvious).
In the last 20 years, Microsoft has been busy solving problems nobody I know seems to have had. I guess they're just going to continue the tradition.
Re:MS are fully into change-for-its-own-sake mode (Score:5, Funny)
> In the last 20 years, Microsoft has been busy solving
> problems nobody I know seems to have had.
That's not entirely fair. In the last 10 years, Microsoft has been very busy solving problems they themselves created in the previous 10 years.
That being said, Windows 8 is looking like they're ready to start another 10 year cycle of creating new problems.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Nah. Ribbon is objectively better than the previous office UI, just look at all the usability studies they did. Watch Jensen Harris's talk about it.
On the other hand, this is just another fad. People have been capitalising letters in every possible way over time. We had the WordPerfects of the world, we had iPods, we had flickr and finally the obvious next step was to try FILE EDIT VIEW PROJECT BUILD DEBUG TEAM SQL DATA DESIGN FORMAT TOOLS TEST ARCHITECTURE ANALYZE WINDOW HELP.
I personally believe the probl
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Well, they have certainly managed to implement the "fewer blue screens" feature. Can't remember the last time I've seen one. Must be a few years by now.
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> Mod up! This is absurdly true. Office got a new interface that it didn't need that seems no better (just different) from its last interface
This is due to their business model. Thet must change things every couple of years (make things slightly incompatible or inconsistent) to drive revenue. If they stopped breaking thins then they lose a lot of money. That is why hey drop their techologies for "teh new shiney" every half-decade. Which means everyone investing in their tech will get shafted and loose
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They make change for change's sake, like car companies. I still hate the icon-based Office 2010.
The pictures are meaningless for user "discovery", AKA the process where people figure out what is where. So it offers nothing over purely text-based menus and just uses up valuable screen real estate. I love having all those fat bars taking up a grand total of almost 50% of the screen space, crowding out the actual data.
"Oh! You can reduce them! Just go into blah blah blah cmd prompt tar -xvf..."
Re:MS are fully into change-for-its-own-sake mode (Score:5, Funny)
Speaking of Windows 8, maybe they should just get rid of the menus altogether! Instead, you should have to point to an invisible, 2-pixel-wide area of the lower-left corner of the window to see a full-screen page of active tiles representing what Visual Studio can do with your project. Each tile should move, spin, twirl, or change color in some way to keep your eyes busy while you look for the item you want. And since it's hard to do multi-touch on a desktop, it should require two mice to operate!
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Visual Studio and before that, Visual Basic and Visual C++ always had really lousy interfaces. When I first used VB I wrote exactly the same program in Delphi, and Delphi was easy to learn and pickup while VB was a constant struggle due to the design. Ie, put all of the hundred or so properties into a menu, sorted alphabetically, so that you use maximum mouse movement to set the 3 properties that you need. It was almost as if the UI for Visual Basic was designed by the typical Visual Basic user. Now I'm
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The other problem is that Apple's UIs really are stylish and attractive. Sure, they cost too much and are basically like electronic prisons, but it's hard to deny that they really know their aesthetics. Microsoft, OTOH, keeps trying to be stylish, but usually ends up failing badly at it, and making something that looks comical or just plain ugly.
Are you surprised? (Score:5, Informative)
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I would have used the example of, "This is the company that gave us Windows 7." Where they deliberately move stuff around in order to make users play hide and seek or hunt and peck in the hope they might chance across what they are looking for.
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They just upgraded us to office 2007 (yeah I work at one of those companies).
All I can say is, nailed it on the head with the chaos strip. Fuck that thing is annoying. I mean the old way of doing things was painful, but we were used to it.
And yeah, it's like they sat down and made a list of the most commonly used features, then made damn sure they would all be on seperate tabs.
I work on fairly complex (actually out of scope for word.. but it's what has been dictated) documents with a lot of sectioning and p
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What's really annoying is they made the stuff that mostly worked worse, and left the stuff that doesn't work completely alone.
I too work on large word docs. I'd love to do them in latex (or just about anything else), but it's what the customer wants (they want to be able to change them themselves easily).
Revision tracking (the "track changes" feature) still has all the old annoyances. When you are using fields and cross-references they still don't update automatically. The old "print preview" to get them to
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I really don't mind clicking, this is not what is wrong with the ribbon.
The problem with the ribbon is that you have to think in order to use it. You have to take a moment and think what you want to do so that you can figure out where you have to click in order to find the appropriate tool. It is actually rather well structured if you consider that it is a hard thing to group abstract menu items and tools in a meaningful way. It will work in favor of someone with little or no previous experience, but it is
Re:Are you surprised? (Score:5, Interesting)
I understand that if you are someone who knew exactly where every option was then the ribbon would be a step back. But from my point of view it makes it much easier to find features that were previously buried in the menus.
The point of the ribbon is to expose useful features to the user so they actually use them.
Re: (Score:3)
And then once they find something interesting, it disappears, never to be seen again.
For some reason, people still tell me I should suck it up and accept the new, dynamic Start menu in Windows 7, because it's awesome. Well, it's awesome if you only use 5 programs and you know exactly what you want so you can type in the name. Of course, if that's all you need, then the dynamic menus are redundant, anyway! If you just got the OS and want to see what's there, or if you do a lot of stuff, menus that automat
All of the "new UIs" (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:All of the "new UIs" (Score:4, Interesting)
Totally agree.
I think it's being driven by the cell phone / tablet craze. Everyones trying to make their desktop look like their cellphone. I too think it's a major step backwards.. and I think a lot of the UI design guys are out of touch with what people actually want.
Relearning... (Score:5, Interesting)
As I understand it road signs (or many of them) in the UK used to be in caps but studies showed that mixed-case was much easier to read (which mattered more as cars got faster) since we're looking for familiar patterns.
Looks like Microsoft will need to re-learn this lesson...
Re: (Score:3)
since we're looking for familiar patterns.
ALL CAPS WILL BECOME FAMILIAR. YOU WILL BE ASSIMILATED!
(Side note: I typed half of that sentence before remembering that there was a caps-lock button... I think it is the first time I've used it.)
About your side note... (Score:3)
"Obligatory" bash quote [bash.org]
Re: (Score:3)
which mattered more as cars got faster
Maybe Microsoft is trying to slow down the speed of development.
changed in 1965 in the UK after 1958 testing (Score:5, Interesting)
UK road signs were changed to their current style after testing in 1958, there's a nice summary on the BBC [bbc.co.uk]. This new mixed upper and lower case style became legally required on 01 January 1965.
So yes indeed, typographical designers understood this in the UK quite a while before it was a widely discussed computer interface debate..
Blog author knows what they are talking about (Score:5, Insightful)
Only someone who has a website with such bad usability can truly see horrible usability in others' work.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Blog author knows what they are talking about (Score:5, Informative)
You beat me to it. The guy is whining about "usability" and yet:
his website is a horrible mix of:
I could go on but I think I've pointed enough mistakes. I can't believe someone with a website like that has the nerve to criticize Microsoft (or anyone) for using uppercase menus.
Re:Blog author knows what they are talking about (Score:5, Insightful)
While I agree with those complaints, every single one of them except the jQuery window problems are design issues, not usability problems.
The two areas of expertise are independent yet often correlated because they frequently go hand-in-hand during the design of an interface. You can easily have ugly yet highly usable, or stylish and entirely unusable.
The all upper-case menu is actually a usability issue and a design issue. Not only does it look bad, but it also makes reading more difficult because humans process the shapes of whole words. All uppercase words are basically rectangles. It also makes distinguishing independent menu items more difficult (although proper negative space would help with that).
But that picture pop-up window thing is atrocious.
Structure (Score:4, Interesting)
When each menu items starts with a cap then there is structure because you can see the change in height, marking the start of the next menu item.
Call me blind. But this rant is blown out of proportion. He's complaining about structure, yet there is a very clearly delimited blank space between menu items a blank space which is much large than present in the mixed case version. In fact, I find it a lot easier to read the menu item word in the all capital version compared to the mixed case most based on the large spacing alone.
Re: (Score:3)
If that is so, then surely mixed case + large spacing would be the best of all?
CamelCase (Score:5, Informative)
"Developers are the people who invented CamelCase"
I think chemists has developers beat by a century or two. Now please pass the NaCl.
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No kidding. CamelCase is just plain ordinary Title Case with the spaces removed because programming languages expect names to be OneWord.
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You guys have strange camels where you come from. Around here it's camelCase, the hump is in the middle(ish).
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That's drinkingCamelCase (head down) versus StandingCamelCase (head up). Both are camelCase.
Backronyms. (Score:3)
Maybe we can come up with backronyms for each of them, that way, like the SQL menu, they can all be acronyms that require capitalization.
Re:Backronyms. (Score:5, Funny)
Even better: Circular backronyms!
FILE -- FILE Input Listing Element
EDIT -- EDIT Document Interface Tool
VIEW -- VIEW Interface Element Window
etc.
The answer is simple (Score:3)
Justification? (Score:2)
The article, which is based on a blog post, mentions that it is not obvious how to change the case. If you read the blog post it says they haven't settled on how Microsoft will expose a change of case feature. My guess is you'll have to customize the menu, just like what's been done in V
Project Direction (Score:4, Insightful)
"Microsoft Ignores Usability" (Score:2, Flamebait)
Historically speaking, you really could have stopped right there.
Glasshouses (Score:2)
This guy here somehow has managed the feat to have both... and then has the gall to pontificate about usability!
Congratulations!
It's like a retard bomb exploded in Redmond (Score:2)
Somebody nuke it from orbit before the madness spreads to the rest of the country.
I'm no Apple fan, but somebody on another forum made a great point... Apple doesn't force iOS-like interfaces on desktop users... so WTF is Microsoft so hell bent to do this? It's like they have a perpetual hard on for anything Metro now.
Is there something I'm missing here? I do not want Metro on my desktop. Windows 7 does everything pretty well, and Windows 8 adds NOTHING that I would care to add to Windows 7.
Windows 8 is not
A registry hack for this already exists. (Score:2, Informative)
it's been circulating on teh internets _atleast_ since late May.Once VS start reporting back that more and more people are reverting back to regular style menus they'll make it an option inside VS itself, albeit hidden behind some rarely used obscure menu. Nothing to see here, carry on.
Re: (Score:2)
it's been circulating on teh internets _atleast_ since late May.Once VS start reporting back that more and more people are reverting back to regular style menus they'll make it an option inside VS itself, albeit hidden behind some rarely used obscure menu. Nothing to see here, carry on.
You mean like how they removed the registry entry to turn off Metro and have a normal desktop?
--
BMO
Did they run out of things to fix? (Score:3)
Seriously?
What happened to the "if it's not broken, don't fix it" motto? Did anyone complain that the menu list, that everyone knows where it is and what is there to expect, did not stand out enough? Or that it lacked any other visual property? At least with the ribbon they tried re-thinking the topic "menu" and took a shot at providing something different (whether you like it or not is another topic). What exactly were they trying to achieve with this modification? What a horrible waste of resources...
For the record, I find it a bit childish and old-fashioned in caps, but, actually, I couldn't care less.
ESL (Score:2, Interesting)
Developing software for a global bank many moons ago, the software recipients preferred/required capitalized menu items and input fields. As English was not their first language, they explained that CAPS were easier for them to read.
So either Microsoft's focus group is global or their developers are
addin can fix it? (Score:2)
I wonder if a simple adding can fix this. Just walk the menus and change the labels?
Change is bad. Need structure (Score:2)
This reflects .... (Score:5, Funny)
Next up: They are going to replace Clippy with a flying chair.
It can be turned off (Score:5, Informative)
If you go to the source, http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudio/archive/2012/06/05/a-design-with-all-caps.aspx [msdn.com], they note that there will be an option to disable it.
There's also a blog post that shows the registry key that works today to disable it.
Re: (Score:3)
Now, Slashdot still wants to be outraged at Microsoft, and it really seems like we're scraping the barrel here. Seriously, minutia like top level menu case is not somet
Menus OK, but icons? (Score:3)
The uppercase is deck chairs. The uppercase does make it look a little cleaner; yes, and the tradeoff is a little harder to read. Not a big deal either way. But if you've read any of the Windows Metro philosophy papers, the "chrome" was supposed to go away and be replaced with blank panels, clean typography, images, and animation -- in short, give desktop apps the same clean appearance as iPhone apps. Then why is there still a strip of little-used icons? Does anyone really click the floppy icon to save? No, of course, not. You either click CTRL-S, or, since it's Visual Studio (and I don't know why Borland and Eclipse don't do this), you just click "Build" and it saves automatically. And all the other icons, I still don't know what they do after 20 years of using Visual Studio.
After reading the Metro philosophy papers, I was initially excited. I was eager to see how Microsoft was going to adapt its products to the new philosophy. Now I see that has gone the way of Longhorn WinFS. And besides, I've since realized that it's better to target HTML5 (with Canvas -- pixels finally come to HTML) than Metro anyway.
SO WHAT?? (Score:2)
THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH ALL CAPS TEXT!!!!!!! IT DOESN'T MAKE IT SHOUTING!!!! NEITHER DO EXCLAMATION MARKS!!!! THEY ARE JUST EXTRA PIXELS ON THE SCREEN AND DON"T GENERATE ANY NOISE!!!!@!$!# YOU IDIOTS!!@!%!*!(!)p0!-!!!
loppity loppity lpooity loppity loppity loo loppity loo tru-da loo bopppity boo boppity Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Aenean augue est, venenatis nec porta a, pellentesque commodo quam. Vestibulum elementum velit commodo mauris accumsan tempus. Ut sagittis feugiat
Grow up, Microsoft (Score:2)
In the 90s, when mass computing was new, software from Microsoft was designed by young, arrogant 20-somethings with no thought for usability or the needs of customers, usually business customers. It's 2012 now, not 1992. The world changed - Microsoft hasn't. Users got older and less tolerant of giggly nonsense and unstable systems. They don't want to learn new stuff. They want to get their tasks done. Period. Businesses need results, not the latest and coolest anything. Cobol still exists for a reason.
Apple
Re: (Score:3)
True. The factor here is, "The easiest interface is the one you already know." That, and software compatibility, are the two chains that keep everyone tied to Microsoft. At the moment, they're even screwing that up.
Use doublewidth (Score:3)
Meh, using mere ALL CAPS is so ASCII. Can't they at least use CJK doublewidth ("fullwidth") characters (U+FF00..U+FF7E) for yelling? Everything but Slashdot can support those.
Looks good to me. (Score:4, Insightful)
Clearly, whoever wrote that article is not a designer. Capital letters are NOT inherently more difficult to read. They're more difficult when you've got a paragraph of text. But when you're talking about buttons and menu items they can aid in legibility and emphasis.
In my experience programmers make for the worst designers. Admittedly they have specific needs, but like anyone else they're slaves to habit. So just because they want something a certain way doesn't necessarily make it right. There's always backlash when someone deviates from the expected, even if it's for the better.
I actually like the all caps approach. The menu items are very clear and legible. They're a lot more distinct than in the traditional initial caps approach. Now, you could argue that it makes them too prominent. It may also have the side effect of de-emphasizing the Application title too far.
So to suggest that this approach somehow ignores usability is ridiculous.
I notice that the article also takes a jab at the all-grey interface. If they're going to knock Microsoft for this then they should take aim at the worst offender of all: Apple. I've always found that Windows provides enough contrast between windows, using distinct borders and colored headers, that it's fairly easy to pick them out. In OSX, however, everything blends together.
I do find it amusing that this I Programmer site is dumping on Microsoft for something so minor when the site itself looks like total shit. Look at that freaking logo of theirs.
Re:Looks good to me. (Score:5, Insightful)
The only people worse then programmers at design are designers who have become totally disconnected from their audience. Like say, the ones doing this. The audience is programmers. They probably know what they want, and the areas Visual Studio needs improvement in were not caps locked menus and monochrome grey icons.
Also, all caps is harder to read: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-15990443 [bbc.co.uk] . We've known this for decades. It was determined before Microsoft existed. They were with the program for a while, then this "Metro" disease showed up in Redmond and now everybody is screwing everything up and calling it Metro (though when they call VS Metro I really don't know what they're talking about, unless Metro is code for ugly).
And while we're on it, what does Apple have to do with this? You're saying they should bash Apple for something that Microsoft just changed their UI to do. Since Microsoft wasn't doing it and now is, why wouldn't we go after them for screwing it up when they had it right before?
Ballmer's Influence (Score:3)
FILE!
FILE!
FILE!
EDIT!
EDIT!
COPY!
YEAH! GIVE IT UP FOR ME!!!!
(Then you wait several seconds for your operating system to catch its breath.)
I for one am thankful that I know keyboard shortcuts.
American or English? (Score:3)
If you wanted to put structure into a menu, well how about color? Oh wait, I forgot the design department dumped color in favour of the 'everything-is-grey UI.'
How do you determine if this writer was American or English? (Pause) -- That's correct, it's time for a horse race!
If you wanted to put structure into a menu, well how about color?
They're out of the gates, and "American Author" sprints into an early lead!
American: 1
English: 0
Oh wait, I forgot the design department dumped color
Ah, an obstruction in the track! "English Expositor" got its hoof stuck on a sodding large crumpet and is now clomping along alone like a Billy No-Mates! With such a slowdown, it may never catch up, just like the train schedule!
American: 2
English: 0
in favour of the
But wait, "American Author" has smelled the crumpet and is circling back to investigate! It looks like the rider is shouting to "American Author" at the top of his lungs that its going the wrong way, but he refuses to use his riding crop or otherwise take action to correct the problem.
Now "European Expositor" is gaining ground fast! A more in-depth genealogy analysis may very well reveal that Bob is, in fact, his uncle!
American: 2
English: 1
'everything-is-grey UI'
"European Expositor" has shaken off its handicap and they're on the home stretch! They're neck and neck across the finish line -- it's a tie!
American: 2
English: 2
To finish the story, the riders then dismounted and decided to play a tiebreaker match of football. It ended in another tie, one team scoring two touchdowns and the other netting twelve goals.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Regardless of one's feelings on Microsoft, that company has consistently and continually tried to make their user interfaces as attractive and easy to use as is possible. They've gone through the effort to develop fonts, to determine how to add pseudo-3d effects, how to space things and how to define icons and sizes. Whatever your beef with Redmond, the UI is the one thing that I will wholeheartedly disagree with you about in almost all circumstances.
If they drop
Re: (Score:2)
Of course it may be that they put an idiot in charge of the look and feel for their developer tools. Given how they've already been one through one firestorm of criticism for using monochromatic icons that could w
Ribbon menu (Score:5, Interesting)
How come they haven't created a 'ribbon menu' for Visual Studio? Perhaps this is tacit admission that the Ribbon Menu sucks and is inefficient.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Ssssshhh! Don't say stuff like "'ribbon menu' for Visual Studio", Microsoft might hear you!
Re:Ribbon menu (Score:5, Funny)
I used to code .NET but am a manager now. Suddenly a VS Ribbon Menu sounds appealing! ;-)
Re:Ribbon menu (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Ribbon menu (Score:4, Interesting)
Ribbon is quite the opposite of inefficient, in terms of finding things and clicking them. Some people claim to be incapable of operating it properly, but I truly do not understand this. It groups and sub-groups in a way similar to a menu, but with much more visible at-a-glance, without submenu delays, and with more images and less text. Additionally, sections are shown when relevant and removed otherwise, instead of having a fixed menu bar that, if you don't have an image slelected (for example), is clickable but has every option under it greyed out.
The problem with the ribbon is that, while it aids discoverability and rapidly performing common actions, it's less space-efficient. Given the truly phenomenal number of configurable options and user-initiatable actions in Visual Studio, it might just not be possible to fit a suitable number of items on a ribbon for any display of less than excellent horizontal resolution. Sure, many developers will have such a display, and for them (us), an optional ribbon might actually work very well. For people still coding on screens less than 1500 pixels wide or so, or for people who like to tile Visual Studio with another window on the same screen, the ribbon would just be too truncated.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Regardless of one's feelings on Microsoft, that company has consistently and continually tried to make their user interfaces as attractive and easy to use as is possible.
Which only proves that trying hard does not mean you will necessarily succeed.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
Illegal tying of OS to hardware, etc etc (go read how BeOS signed a deal with a laptop manufacturer to offer BeOS as an alternate OS, and how Microsoft forced them to "hide" that option.
They dominate not because they were good (go read how early Office versions would have access to secret APIs that competitors did not have), but because they pulled a shitload of dirty tricks.
And then people like you conveniently forget or gloss over those facts.
Re: (Score:2)
"Regardless of one's feelings on Microsoft, that company has consistently and continually tried to make their user interfaces as attractive and easy to use as is possible."
Are you talking about the same Microsoft I know?
Oh, right, they're "trying".
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
My fucking tools and workbench are not you damn designer plaything Microsoft
As long as you continue to purchase your tools from Microsoft, that's exactly what they are!
Re:Hands Off (Score:4, Interesting)
Not everyone does the job for fun.
I have been doing all my development work in Eclipse for the last 5-6 years. However for this specific Windows C++ project I needed to use Visual Studio. Like it or not I have a life to manage. Otherwise why would I do programming day and night at the age of 40, with a PhD in computer science? Salary of a PhD university staff is less than $1500/month and that's not enough (considering that I spent savings of 10 years of my hard work to reach the PhD dream of mine).
When I turned into Visual studio 2012 RC hoping that it will provide better compiler, error messages, error preview and editor, I could not bear it even for 20 minutes:
- The error list uses dark gray texts on gray background (my almost old eyes could not bear it...). ...
- Clicking on an item in errors list would open the source on bottom output/error dock! in a new tab.
- Tabs were on bottom (like the class and solution explorer), now they occupy additional space on top.
- Menus are caps
- You feel bored in a gray and flat environment after 12 hours of programming daily
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Knock, knock.
WHO'S THERE?
The Worst IDE in the World.
Oh, hi, Apple's XCode! Now GTFO.