> windows didn't really get any more usable after that...
The old UI is good but I am not a fan of the everything is folders and files idea of the start menu. Maybe I'm misremembering but iirc as a child I used to forget which sub menu inside the thing I needed was except for the ones I used frequently.
I like being able to just type obs and press enter in the new windows. I preferred the old theme better than windows XP Luna theme. I had a copy of tune up software and it said the old theme is somehow easier on my ram? iirc I only had 128MB on my pentium 4 computer.
> everything is folders and files idea of the start menu
Your comment is Ribbon/magic-search-bar vs hierarchical-organization preference in a nutshell.
I've decided there are two mutually-exclusive sorts of people: (a) those who want search to surface things for them, and hate having to remember where to find things & (b) those who want to remember where/how to find things, and hate relying on fuzzy search to surface them.
IMHO, there's enough of each type that any given UI should support both.
Ribbon would have gotten less flak if they hadn't also simultaneously made a mess of the organizational hierarchy behind the scenes. (MS Office-style "select things to show from a giant list in a tiny scrollbox" is terrible)
> I've decided there are two mutually-exclusive sorts of people: (a) those who want search to surface things for them, and hate having to remember where to find things & (b) those who want to remember where/how to find things, and hate relying on fuzzy search to surface them.
Funny because I belong in both camps, but for different things.
I prefer fuzzy, flat search for launching applications (I mean we basically do the same on the CLI right? Hierarchy for apps seem more like arbitrary labels. Some things don't neatly fit into one label.
And prefer to locate files by hierarchy. With the exception of less familiar and very large file systems and codebases, where I will resort to either fuzzy filename find or grep like tools. I use broot for my file manager which caters to all of these modes quite nicely.
Yes but that's only in terms of resolution, the interface is flat, i.e you don't explicitly ask for usr/sbin over usr/bin. The differences only become a problem with naming conflicts and misconfigured $PATHs.
I also prefer the ribbons, but a real power user of hierarchical menus doesn't click through them. The menus in Windows used to have the first character underlined: this is a shortcut. File->Save could be accessed with an incantation like Alt+fs. The real power of the old menus was remembering the discoverable shortcuts and flying through the menus without using mouse, somewhat similar to how Vim works.
For me menus are great for discovering related features on my own, search is great for getting to them quickly. I wouldn't want to have only one or the other.
> those who want to remember where/how to find things, and hate relying on fuzzy search to surface them.
I'm in this camp, but with a bit of nuance. Fuzzy search tends not to work well for me -- if I can't remember the exact name of the application I want to use (and I often can't), then search is an iffy way to locate it.
But mostly, it's about not liking to switch between using the mouse and using the keyboard. If I'm firing up a program, I'm almost certainly using the mouse at the moment. Switching to keyboard adds a bit of unnecessary disruption.
> Ribbon would have gotten less flak if they hadn't also simultaneously made a mess
My problem with the ribbon is that the contents move around, which means I'm constantly having to search through it for the thing I want to do.
If there was a keyboard shortcut to focus the menu searchbar I wouldn’t mind ribbon at all, typing ctrl+hekwj is just as fast as typing ctrl+/grou+enter
> I used to forget which sub menu inside the thing I needed was except for the ones I used frequently
The trick was to create your own folders to flatten the hierarchy, so you never have to look inside the "Programs" sub menu. You could even move your most frequently used items to the top level, with no folders at all, so they're available with a single click.
This got a lot easier with Windows 98 (or with the IE version that included the shell update) where you could just drag and drop to rearrange the menus.
> it was usually a pretty reliable clue as to their skill level.
But in which direction? I'm very skilled, and used to customize things like this -- but at a certain point, I stopped doing it because I'd develop muscle memory for my customizations that would really mess me up when using someone else's computer.
So now, I don't customize anything. It makes my life easier.
You can tack good modern search-launchers (a la spotlight or synapse) onto a Windows 95 interface without bringing over all the other modern UI cancer. It's an entirely orthogonal concern to things like flat icons, excessive whitespace, or bad discoverability.
I don't understand this objection. The Start menu (which was a step backward from Program Manager) really went downhill when it obscured or removed the ability to group your programs into folders. Why do I want my audio & music programs jumbled together with my development tools? Or my graphics programs mixed in with general office apps?
People who argue that you should just type into a search bar 100% of the time to find and launch apps are naíve. First of all, unless you have a trivial number of applications, it's absurd to expect everyone to remember the name of every program on his computer. Oh gee, what was that SD-card-formatting utility again? I don't know, but hey in two clicks I'm in my Utils folder and there it is. I'm not scouring a disorganized, flat list of 100 applications to find it.
> People who argue that you should just type into a search bar 100% of the time to find and launch apps are naíve. First of all, unless you have a trivial number of applications, it's absurd to expect everyone to remember the name of every program on his computer. Oh gee, what was that SD-card-formatting utility again? I don't know, but hey in two clicks I'm in my Utils folder and there it is.
Maybe you should relook at this again; they don't work like that anymore - you don't need to remember "Brasero" when searching for a CD burning tool, the menu items all have a description field which is also searched.
So for your specific example, all you'd need to do is search for "SD Card", even if the name does not have the text "SD" or "Card" in it.
Typing something like "SD Card" takes too much time in comparison with launching an application from a hierarchical menu using less key presses (or mouse movements/clicks).
In most cases, when you have to type something longer than "SD Card", the difference in launching speed is even greater.
Thanks for the info. I don't use Windows anymore, but people make the same argument on Mac; I don't see any description field there, and searches can fail even when you use a word contained in the program title.
Even if such a field is 100% accurately and adequately populated for every application (which I doubt), I don't want to invoke a text-based search and have to start typing a query.
Ah, the wonderful world of balanced and effective configurations from the bottom of the barrel PCs... So much time, money and CO2 could be saved by another/bigger atick of RAM.
> So much time, money and CO2 could be saved by another/bigger atick of RAM.
I did eventually get a 256 MB stick of RAM.
iirc I was already out of high school at that point.
One point I don't hear being talked about too much
is how hopeful and stupid we were in the late nineties
and early two thousands.
We were supposed to have 10GHz processors by 2005,
or I mean mass market for consumers
by the end of the decade, at the latest?
To put things in perspective,
my parents practically never used the computer.
For all intents and purposes,
the computer was for a child to learn
by parents who were not very computer savvy
in a time when computers were advancing (or at least so we thought)
very rapidly.
> One point I don't hear being talked about too much is how hopeful and stupid we were in the late nineties and early two thousands. We were supposed to have 10GHz processors by 2005, or I mean mass market for consumers by the end of the decade, at the latest?
Sure, but look at the decade prior. I had a 486 DX-50 in 1992. Within a decade, we had processors clocked in the GHz. A decade after that, clock rates had pretty much stagnated as we have shifted to multiple cores. We saw something similar happen with memory capacity (huge jump in the late 1990's, and near stagnation over the past decade). The switch from hard drives to solid state drives actually resulted in a huge step backwards (in terms of capacity, though we got a huge bump in performance).
There has been progress with modern computers, but the benchmarks we used in the late 1990's are practically irrelevant these days.
>One point I don't hear being talked about too much is how hopeful and stupid we were in the late nineties and early two thousands. We were supposed to have 10GHz processors by 2005, or I mean mass market for consumers by the end of the decade, at the latest?
I think a lot of those predictions came from a world unconcerned with cores and threading.
The jump from sub ghz to 1 ghz (p2 to p3) came about suddenly, the jump from 1ghz to 3ish ghz came about suddenly (p3 to p4); and then things moved to prioritizing chip real estate for cores/threading/parallelism.
The chips we have now are great, but it would be damn nice to have a 10ghz core somewhere.
( I eventually upgraded my RAM before ditching the Presario, too, but I think it's because at the time I wanted to play Dark Age of Camelot without lagging to death in team fights.)
I don't understand this sentiment from an HN user. It sounds like you wanted a 5-10x performance boost vs. what we had in 2000.
Today's CPUs are literally like 10-50x faster than CPUs of that era depending on how many cores you're using at once. Storage is an order of magnitude faster as well. Mission accomplished! Software is in general more bloated, so things don't always "feel" faster, but for raw computational tasks like e.g. video encoding they truly are orders of magnitude faster.
I've got plenty of complaints about how the industry has changed since then, but raw hardware performance certainly isn't one.
Not just cores and threading but implementation efficiency, which is a couple of orders of magnitude better today than it was in the late 90s.
Clock speeds were always more about marketing than actual performance.
There are a few power-user applications where a 10X to 1000X speed bump would be very welcome - mostly video, audio, and AI.
For example - if you generate/process audio at 32X or 64X oversampling you can eliminate all of the usual DSP and conversion artefacts, even for difficult processes like non-linear distortion.
But for most applications, most users have more cycles than they need.
> One point I don't hear being talked about too much is how hopeful and stupid we were in the late nineties and early two thousands.
If I aould be in tbe mood and stance I would reply again, but I for what it gives I'm really grateful for my parent who indulged in this thing, despite it being a total terra incognita for them.
long ago this 'category' was referred to as 'grandma gifts' by folks near me on the net : a computer that no one in their right mind would buy themselves, but seemingly everyone had received one from a distance grandma/aunt/uncle who themselves were clueless about computers so they hop in the car and just buy whatever is cheapest on the Circuit City (or equivalent) floor; generally they were Presarios/Inspirons/Pavillions/etc.
If you were real lucky you'd get a Sony VAIO; but fashion be damned it had the same crap specs as the rest of the grandma gifts.
> I like being able to just type obs and press enter in the new windows.
This might be one of the few useful features that I take for granted in modern Windows. That and Win + tab which I think GNOME does better. The "Windows" key in GNOME brings up the overview but also brings up search where you can either click which window you want or type what you want. Intuitive
