I'm going to lose it if Win10 does not integrate automatic time zone adjustment like OSX. What, does no one at MS mind having to manually change the time zone with 7 clicks every time they travel? Why is it not just two clicks to change the time zone at least? Maybe something like right-click time, select from list of preset "favorite" time zones. That doesn't even requite a time network, let alone being able to read time stamps on surrounding wireless networks.
Or there is no Outlook global search or no message threading.
That's not new or challenging stuff, Microsoft. WTF?
Can you think of anything else basic that is annoying as heck about Windows?
To be fair: it could be resized (though in an extremely non-user friendly way) and copy/paste has been possible since a long time (no idea since which version, and again, it wasn't particularly user-friendly at all)
This. It was just a small thing, that every now and then made life a little more difficult than it needed to be when you tried to paste something and got ~V :D
The console was broken for a long time primarily to make it possible to do full-screen VGA text modes for NTVDM-requiring apps. Enabling either or both required elevated hardware privileges so they shoved the whole rendering thing into CSRSS and it gave us the shatter attack and (later) no cut/paste as thanks.
I think we're paying for a mistake made upon the alter of backwards compatibility back when asking someone to use virtualization made you sound like a nut (and back before Microsoft had Hyper-V to offer as an alternative to customers who couldn't or wouldn't budge).
> I think we're paying for a mistake made upon the alter of backwards compatibility
There's a book called The Old New Thing (I think I heard about it here on HN, haven't had a chance to get it yet) that discusses a lot of quirks that Windows has and how they came about. Usually there was a purposeful decision behind it, like you suggest with backwards compatibility. It'd be interesting to see if this particular case is addressed in the book.
The Old New Thing is Raymond Chen's blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/ and the book is excerpts and articles from his Blog (with some additional content no doubt).
Raymond is/was a compatibility engineer at Microsoft. He was responsible for "shimming" a bunch of hacks into Windows to ensure large applications which relied on undocumented API calls wouldn't break when they overhauled libraries in a new version of Windows.
I can't understand why the built-in email client is so bad. Every other mail client Microsoft makes is at least usable. Outlook, Windows Live Mail, even outlook.com webmail has message threads enabled by default.
I was actually a fan, and to this day use it at work. Mainly because it was a much lighter version of my bloated outlook client, just giving me emails and allowing me to respond to them.
That said, I don't receive more than thirty or so emails a day so perhaps that's the effective audience for the app.
When it launched, it didn't even support POP or IMAP, only Exchange. We had to put up instructions for all of our customers to install a third-party email client just to check their email. And there was a constant stream of phone calls to our support center for months until the update came out that added IMAP.
And if you have one email selected, and right-click on a different email, it selects both emails. That just seems broken.
PDF viewer. Chrome is the only non-awful PDF viewer I've found for Windows. Requires third-party install.
Copying and pasting text causes weird characters to be carried around (e.g. emdash), and I haven't found a reliable way to sanitise it.
Does notepad handle \n separated lines correctly yet?
Something about excel breaks the behaviour of the alt+tab stack. (if you have multiple documents open)
Also, it's annoying the way that - by default - excel wants to open everything in the same parent window. Why why why why why would you want it to behave like this?!
Apps that minimise to the small-icon part of the start bar (next to time) don't go to the back of the alt+tab stack.
A bunch of NTFS features are not exposed to the user interface.
Not quite in the spirit of what you're asking, but I think Windows file locking is a bad design. You can't copy that excel file (in pscp), because you have it open in excel.
It'd be useful to be able to mute an application from the OS interface, and to see an indicator for audio activity ion something like the task manager.
No strong answer to sshd.
No TCP-check tool in the standard install. Why on earth did they get rid of telnet in the standard build? If anything we needed a better TCP-check mechanism - they got rid of the only trustworthy one that was in.
Similarly with shell scripting - they actually neutered a bunch of features that were in NT in subsequent versions. Previously you could (just) ship a single bat file that would act as a self-installer for binary content. I imagine they disabled this to discourage malware. But - how is a bat particularly different than an exe?
I think it's a shame Windows doesn't ship with devtools out of the box, also. If it came with devtools, would be one less hurdle to getting newbies into programming. Offer good tools at every level - an assembler, a C compiler, c#-level tools, javascript debugger, visual basic. Microsoft's grew from a successful devtool company.
They should bundle a python API to windows and a recent version of python also. Make it easy to create and ship python on Windows. A community would just grow around this, with no further effort from them.
Would be good if you could choose a filesystem that had strong performance with git. Either make git+NTFS fast, or else offer a well-support FS that git does want to work on.
Weak scheduler, init mechanisms. (from user perspective)
There's no nice IPC mechanism available for casual development. Cmd kind of has pipes but they're horrible.
This is kind of evil, but if I was Microsoft I'd be tempted to make Access more accessible (i.e. ship with base office). As soon as users hit a certain level of scale they'll find themselves needing SQL Server. Access has huge lock-in to the Microsoft world. Much like the way a manager will create a microsoft word or excel document, and then suddenly you find yourself stuck with sharepoint everywhere - ugh.
> You can install telnet via the add features option from the control panel. Who wants to have such insecure program available anyway?
There's no security problem with the telnet client, unless you're using it to log into remote hosts without encryption. But OP, and presumably many other people (like me), use telnet as a simple TCP client for troubleshooting. On Linux, one can use netcat (though I never remember to type nc, and always try telnet first), but of course Windows doesn't come with netcat.
It's important to have something to be installed by default, and not require admin privileges. This is what you need need if you're supporting people over the phone. That is - something dependable that you can use to check that they don't have TCP obstacles for whatever they're trying to do.
Telnet-for-Windows was a terrible interface for this purpose (if it succeeds, you get left at a meaningless command prompt) but it was possible to talk people through that, and that was enough. (You can't trust the proxy configuration of their web browsers.)
> Chrome is the only non-awful PDF viewer I've found for Windows.
I'm definitely guilty of using my web browser for PDFs most of the time, but when I use a standalone application I like Sumatra PDF. It's speedy, lightweight, and gets the job done. It is still pretty annoying that I have to install something else in the first place, however.
> PDF viewer. Chrome is the only non-awful PDF viewer I've found for Windows. Requires third-party install.
The built-in viewer that shipped with 8 is no-frills (like Chrome's), but works well enough. If you have touch/pointer input, you can annotate and sign PDFs in that viewer too, which is great on a Surface.
> It'd be useful to be able to mute an application from the OS interface, and to see an indicator for audio activity ion something like the task manager.
This has been possible since 7, I think? Maybe 8.
> Would be good if you could choose a filesystem that had strong performance with git. Either make git+NTFS fast, or else offer a well-support FS that git does want to work on.
Not sure I understand this one. I've been using git on both OS X and Windows for years and haven't noticed any perf issue on my Windows machines (coming from SVN, granted). Is there something I'm missing, maybe with particular git features I don't use?
Argh, the Win8 PDF viewer is so infuriating. It seems to only have two zoom levels: 100%, and grid of thumbnails. Great if I want to only see a bit of a page or all of then very small, but not so much when I just want to view a whole page on the screen. Which I would have thought would be a fairly basic task. For a document viewer.
I only have Win10 handy right now, but the built-in "Reader" app there has an option for fitting a single page, two pages side-by-side, and continuous vertical pages. It's missing an automatic option to fit the page width-wise, which is what I'd prefer, but zooming in to that level is easy enough with the "+" zoom button overlaid in the bottom right corner.
Not sure if that's a lot different than the Win8 version. It's been a while since I've used 8 now.
Thanks for your note. I should have mentioned in my original comment, I'm behind with my knowledge of Windows. The fact there's a competent PDF reader in Windows 8 highlights this. Thanks.
Agree with all of your points! A lot of them could be addressed by powershell (unfortunately). I have no idea what they were thinking with powershell. They pretty much just had to give people bash + all the unix command line favourites on Windows and somehow they arrived at Powershell. It's like they made a deliberate effort to make something different when the unix way is already tried, tested and loved. It seems to me that they were shooting for the simplicity of bash, but with the power of .NET. Unfortunately the middle ground between the two is useless. Why, why, why, whyyyyy :(
> I think it's a shame Windows doesn't ship with devtools out of the box, also. If it came with devtools, would be one less hurdle to getting newbies into programming. Offer good tools at every level - an assembler, a C compiler, c#-level tools, javascript debugger, visual basic. Microsoft's grew from a successful devtool company.
It does. Since Vista the framework .net is bundled with Windows and it contains a C# compiler (csc.exe in one or more subfolders of %WINDIR%\Microsoft.NET\Framework). That's how I started C#: notepad and compiling in command line. But I agree it is not at all user friendly and I'm pretty sure it isn't here to be used by final customer anyway.
That being said, bundling WebMatrix or put a download link in the Start Menu could be a nice idea for creating vocations.
(Disclaimer, I work for Microsoft, but on nothing at all related to Windows, so all this is my own opinion from having used computers since I was 5 or so :) )
> Copying and pasting text causes weird characters to be carried around (e.g. emdash), and I haven't found a reliable way to sanitise it.
That is by design. The Windows clipboard is insanely powerful, it'll paste the best representation of your text in that your destination buffer can handle. If I copy a code segment from Visual Studio (or Notepad++ with the right plugin!) I get to keep syntax highlighting if I paste into a program that can handle colored text. But if I paste into Notepad, all formatting gets cleared.
Pasting into Notepad BTW is the standard way to clear any special formatting. Although an emdash isn't special by any means, it is just a normal character that has a specific use in the typewritten English language.
> Apps that minimise to the small-icon part of the start bar (next to time) don't go to the back of the alt+tab stack.
By design, and 100% up to the app creator. Alt-Tab switches between things on the taskbar. Things are minimized to the tray to keep them out of the way!
> They should bundle a python API to windows and a recent version of python also. Make it easy to create and ship python on Windows. A community would just grow around this, with no further effort from them.
IronPython? :-D
But I know what you mean, Python is fun.
> Weak scheduler, init mechanisms. (from user perspective)
On this I disagree! Windows exposes its startup routines in a very user friendly manner. On top of that, the way Services are initialized actually works w/o worry or concern. End users don't have to deal with it, which is a blessing IMHO.
> There's no nice IPC mechanism available for casual development. Cmd kind of has pipes but they're horrible.
Windows has a plethora of IPC mechanisms available in native land, and .NET add in a few more!
Start off with the old time favorites like TCP/IP loopback and named pipes (both of which are pretty darn easy to get up and running) and go on from there.
But yeah, every OS has its oddities and warts. Heck if you write a clean room OS, by the time you are at version 1.01 cruft will have accumulated!
> By design, and 100% up to the app creator. Alt-Tab
> switches between things on the taskbar. Things are
> minimized to the tray to keep them out of the way!
Right. So the thread is about things that are wrong with the OS. The way it is may be up to the app creator. But it /should/ be not-at-all influenced by the app creator.
Alt+tab is a platform feature, not an application feature. Its value is tied to the consistency of its behavior. If I minimise something, regardless of where it minimises to, it should go to the back of the app stack. That's what the user (me) expects from alt+tab.
By the same principle, there shouldn't be ghost windows from Excel appearing in the alt+tab list. I'm particularly harsh on excel because it's Microsoft's own app, and it has behaviours that undermines the platform.
> Start off with the old time favorites like TCP/IP
> loopback and named pipes (both of which are pretty
> darn easy to get up and running) and go on from
> there.
For my stuff, when I need this on Windows I just roll a TCP/IP even loop in python, and have that act as a message broker. But that's not an option for people who don't grok TCP/IP, which has a fair learning curve. You want a mechanism for casual developers where it's easy to tie things together. e.g. Have a batch script send data to a visual basic app. Maybe named pipes is good, haven't looked at that in windows.
The best take on this stuff that I've seen is the Be API. It has a cascade of IPC systems from unix-style console pipes up to sophisticated and high-performance message passing. All of it is easily accessible from a single set of python wrappers.
Sorry, unless I totally missed something, that is not really the case. I am talking about conversation threading like Gmail and outlook global search in Outlook itself. I have not played with the most recent version and maybe I'm just not doing it right, but as far as I can tell in Outlook, searching a mail folder will only search that single mail folder, not a parent, not a child.
Threading like Gmail is called "Show as Conversations" in Outlook. It's been available since 2010. They work almost identically as far as I've noticed (I use both Outlook and the web interface to my Google Apps email account most days).
For a while before, you could still search globally. If you did a single folder search, there was a link/button/something to expand the search to all folders if you didn't find what you were after in the single folder.
The key with Outlook search is that you need to let the indexing service run. Search from within Outlook depends on that index for quick searches.
For some reason since the release of Windows 8, I have not been able to shake this feeling that all Metro+ adaptations are unpolished. The original Windows Phone release, although lacking features, felt like a product that was well designed, with a clear philosophy. Since then, each adaption seems to bloat just a bit more. Slowly going back to what had already existed, it's a bit disheartening to watch.
>We started by exploring concepts to push the boundaries of our design system, going from mild to wild variation, trying out new patterns and controls, new type treatment and using color in bold fresh ways.
...and we ended in the smallest possible variation from an unimaginative merging of the classic start menu and the Metro style blocks...
That doesn't necessarily mean they made a wrong or otherwise bad decision, though. In a way, being too imaginative was what made Windows 8 perform poorly.
I'm a bit skeptic about the direction of Windows (Phone) 10. It's not that its bad, it's just that it isn't great and they've missed the opportunity to but in substantial UX improvements.
Also having the same interface for Phone/tablet/desktop is a dangerous idea if pushed to far, jack of all trades, master of none. Of course they should share some common ground but they risk sacrificing an tailored experience for each on the altar of standardization.
They haven't made any greater strides in addressing thumb ergonomics on larger screens. Sure at least the buttons are at the bottom again but to make it truly next generational they should have utilized more gestures.
My guess is they don't dare make Win 10 "too different" for risk alienating developers from other platforms and "mainstream users". That might be the safe choice but it doesn't make for greatness. It feels more like design by committee.
There was certainly room for improvement, the old interface was a little too stark, but they're changing course instead of refining.
I also call bullshit on "people are circles" argument. The "old" metro was more about full bleed pictures which IMO is more timeles, the circles thing is just being influenced by a current design trend and makes WP less unique. Each to their own I guess.
I hate gestures, especially on larger screens. It 100% ensures I will need to be using two hands, at which point I might as well just have a button. Occasionally I'll try to swipe and find there is a smudge on the screen or maybe the humidity has gone up and my hands are a bit more grippy and whoops, there goes the entire phone out of my hand. On something the size of an iPhone 5, it's fine. On an iPhone 6+ (where you have less of a hold on the phone one-handed anyway), that's a big deal.
That depends on what kind of gestures you use and where. The closest edges for instance are more easily accessible. Also gestures doesn't necessarily mean swiping.
> They haven't made any greater strides in addressing thumb ergonomics on larger screens. Sure at least the buttons are at the bottom again but to make it truly next generational they should have utilized more gestures.
Imo gesture based UIs are UIs that are hard to use for average users.
and "hamburger menus" are immediately intuitive? :) Don't people swipe to get to the notification center in most mobile UI's? I think saying gesture based UI's are harder to use is an overstatement.
What do would you rather use, an UI that's super easy to learn but cumbersome to use, or an UI that required learniing a few basic gestures and then being much more efficient and ergonomic to use?
UX-wise, this an extremely basic (to avoid saying lousy) article. I ended up with the impression that their source of data is pretty much the feedback from beta users (which is great but highly skewed - to the technocentric pole - data).
I would like very much to know more on how they are working with end-users. Are they using ethnographic methods? Observing how Windows is used in the real world? How are they addressing cultural diversity? Are they having focus groups, interviews? What kind of telemetrics they gather? What have they discovered from their huge user base (and huge funding for their design project)?
This would be much more interesting - even to the layman, I think - than empty phrases such as, say, "people aren't squares".
> We want to deliver an experience that flexes elegantly across a continuum of devices
And there's the punch to the gut. Just like with Windows 8, if you want to use Windows 10 on the desktop your experience is going to be degraded by sacrifices made for mobile. I was really hoping that Microsoft would learn their lesson, since DirectX 12 is going to be exclusive to Windows 10 and I'm going to have to upgrade.
They're killing Windows on the desktop (where they have 91% market share) for the sake of Windows on mobile/tablet (where they have 2% market share). Again and again I think how much more attractive Microsoft would be if they decoupled their titanically-successful cloud/enterprise world from their depressing, clueless consumer arm. Microsoft shareholders shouldn't be paying for Nokia, the red ring of death, or the Windows Store.
It sure would be nice if they could come up with something that provided developers an opportunity to develop best of breed experiences based on the type of device, screen, pixel resolution, etc.
But, then they did. The Universal App template project provides for making separate UI layers for your applications. If your applications don't make use of screen space, blame developers. The OS and tooling support optimized experiences. There are fewer "opinions" than with 8.
Decent Continuum experiences seem intended to make developers stretch, not users.
The Windows 10 UI framework is resolution-independent and built-in controls are responsive. App devs have everything they need to provide a good UI for every device type. Or you can use HTML/JS.
I still did not have got enough time to test the new updates on windows but I sincerely hope they learned by now that what work for tablets does not necessary work on a desktop machines even if the screen size is roughly the same. Not everything is related to the screen size. I remember the full screen calculator on my laptop which was a clear example of the problem.
Resolution independence is nice. Has Microsoft figured out how to scale legacy apps on HiDPI displays for Windows 10? I found Windows 8.1 unusable on my Retina MacBook Pro because so many apps didn't use the new fonts/rendering framework (even many built-in Windows tools like the MMC) and text was therefore horribly disfigured. I don't have such problems with any applications anymore on OS X.
> the desktop your experience is going to be degraded by sacrifices made for mobile
Or you can view it as mobile being enhanced by commonality of OS with one found on the desktop. If the same UI works in both environments you can see it as harmful influence of mobile on the desktop or you can see it as Microsoft not forcing you to buy and carry around two devices where one would suffice.
>Or you can view it as mobile being enhanced by commonality of OS with one found on the desktop.
You could, if the mobile didn't have the minority share of the install base. Why would we be okay to enhance the minority at the expense of the majority?
> If the same UI works in both environments...
And that's precisely the thing. it doesn't work in both environments. Windows8 has already showed us what happens when you slap the touchy feely stuff on the desktop and let the user figure it out.
My point is that this is just a matter of perspective. Windows UX was never a paragon of design clarity so adding sparsity to accommodate for touch is nothing new in the world of Windows which has seen other transgressions far worse. Windows is still influenced by choices made in DOS age, in some places it still drags graphics from 9x age, the choice of ribbons, menus and sidebars seems random and seemingly non-systematic. If elements are farther apart then this is nothing new for Windows, what is new is that they are going against the view established by Apple which dictates that desktop and mobile OSes should be different for some undeclared a priori reason.
Apple likely did it because they didn't want to obliterate their Mac line with its higher margins and Google concurred because it promoted their emergent Android instead of giving credibility to the established hegemon from Microsoft.
> if the mobile didn't have the minority share of the install base.
I'm of the opinion that choices should be made based on their intrinsic value, not something as arbitrary as the current market share. You can reuse exact same SoC to do both environments so why arbitrarily force one into media-consumption role with choices made in OS.
> it doesn't work in both environments.
This smells of echo-chamber of Vista days. People seem to have bought to the tick-tock theory, not realizing that it is likely something pundits with blogs created to sell them ads.
Windows 8 worked very well to me - it never gave me as much gief as did my old iPad with its arbitrary restrictions. Use Dropbox or iTunes for file transfer - are you fracking kidding me?? I can install everything on Windows. I can run Eclipse. I can hook external monitor and it works. All for the price of learning a few new metaphors which would come to Windows regardless because UI on Windows has always been changing.
I tried Windows 10 on both my desktop and tablet. I went back to Windows 8 on the tablet because the UI was horrible for tablet.
If anything, I think the pendulum swung back too much the other direction. There are a lot of UI decisions they made that make the experience with a tablet device painful. For example, the decision to get rid of the Charms Bar (in Tablet Mode) was a horrible one. A lot "Metro" apps don't really run full-screen anymore. Edge Browser isn't nearly as nice of an experience as full screen IE was (with the swipe gestures for page forward/back navigation).
On the desktop though, it has been quite nice to use...
Things are changing all the time I hear, you can't judge Windows 10 if you tried one release. Maybe you should wait and give the final version a go when it comes out. I don't run it on a tablet so I can't tell you for sure what changed but I read user comments saying that the latest releases fixed a lot of the tablet mode issues.
Microsoft is sure that this is the future though - one operating system, one set of applications, multiple UI experiences depending on input and screen size. I think they're right, and would love to be able to dock my phone and have it operate seamlessly as a full desktop with a monitor and M+K.
They just need to get the UX right, which they got way, way wrong with Windows 8. Luckily they have so much inertia in the desktop market that at this point it didn't cost them too much.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 110 ms ] threadOr there is no Outlook global search or no message threading.
That's not new or challenging stuff, Microsoft. WTF?
Can you think of anything else basic that is annoying as heck about Windows?
That it took 10 versions to finally get a resizeable command line terminal that you can copy and paste text within.
I think we're paying for a mistake made upon the alter of backwards compatibility back when asking someone to use virtualization made you sound like a nut (and back before Microsoft had Hyper-V to offer as an alternative to customers who couldn't or wouldn't budge).
There's a book called The Old New Thing (I think I heard about it here on HN, haven't had a chance to get it yet) that discusses a lot of quirks that Windows has and how they came about. Usually there was a purposeful decision behind it, like you suggest with backwards compatibility. It'd be interesting to see if this particular case is addressed in the book.
Raymond is/was a compatibility engineer at Microsoft. He was responsible for "shimming" a bunch of hacks into Windows to ensure large applications which relied on undocumented API calls wouldn't break when they overhauled libraries in a new version of Windows.
I can no longer remember, but I think it was already there back in the 16 bit days, or at very least Windows 95.
That said, I don't receive more than thirty or so emails a day so perhaps that's the effective audience for the app.
And if you have one email selected, and right-click on a different email, it selects both emails. That just seems broken.
Copying and pasting text causes weird characters to be carried around (e.g. emdash), and I haven't found a reliable way to sanitise it.
Does notepad handle \n separated lines correctly yet?
Something about excel breaks the behaviour of the alt+tab stack. (if you have multiple documents open)
Also, it's annoying the way that - by default - excel wants to open everything in the same parent window. Why why why why why would you want it to behave like this?!
Apps that minimise to the small-icon part of the start bar (next to time) don't go to the back of the alt+tab stack.
A bunch of NTFS features are not exposed to the user interface.
Not quite in the spirit of what you're asking, but I think Windows file locking is a bad design. You can't copy that excel file (in pscp), because you have it open in excel.
It'd be useful to be able to mute an application from the OS interface, and to see an indicator for audio activity ion something like the task manager.
No strong answer to sshd.
No TCP-check tool in the standard install. Why on earth did they get rid of telnet in the standard build? If anything we needed a better TCP-check mechanism - they got rid of the only trustworthy one that was in.
Similarly with shell scripting - they actually neutered a bunch of features that were in NT in subsequent versions. Previously you could (just) ship a single bat file that would act as a self-installer for binary content. I imagine they disabled this to discourage malware. But - how is a bat particularly different than an exe?
I think it's a shame Windows doesn't ship with devtools out of the box, also. If it came with devtools, would be one less hurdle to getting newbies into programming. Offer good tools at every level - an assembler, a C compiler, c#-level tools, javascript debugger, visual basic. Microsoft's grew from a successful devtool company.
They should bundle a python API to windows and a recent version of python also. Make it easy to create and ship python on Windows. A community would just grow around this, with no further effort from them.
Would be good if you could choose a filesystem that had strong performance with git. Either make git+NTFS fast, or else offer a well-support FS that git does want to work on.
Weak scheduler, init mechanisms. (from user perspective)
There's no nice IPC mechanism available for casual development. Cmd kind of has pipes but they're horrible.
This is kind of evil, but if I was Microsoft I'd be tempted to make Access more accessible (i.e. ship with base office). As soon as users hit a certain level of scale they'll find themselves needing SQL Server. Access has huge lock-in to the Microsoft world. Much like the way a manager will create a microsoft word or excel document, and then suddenly you find yourself stuck with sharepoint everywhere - ugh.
All non-POSIX OSes with proper file locking use the same approach as Windows does.
You can install telnet via the add features option from the control panel. Who wants to have such insecure program available anyway?
Commercial UNIX systems were know to charge at least $2000 for their SDKs, something that made many join the effort to improve GCC back in the day.
Windows NT family has had multi-threading since the day one, even at the kernel level. Which took ages for UNIX systems to catch up.
The only UNIX that matches Windows IO completion ports is Solaris.
The init is so bad that part of its design has been copied by UNIX systems, instead of using spaghetti init scripts.
There's no security problem with the telnet client, unless you're using it to log into remote hosts without encryption. But OP, and presumably many other people (like me), use telnet as a simple TCP client for troubleshooting. On Linux, one can use netcat (though I never remember to type nc, and always try telnet first), but of course Windows doesn't come with netcat.
Telnet-for-Windows was a terrible interface for this purpose (if it succeeds, you get left at a meaningless command prompt) but it was possible to talk people through that, and that was enough. (You can't trust the proxy configuration of their web browsers.)
And even the common ones lacked lots of useful options from the GNU land.
All comparisons of GNU/Linux distributions with Windows, have the fallacy of comparing a distributions with an OS targeted originally for consumers.
Normal users just don't go telnet into their local networks.
Server editions usually have the proper services in place.
I'm definitely guilty of using my web browser for PDFs most of the time, but when I use a standalone application I like Sumatra PDF. It's speedy, lightweight, and gets the job done. It is still pretty annoying that I have to install something else in the first place, however.
The built-in viewer that shipped with 8 is no-frills (like Chrome's), but works well enough. If you have touch/pointer input, you can annotate and sign PDFs in that viewer too, which is great on a Surface.
> It'd be useful to be able to mute an application from the OS interface, and to see an indicator for audio activity ion something like the task manager.
This has been possible since 7, I think? Maybe 8.
> Would be good if you could choose a filesystem that had strong performance with git. Either make git+NTFS fast, or else offer a well-support FS that git does want to work on.
Not sure I understand this one. I've been using git on both OS X and Windows for years and haven't noticed any perf issue on my Windows machines (coming from SVN, granted). Is there something I'm missing, maybe with particular git features I don't use?
Happy to hear if I'm wrong though.
Not sure if that's a lot different than the Win8 version. It's been a while since I've used 8 now.
It does. Since Vista the framework .net is bundled with Windows and it contains a C# compiler (csc.exe in one or more subfolders of %WINDIR%\Microsoft.NET\Framework). That's how I started C#: notepad and compiling in command line. But I agree it is not at all user friendly and I'm pretty sure it isn't here to be used by final customer anyway.
That being said, bundling WebMatrix or put a download link in the Start Menu could be a nice idea for creating vocations.
There's a version of Evince available for Windows:
https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Evince/Downloads
https://chocolatey.org/packages/evince
Technically Okular is available too, via KDE for Windows, but installation is a bit of a hassle:
https://windows.kde.org/
> Copying and pasting text causes weird characters to be carried around (e.g. emdash), and I haven't found a reliable way to sanitise it.
That is by design. The Windows clipboard is insanely powerful, it'll paste the best representation of your text in that your destination buffer can handle. If I copy a code segment from Visual Studio (or Notepad++ with the right plugin!) I get to keep syntax highlighting if I paste into a program that can handle colored text. But if I paste into Notepad, all formatting gets cleared.
Pasting into Notepad BTW is the standard way to clear any special formatting. Although an emdash isn't special by any means, it is just a normal character that has a specific use in the typewritten English language.
> Apps that minimise to the small-icon part of the start bar (next to time) don't go to the back of the alt+tab stack.
By design, and 100% up to the app creator. Alt-Tab switches between things on the taskbar. Things are minimized to the tray to keep them out of the way!
> They should bundle a python API to windows and a recent version of python also. Make it easy to create and ship python on Windows. A community would just grow around this, with no further effort from them.
IronPython? :-D
But I know what you mean, Python is fun.
> Weak scheduler, init mechanisms. (from user perspective)
On this I disagree! Windows exposes its startup routines in a very user friendly manner. On top of that, the way Services are initialized actually works w/o worry or concern. End users don't have to deal with it, which is a blessing IMHO.
> There's no nice IPC mechanism available for casual development. Cmd kind of has pipes but they're horrible.
Windows has a plethora of IPC mechanisms available in native land, and .NET add in a few more!
Start off with the old time favorites like TCP/IP loopback and named pipes (both of which are pretty darn easy to get up and running) and go on from there.
But yeah, every OS has its oddities and warts. Heck if you write a clean room OS, by the time you are at version 1.01 cruft will have accumulated!
Alt+tab is a platform feature, not an application feature. Its value is tied to the consistency of its behavior. If I minimise something, regardless of where it minimises to, it should go to the back of the app stack. That's what the user (me) expects from alt+tab.
By the same principle, there shouldn't be ghost windows from Excel appearing in the alt+tab list. I'm particularly harsh on excel because it's Microsoft's own app, and it has behaviours that undermines the platform.
For my stuff, when I need this on Windows I just roll a TCP/IP even loop in python, and have that act as a message broker. But that's not an option for people who don't grok TCP/IP, which has a fair learning curve. You want a mechanism for casual developers where it's easy to tie things together. e.g. Have a batch script send data to a visual basic app. Maybe named pipes is good, haven't looked at that in windows.The best take on this stuff that I've seen is the Be API. It has a cascade of IPC systems from unix-style console pipes up to sophisticated and high-performance message passing. All of it is easily accessible from a single set of python wrappers.
Yes, thankfully.
I'm not sure when exactly it was added, but this dropdown near the search input controls the scope: https://www.dropbox.com/s/7x35rgahnuultnp/outlook-search-all...
For a while before, you could still search globally. If you did a single folder search, there was a link/button/something to expand the search to all folders if you didn't find what you were after in the single folder.
The key with Outlook search is that you need to let the indexing service run. Search from within Outlook depends on that index for quick searches.
...and we ended in the smallest possible variation from an unimaginative merging of the classic start menu and the Metro style blocks...
Also having the same interface for Phone/tablet/desktop is a dangerous idea if pushed to far, jack of all trades, master of none. Of course they should share some common ground but they risk sacrificing an tailored experience for each on the altar of standardization.
They haven't made any greater strides in addressing thumb ergonomics on larger screens. Sure at least the buttons are at the bottom again but to make it truly next generational they should have utilized more gestures.
My guess is they don't dare make Win 10 "too different" for risk alienating developers from other platforms and "mainstream users". That might be the safe choice but it doesn't make for greatness. It feels more like design by committee.
There was certainly room for improvement, the old interface was a little too stark, but they're changing course instead of refining.
I also call bullshit on "people are circles" argument. The "old" metro was more about full bleed pictures which IMO is more timeles, the circles thing is just being influenced by a current design trend and makes WP less unique. Each to their own I guess.
Imo gesture based UIs are UIs that are hard to use for average users.
What do would you rather use, an UI that's super easy to learn but cumbersome to use, or an UI that required learniing a few basic gestures and then being much more efficient and ergonomic to use?
I would like very much to know more on how they are working with end-users. Are they using ethnographic methods? Observing how Windows is used in the real world? How are they addressing cultural diversity? Are they having focus groups, interviews? What kind of telemetrics they gather? What have they discovered from their huge user base (and huge funding for their design project)?
This would be much more interesting - even to the layman, I think - than empty phrases such as, say, "people aren't squares".
And there's the punch to the gut. Just like with Windows 8, if you want to use Windows 10 on the desktop your experience is going to be degraded by sacrifices made for mobile. I was really hoping that Microsoft would learn their lesson, since DirectX 12 is going to be exclusive to Windows 10 and I'm going to have to upgrade.
They're killing Windows on the desktop (where they have 91% market share) for the sake of Windows on mobile/tablet (where they have 2% market share). Again and again I think how much more attractive Microsoft would be if they decoupled their titanically-successful cloud/enterprise world from their depressing, clueless consumer arm. Microsoft shareholders shouldn't be paying for Nokia, the red ring of death, or the Windows Store.
They're a "mobile first, cloud first" company, creating a "tablet that can replace your laptop".
But, then they did. The Universal App template project provides for making separate UI layers for your applications. If your applications don't make use of screen space, blame developers. The OS and tooling support optimized experiences. There are fewer "opinions" than with 8.
Decent Continuum experiences seem intended to make developers stretch, not users.
disclaimer: I work on Windows 10
disclaimer: I use Windows 8 at work.
Or you can view it as mobile being enhanced by commonality of OS with one found on the desktop. If the same UI works in both environments you can see it as harmful influence of mobile on the desktop or you can see it as Microsoft not forcing you to buy and carry around two devices where one would suffice.
Disclaimer - I love my W8 transformer.
You could, if the mobile didn't have the minority share of the install base. Why would we be okay to enhance the minority at the expense of the majority?
> If the same UI works in both environments...
And that's precisely the thing. it doesn't work in both environments. Windows8 has already showed us what happens when you slap the touchy feely stuff on the desktop and let the user figure it out.
My point is that this is just a matter of perspective. Windows UX was never a paragon of design clarity so adding sparsity to accommodate for touch is nothing new in the world of Windows which has seen other transgressions far worse. Windows is still influenced by choices made in DOS age, in some places it still drags graphics from 9x age, the choice of ribbons, menus and sidebars seems random and seemingly non-systematic. If elements are farther apart then this is nothing new for Windows, what is new is that they are going against the view established by Apple which dictates that desktop and mobile OSes should be different for some undeclared a priori reason.
Apple likely did it because they didn't want to obliterate their Mac line with its higher margins and Google concurred because it promoted their emergent Android instead of giving credibility to the established hegemon from Microsoft.
> if the mobile didn't have the minority share of the install base.
I'm of the opinion that choices should be made based on their intrinsic value, not something as arbitrary as the current market share. You can reuse exact same SoC to do both environments so why arbitrarily force one into media-consumption role with choices made in OS.
> it doesn't work in both environments.
This smells of echo-chamber of Vista days. People seem to have bought to the tick-tock theory, not realizing that it is likely something pundits with blogs created to sell them ads.
Windows 8 worked very well to me - it never gave me as much gief as did my old iPad with its arbitrary restrictions. Use Dropbox or iTunes for file transfer - are you fracking kidding me?? I can install everything on Windows. I can run Eclipse. I can hook external monitor and it works. All for the price of learning a few new metaphors which would come to Windows regardless because UI on Windows has always been changing.
If anything, I think the pendulum swung back too much the other direction. There are a lot of UI decisions they made that make the experience with a tablet device painful. For example, the decision to get rid of the Charms Bar (in Tablet Mode) was a horrible one. A lot "Metro" apps don't really run full-screen anymore. Edge Browser isn't nearly as nice of an experience as full screen IE was (with the swipe gestures for page forward/back navigation).
On the desktop though, it has been quite nice to use...
They just need to get the UX right, which they got way, way wrong with Windows 8. Luckily they have so much inertia in the desktop market that at this point it didn't cost them too much.