Windows UI Taskforce: Your Help Wanted
Linked by Thom Holwerda on Sun 1st Jun 2008 14:35 UTC
Graphics, User Interfaces As I already explained in the first Usability Terms article, consistency goes a long way in ensuring a pleasurable user experience in graphical user interfaces. While some user interfaces appear to be more graphically consistent than others, Windows has always appeared to be worse than most others - probably because it carries with it stuff that dates back to the 16bit era. IStartedSomething agrees with this, and started the Windows UI TaskForce.
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RE[2]: Why?
by MollyC on Mon 2nd Jun 2008 00:58 UTC in reply to "RE: Why?"
MollyC
Member since:
2006-07-04

I agree with you. I'd rather see a community improve something which is OWNED by the community instead of them helping a big company which has done pretty much everything it could to hurt innovation - and in that sense, that same community. And as a psychologist, I well know past behavior is often the best predictor of future behavior. Maybe I'm extreme, but I think it's bad to support proprietary software in any way. I think the whole concept is bad for humanity. Information and knowledge should be free, and by extend should the infrastructure on which it is transported and spread.


Clearly, those that are using Windows and want certain things "fixed" (I put that in quotes because many of the things listed in the article aren't bugs, but are requests), have an incentive to report said issues. Who are you to tell them not to do that, or look down on them for doing it? You don't think it's worthwhile to report problems in Windows (because it's not OSS or whatever)? Fine, then don't. That's your choice. But it's others' choice to go ahead and report the problems they find. Your calling these people saps for reporting problems with a closed source product is akin to a closed source dev calling an open source dev a sap for working for free to enrich the pockets of the investors and execs of a company that distributes the resulting OSS product. That's what you sound like when I read your self-righteous, self-congratulatory post.

I get the feeling that what really upsets you about this is that you hate Microsoft (you've said as much in your post), and therefore *want* their products to suck and can't abide any effort to improve their products undertaken by those that use said products.

Oh, and save the self-righteous "owned by the community" bull. The people reporting these UI problems aren't necessarily developers, they are users. And non-dev users aren't part of the "community" that "owns" OSS. For example, I and most I know use Firefox, an open source product, but none of us feel that we are in some "community that owns" Firefox, anymore than we'd feel that we "owned" Opera, IE, or any other closed-source browser. That's because we don't give a damn that the code is OSS. It's just another product.

One last thing: This article has nothing to do with OSS advocacy or your anti-Microsoft crusade. Every time a Microsoft article is posted here, the haters come out of the woodwork to spout the usual lines on how Microsoft sucks and how some OSS alternative is better or the OSS "philosophy" is better, or some other claptrap. When an Linux article is posted, you almost NEVER see some Windows fanboy derailing the thread with anti-Linux BS or pro-MS advocacy. To put is simply: This article is NOT about you. It's about Windows users that want to improve it. Not everything is about you. You want to advocate OSS? Then do it in an appropriate article rather than derailing every single Microsoft article's thread with pro-OSS anti-Microsoft bilge.

Edited 2008-06-02 01:11 UTC

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