Back to Windows: second day

Today was a slightly better Windows day. Google lit up my windows life a bit. I downloaded the google pack. I didn't get around to trying very much of the apps. But what was enough for me was that I finally had something that worked more or less exactly like spotlight. It was a relief to be able to quickly locate any file on my hard-drive with the google desktop search. It seemed to work just as fast as spotlight. Only downside seemed to be that it depended on a background process indexing your files constantly.

But there were new and old Windows annoyances again today. I installed some more apps and again I noticed all the annoying completely unnecessary questions. E.g. Thunderbird let you chose between custom or simple install. Except custom install doesn't give you any more options, so they make you answer yet another unnecessary question. Then of course the usual, do you want a link here or there, do you want to launch the app after install etc.

Now given that both Firefox and Thunderbird are cross platform and basically the exact same app is installed on OS X, it is obvious that all these annoyances are not actually necessary. But it seems that although Windows don't require or enforce this kind of behavior for installers, the custom is so ingrained that everybody just do it.

I just pray that all these pop ups and are you sure you want to do this questions wont overtake OS X the way they have Windows. We already had a change for the worse in Safari with that. Every time you download an app now you have to click okay, right after it finishes download.

Printing
Printing is not something I know very much about, because seldom do the printer configuration myself and have not owned that many printers. What I do know however is that every time I have plugged my Mac to a printer whether on a network or directly it has just worked. It required no choices, driver or software install on my part. When I plugged a printer into my LAN using airport, I didn't even have to search for it on the network, it just popped up in the printer list.

Get access to a printer on my Windows box at work though was a whole other story. I let the others that work there fix it for me. That sure took its time. First they had to figure out which printer on the network actually corresponded to the physical printer located behind me. When they figured that out, Windows asked them to specify the printer brand. After that Windows wanted us to tell it which one of a zillion different Epson models in a list was our Epson model. We couldn't find it.... ah well it did eventually work, after a lot of wasted time.

Program crashes
Windows XP might not crash and burn into a blue screen like in the good old Windows days, but it doesn't mean crashes have stopped being a problem. Several times I experience apps hanging and then almost taking down the whole OS. The OS remained unresponsive for a quite a long time. Long enough for me to wonder whether I should just reboot. The other problem is that apps stop doing repaint in Windows when they hand and so you think you got the kill app dialog open, and you click kill like crazy only to realize that there is no dialog there. There is only left over pixels because a redraw hasn't happened. How are novice users going to understand the difference between left over pixels and a dialog that is actually unresponsive?

Redraws
I couldn't remember this from when I used XP before, but perhaps it was very noticeable now because I am used to OS X's smooth double buffered windows.I could very clearly see the windows being redrawn when I moved them around. And this was on a 2 Ghz processor, with a good graphics card!! Not only that but when I moved a Window over acrobat reader, it was simply pathetic how visible the redraws were. It looked unprofessional an unpolished. Kind of the same feeling I got when I used Linux the first time (Red Hat 3.x something). That was back in the day when programmers seemed to have been making the icons and graphics themselves.

Hotkeys
I tried pressing a lot of buttons today to do things like quitting apps and closing windows from the keyboard. But without any luck. I still believe there should be something, except I haven't found the keys yet.

Handling Windows
I hate it how Windows insist on blowing up all the apps I launch to full screen each time I launch them, even when they contain very little information and do not need to take up all the screen real-estate on my big LCD.

I find it inefficient to work with many windows and apps open at the same time compared to OS X. I can throw the mouse up to the menu bar always on the top like on OS X to access the menu items. Instead I got to more carefully aim to hit the narrow strip of menu within each window.

That there is no notion of running applications, just open windows strike me as very retarded now. I close all my browser Windows in Firefox, but the app keeps running because the little download window is still open. That just don't seem right. Or when I work with an editor, I close a file because I am done reading it, and I want to open another file afterwards, except this closes the whole app!! So I have to relaunch it to access the open menu again.

GUI: Floating panels
Windows IDE's are typically contained within one big window which contains a number of panels for different functionality. E.g one for editing files, one for browsing files in the project, documentation panel, different debug panels etc. When you try to rearrange these panels everything jumps around like crazy. Moving the panel into the position you want is an art. E.g. I wanted a panel in the bottom left corner. I kept moving it around looking for the and outline that would indicate that it would place itself at the bottom. But no. I gave up and moved it to the top left corner. Then I moved the panel that got pushed down up, and I managed what I wanted.

I can't help feeling that it is a bit ironic that MS is coming up with all these fancy GUI metaphors to deal with problems caused by this and an ever increasing large number of floating toolbars (which have the same placement problems), when this problem was pretty much solved long time ago in the first GUIs. By using floating palettes and don't use one big enclosing window you solve these problems. However I don't think xCode is that great UI wise, but it is a sort of anomaly. It would probably have been better if it was more like the IDE in the OpenStep days. Although some of its problems can be solved partly by simply using a larger screen.

Conclusions
I think that over time MS can never truly beat Apple on the OS scene interface wise. The problem is that they can't alienate their users completely by changing some of the very basic ways in which windows works. This means despite all the new advance technologies MS puts into Windows, we will still be stuck with: drive letters, menus inside each window and no notion of apps as an entity. I also doubt the way MS does MDI's is going to radically change.