Finally I get my computer back from Apple. Much better. So, so, much better! You don’t realise how bad it is to be stuck using Windows all the time at work, and then going home to no beautiful *functioning* iMac. Well now its back. It works this time, but what I actually mean is I haven’t found any more faults yet…
I’m not sure why or how I’m finding it so hard to cope with the general shitness of Windows at the moment. It might be because I actually have to do something with it. I was expected to use Paint to create images for documents… What is that about? I had some completely stupid restrictions on my computer so that I couldn’t install any more software, so nothing even like The GIMP to do work with. Then again for the stuff that I’m doing, the program really needed is OmniGraffle Professional.
The GUI is just terrible. There was no effort, absolutely none, put into the creation of Windows XP. I assume that’s generally accepted by everyone because it should be. They don’t even put in any effort to make the ‘taskbar’ look nice. It has the ability to go to one side or the top of the screen, yet, the rendering of it is awful in that position. The icons aren’t even centered, and the buttons (even the start menu) doesn’t even have rounded let alone finished and joined up edges. Why Redmond why?
Then again I suppose its difficult for people without proper Human User Interface Guidelines and such a thing as Aqua. When you’re copying another operating system, everything just happens to be that little bit behind. Shame really… Linux managed to make it all look pretty polished.
But why bother polishing a system that is flawed from its very beginning? I mean why attempt to make GUI look half respectable when the idea of having a window that fills the whole screen as the basis for the OS is around. Firstly, in Windows, Gates wants you to have two window sizes, full window, and not full window, which is usually just too small a size to be of any use! When you’re in full window mode as one could call it, you can’t have any windows on top, or at the side, or available to pull down or quickly glance at… You just can’t!
It makes it so impractical. Well maybe if you’re writing a report, and you want to be so focused and in a ‘I’m so not going to look at any references’ frame of mind, then just one window is great. The other 99.5% of the time, no. ‘It can’t happen here’ as The Mothers Of Invention might say. The impracticalities of it are outstandingly huge. Yes you might need to try something different to realise what you’re missing. But once you’ve seen the light, no going back! Also have a go at hovering your mouse cursor over a window that can scroll, and try scrolling, it’ll only scroll if its active. What an annoyance!
Another nice impracticality and general annoyance is perhaps when you’re thinking ‘hmm, I’d like to open an image in one folder, and compare it with an image in another folder.’ Let’s also assume in this case, you’re one of those many people who doesn’t possess a decent image organiser/editor (even Picasa anyone?). Well in Windows, provided you’ve got over the full screen window problem, you’ve got no hope! If you’d act as a normal person and double click on the file to open it, you get a nice ‘Windows Picture & Fax Viewer’ window popping up with the image in it. By this point you should be thinking two things; wow, it actually works and why call it a fax viewer too? Who ‘views’ faxes on their computer, I thought you read a fax as well (providing it had words on it, but thinking about it, who sent complex images by fax? like no one.), then again that might be me with rational thinking again! You might want to open the next window now, so you can go about the action of comparison between the images. You’d navigate to the other folder, open the file with a (swift) double click and… it would open it in the same ‘Windows Picture & Fax Viewer’ that you already had open. Oops! Now you’d just have to go back to the other file and open that again. But most likely it will open it in the same window. How useful. Isn’t it just great how Windows lets you have lots of Windows (or not) of the same application, sorry I mean program, open.
Yes, at the end of the day the solution is inevitably obvious, but who cares. The point of this is to again reiterate how terrible certain things are about a too popular OS.
Leopard would be worth getting, I might have to get it soon! I just love some of those new features!