rangerBlog

01:39 am

My laptop was stolen on Friday. I was pissed.

With no sign that it's coming back, I purchased a new one on Monday. Another HP Pavillion, one or two model numbers above my old one.

One hitch: It runs Vista.

*cries*

I've spent 6 hours gutting awful interface changes, restoring the instinctive up-a-level button, etc. Hate, hate HATE.

I cannot figure out how to search for a file in Vista. The new search interface is-- awful. A mess of nonpersistant settings, dumb-as-rocks default windows, out-of-date indexes that don't reflect changes to the file system and searches for files that simply stubbornly won't show up.

A search leading me to Microsoft's Vista Blog reveals the startling truth- not only is the Search now stuck in broken-mode-- they've also thrown out the entire search paradigm used by every search function-- ever-- in favor of a nifty new proprietary search format that uses bizarre encapsulated braces and finicky control-terms! Yay! All the headache of Regular expressions (to perform a BASIC search instead of this enhanced garbage!) and none of the power!

You know what- I like Google Desktop too! It's incredibly nice and useful to be able to find things quickly, and to have text cache and mid-document searching, it's a great and powerful application!
Google Desktop is also completely unusable for many things. I have multiple external hard drives. They get indexed willy-nilly- so if an external drive mounts as E: once and H: another time the files show up both places. And clicking on the E: response in Google Desktop Search results in an error message- the file does not exist even if that file IS there on H:!
It's a great, wonderful search paradigm... that is absolutely useless for many basic system tasks. Which is why GDS was a great tool to use hand-in-hand with a basic search- the right tool for the right job!

But Microsoft has replaced basic search with another Desktop search- and no real ability to run a basic search-a t all. Now instead of tools that work hand-in-hand I've got two left hands and I can't jerk off because I can't find my porn anymore.

Does Google have a 'Basic Fucking Search that Works' program I can use as my other hand now? Seriously- anything? I'm tearing my hair out trying to perform the most basis searches, and it makes me want to cry.

Microsoft, as a corporate culture, seems to have 'redesign it, even if it doesn't need it' deeply ingrained into themselves. I'm going to use the new folder icons as an example.

We all know the basic folder visual paradigm- a manila folder icon.

Vista has cleverly made the fodler icon fresh and exciting by turning it on its side!



Ignoring (for the moment) that the visual metaphor breaks down because turning a manila folder that way would cause its contents to spill out, I have a more fundamental problem with the icon redesign.

Let's look at the footprint of standard icons from time immemorial!

file

folder

program

Hey, look! The 3 basic kinds of icons, files, folders, and programs, have different footprints! Files are tall and thin, programs are blocks, and folders are square! There is no technical reason for this, they all use the same icon format, but this is the convention that's built up over 25 years! The result is- even if a program/folder/file uses a custom icon, we can tell at-a-glance whether it's a file, folder, or program because it's footprint is part of the visual metaphor we uses to interact with the operating system!

Now let's look at Vista's icons!

file

folder

program

Well, they seem to have fucked it up, haven't they? It's not a big deal when viewing folders full-size... but when viewing using small (16x16) icons folders no longer read like folders, they look like files.

I'm sure I'll eventually get used to this- and pick out the Vista folder icon despite it begin visually coded as a file instead of a folder... but it's nicely symbolic of Microsoft's place in the marketplace. They did not create the icon footprint paradigm, that came out of Redmond, Microsoft just stole it without understanding why it worked. As a reuslt- for 25 years Microsoft ripped off these footprint from someone who knew what they were doing, their icon footprint paradigm made sense despite an absence of intention or awareness of its existence on Microsoft's part. But they change it- and because Micrsoft dosn't even realize it's supposed to be doing something, they make it a total fucking mess.

I think what irks me is that- this kind of shit is not a trade secret. Apple publishes it's Human Interface Guidelines freely for all to read- explaining how they things things should work in MacOS, and their operative logic why! (I read them cover to cover circa System 7.) Microsoft doesn't have to be bound by Apple's solutions to those human interface problems... but they should at least acknowledge they exist

In summary:

Vista's search function is a lot like talking to a Disney tour guide. It gives you whichever canned-response answer best correlates to your question-- regardless whether that actually answers the question you were asking.
Microsoft employees employ much the same tactics when people ask how to restore the old search function. "You can access our new advanced search capabilities by..."