Even the 1984 Macintosh was snappy in its user interface: when you clicked a menu it opened instantly, when you dragged a window it always moved instantaneously.
Working with Windows even 20 years later was disappointing. You click the Start menu, and waited. Finally it appeared. You hovered over a menu item and waited. Finally its submenu appeared.
There was a hover delay built into WinXP which I also found annoying, but you could disable it (for free) using Powertoys for XP from Microsoft. It wasn't the computer that was too slow but a stupid UI decision by Microsoft. That was easy to fix though.
I think you are being far too nostalgic about the experience using old computers. It was shit. It was much harder to do anything useful. Try editing a video for instance. Or even just emailing a photo. Or loading a file from a floppy which took tens of seconds. Some people remember the experience of using an old PC as being better because it was simpler because they didn't even attempt to do anything more complex than very basic tasks like word processing.
I remember launching an application on a 1989 Mac SE30 took (I'm guessing) about 10 seconds. You heard the HD thrashing around long before the application was visible. Most programs launch in less than two seconds on my >5yr old i5-2500 with an SSD (Windows 7). The machine has started up and is ready to use in less than a minute. I have over 300 tabs in Firefox and it is still responsive (admittedly after a significant launch delay, but after that it's fast).
You could run notepad/Word and nothing else if you want on a modern PC and it will run lightning fast, and the menus are quick.
If you enjoy the old PC experience so much, there's no reason you can't continue to use one.
No, this was longer and inconsistent. The more I used the menu, the faster it got, until finally the built-in delay was the only delay.
> I think you are being far too nostalgic about the experience using old computers.
No, I'm just saying that there were some nice things about old Macs that took Windows decades to match. And I'm agreeing with the article that there are some subtleties that are still hard to beat, despite many other things that are of course many times worse. The article wasn't about how an old Mac is better in every way and we should all dump our modern computers and go back. It was pondering the irony: "Hey, isn't it ironic that this computer can't open Facebook, but it has a spatially oriented file browser the remembers the spots for all your icons in every folder." To this day, Windows cannot keep the Recycle Bin in the bottom-right corner across screen resizes. It is obviously recording the coordinate from the screen's top left. That always bugged me too (I know, it's the small things).
I recently switched back to Windows after using OS X exclusively for about five years. Windows has the ergonomics and aesthetics of a U-Haul. :)
I don't know how regular people can use Windows productively without breaking everything. All the controls and settings are so persnickety and janky, built upon strata of earlier generations that are still in the way. There are so many little things Microsoft could do to streamline the user experience and make it feel solid without alienating existing users, but they just keep adding more to the stew or throwing curve balls like Metro.
> I don't know how regular people can use Windows productively without breaking everything.
With the keyboard. The UI changes, and the mouse handles move around, but the keyboard shortcuts still work (mostly). After using a Mac for work for almost 5 years, it still annoys me the amount of things you can't easily do without the mouse.
That's a good point. I worked at Microsoft, back during Windows 2000, and engineering management would encourage "no mouse" days to identify UI that was not keyboard friendly.
I don't understand why they haven't updated shell32.dll with new icons in Windows 10, instead of the 50 different icon sets available. Open MMC, put in a snap in, open Explorer, open Control Panel, open Settings and observe the plethora of conflicting icons. It's horrible.
Because new icons take artists' time and effort? Windows 10 is slowly converging icon sets, it just clearly takes time.
Additionally, as you point out, many of the classic icons are embedded into system DLLs and EXEs. Servicing some of those files is a potential backwards compatibility nightmare and as a programmer I can understand not taking that lightly. (Not to mention, as much as people complain about "unnecessary" restarts from Windows updates, how many people would complain about a restart just to change icons in a system DLL?)
But if they're writing a new system and hailing it as a fresh start, why drag along all the old icons? They could replace those old icons in the same indexes in those DLLs with new flatter icons so it doesn't feel like you're using a horrible mess.
It would be a case of opening the RC files and going through the source images, surely? As for it being a nightmare, it is their operating system so they should be able to maintain it... (I think they have sufficient resources to draw icons - after all, they have drawn a new set of flat icons for half of the system).
As for the restart for new icons - I would have thought they would have done this before releasing the OS so that it didn't feel like a hodgepodge of different eras.
Other inconsistencies include the 3 new menus: the right-click menu on the Start menu, the right-click menu or normal menu within Edge and the right-click menu in Explorer or anywhere else. Apparently it is the same system (and these 3 things were released concurrently, remember) yet they are different.
It hardly encourages developers to be consistent if the OS vendor can't be bothered.
As a whole Windows is not a new system nor hailed as a fresh start. Yes, there are new systems in Windows and the Universal Windows Platform is sort of a fresh start (but even then the UWP is certainly more evolutionary than revolutionary in a practical sense, ultimately still having roots way back in COM, early .NET history, and Longhorn ideals that didn't get finished in time for Vista).
At the end of the day, even Microsoft's resources aren't infinite: they can prioritize new features and tech or they can prioritize cleaning up old stuff that still works and isn't broken, and unsurprisingly many times they can't prioritize both.
I get that the little inconsistencies bug a lot of people, but it's a complex ecology of systems and they all evolve at their own rates. A truly fresh start for Windows would probably have been shutting down the Win32 subsystem altogether and they experimented with that on ARM tablets and people lost their minds; Windows' backwards compatibility swamp means that it will always be a somewhat inconsistent ecology. (Windows is much more consistent on mobile and Xbox and presumably the HoloLens where Windows 10 is less constrained by backwards compatibility ghosts.)
To bring it back on topic: complaining about where Windows 10 is now, consistency-wise, is much like the complaints when OS X released and the way Cocoa apps and Carbon apps lived side-by-side. Eventually it will be great when the Windows equivalent to Carbon apps are all gone, but with the long, long tail of Windows apps in the world and even inside Windows itself, that's going to take a while and Microsoft has much less of an ability than Apple to just fiat mandate that Win32 will end of life any time soon (at least not without angering a vast number of developers and users).
The replacement of icons is a smaller challenge than eliminating Win32 though. Perhaps such a small start would be beneficial to exude a feeling of quality and not "more stuff has been taped on!".
As it turns out, I don't think they will ever do away with Win32 as UWP uptake is very small (it's just a COM subset after all, just not IUnknown), and 90% of all other apps use Win32 (including every single "desktop" Windows app like Explorer, Notepad etc. etc...)
Smaller challenge, perhaps, but still a challenge and returning to my original point: these are icons in Win32 DLLs that they may have no other reason to touch. If their goal is to leave them alone until such time as they can remove them, them why spend time updating icon resources they can better use elsewhere?
Supposedly any touch to Win32 requires testing multiple decades worth of software for backward compatibility breaks. Even something as seemingly innocuous as updating icon resources could break things. (Don't believe me? Spend some time reading the archives of Raymond Chen's Old New Thing blog and see some of how crazy backward compatibility in Win32 gets...)
I don't expect we'll see the end of Win32 anytime soon, but I'm willing to bet we might see it shuffled into a virtual machine/container eventually. UWP uptake is not as small as you imagine, it's more like a COM superset, and many "built-in" Windows "desktop" apps have converted to UWP already (Edge and Calculator for two examples) or seem to be well along in the process (Settings has replaced a majority of the Control Panel now and on track to replace all of it, except for backward compatibility with million year old plugins). (Explorer might never, again for backward compatibility reasons, but it's already a hybrid and likely to continue to be hybridized or it may even be replaced instead, like Edge replaced IE.)
Again, the Carbon/Cocoa analogy seems the most apt one I can make here. It's a process that will take time, and even Apple didn't do the equivalent changes overnight.
I am aware of Calculator and Edge being UWP, which explains Calculator's poor startup time and needless splash icon on loading.
Settings really hasn't replaced Control Panel in the slightest - each item you open in Settings typically opens the items from Control Panel if you go beyond the entry level stuff (all just COM components anyway). Settings happens to be a needless frontend to the same items, but with reduced functionality and a titlebar that ignores the system colour settings (it's always grey despite your settings). For example, try this:
1. Settings let you choose desktop colours. It does not let you choose a custom colour. Open Settings > Personalisation > Background and choose "Solid Color". You have a limited choice of a few colours.
2. Open Control Panel > Personalisation > Desktop Background. This now opens the Settings app, annoyingly.
3. Run control.exe /name Microsoft.Personalization /page pageWallpaper
This will bring up the magical missing dialog (not accessible from any GUI) where you can actually set a custom colour by clicking the "More..." button at the bottom. Setting a custom colour makes the Settings window show the wrong colour for your desktop background, as it isn't in its feebly small selection of colours. So the settings app has reduced functionality that the other existing items in the system that they haven't properly removed or tidied up.
Why add another settings app that has less functionality? Is this the future?
I would stand by my original point that instead of writing new things, why not make the existing items consistent? Icons would be a good start, let alone behaviour like I have detailed above. Why not make the Start menu search use the NTFS index instead of being dog-slow etc? Why do we have 3 different right-click menus? Did we need 2 new ones in Edge and on the Start menu? They can write 2 new menus and an entire Settings frontend but not new icons?
Also, they can successfully change icons in DLLs with no side effects - look at Shell32.dll and observe the new jaunty angled "My Computer" / "PC" icon compared to Windows 7, and stuff didn't break when they changed it. See also the new Recycle Bin (whilst they have also kept the old Recycle Bin icon which isn't used anywhere). It's a mess.
EDIT: BTW, the Cocoa analogy is a good one. It will take time for these things to change in Windows, if they actually bother making the changes. I am not convinced they will. I wonder if they'll just leave it all as it is (like they have done) whilst adding new stuff to duplicate the existing functionality of old stuff.
And what are we meant to do with this 2 million+ lines of MFC codebase we have? What future does MFC have? There is silence on the matter. All in all it doesn't instill confidence at all.
I feel that that small simple changes (like icons) would lead to a better feel of the OS, particularly to the non-techy user who doesn't care about Win32/UWP. And to us end-users who are more techy, it would feel less like a giant rolling ball of 25 years of different technologies, covered in mud.
«And what are we meant to do with this 2 million+ lines of MFC codebase we have? What future does MFC have? There is silence on the matter. All in all it doesn't instill confidence at all.»
Wasn't MFC deprecated in favor of ATL a long time ago, and that in turn deprecated in favor of WTL? All three of which now seem deprecated in favor of C++/Cx. I haven't kept up with C++ that well, but I don't think MFC has had a future for a long time. I don't think Microsoft has been that silent on it either, albeit the communication has shifted and evolved over the years as Microsoft settled their COM/.NET/UWP approaches...
What you could do with that codebase today is use the Desktop App Converter to wrap it in a UWP package (.appx). Once converted you could also slowly start to migrate to C++/Cx and UWP APIs and XAML screens. There are a bunch of Microsoft blogs about that if you wanted to read more.
As it turns out, this problem is really my employer's problem. I suspect many other software vendors have the same problem with these festering codebases.
Hopefully my employer will being making moves to other frameworks some time soon (and first things first off C++2003)...
Just replying to myself to say that this is all obviously a bit of a "first world" problem, and these annoyances are small problems in the grand scheme of things. I realise I appear to come across as frothing at the mouth regarding the state of these issues as they are irritating, but they aren't the biggest problems in my life, or anyone's lives for that matter, nor should they be!
Working with Windows even 20 years later was disappointing. You click the Start menu, and waited. Finally it appeared. You hovered over a menu item and waited. Finally its submenu appeared.