4 ms·

Anectodata, so “caveat emptor”. I helped a non-tech friend migrating from a crumbling XP laptop to a newly bought Vista laptop. Took us the best part of an af

by Pamar 9y ago

Anectodata, so “caveat emptor”. I helped a non-tech friend migrating from a crumbling XP laptop to a newly bought Vista laptop. Took us the best part of an afternoon, because I was really careful and she was paranoid about losing her stuff. Two things did not work for her: 1) No way to migrate groups (address lists, not sure of the name) from Outlook Express to Vista mail standard app (I also tried Thunderbird and/or another free email app and in the end had to cobble together a small utility to get the addresses out of sent email headers). 2) Word had to be updated (paid) - I don’t remember exactly what the problem was but I think it just wouldn’t run. On top of that the UI felt alien and non-intuitive to us both. So while technically it might have been a jewel, in terms of user experience (including the fact that third-part stuff worked, while MS apps were the only ones giving us problems)it really looked like great advertiing. For OsX...

proactivesvcs 9y ago
It's always been a massive pain to get email + metadata into or out of Microsoft products. It's so frustrating as it cannot be difficult to implement half-decent import/export but my heart drops every time I know I have to do it for a customer... OOI, what parts of the UI did you find non-intuitive? I found the new Start Menu odd, but it wasn't long before I was more used to pressing Windows, then typing, to launch a program, rather than find it manually. I can't believe I used to spend so much time manually organising my Start Menu! (And I'm usually the type that doesn't like this sort of change)
- Pamar 9y ago
  It has been ages, and I did probably not touch Vista anymore after that (I used Mac at home after years of Windows&Linux, while at work it was mostly WinNT, Linux, Solaris...) so I cannot recall what specifically felt odd (apart from the UAC that at least for the first hour or so were cropping up with alarming frequency - the person I was helping lives far away from my hometown, so the idea of leaving her with mistery pop-ups wasn't really encouraging). In any case, the UI was only a minor concern: I was confident that everyone can learn and adjust after a few hours of work with it. But what I could not help to notice was that I still remembered clearly what happened when I started my first Macbook (three years before the Vista episode): the UI felt very different than what I was accustomed to... but it felt also much better. Intuitive, empowering. When something unexpected happened it was, most often than not, a nice surprise like "wow, the global search can find strings even in a just-closed Word for Mac documents!" (compare and contrast with stuff like Magellan on Windows) or how the progress bar on file copies worked (compare and contrast with https://xkcd.com/612/ https://xkcd.com/612/ ).

by Pamar 9y ago

proactivesvcs 9y ago

It's always been a massive pain to get email + metadata into or out of Microsoft products. It's so frustrating as it cannot be difficult to implement half-decent import/export but my heart drops every time I know I have to do it for a customer... OOI, what parts of the UI did you find non-intuitive? I found the new Start Menu odd, but it wasn't long before I was more used to pressing Windows, then typing, to launch a program, rather than find it manually. I can't believe I used to spend so much time manually organising my Start Menu! (And I'm usually the type that doesn't like this sort of change)

Pamar 9y ago
It has been ages, and I did probably not touch Vista anymore after that (I used Mac at home after years of Windows&Linux, while at work it was mostly WinNT, Linux, Solaris...) so I cannot recall what specifically felt odd (apart from the UAC that at least for the first hour or so were cropping up with alarming frequency - the person I was helping lives far away from my hometown, so the idea of leaving her with mistery pop-ups wasn't really encouraging). In any case, the UI was only a minor concern: I was confident that everyone can learn and adjust after a few hours of work with it. But what I could not help to notice was that I still remembered clearly what happened when I started my first Macbook (three years before the Vista episode): the UI felt very different than what I was accustomed to... but it felt also much better. Intuitive, empowering. When something unexpected happened it was, most often than not, a nice surprise like "wow, the global search can find strings even in a just-closed Word for Mac documents!" (compare and contrast with stuff like Magellan on Windows) or how the progress bar on file copies worked (compare and contrast with https://xkcd.com/612/ https://xkcd.com/612/ ).