5 ms·

Hasta la Vista, baby: Ars reviews Windows

54 points by soundsop 17y ago

GeneralMaximus 17y ago
Nice to see in-depth coverage of technology in this Web 2.0 world of content-free publishing. I think only Ars could pull off a 15-page review of an OS. I'll now read this through, even though I haven't used Windows for over 4 years.
- rimantas 17y ago
  >I think only Ars could pull off a 15-page review of an OS. They have 23 pages for Snow Leopard, not sure if that's the record.
- idlewords 17y ago
  And for the reader's convenience, they make 'single page mode' click through to a subscription page.
  - mrkurt 17y ago
    Sorry, that's supposed to have a "Premier" badge on it so you're not totally ambushed with the subscription page. I'm not sure where it went, though. I'll go find it! EDIT Aaaand there's some text there now.
- ugh 17y ago
  The OS reviews Ars produces are always epic and great.
sid0 17y ago
Great review. I agree with Peter's claim about the lack of attention to detail, but Windows 7 is still, as he calls it, a "fantastic OS". At least the Install Font dialog from Windows 3.1 is gone. :)
nazgulnarsil 17y ago
article hits one of my biggest gripes with computer UI design in general: the ubiquity of the yes/no option. programs are no longer a stack of cards people. the options presented to the end user should be a list of the actions available to them (with most common at the top) with a small blurb in non-tech speak about what each option does.
- Glimjaur 17y ago
  I dont understand exactly what you're getting at here, could you elaborate? Also, could you give an example when the Yes/No option doesn't work and when the added complexity of presenting several actions is justified?
  - nazgulnarsil 17y ago
    basically anytime actions are presented without context. for many of the choices presented to you there is no way to logically infer what the system will do based on the information they give you. the design choices are implicit and have to be discovered by the user via rote learning. design choices should be explicit. applications should ask you intuitive questions about how it should handle your data. not a series of drop down boxes and yes or no questions. some third party applications are good about this, OSX and Windows suck at it.
  - StrawberryFrog 17y ago
    It's not that Yes/No dialogs "doesn't work" at all, it's just that they don't work as well. Yes/No options are easy to get confused over as soon as there's a negative in the question. A question like "Do you want to cancel the delete" with "Yes" and "No" options is easy to get wrong - is that"Yes, delete" or "Yes, cancel". You can work it out if you try, but there will be an avoidable percentage of errors using it. Two buttons with "delete" and "cancel delete" on them is better. In both cases you are "presenting several actions", they're just better labelled in the second case, so there's no added complexity to the user. To the coder, maybe, but making good UI's is what coders are paid to do.
    - 17y ago
StrawberryFrog 17y ago
Notepad, by the way, remains crap. (page 11) Ah, call me sentimental, but it's good to know that some things are still kept the way they always were. I agree with the basic statement on page one: Vista is not that bad, Win 7 is Vista take 2, rough edges smoothed off, and the drastic difference is just in perception.
- scottjackson 17y ago
  To be honest, I hope they never "improve" Notepad (either of them: http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2006/03/28/563008.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2006/03/28/563008....). I think every operating system needs a totally-bare-bones text editor. Because of that, I think Notepad does exactly what it's meant to do, and "improving" Notepad would change that. WordPad, on the other hand... They can keep Ribboning the shit out of that for all I care.
  - StrawberryFrog 17y ago
    Yep, I agree. Notepad should be (and is) the simplest possible GUI text editor. All the devs that I know use either Notepad2 or Notepad++ for more complex general-purpose editing.
    - listic 17y ago
      Anyone uses something other, like TextPad?
      - WalkingDead 17y ago
        I am still using TextPad which I started using since 90s. But wish I could jump to something better. TextPad is now dead with no update for, what 6 years? No v.5 doesn't count as update, it's downgrade. No Unicode, only more fancy GUI. Switching editor is really hard.
        blue1 17y ago
barrkel 17y ago
I'm not finding myself sympathizing with the reviewer. Perhaps I value different things, but I find e.g. relentless bright white in the UI tiring for the eyes, so when the reviewer comments on e.g. battleship grey used in the Mouse control panel widget, I'm rather glad it's there - anything dimmer than glaring white is better. Windows 7 appearance is remarkably uncustomizable compared to Windows 2000 / XP in classic mode, at least with the tools provided in the OS. I normally use a light blue background for my Window area, and that was respected in 2000, XP etc. for e.g. Windows Explorer, but that's all gone now in Win 7 (and also Win Vista I believe, but I never ran it long enough to find out). As a result, any extended bout of file management leaves me with tired eyes. The alternative is to fiddle with the monitor brightness, contrast and gamma, but that affects whole system color reproduction. I want bright whites, but in their place, photos and the like, not as a default background colour. I have many, many other annoyances with Windows 7, but they are largely niggly little things. I've made a list, and I'll write them up eventually.
- noblethrasher 17y ago
  You can still modify the window client area in Vista but I'm not sure about Windows 7. In any case, I look forward to your list.
  - barrkel 17y ago
    You can modify the window client area colour, but relatively few applications respect it. Even Firefox running under Win7 switches to white text backgrounds in text entry areas like this very comment box; with theming disabled (and only when theming is disabled), it respects the user's choice of background colour.
preview 17y ago
My problem with Vista has always been the lack of a compelling feature that would drive me to upgrade. If Microsoft is claiming that Vista (or 7) is a solution, I'm still left asking "To what problem?" For new hardware, I would stick with 7. It would work well on new systems with the memory to run it (even though I might not be into the new UI). But for my existing systems, I don't see a compelling reason to spend the money to make the change.
thetrumanshow 17y ago
"But if you hated Vista's UI, you're going to hate Windows 7's. Worse, in fact, because 7 forces you to use the new Start menu and taskbar, with no possibility of reverting to the old behaviour." Does this seem incredibly bull-headed to anyone else?

54 points by soundsop 17y ago

Nice to see in-depth coverage of technology in this Web 2.0 world of content-free publishing. I think only Ars could pull off a 15-page review of an OS. I'll now read this through, even though I haven't used Windows for over 4 years.

rimantas 17y ago
>I think only Ars could pull off a 15-page review of an OS. They have 23 pages for Snow Leopard, not sure if that's the record.
idlewords 17y ago
And for the reader's convenience, they make 'single page mode' click through to a subscription page.
- mrkurt 17y ago
  Sorry, that's supposed to have a "Premier" badge on it so you're not totally ambushed with the subscription page. I'm not sure where it went, though. I'll go find it! EDIT Aaaand there's some text there now.
ugh 17y ago
The OS reviews Ars produces are always epic and great.

sid0 17y ago

Great review. I agree with Peter's claim about the lack of attention to detail, but Windows 7 is still, as he calls it, a "fantastic OS". At least the Install Font dialog from Windows 3.1 is gone. :)

nazgulnarsil 17y ago

article hits one of my biggest gripes with computer UI design in general: the ubiquity of the yes/no option. programs are no longer a stack of cards people. the options presented to the end user should be a list of the actions available to them (with most common at the top) with a small blurb in non-tech speak about what each option does.

Glimjaur 17y ago
I dont understand exactly what you're getting at here, could you elaborate? Also, could you give an example when the Yes/No option doesn't work and when the added complexity of presenting several actions is justified?
- nazgulnarsil 17y ago
  basically anytime actions are presented without context. for many of the choices presented to you there is no way to logically infer what the system will do based on the information they give you. the design choices are implicit and have to be discovered by the user via rote learning. design choices should be explicit. applications should ask you intuitive questions about how it should handle your data. not a series of drop down boxes and yes or no questions. some third party applications are good about this, OSX and Windows suck at it.
- StrawberryFrog 17y ago
  It's not that Yes/No dialogs "doesn't work" at all, it's just that they don't work as well. Yes/No options are easy to get confused over as soon as there's a negative in the question. A question like "Do you want to cancel the delete" with "Yes" and "No" options is easy to get wrong - is that"Yes, delete" or "Yes, cancel". You can work it out if you try, but there will be an avoidable percentage of errors using it. Two buttons with "delete" and "cancel delete" on them is better. In both cases you are "presenting several actions", they're just better labelled in the second case, so there's no added complexity to the user. To the coder, maybe, but making good UI's is what coders are paid to do.
  - 17y ago

StrawberryFrog 17y ago

Notepad, by the way, remains crap. (page 11) Ah, call me sentimental, but it's good to know that some things are still kept the way they always were. I agree with the basic statement on page one: Vista is not that bad, Win 7 is Vista take 2, rough edges smoothed off, and the drastic difference is just in perception.

scottjackson 17y ago
To be honest, I hope they never "improve" Notepad (either of them: http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2006/03/28/563008.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2006/03/28/563008....). I think every operating system needs a totally-bare-bones text editor. Because of that, I think Notepad does exactly what it's meant to do, and "improving" Notepad would change that. WordPad, on the other hand... They can keep Ribboning the shit out of that for all I care.
- StrawberryFrog 17y ago
  Yep, I agree. Notepad should be (and is) the simplest possible GUI text editor. All the devs that I know use either Notepad2 or Notepad++ for more complex general-purpose editing.
  - listic 17y ago
    Anyone uses something other, like TextPad?
    - WalkingDead 17y ago
      I am still using TextPad which I started using since 90s. But wish I could jump to something better. TextPad is now dead with no update for, what 6 years? No v.5 doesn't count as update, it's downgrade. No Unicode, only more fancy GUI. Switching editor is really hard.
      - blue1 17y ago

barrkel 17y ago

I'm not finding myself sympathizing with the reviewer. Perhaps I value different things, but I find e.g. relentless bright white in the UI tiring for the eyes, so when the reviewer comments on e.g. battleship grey used in the Mouse control panel widget, I'm rather glad it's there - anything dimmer than glaring white is better. Windows 7 appearance is remarkably uncustomizable compared to Windows 2000 / XP in classic mode, at least with the tools provided in the OS. I normally use a light blue background for my Window area, and that was respected in 2000, XP etc. for e.g. Windows Explorer, but that's all gone now in Win 7 (and also Win Vista I believe, but I never ran it long enough to find out). As a result, any extended bout of file management leaves me with tired eyes. The alternative is to fiddle with the monitor brightness, contrast and gamma, but that affects whole system color reproduction. I want bright whites, but in their place, photos and the like, not as a default background colour. I have many, many other annoyances with Windows 7, but they are largely niggly little things. I've made a list, and I'll write them up eventually.

noblethrasher 17y ago
You can still modify the window client area in Vista but I'm not sure about Windows 7. In any case, I look forward to your list.
- barrkel 17y ago
  You can modify the window client area colour, but relatively few applications respect it. Even Firefox running under Win7 switches to white text backgrounds in text entry areas like this very comment box; with theming disabled (and only when theming is disabled), it respects the user's choice of background colour.

preview 17y ago

My problem with Vista has always been the lack of a compelling feature that would drive me to upgrade. If Microsoft is claiming that Vista (or 7) is a solution, I'm still left asking "To what problem?" For new hardware, I would stick with 7. It would work well on new systems with the memory to run it (even though I might not be into the new UI). But for my existing systems, I don't see a compelling reason to spend the money to make the change.

thetrumanshow 17y ago

"But if you hated Vista's UI, you're going to hate Windows 7's. Worse, in fact, because 7 forces you to use the new Start menu and taskbar, with no possibility of reverting to the old behaviour." Does this seem incredibly bull-headed to anyone else?