Hidden features
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in operating systems, Futures, Windows, Microsoft on
Too often little things hide away from you, little things that could simplify things or make things just that teensier bit easier. Take this one, for example:
As a followup to getting Windows 7 running on our media centre/TV, I was getting to grips with the various user account dialog boxes. I wanted to make a machine part of the domain I use here at our home office, but I really didn’t want the whole “CTRL-ALT-DEL” login screen experience. After all, I was already using fingerprint recognition to control access to my laptop - so I wasn’t at risk from fake login screens.
I was adding a couple of my standard users to the laptop in question, when I found something I didn’t recognise in the advanced tab of the User Accounts dialog. It was an option to suppress CTRL-ALT-DEL on login. “Huzzah!” I thought, “Something else good and new in Windows 7!” After all, there’s lots of UI tweaks in Windows 7, and something like this seemed to fit in with the new ethos at the heart of the OS.
But something nagged at me. The dialog box didn’t have the look of something added in Windows 7, and it was running outside the control panel window. I tracked down the same dialog box on a machine running Vista, and yes, the same option was there. Microsoft had put the option in long before I’d thought to look for it. Then it occurred to me - was the same option in XP?
As I don’t have any XP boxes around with the ability to join a domain (my biggest annoyance with XP Home running on a netbook), I had to resort to search engines (and O’Reilly’s Safari Online) to find that the function had been in Windows as far back as XP…
That’s one of the problems with Windows - in fact with pretty much all operating systems. They’ve grown over the years, building on an original set of UI ideas, on and on and on. The result is a set of user interface behaviours that inherit from old versions of the OS, and where dialog boxes don’t inherit the new ways of working. Bits of UI are buried under layers of new ways of working, and suddenly jar when you find them. The search-driven approach at the heart of the current generation of OSes changes the game, making these bits of old UI discoverable, and opening them up to all and sundry.
That’s a big problem for companies like Microsoft - there’s just so much code in Windows that it’s impossible for them to find and sanitise every window, every dialog. So what’s to be done? In the end, I suspect, nothing. It’s too expensive to find and fix them all. After all, these are dialogs that only the dedicated and most inquisitive will find - and for most of us, they’ll be settings pushed out by policies. So what matter if they look odd, or old? Even so, it’s something that needs to be cleaned up over time, slowly building a consistent user interface look-and-feel.
Of course, by the time we’ve fixed them all, it’ll be Windows 9 or 10 or OS X 8 or 9, and we’ll just have to start all over again.
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Loading ...Comment by aesthref - July 31, 2011 on 9:47 pm
Планы, ракурсы, фокусы. Люблю, когда много фоток)
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