> Microsoft should have really invested time in creating template projects used to migrate from the 95 era panels to the Vista/7 era panels. And then again for

> Microsoft should have really invested time in creating template projects used to migrate from the 95 era panels to the Vista/7 era panels. And then again for Win10. A lot of the problem just feels like they've repeatedly given up halfway through converting old settings UIs to newer ones and fallen back to bundling the old UIs into "advanced" or "additional settings" windows. The Personalization settings are a perfect example of this -- there's a Windows 10 Settings applet, which defers to a Windows 7 Control Panel applet for some options, which internally defers to a Windows XP era dialog for setting colors (which are mostly no-ops on Windows 10, but I digress). What they really need is a concerted effort to finish the job. > Did Mac OS 9 and earlier have plugable 3rd party panels? Ooooooh boy. Tangent time: Control Panels and Extensions were perhaps one of the most terrifying part of Classic Mac OS from a modern development perspective. They represented modules of code which were loaded system-wide at startup, which could patch any (ANY!!) part of the operating system with their own code to add custom functionality -- for example, some common ones would add a screen saver (After Dark), add custom system-wide menus (Now Menus), or change the appearance of system controls and windows (Kaleidoscope). Conflicts between different cdevs/extensions were commonplace; System 7.5 added a first-party Extensions Manager utility that could be used to temporarily disable extensions, and a number of third-party utilities existed to diagnose startup crashes caused by conflicts. The only difference between a Control Panel and an Extension was that a Control Panel could be launched as an application, typically to change its settings. There was no special UI framework for third-party Control Panels; they used the same UI toolkits as any other application.