livingenzyme Posted February 18, 2015 Share Posted February 18, 2015 Or maybe the fact that MS seems to have a bad track record of "making things better" and instead "making things look better," at least to some. Are you sure?.x.(.x.) Yes (.x.) No ... at least since 7 SP1, it's very doubtful whether MS has made anything better at all, but it sure made Windows look a whole lot worse! Why not move over to macOS? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JorgeA Posted February 18, 2015 Share Posted February 18, 2015 Far more intuitive would be if this thing would be nameless and you would call it up by saying "Hi, Windows". You're interacting with your computer, the OS is called Windows (in all forms). Everyone calls it Windows, it's well known brand name. Why would you activate the voice recognition with "Cortana"? Why is referencing to itself as "Cortana"? Who knows that s***? As mentioned elsewhere (maybe it was this thread, I don't recall), it's all about sex. Sex sells. I'm surprised Microsoft's CEO isn't being raked over the coals about the WIndows assistant being the same nude-but-digitally-body-painted character as is found in their Halo game. And let's not forget that Apple invented theirs with the name Siri. Microsoft can't let Apple do anything without trying to do it too. It's like one of the most important industries on the planet is being run by 11 year olds. -Noel Apropos of that last paragraph, you probably saw this but others here may not have: [source] --JorgeA Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dencorso Posted February 18, 2015 Author Share Posted February 18, 2015 Or maybe the fact that MS seems to have a bad track record of "making things better" and instead "making things look better," at least to some. Are you sure?.x.(.x.) Yes (.x.) No ... at least since 7 SP1, it's very doubtful whether MS has made anything better at all, but it sure made Windows look a whole lot worse! Why not move over to macOS? Because not move is good enough. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JorgeA Posted February 18, 2015 Share Posted February 18, 2015 Someone make a mod so you can change Cortana to some other name. I would prefer Bob. Microsoft Bob. --JorgeA Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JorgeA Posted February 18, 2015 Share Posted February 18, 2015 Add - just like it is rumoured about car names - some research should be done on what happens in other languages... ... and no, I will not post what Cortana rhymes with in Italian , but let's say that it has some common points with a Mazda model name:unfit for Portuguese and Spanish-speaking countrieshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mazda_Laputa jaclaz Incidentally, I'm glad to learn that the "Chevy Nova problem" has been officially debunked. I was living in a Spanish-speaking country when the Nova came onto the market, and I don't remember anybody ever associating the car's name with a bad assessment of its capabilities -- not even as a joke! The public was intelligent enough to realize that "nova" is totally different from "no va." --JorgeA Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Formfiller Posted February 18, 2015 Share Posted February 18, 2015 (edited) Far more intuitive would be if this thing would be nameless and you would call it up by saying "Hi, Windows". You're interacting with your computer, the OS is called Windows (in all forms). Everyone calls it Windows, it's well known brand name. Why would you activate the voice recognition with "Cortana"? Why is referencing to itself as "Cortana"? Who knows that s***? As mentioned elsewhere (maybe it was this thread, I don't recall), it's all about sex. Sex sells. I'm surprised Microsoft's CEO isn't being raked over the coals about the WIndows assistant being the same nude-but-digitally-body-painted character as is found in their Halo game. No, it's about Apple-envy. MS is so far in the Apple-envy deep-end I wonder if they could even chose a different strategy like "sex sells" at this point. Aside from a porton of the gamer circle, no one knows who or what "Cortana" is. We're not talking about Lara Croft here - Cortana is pretty much a nobody to the wider public. It's not a cultural sex icon (aside for horny 15 year old xboxers - I doubt they are a critical mass though) I mean, just like you said, not even the feminists care about Cortana. If even the hysterical Anitas and Zoes of the world don't care about it, you know how important the Cortana character is... Edited February 18, 2015 by Formfiller Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JorgeA Posted February 19, 2015 Share Posted February 19, 2015 Interesting background from Paul Thurrott on Metro's roots in Windows Phone 7: Five Years Later, a Full-On Retreat from What Made Windows Phone Special Windows Phone 7 Series would feature a clean design, with crisp typography, minimalistic iconography, and no 3D highlights. “The principle is that your content shines, not the UI chrome around it,” I was told. “The interface will help make that stuff the star.” Internally, this visual design was called Metro[...] But Metro was really just a step forward in a path Microsoft had been making for many years. It had its roots in products like Media Center and of course Zune, and it shouldn’t surprise anyone that the designers of Metro came up through Microsoft by working on those very products. And this, sadly, is where things really go off the rails. In a push to legitimatize the design of Metro and the inherent superiority of Windows Phone 7 Series, Microsoft repeatedly kept communicating a pukey, design-centric language of its own. And it just made no sense to normal people. Rather than embarrass anyone specifically, let me lay out a number of key phrases that were repeated ad naseum at the time. Fast and fluid. Do a lot with little. Fierce reduction of unnecessary elements. Delightful use of white pace. Full-bleed canvas. A celebration of typography. Uncompromising sensitivity to weight, balance and scale. Alive in motion. Content, not chrome. Content is the interface. Authentically digital. Red threads. Terrible. But what’s really sad about all this designerly approach is that it simply didn’t resonate with anyone. Take the white space thing. Microsoft’s original UI design for the Windows Phone 7 Series Start screen left a “gap” on the right side of the screen, a purposeful bit of white space. Everyone hated it. It was a waste of valuable onscreen real estate that could have been used for live tiles. So after trying to explain why this was good design, Microsoft finally relented and filled in the space. It was the first of many design capitulations to common sense. Specific Metro design ideals that have been stripped away to nothing include hubs and panoramic experiences, pivot-based tabs, single-scale UIs that don’t let the user change font sizes or colors, and app bars and app menus. Today’s Windows Phone does have live tiles, but the rest of the system seems cribbed from the iPhone and Android playbook, with hamburger menus and other bland UI. Why? Because that’s what users expect, and what they want, and they will not switch to Windows Phone if it is too unfamiliar. (They don’t switch regardless, but that’s a separate story.)[emphasis in original] LOL on that last one... And so, in light of the ongoing failure of this concept, Microsoft forges ahead with it in Windows 10. --JorgeA Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
NoelC Posted February 19, 2015 Share Posted February 19, 2015 (edited) >Take the white space thing One point to sum things up. Maybe it boils down to "user information" and "technical data". People who need technical data to do their work don't need it spread out. Those folks don't have cognitive overload. They need all the data in order to be able to create tools to allow reasonable manipulation of user information. Somewhere there's a thread on Microsoft's own forums I wrote blasting Microsoft on spreading things out in Explorer around the time of Win 7. Don't look now but they did more of it in 8, and now 10. Ever compare the information density on an XP screen with anything from a current version (note that I didn't say Modern, because writing with crayons on colored construction paper is no more modern than using charred bones on cave walls). I can only guess that there are some quite simple-minded people making decisions at Microsoft, who prefer not to see very much scary and daunting data on their computer screen. At various parts of my career, when desktops were more physical than virtual, those of us in the know used to say "a clean desk is the sign of a slacker". -Noel Edited February 19, 2015 by NoelC Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tripredacus Posted February 19, 2015 Share Posted February 19, 2015 Is it possible that Windows UI is still being developed with 4:3 displays in mind? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
NoelC Posted February 19, 2015 Share Posted February 19, 2015 I freely admit to not knowing much of the ins and outs of the "Metro/Modern Design Standards". I certainly haven't yet been able to discern any reasonable pattern in them by (briefly) trying to use Metro/Modern Apps, except they all come off to me as "dumbed down". And the programming language must not be easy to master, as even Microsoft's own Apps are quite buggy (reference the various dysfunctional versions of the Win 10 Feedback App so far). But if I had to guess, I'd guess they're being designed for screens the size and shape of those on phones or phablets. -Noel Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JorgeA Posted February 25, 2015 Share Posted February 25, 2015 Stardock to deliver a Windows 10 Start menu replacement Stardock announces Start10, a Windows 10 Start menu replacement Brad Wardell talks Start10, the follow-up to the popular Start8 Start menu app Check out the gallery in the middle link. No doubt the good folks at Classic Shell are also hard at work making sure they have their own alternative ready for Win10 GA. --JorgeA Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
NoelC Posted February 25, 2015 Share Posted February 25, 2015 Classic Shell already worked fine with Win 10, as long as you rename the installer file to get around Microsoft's arbitrary warning. As with prior versions of Windows that shipped with Start Menus, Classic Shell is simply a better implementation (works more smoothly and reliably) than any of the Microsoft implementations. these Start button replacement tools strive to return Windows to be more focused on General Purpose Computing, where Microsoft is clearly trying very hard to move it away from that and toward being for App Store Delivery and Content Consumption. Almost no one can believe / accept that Microsoft would change their system essentially to be something entirely different than what it's own name implies, but it cannot be denied that the desktop is being reduced in usability. Note the subtle removal of a small amount of usability from the Taskbar (noting it's harder to see where one button stops and the other starts now) between version 9879 and 9926 in the name of "changing the style": 9879: 9926: -Noel Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TELVM Posted February 25, 2015 Share Posted February 25, 2015 (edited) ^ You know what those Windows 1.0, flat, monochrome, low contrast, hieroglyphic icons look like? Low-visibility insignia, "... used to increase ambiguity ... and to avoid compromising the camouflage ...". Exactly what you need for UI ease of usability. Edited February 25, 2015 by TELVM Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JorgeA Posted February 25, 2015 Share Posted February 25, 2015 ^^ You're right!! Good point. The app icons aren't that much easier to see in the Technical Preview's own redesigned Start Menu. They're all surrounded by monochrome squares of various colors, which actually makes it harder to spot them by a visual scan than if they had just the icons and not the squares. --JorgeA Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JorgeA Posted February 28, 2015 Share Posted February 28, 2015 Paul Thurrott celebrates the apparent revival of the desktop PC market in Windows Weekly #396: Paul: The one thing, bringing it back to the PC thing, the thing I really am most happy about looking forward to this year and thinking about Windows especially and Microsoft in general is this kind of notion of a PC resurgence. Because ultimately the device stuff will always be interesting to me. I love Windows Phone and all that stuff, Cloud service. But the PC to me is still the heart of what this is all about. And I feel like in the Windows 8 generation we got away from that. Right before Windows came out, Microsoft believed very deeply that the future of personal computing was these devices. And that was it. And I think what they underestimated was the amount of interest and need for actual PCs, just productivity devices. These things that work really well. That are what Mary Jo just called a known quantity. I’m really happy about that. Ultimately I really just care about that stuff so much. And this is all reminding me of how we had kind of lost that for a couple years there. [emphasis added] Had they asked, we could've told Microsoft that three years ago, saving a lot of grief all around, but what do we know -- we're just a bunch of ignorant peasants out in the field and they're the expert geniuses in their ivory towers. --JorgeA Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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