Welcome to the internet.
There's going to be a huge realignment in white collar work in the next decade or two, and then there's the fact that college degrees themselves (except for maybe STEM), are becoming less and less valuable because…
And when you break the rules, you get absolutely no feedback. You don't even know if you break the rules, or you were just beat by a candidate the interviewers preferred. I had to go through the process last year and…
I also have really fond memories of Cinemaware's Three Stooges game. That's one I'd love to play again. It even had some digitized voices, sound effects and photos of the Stooges. It consisted of several mini-games you…
I feel like it's a rite of passage for a beginner programmer to have a recursive function generate a stack overflow.
DVD menus is another place where this confusion happens. Of course, any DVDs I buy these days are ripped, converted to H.265 and put on the NAS.
Yeah, it was butt-ugly. The default Windows UI didn't actually look better until Windows 7, but I used the "Classic" look as long as it was supported. I skipped Windows 8/8.1 entirely, and while Windows 10 was…
I don't understand why they couldn't have kept that option. The Windows UI is currently the least customizable I've ever seen and I started using Windows with 2.1.
That era ended 20+ years ago. Sorry, pal. Microsoft has been flailing since Windows 2000 to "improve" the UI, often with one bad idea after another: let's make Windows apps look like webpages, let's make Windows apps…
Application developers often had a lot of crazy (and bad) ideas, but at least Windows itself was consistent. But then those crazy, bad ideas started affecting Microsoft, and then you could make the Windows Media Player…
I've been saying for many years that it seems most UI "designers" are just art school dropouts. Art school graduates would have a better sense of style, even if they weren't HCI experts. Windows 2000 was peak Windows…
Yeah, but I would still usually see Explorer crash within an hour of a fresh Win2k installation. Windows 2000 was peak UI, but it wasn't peak Windows. That was Windows 7. And Windows 7 was advanced enough that you could…
> Obvious borders and some padding between elements were a necessity to click what you intended to click. That never changed.
For people complaining that "Start" isn't a great choice, perhaps there's something better, but I can't think of anything. You need a small word that implies, "Click here to do something or find something." and in that…
> And more and more over time, Microsoft has thought more about what they want in the menu than what the user wants. This pretty much describes _everything_ in Windows in the last 15 years.
I've witnessed this so much over the years. Much of the time when someone would ask me for help with something on the computer, I would have no idea, but I could discover the answer with a little bit of exploration and…
Windows 2000 was the peak of Windows UI. While features and functionality has improved in many ways, everything UI change since then has been a step backward. Microsoft (and IBM and others) did a ton of good HCI…
> how to make it sound as loud as possible without sounding compressed. .. which is ironic, because the end result usually sounded terrible. You know, overly compressed.
In 2012, I was working for a company that did all the development for its Windows clients on an ancient version of Visual Studio running in a Windows 2003 VM, and I discovered that the Windows 2003 running in a VM could…
I used Windows 95 for a few months and switched to NT and never looked back. I did later run Windows 98 on my kids' machine for games, but I never tried, or wanted to try Windows ME. Windows 2000 has the best look and…
Given that Windows search has been this broken for decades, do you think Microsoft is going to start caring _now_?! Next thing you'll be asking to make OneDrive even remotely predictable in its behavior (other than the…
Their whole business model at the time seemed to be "making dubious acquisitions".
Somewhere there's a "create a random, soulless, corporate website generator", and these folks used it.
Companies like IBM and Microsoft did a lot of HCI research back in the 80s, and made a lot of progress with usability and common idioms that all software followed. Then when displays with 256 or more colors became…
I feel the opposite. I'm 61 and I feel like I understand ideas more quickly than I ever did before, so much so that I'm surprised at how shallowly I thought about some things in the past. While there is definitely…
Welcome to the internet.
There's going to be a huge realignment in white collar work in the next decade or two, and then there's the fact that college degrees themselves (except for maybe STEM), are becoming less and less valuable because…
And when you break the rules, you get absolutely no feedback. You don't even know if you break the rules, or you were just beat by a candidate the interviewers preferred. I had to go through the process last year and…
I also have really fond memories of Cinemaware's Three Stooges game. That's one I'd love to play again. It even had some digitized voices, sound effects and photos of the Stooges. It consisted of several mini-games you…
I feel like it's a rite of passage for a beginner programmer to have a recursive function generate a stack overflow.
DVD menus is another place where this confusion happens. Of course, any DVDs I buy these days are ripped, converted to H.265 and put on the NAS.
Yeah, it was butt-ugly. The default Windows UI didn't actually look better until Windows 7, but I used the "Classic" look as long as it was supported. I skipped Windows 8/8.1 entirely, and while Windows 10 was…
I don't understand why they couldn't have kept that option. The Windows UI is currently the least customizable I've ever seen and I started using Windows with 2.1.
That era ended 20+ years ago. Sorry, pal. Microsoft has been flailing since Windows 2000 to "improve" the UI, often with one bad idea after another: let's make Windows apps look like webpages, let's make Windows apps…
Application developers often had a lot of crazy (and bad) ideas, but at least Windows itself was consistent. But then those crazy, bad ideas started affecting Microsoft, and then you could make the Windows Media Player…
I've been saying for many years that it seems most UI "designers" are just art school dropouts. Art school graduates would have a better sense of style, even if they weren't HCI experts. Windows 2000 was peak Windows…
Yeah, but I would still usually see Explorer crash within an hour of a fresh Win2k installation. Windows 2000 was peak UI, but it wasn't peak Windows. That was Windows 7. And Windows 7 was advanced enough that you could…
> Obvious borders and some padding between elements were a necessity to click what you intended to click. That never changed.
For people complaining that "Start" isn't a great choice, perhaps there's something better, but I can't think of anything. You need a small word that implies, "Click here to do something or find something." and in that…
> And more and more over time, Microsoft has thought more about what they want in the menu than what the user wants. This pretty much describes _everything_ in Windows in the last 15 years.
I've witnessed this so much over the years. Much of the time when someone would ask me for help with something on the computer, I would have no idea, but I could discover the answer with a little bit of exploration and…
Windows 2000 was the peak of Windows UI. While features and functionality has improved in many ways, everything UI change since then has been a step backward. Microsoft (and IBM and others) did a ton of good HCI…
> how to make it sound as loud as possible without sounding compressed. .. which is ironic, because the end result usually sounded terrible. You know, overly compressed.
In 2012, I was working for a company that did all the development for its Windows clients on an ancient version of Visual Studio running in a Windows 2003 VM, and I discovered that the Windows 2003 running in a VM could…
I used Windows 95 for a few months and switched to NT and never looked back. I did later run Windows 98 on my kids' machine for games, but I never tried, or wanted to try Windows ME. Windows 2000 has the best look and…
Given that Windows search has been this broken for decades, do you think Microsoft is going to start caring _now_?! Next thing you'll be asking to make OneDrive even remotely predictable in its behavior (other than the…
Their whole business model at the time seemed to be "making dubious acquisitions".
Somewhere there's a "create a random, soulless, corporate website generator", and these folks used it.
Companies like IBM and Microsoft did a lot of HCI research back in the 80s, and made a lot of progress with usability and common idioms that all software followed. Then when displays with 256 or more colors became…
I feel the opposite. I'm 61 and I feel like I understand ideas more quickly than I ever did before, so much so that I'm surprised at how shallowly I thought about some things in the past. While there is definitely…