Posted by rbanffy 5 days ago
(I maintain that Windows 11's bad UX is a consequence of MS having to make a single UI for everyone, which means it'll be too dumbed-down, simplified, or inflexible for power-users (XP, Win8, Win11); or too complicated and intimidating for everyone else (Win7, Win10), or just bad for everyone (Vista)).
If Microsoft wants me to willingly buy into Windows 12, then I want the option to keep the Windows 10 UI (File Explorer, Taskbar, Start Menu, and Window Management) - I know it can be done in theory[1], I just want proper support.
That's a false choice, and pie menus are the way out of it. The same menu can lead novices by showing them labels, follow intermediate users who know roughly where things are, and get out of the way of experts who flick in the direction without waiting for it to appear. One UI, no "simple mode" and "advanced mode", and the novice turns into the expert just by using it, by self-revealing rehearsal! I went into that and the research behind it upthread.
As I titled my 1998 Xerox PARC talk: "Natural Selection: The Evolution of Pie Menus", reviewed here:
https://baychi.org/calendar/19981013/
> Pie menus appealed to Hopkins because they conform to the rule that the user's attention should not be squandered. A pie menu selection offers direct feedback versus a user selection that brings up intermediate menus. The programmed pie menu ignores users' gestures except the motions to select or cancel. Hopkins uses pie menus because they take advantage of Fitts' Law, which relates fast selection speed and low error rate to the pie menus' large target size and small distance between selections.
The other half is letting users rearrange it themselves, without registry hacks. HyperCard set the precedent in 1987: the user interface was made of the same stuff as the content, so anyone could open it up and change it. Arthur van Hoff's HyperLook took that to NeWS and PostScript and networking: users could build and edit not just their own nested linear and pie menus, but also customize the live user interfaces of running apps, including the SimCity I ported to it, by copying, pasting and configuring scriptable components from "warehouse" stacks. We were taking it all the way to the window frames themselves, with a HyperCard-like window manager where you could build your own frames out of the same parts, a built-in structured PostScript graphics editor you can use in your own stacks, windows with any shape (like my Lava Lamp shaped Cellular Automata Machine), and you can compose your own custom applications inside them.
HyperLook Cellular Automata Machine:
https://github.com/SimHacker/WillWrightShowForFood/blob/main...
HyperLook SimCity:
https://github.com/SimHacker/WillWrightShowForFood/blob/main...
Why we also need a non-editable runtime system (with a removable UI editor): User Interface Vandalism:
https://github.com/SimHacker/WillWrightShowForFood/blob/main...
My comments in the "What HyperCard Might Have Been" discussion:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22282361
I also discussed HyperLook and HyperCard with Alan Kay, who said "This work is so good -- for any time -- and especially for its time", and also "I wish he had done a real end-user language for this":
https://github.com/SimHacker/WillWrightShowForFood/blob/main...
Simon Schneegans's Kando carries that spirit today. Its menu editor is direct manipulation all the way down: you drag and drop items and submenus right into the pie, see exactly where they'll go, and put the things you use most in the directions that feel right to your hand. That's how a power user should customize a menu, and a novice can do it too, because it's just dragging things around:
I took that idea further in MediaGraph, a music navigation prototype I made in Unity for Will Wright at the Stupid Fun Club in 2010. It has two layers of pie menus.
The first layer is ordinary nested pie menus for editing the content, with live feedback: as you move around the menu that sets a song's size or its "biome" (a cellular automaton growing around it on the map), you see the effect in the world before you commit. Same biomes merge, different biomes compete for territory.
The second layer is the content itself. The songs are laid out on a map and connected by roads, and the map is a geographic, networked pie menu. Touch one song to another -- kissing them together -- to make a road between them, and kiss them again to break it. Flick on a song in a direction and it fires you down the road to the next song that way, like the cannons in Super Mario World. Point at a song and it plays an earcon, click it to play.
Following links, editing links, panning, zooming and flicking are all the same kind of gesture, with continuous zoom and pan and inertia. As I wrote at the time, what I was proudest of was the "Fahrvergnügen" of connecting and disconnecting places by bumping them together, and traveling down the roads by flicking between them, "without creating another mode". The menu editor disappears and dissolves into the content, by replacing hierarchy with geography.
MediaGraph demo:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KfeHNIXYUc
How it works, with a timeline from DreamScape and iLoci to MediaGraph:
https://github.com/SimHacker/WillWrightShowForFood/blob/main...
My entire UI workflow is top right orientated (menus, windows size/close buttons, docks) for muscle memory, so the Win10 stopped security updates forced me to switch.
Ironically a week later they extended security support for Win10.
I'm still waiting for Mozilla to give back the option to delete MRUs from the Firefox navbar.
Oh, it's absolutely has nothing with how they push sponsored links there. Absolutely.
The actual search results were a scrollable list with 5 rows visible of the content I was searching for.
I wonder what skills must one posses to rise to places that give one the authority to make such decisions? Are there incentives that drive these or are these borne of Kafkaesque bureaucracies? Does no one object to such monstrosities? Are the ones responsible so bereft of empathy and/or common sense? I know this is meandering and pointless but I wonder and struggle to understand the thought processes. This apathy, sure it presents itself in something so mundane but it permeates everything. i guess its the human condition.
Microsoft just stops investing in innovation once they take over a market. You saw it with IE, with office, with windows even.
There was a Word for DOS, but Word for Windows was a port of Word for Mac. Excel started on the Mac (their DOS spreadsheet was called Multiplan). PowerPoint started out as a Mac product funded by Apple, which Microsoft acquired.
None of this can be described as "knocked out by Microsoft in a year".
I have a dozen or so myself, probably two dozens, that I meet daily. Yes, daily. Using Windows feels like trying to run in muddy water with Lego bricks in the bottom here and there. It wasn't like this much earlier. Not even when the blue screen of death was commonplace.
What a heaping pile of you know what. You need Microsoft accounts to download basic apps from the App Store
You get nagged and nagged to enter a windows account
Having grown up with it, it’s an incredibly odd feeling using it. Modern ui…modern ui…modern ui…and then BAM a weird screen directly ported from windows 98 (or 2k, you get the point)
An OS that was always incredibly intuitive to me all of a sudden just felt like a disorganized mess. Want to see your Ethernet adapters? Good luck, you’ll open 10 other settings menus/search results before finally getting to the options you need. Advanced sound settings? Same
My headset wasn’t working, after clicking through a bunch of options at some point I loaded a wizard with very specific questions that I’d never seen before and wouldn’t how how to get back to, it randomly worked
Still a bunch of bloatware, still can’t be on for more than a day without having to reboot, everything I remembered that was bad with made worse by bad ux
These days they even tried to remove the option of installing windows with an internet connection, aka ms account
Just bad, there are a lot of annoyances to fix
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/servicing/os/windows-11/...
>New! This update introduces an updated context menu that is faster, simpler, and more customizable. The updated menu opens more quickly, reduces clutter, and gives you more control over the commands and app extensions that appear when you right-click.
>You can now customize the context menu to better fit how you use Windows. Select Customize menu at the bottom of the context menu to open its Settings page.
Good, though doesn't seem to be include the ability to control icons, name and accelerator keys, so still a long way to reach the user ergonomic heaven...
(I think it was actually 10, but 8 really started the lean away)
