What is Digg?95 Comments
- gcnaddict, on 10/12/2007, -24/+50Apple fanbois will digg you down because you're implying that their OS sucks. Heck, I'll be dugg down too just for saying this.
I tested Vista/Longhorn for well over two years. The UI, even in its alpha stages, was better than the UI in XP. What does this frenchie know? - dt40, on 10/12/2007, -0/+25Vista's menu latency is a little annoying, but nowhere near as bad as Digg's designed-in latency when I "show comment" or bury a comment. Waiting for that to happen gets real old, real fast.
(I still love Digg) - 7of7, on 10/12/2007, -34/+54The UI is very nice. Those of us who actually use it know that. It is fast and intuitive. The design is very subtle and I'd say it's refreshing after years of grey, brushed metal, and fluorescent blue. Vista just looks and works well, that's all.
- TNHitokiri, on 10/12/2007, -5/+23The UI is nice graphically, but I feel that it is less usable than XP. Possibly because I am so used to XP.
Everything seems to take up more space in Vista. There's just a feeling that there is less room to work with. - leobaby, on 10/12/2007, -5/+22I find it cluttered and incoherent.
And yes everything does take up more space since every single window has a ten pixel border around it. - deadbaby, on 10/12/2007, -3/+17"Menu latency, Pfeiffer said, remains a major problem in Vista, which scored 20% slower than XP. "Windows XP was a major step forward from Windows 98, but Vista is back to where 98 was," Pfeiffer said."
I've been annoyed by this lately. Something is causing Media Center to hangup randomly my HTPC so when I pull up task manager and right click on the task sometimes nothing happens and I do it again, and nothing happens, then all the sudden the menu flashes open and closed twice leaving me to click yet a THIRD time to get a menu. It's not the fastest system but I would think a Pentium D/1GB DDR2/ATI x1600 would be more responsive. - arthurbarnhouse, on 10/12/2007, -3/+17I hate to say this when someone else decided to be so blindingly stupid (calling someone a "French *****" doesn't actually prove anything), but the Apple UI, as well designed as it is, never seemed "responsive" to me. In fact Fatbits over at Arstechnica has bitched constantly about how unresponsive the finder is. In general I think Mac has a more intuitive design, but I'm not sure about this claim.
Also remember this is an analyst. think carefully about whether you'd like to agree with an analyst. - zumpiez, on 10/12/2007, -7/+19Where I most disagree with this is the mouse accuracy. I am absolutely NOT comfortable with OSX's mouse acceleration behavior. It feels uncomfortable to me even if I crank the speed all the way up. If the sluggish feeling is what is necessary for greater accuracy, I'd rather do without it.
- Roger, on 10/12/2007, -2/+13And you make a very convincing argument...
- BESsy, on 10/12/2007, -2/+12When I was still in school I had the same problem. No matter how high you turn up the speed, it still feels like the mouse is dragging around in molasses.
- akarpo, on 10/12/2007, -5/+14I'm sorry, I disagree with this analyst's opinion. I have a Macbook Pro, ran OS X/XP about 50/50 and after doing a clean install of Vista, I was pleasantly surprised. The split is now 75/25 after installing Vista. Some small caveats; I disabled the sidebar and UAC. After that, I couldn't be happier with Vista.
- appletalk, on 10/12/2007, -9/+18I assure you, having OS X and Windows Vista installed in the same Macbook Pro laptop, that Windows UI is far more responsive,
even in a simple task like opening a Window. - Roger, on 10/12/2007, -8/+16@mikesty
race: "A group of people united or classified together on the basis of common history, nationality, or GEOGRAPHIC distribution"
Nothing wrong with calling his comment racist.
Or if you prefer, call it Francophobic.
And yes, you can question the validity, but you should have some evidence to back up your claim. - Me1000, on 10/12/2007, -10/+18Flip-3D one of Vista few original features of Vista...
Is pointless, the menu bar did the same thing, they are trying to make eye candy like OS X, but it didnt work.
Expose' is very easy to switch, when i have to scroll my mouse wheel to flip through windows it waists my time, especially when i go past the window I wanted! then the windows just look like crap in Flip-3D! They are spaced too far apart, and they are all different sizes! - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -9/+16Yes 7of7, you ARE an unbiased source...
"I'm not sure that's something to be proud of. 'Hi, I failed at life, that's why I use a Mac. It makes me feel slightly less miserable'"
"It's not a discussion, it's a bunch of Mac fans throwing about completely unsupported claims so that they can feel better about their OS of choice being the laughing stock of the computer industry. Apple has spent half a billion marketing it and still can't even get 5% of the OS market."
(Commenting on OSS)
"Was it ever a grassroots social movement of idealistic underdogs? More accurately has always been an outspoken movement full of arrogant elitists with inferiority complexes intent of foisting unusable software off on the rest of the world. There's nothing wrong with the idea of open source, but it sure attracts the worst people. Look no further than the freakshow Stallman for an example."
"You're a tool with a trust fund? Are you afraid to stand out in a crowd? Are you ready to sell your soul to a company that makes mediocre PCs and has a bizarre design philosophy? If so...buy a Mac."
Face it, you hate anything Linux and Mac. You worship Gates. - MioTheGreat, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7"Possibly because I am so used to XP."
That's the thing.
Vista comes with spiffy new tools like breadcrumb navigation that are inherently better than XP's ***** "Let's just show a text box and an 'up' button" method, but until you get used to using them, you've been slowed down. Once you get to using them, however, you'll find that XP feels clunky, primitive, and even idiotic at times. - OBKenobi, on 10/12/2007, -10/+16ROFL the same MS trolls are still here.
7of7, GCNaddict, RedLion, etc.
These guys have got be getting paid for doing this. - leobaby, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6Arrgg, this bugged me so much. Like molasses is right, and then you move a little faster and it zips past where you wanted to go.
This is where the software that comes with a mouse is handy dandy. I tried the kensington and the microsoft drivers and they both seemed to help a bit. There was a tweak somewhere that made it accelerate like a normal computer with a driver. - Roger, on 10/12/2007, -16/+21=>"It is fast and intuitive."
Thats not the whole story though. Its also about how long it takes to do tasks like open folders and delete files.
The article quotes measurable numbers, so unless you find a flaw in their measuring procedure or have contradicting data you can't really refute it. - TokenUser, on 10/12/2007, -3/+8From the article:
""Menu latency is the time it takes an operating system to display a menu," said Pfeiffer. "In Windows, it's not immediate. That's not a speed or performance issue, but a design choice.""
I wonder if he had applied the fix to stop OSX from "unfolding" its menus. He says that turning off Aero allows Windows to perform at XP speed (which he found acceptable). Appears to me that a registry tweak to speed up the menu unfolding is all that is required.
Less than 1 minute on Google found me this page: http://www.vistajuice.com/2007/02/tweak_your_aero.php
Whodda thunk it? - goodoldharris, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4From the article: "In Vista, a folder fades in, as if it appears out of nothing. It looks great, but after 10 times you realize you're losing time waiting for that."
MS often seems to think that good interface equals "eye candy". But useless eye-candy gets annoying really quick. Apple's interfaces aren't better because they look nicer. They're better because they are designed smarter.
I use both XP and OS X, and although I can find things to complain about in OS X (ie. Finder could be way better), I can't say there are many user tasks I prefer doing in XP. That said, I'd be very very interested to see a study showing user tasks where XP or Vista outperform OS X. Point is, the benchmarks used in this test are few and may not tell the whole story. - victorc26, on 10/12/2007, -2/+6Vista has so far been very responsive. Even more at times compared to XP.
I guess it depends on the machine you're using. (Ex, sometimes different motherboards can differ in speed/system responsiveness) - geeker819, on 10/12/2007, -2/+5I've been using Windows as my choice as OS most of my life, but this version definitely takes a step back.
Windows XP introduced stability and efficiency, while Windows Vista is the complete opposite.
See - Windows Vista only seems so new because most of the many basic features are rearranged, thus created an illusion. Sure there are some really neat features like Aero Glass (which gets quite old fast IMO, but then again I'm all about functionality rather than eye candy), free-scaling of icons, and search.. oh wait that has been there since what, Windows 3.1? There was no reason to implement the search function into the start menu. Windows search on Windows XP was quite fast, why they felt the need to destroy the entire purpose of the start menu for a search bar? I don't know. What's the deal with the display settings? They stripped most of it down, and slapped most of it over inside the control panel instead of just one central location. Why don't they just keep it all in one place rather than have five different things in the categorized control panel. Flip 3D is a complete joke, and Alt+Tab is still better. At least with alt+tab I can know everything that is running, with flip 3d you see one image at a time, with everything else piled and 'censored' behind it until you proceed. How that is efficient I will never know. If they showed everything at one time - then maybe it would be useful.
Windows Vista simply fails. For now, I'm sticking with Windows XP. - Wang, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3More flamebait nonsense. I bet half the people who have dugg this have not even tried Vista rtm or dare I say it, are loyal fans of another company (mentioning no names) who simply post ignorant and negative articles against MS whenever they get a chance.
- necrisque, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Remember, this isn't about performance. In the practical cases we're talking about 100th-parts of a second, windows fading in and wait time for menus to appear. You will not experience the UI to be slow or laggy, okay?
The test is purely about user interaction speed. Those little "penalties" you pay in miliseconds every time you open a window or have to wait for a menu to appear gather up over time and essentially mean "more wasted time per action". In a loong time if you bothered you can probably measure that time spent in seconds, minutes and hours depending on how much you use a computer daily.
That's why the analyst says it's a step back, not because it's some clunky slow crap interface. From the comments it seems like most people here did not understand what the test is about at all. - undersky, on 10/12/2007, -4/+7I absolutely hates the keyboard and mouse on my Mac! Maybe I just switched, I don't know, since I am not a fanboy of either, I msut say the mouse behaves quite awkwardly on mac.
First I thought it was my cheap MS optical's fault, but when I tried to $59 mighty mouse it did the same thing. Constantly it does not land on the icon I intended to go, all due to its weird handling of acceleration and jerkiness. When I say jerkiness I mean, if I attempt to draw a circle, even slowly, it always appears to be polygons.....
Keyboard is the MAJOR GRIP! It took me one week before I found a program (TextWrangler) that can handle the "End" and "Home" keys for pure text editing.
"Home" and "End" keys behave differently in different programs, it's super super super annoying.
By the way, I think Mac UI is very nice, but I am so used to Windows that sometimes I really miss the Image and Document Viewer in XP (nothing can beat that, heck, the Preview, it can't even move to the next file!!!!!! SO FRUSTRATING!!)
Don't even let me start on iPhoto...when I try to edit ANY picture, it has to import, meaning DUPLICATE THE FILE IN ITS OWN FOLDER IN MY HARD DRIVE. What kind of program is that?
Beside these complaints I still like my Mac a lot though for its beautiful UI, I mean, just look at all the 3rd party softwares, Mac softwares all look far better than MS 3rd party softwares.
It is a rather shallow point I know, that's just my preference. - EzarKun, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4I like Office 2007 UI.
A little compact, but very cool. - Invid, on 10/12/2007, -2/+4The UI is pretty pleasing to the eye, and a definite improvement over XP. That said, I can't for the life of me figure out why MS went to a 3D desktop and only replicated the 2D desktop of yesteryear. Microsoft missed a prime opportunity to innovate here. They are way overdue for virtual desktops by default just for starters.
Even the early builds of Aero were impressively polished. I use Linux now, but it has nothing to do with the quality of the UI. - Luuvitonen, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2So you run OS X more now than you did when dual booting XP?
- slipgate, on 10/12/2007, -2/+4Ok first off who is this french guy and why does anyone care what he thinks? If you put Vista on older pc of course its going to run slower than XP did, just like win 2000 ran slower than win 98 and so on, its just got more overhead and higher hardware requirements - that doesn't mean the OS sucks. Besides no one is going to care a couple years from now when everyone is running dual or quad cores.
- zionKing, on 10/12/2007, -3/+5Right, your comment ignorantly stereotyping a nation of people is *much* better than stereoyping people based on race *rolls eyes*
- compwizz, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I admit that when I first switched to the Mac, I couldn't stand the mouse acceleration, now I have no problem with it. Just takes some getting used to i guess.
But, for those of you that would like to tweak the mouse acceleration parameters and the like, check out these programs.
MouseZoom (http://homepage.mac.com/bhines/mousezoom.html) - This free program allows you to adjust the speed of the mouse well beyond the maximum values OS X allows. I've tried this, it works quite well.
MouseFix (http://www.knockknock.org.uk/mac/) - This is a free command line script someone wrote, its supposed to fix the way OS X handles acceleration. I've never tried it personally so I can tell you if it works or not.
Steer Mouse (http://plentycom.jp/en/steermouse/payment_frame.html) - This program is Shareware, it has a trial version that lets you try it out though. I personally wouldn't pay money to fix the mouse settings, but it is another alternative.
Hopefully some of those programs will allow you to adjust your mouse settings to your liking. - VeganG, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I use Firefox but I actually do think that the less-cluttered appearance of IE7 over IE6 is an improvement. Not that my opinion is worth much.
- Endoplasmic, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2While I love the eye candy that Vista has provided I can't help but agree with this article.
I upgraded my machine (not for Vista, more for games and to jump on the dx10 train early) and I score a 5.5 in Vista (which I think to be fairly decent) but I can't get around how slow things move (especially the start menu, god I hate how everything is in 1 pane... I've got 1800 pixels to the right the damn thing can use).
Using explorer is also slower than XP (even in Vista classic) in just clicking around. Just "feels" slower and I guess someone has tested the theory.
If you can get past him pushing OSes on you and drill to the numbers, you'll figure out why this new OS *is* taking a step back. - VeganG, on 10/12/2007, -3/+5@tokenuser
I often bring up to my Mac fanatic friends how a lot of Windows complaints are rendered moot by the ability to tweak and customize to your heart's content. However, they argue that you shouldn't have to do that, and now the complaint is that the DEFAULT settings are deficient. Some people just won't let you win an argument. - Roger, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2It does look pretty good, but the new menus take up too much space. I don't see them scaling well for programs with more menu commands.
- shirosamurai, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I am very curious to know just how many people that bash Vista have actually sat down and used it? I picked it up a week ago, and I'm finding it very smooth and intuitive. It looks great, AND runs great, and this is coming from someone who has never been a big fan of Microsoft. I will admit I have noticed a very slight decrease in game performance... however, it's pretty negligible -- something I'm sure will be fixed when nVidia gets their act together and/or when Microsoft releases more updates.
- astrosmash, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3This was exactly my impression of Vista. Things don't appear, they fade in, slowly. Click a button and it doesn't depress, it slowly fades to another state. It makes the system feel uncomfortably sluggish.
It seems for every problem they fixed in XP, they can't help but introduce another problem. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -2/+3Expose is a workaround for a problem that doesn't exist in Windows: the mess created by the Mac OS trying to use one menu bar for every application that's running, and the proliferation of floating windows beneath it.
- tamoneya, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2id like to see him run this friction test on beryl linux.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1But hm, a search in Explorer can show you a list of hits and WHERE THEY ARE. Try that with the vaunted Spotlight, and you find a list of crap (often identically named) with no paths. Instead of being able to scan down the list of hits and determine which of them is what you're looking for, you have to click on each one and peer at the bottom of the window to see its path. Just plain stupid.
- dtfinch, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2If you don't like the animations, special effects, and other eye candy, you can turn them all off.
My last XP desktop looked like Windows 95. Classic style everything. No shadows or animation. No cleartype. I didn't even have title bar gradients. It all just got in the way. - Roger, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2I think he meant folder icons.
- dacheetah, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1You Americans have a history of asking the French (and others) what they think, and then ignoring them completely and going to war anyway.
- Christia, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I'm not saying this guy is wrong, just that I'd like to know more about his methodology. Being a dedicated Mac user, I still find XP to be more fluent and offer less friction in its gui.
- Eallan, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I'm enjoying vista home premium, even paid for it. First time I've paid for windows; I figured it was due. Whoever up there said XP search was fast is absolutely crazy.
- emer, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1This just in. Some guy says Windows is no good. He also says OSX and all Linux distros are no good either. Whatever shall we do!!!!!
- Eoxx, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Instead of doing aggressive and phobic remarks on the nationality of researchers, you could take this research as an 'optimistic news' : the fact that people not working at Microsoft do give remarks on the new MS OS is a good thing for Microsoft. If someone give you feedback on your product, you can enhance it if you think the remark is accurate ...This is a useful to have external feedback for a product. When you work in a closed environment you are blind to a lot of things cause it is criticizing your own work and it is not easy to do.
- unassuming, on 03/31/2008, -0/+0You're saying this, on Digg?
Haha oh wow - MotionAesthetic, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Honest question: In Windows Vista, can you close a maximised window by moving your mouse into the top right corner of the screen and clicking? The way the UI is designed, it doesn't look so.
Also, is there any way to make it look like Windows 98? -
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