I think Vista is possibly even worse than WebCT. I don't remember WebCT requiring Java to run. And the sessions in Vista are so fragile. It's the only think I ever use that makes me restart the browser.
And it's damn ugly. Everything about it is ugly. It's messy and ugly. The URLs are ugly. The colours are ugly. The layout is ugly and impractical. It uses Javascript to break stuff in random places. There isn't a single component or idea that isn't substantially worse than average or what you'd expect.
And it doesn't actually do anything. I feel like I've written applications in a week that do more than Vista. Maybe there is a whole lot of fancy stuff going on behind the scenes which means the stuff we actually use has to suck, but I doubt it.
Vista lives up to every stereotype of the kind of bloated software favoured by large institutions. It pains me to use it. And I'm not being melodramatic.
The thing that freaked me out with my one test drive of Office 2007 was how everything seemed to have been changed, for no discernible reason. I mean, they’ve gotten rid of the “File” menu bar for goodness sake. Something every user of Microsoft product user has gotten used to over the last 20 years, with every useful function – save, print, and all that – is now hidden away god knows where.
And, since you weren’t being melodramatic, can you describe the pain that using Vista causes you? Was it a stabbing or a crushing pain? Intermittent or regular?
ben / 9:56pm / 18 April 2007
Or just like having your nostrils scraped out with a vegetable peeler?
Ouch. Sorry. Couldn’t help myself.
ben / 9:57pm / 18 April 2007
IE7 doesn’t need a menubar for normal usage. They saw the same thing applicable to other applications. That small buttn bar off to the right is all you need in IE7. Takes about 10 minutes to get used to. And then you have 10% more screen space. Pretty good.
Wil / 7:40am / 19 April 2007
I tend to opt on the side changing things and freaking people out sometimes. So much good stuff doesn’t happen because developers are worried about that. Even if it takes people a few weeks to get the hang of it more space is probably a good thing. I suspect my generation copes better with that sort of thing anyway. We use so much different software that a new paradigm isn’t that big a deal.
The pain is partly aesthetic. When I see bad art I get similar pangs. HSC major work exhibitions, contemporary/experimental art exhibitions. Amateur websites. Animated GIFs.
It’s also frustration with the way the world works. It’s a very small version of the frustration I feel about the US destroying effective democracies (i.e. Nicaragua). The costs to the destroyed nation are so great and the benefits to the US are so trivial. With Vista they impose enormous costs on most users for trivial benefits to a small number of users. It’s that gut-wrenching “Why oh why!” kind of feeling.
The pain is fairly chronic. It is very rare for me to ever use Vista without some sort of pain, and most tasks I need to complete in it make me conscious of some flaw. Just logging in through two splash screens before the login screen and clicking on two Java alerts and one Javascript alert is tricky enough.
Ryan / 12:46pm / 19 April 2007
Sure. Reasonable point, but…
I’m only thirty-five!!!
ben / 9:25pm / 19 April 2007
You qualify as being in my generation. You’ll probably work out where the print button is sooner than the average 50 year-old. And you probably won’t be regaling others with the trauma of the search for years to come.
Ryan / 1:41pm / 20 April 2007