3 ms·

The old one that people praise isn't that good. It does all the things it needs to, but it uses eight layers of popup dialogs, it works poorly at DPI's over 150

The old one that people praise isn't that good. It does all the things it needs to, but it uses eight layers of popup dialogs, it works poorly at DPI's over 150% and so on and so forth. Basically, a 2005 Windows UI is mostly a bad windows UI. The proper solution would have been to refresh the old one. Make a full-featured control panel that uses just slightly more modern UI paradigms and technologies. And with zero weird extension points for third parties. But no, instead we get half the controlpanel made into a usless minimalist web design look, and the other half is still the original. I don't know what parts of the control panel must remain for backwards compatibility (with what!?) or why someone even thought it was a good idea to have extensibility points that become a nightmare of compatibility of maintenance. Or why it's apparently more work to rewrite a single control panel page than it is to ship a whole major release of Office. But more importantly, I don't care.

qalmakka 5y ago
Yeah Windows UI really took a turn for the worse with Windows XP. People now praise it mostly due to a nostalgia factor, but when it came out its UI was derided due to resembling something out of a Fisher Price toy. Still given that it finally brought NT to a mass of people accustomed to an interior OS, it was a massive improvement.
mschuster91 5y ago
> I don't know what parts of the control panel must remain for backwards compatibility (with what!?) Because programs and drivers can and did ship their own control panels, it's fairly easy (https://www.codeproject.com/Articles/29264/Control-Panel-Applets-for-everyone https://www.codeproject.com/Articles/29264/Control-Panel-App...). Java comes to my mind, as did some virus scanners, and drivers for all kinds of hardware - and the latter is the key why MS keeps the architecture in place, they take backwards compatibility extremely serious, to the extent you can (generally) use Windows 95-era games and other software on a Windows 10 machine! The other part is that there is an utterly absurd amount of things that can be configured in Windows, with a lot of ways to do so: text-based configuration files on the disk (e.g. /etc/hosts), registry settings, group policies that are mapped to registry settings, classic control panel applets, new control panel applets, the whole mess that is the bootloader config... all of this needs serious effort to re-organize, for something that 99% of end-users won't ever touch. And that explains why there is such a split: the stuff that end users regularly need (display resolution, wallpapers, audio, ...) is in the new crap look, and the stuff that even nerds rarely touch (user-wide environment variables) is in the old school CPL applets.
SkeuomorphicBee 5y ago
> [...] Basically, a 2005 Windows UI is mostly a bad windows UI. It is good to look back at what they did wrong, but also what they did right. For me the most notable things: BAD: too many windows and dialogs. The 90s GUI paradigm was all about pumping out a new window or dialog for every interaction or feature. In this regard Microsoft Windows was actually the least offender, most Unixes and Macs went even further and had each toolbar on its own window, it was madness. In this regard modern single-window apps are much better, the modern tabbed web browsers being the best example (I love that even the config dialog was turned into a tab). GOOD: the clear visual separation of "layers". Modern GUIs are too flat for their own good, there is little visual cues separating the app window vs app content, everything has almost the same off-white background so the app toolbars and the app content sit on the same visual domain. The late 90s Windows had a very clear distinction: content have white background, app (window,menus,toolbar,widgets,...) had grey background, so the eye was automatically drawn to the one you wanted. Looking at the screenshots in the article the difference is jarring, the Windows XP/8/10 panels are mostly visually flat, there is nothing guiding your eyes to what you want (content vs toolbars), while the 95/98/2000/ME and Vista had clear visual layers.

qalmakka 5y ago

Yeah Windows UI really took a turn for the worse with Windows XP. People now praise it mostly due to a nostalgia factor, but when it came out its UI was derided due to resembling something out of a Fisher Price toy. Still given that it finally brought NT to a mass of people accustomed to an interior OS, it was a massive improvement.

mschuster91 5y ago

> I don't know what parts of the control panel must remain for backwards compatibility (with what!?) Because programs and drivers can and did ship their own control panels, it's fairly easy (https://www.codeproject.com/Articles/29264/Control-Panel-Applets-for-everyone https://www.codeproject.com/Articles/29264/Control-Panel-App...). Java comes to my mind, as did some virus scanners, and drivers for all kinds of hardware - and the latter is the key why MS keeps the architecture in place, they take backwards compatibility extremely serious, to the extent you can (generally) use Windows 95-era games and other software on a Windows 10 machine! The other part is that there is an utterly absurd amount of things that can be configured in Windows, with a lot of ways to do so: text-based configuration files on the disk (e.g. /etc/hosts), registry settings, group policies that are mapped to registry settings, classic control panel applets, new control panel applets, the whole mess that is the bootloader config... all of this needs serious effort to re-organize, for something that 99% of end-users won't ever touch. And that explains why there is such a split: the stuff that end users regularly need (display resolution, wallpapers, audio, ...) is in the new crap look, and the stuff that even nerds rarely touch (user-wide environment variables) is in the old school CPL applets.

SkeuomorphicBee 5y ago

> [...] Basically, a 2005 Windows UI is mostly a bad windows UI. It is good to look back at what they did wrong, but also what they did right. For me the most notable things: BAD: too many windows and dialogs. The 90s GUI paradigm was all about pumping out a new window or dialog for every interaction or feature. In this regard Microsoft Windows was actually the least offender, most Unixes and Macs went even further and had each toolbar on its own window, it was madness. In this regard modern single-window apps are much better, the modern tabbed web browsers being the best example (I love that even the config dialog was turned into a tab). GOOD: the clear visual separation of "layers". Modern GUIs are too flat for their own good, there is little visual cues separating the app window vs app content, everything has almost the same off-white background so the app toolbars and the app content sit on the same visual domain. The late 90s Windows had a very clear distinction: content have white background, app (window,menus,toolbar,widgets,...) had grey background, so the eye was automatically drawn to the one you wanted. Looking at the screenshots in the article the difference is jarring, the Windows XP/8/10 panels are mostly visually flat, there is nothing guiding your eyes to what you want (content vs toolbars), while the 95/98/2000/ME and Vista had clear visual layers.