Windows XP: rough around the edges
I resisted my well known irrational urge to upgrade as long as I could, but this weekend I gave in and installed Windows XP. A good rule of thumb: never upgrade your operating system simply because you are bored.
My initial reaction is that the fancy UI effects make things feel a little sluggish, but there are some very interesting improvements as well (and the visual effects can all be turned off). What struck me most about the new visual style in XP is that it is full of little glitches and holes. None are particularly significant, and this may seem nitpicky, but as Blink 182 puts it so well, it's All the Small Things.
Behold some stupid little things that I couldn't help but notice and criticize.
Icons Old and New
First, the icons - most are new and beautiful. However, this makes the new that are neither new nor beautiful all the more jarring.
You'll see ugly old icons like this all over the place, but most are from old, non-microsoft programs. That's understandable. This left over icon for Offline Web Pages is just weird. I don't understand - did they forget it?
Even within the icons that were clearly designed for XP, there are odd inconsistencies. As you can see here, there are both icons with an angled perspective, and traditional rectangular icons. Not sure why.
In addition to that, notice how the two rectangular icons (vmmred32.dll and Soab Bubble.bmp) don't even line up.
The end result of all this is a really wacky looking screen full of waggling icons.
The worst offender in terms of icons is in the administrator components of XP. Did they think the pretty new icons would frighten techies? (not a totally unreasonable fear, mind you). These are some of the icons from the admin section of the otherwise beautiful Control Panel.
Rough Around the Edges - Literally
This next point may seem to cross the line into obsessive, but I with all the other eye candy going on (alpha blending fading menu shadows, etc.) it's a fair point. If they can smooth the edges of your fonts, why can't they smooth out the corners of the windows? Perhaps there are good reasons for this - and I concede that this is getting to be a little too nitpicky - but I still noticed it.
Give Your Pretty Widgets Room to Breathe
I also noticed several places throughout the UI that looked like they needed a little room to breath. Spacing and padding are critical to a comfortable looking layout. Notice the areas pointed out by the green arrows.
Innie or an Outie?
While the subtle gradients and shadows used throughout the UI are generally well implemented, there are a few areas that confuse the eye. Note the shadows in the top and bottom of this small window pointed out by the right green arrows. When the eye has trouble discerning depth (is that a rise or a depression?) it can be visually disruptive.
Also, notice what appears to be two versions of the same icon in the image above (by left green arrows).
Oh, I see, Office XP
The next two images are not specific to Windows XP, but to inconsistencies between Microsoft's Office XP and the rest Windows XP. Notice the two different menu styles: the Windows XP default on the left, and Office XP on the right.
Another odd discrepancy between Office XP and Windows XP - the scroll bars. For some reason, Office XP doesn't use the new XP scroll bars. Holy 1995.
Having trouble following the rules in-house can make it all the more difficult to police other developers.
Buying Music Isn't Hard to Do
My final criticism is not visual. In fact, it looks great. Trouble is, it smacks of the overwhelming advertising tactics of RealPlayer. While browsing folders, there are panes with common commands on the left of the window. For the most part, they are quite handy and intuitive. However, when you are browsing a music folder, the following 'helpful' option shows up.
Final Thoughts and Compliments
You'll also occasionally catch a glimpse of the scaffolding behind this pretty OS. When opening a new window, or expanding a new tree in the start menu, if your computer is working at something else you'll often see the old Win2k grey before the pretty new colors load in. This only happens for a split second, but it undermines the feeling of stability (which can be just as important as actually stability in terms of customer satisfaction).
Despite all of this criticism, I am generally pleased with XP so far. The 'Thumbnail' view for images is more refined and much faster than in Win2k. Also, the sorting and grouping options for files and folders are simple, but quite handy. For example, you can group a folder of images by file size or actual image dimensions.
If you have a folder with 3000 images, a third of which are thumbnail, another third large images, and the rest icons, sorting by dimensions is fantastic. See an example grouping by date. For someone who deals with a lot of images, these features are a nice touch.
These points are mostly quite trivial on their own. Together, though, they can undermine with feeling of stability and consistency of the system.
More thoughts as they come to me.
1. "Dude, it looks like some kid ate a box of crayons and vomited on this screen!"
2. "Stupid Microsoft. Do they think that users are complete idiots? This looks like a Disney program!"
3. "Well, I guess most users don't really understand computers, and apparently this makes it easier, so it's fine. I guess."
Sandy, what's so horrible about OSX? It's certainly flawed, but "putrid"?
Steven, I think you should give OSX the same treatment as XP. I'm very curious what you'd come up with. To my eye, OSX is most certainly lovely and XP looks hopelessly second-rate in comparison. The usability of OSX is another issue, of course.
Read Designing Visual Interfaces and you can pretend to be smart like me too (great book).
As for the subjecting question of visual style, I'll let your wierd mac users fight it out.
I have been using IBM PCs for 19 years, starting from the first version of MS-DOS and culminating in Windows 2000 (I like the look of Windows XP, but will not buy into Microsoft's draconian registration process, so will not upgrade). I recently purchased an iBook, running Mac OS X and I consider it the most sensible, highly-evolved, aesthetically pleasing user interface to a computer that I've ever used. It is the only UI I've ever used which is remotely intuitive. I guess, for me, it hit a UI sweet spot. To each their own.
My favourite Mac OS X + iBook feature: fire up iTunes, connect to a web radio station. Listen. Now close the lid of the iBook. iBook goes to sleep. Wait. Now open lid. Web radio station (and, for that matter, the rest of the OS) starts instantly. No "hold on while I try and figure out what sort of computer I am and what I was doing before and refresh the registry and redraw the screen and connect to Microsoft and see if I'm properly licensed, etc." delay that I'm all too used to.
-Peter
First, more icons that were just left behind. These are the three font icons you'll find in your Fonts folder. The left column is the new, larger Tile View. The right colunm is the traditional 32 x 32 px windows icon. Notice that two of the three larger icons are just scaled up from the smaller icon. I can't understand how some of these would get done and other wouldn't.
A few more criticisms of Office XP's visual integration with Windows XP:
- Outlook XP has three scroll bars in its main window - two new, one old (see a screenshot).
- Outlook XP uses custom Save and Open dialog boxes which, despite all of their fancy features, do not allow the new Windows XP standard Tile icon view.
Form controls (buttons, checkboxes, radio buttons, etc.) in Internet Explorer 6 use the new Windows XP. That's a good thing. However, if a button stretches beyond a certain width (not even particularly wide), it stretches in an ugly and rough manner, rather than scaling elegantly as it should.
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Oh and windows XP is the first to handle this nicely - 2000 would show the halos.
Another reason for the inconsistent icons is that Microsoft outsources the icons to the popular Mac icon designers Iconfactory. This might explain why they didn't finish every single icon.
When we finished our part of the design and production, we knew there were more icons that needed to be updated, but Microsoft said they would take care of those themselves. Many of the inconsistencies you see in the OS as far as angles (when an icon is in perspective vs when it is not) is directly due to Microsoft and the set of visual "rules" they set up for themselves (or chose to ignore... however you want to look at it). The vb.ini icon you mention in your article is a great example of this. This is an icon that Microsoft did itself after they said The Iconfactory was finished. I would dare say you can actually tell we didn't create it. Its visually different from the rest, and the perspective "rule of thumb" isn't' followed.
Hope this all helps give you a little piece of mind.
Concerning "Give Your Pretty Widgets Room to Breathe"..
in Win2000 you can edit and custemize the file named "folder.htt" (it's in your [drive]:/WINNT/Web folder) which describes (in HTML) the right plane, detailed view. I'm sure this is the same in WinXP.
the best interface. Who needs a mouse? Plus if you ever get tired of the UI in OSX then it's right there! Anyway, man pages give you more info than every help file on every windows machine in the whole world put together.
It is all anti-aliased, runs faster and smoother than windows and is more enjoyable overall to use.
I have to still use windows machines at work, so i get the best of one world (my home mac) and the poor bum world (windows).
And whats with this latest virus? you dont see us MAC users getting affected, eh?
Don't let Aqua's annoying striped menus keep you from enjoying the full anti-aliasing and dynamic motion of OS X!
Steven, great article. I had no idea until now that Iconfactory was behind the Windows XP icons, although had I been challeneged to think about it I may have come to that conclusion. As someone once charged with developing a set of icons for a product, (that was regrettably canned) I know how hard it is to do, and also how important it is to do right. Especially for a product like Windows.
you please copy it into a .zip file from the CD,
and put it as a download link on this webpage?
Then when you have done that send this webpage as a
link to my email adress and tell me in the e-mail?
Be a good pal and do that.
I've either worked around, worked through, or patched up solutions to most of those - truth is, most of us have more programs on our puters than we use. But lately I'm getting some bugginess around my browsing and hotmail, and it's got me suspicious. Not sure who to blame - MSN, Windowns XP, Eastlink, or Sony Viao ... but when I find out, I will shower wrath down upon them.
Mostly, though, it's been OK ... so far.
Unfortunately, Win XP is now doing that to my Programs section of the Start menu and I can't find the way to show me all my programs.
I want to get to the program I need and this useless extra step is an annoying tme waster.
Any ideas?
In the bottom of that dialog, there is a section called "Advanced Start Menu Options." Scroll to the bottom of the selections in that box and uncheck the "Use Personalized Menus" option.
There! Wasn't that fun?
As a programmer who uses Microsoft products for my work I should have guessed they'd put it in a non-intuitive command. I would have thought "User Personalized menus" would mean it allows you to personalize your menus, not mean "hide/don't hide my programs".
Sheesh.
Thanks again.
"Why would we let the user personalize the menu, when he could possibly do something that would confuse us? Best we do the personalization ourselves. Just look at the pretty clouds. Nothing to see here."
I think also there are quite a few versions of windows XP Pro, the first time i installed it, i but the classic mode on (Win2k look) and it worked fine..... i just reinstalled it (from another CD) and am having major problems with it now!
Themes use magic pink to designate whether a pixel is on, or off inside a border.
Linux doesn't fix this problem either afaik, there is no WM with 32-bit borders.
Like others, I revert back to 'classic' style, turn off all the shadowing and animation. Then it's like a 'slightly prettier, but less stable Windows 2000' - gee...I even set my XP desktop to the same backround 'blue' (65 110 165) as Windows 2000. It almost makes it look like 'real' workstation again. I always Macify my windows icons (place on right, work cascading windows from upper left corner down and over towards the right). I even put my Recycle Bin down in the lower right corner above the systray - I owned an original 128K Mac...gee, how could you tell..
And when I tire of that, it's 'back to Slack' (Slackware) and a minimalist Fluxbox (that's redundant I guess) for real work. Desktop switching via wheelmouse - brilliant ! No matter how nice XP gets, I can't live without desktop switching - that feature (nearly) alone sells me on GNU/Linux. I can't stand minimizing (or even shading) windows. All those extra clicks !
For now, on GNU/Linux, I steer clear of the DE (desktop environ - GNOME vs KDE) debate. Speedy, small, efficient WMs are good for me (but I realize, not for all) for now. Recent GNOME screenshots are starting to look tasty though !
> switching - that feature (nearly) alone sells me on
> GNU/Linux. I can't stand minimizing (or even shading)
> windows. All those extra clicks !
Try deskman.exe from the Microsoft PowerToys for Windows XP package. This desk switching hack doesn't work as elegantly as under UNIX (its slow when you have a lot of windows), but its better than nothing:
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/pro/downloads/powertoys.asp
-- Marcio
P.S. I don't think a computer has to look boring to be usefull.
boşu boşuna 2 dakikamı çaldın benim... saçma saçma şeyler, ne bu böyle adamın işi gücü yokmuş da bunları mı yazmış, ohooo
en iyisi sen bırak bu işleri..
Sana mı kaldı bil geytsi eleştirmek mına goduum. Yapmış adam gül gibi ikspiyi yok orası bozuk yok burası bozuk. Sikerim kullanma o zaman amucuk. Git linuz neyin gullan. Penguenler sitsin de kaçacak pencere arayasın, mına koduuuum!
