I feel Windows 10 and 11, which I am forced to use on various work computers, represent a new era of impossible to predict UI behavior. Like, hats off if that was intended, they succeeded. I can’t make heads or tails of anything anymore, and the things I want are several options deep now.
You know you’re on the right track when you click something, and suddenly the Fisher-Price interface goes away and it opens a dialog box that hasn’t changed since Windows 2000.
I’ve been writing software synthesizers for Windows since the Windows 95 era. The low-level audio API for that (sometimes called “waveOutX” and “waveInX” was a pain in the ass to deal with programmatically but once you figured it out it worked very well and totally reliable. I’ve been continuously amazed (and secretly happy) that for the last 30 fucking years they’ve just kept bringing that same exact API forward. Even Windows CE/Windows Mobile had that shit in it in the early '00s, which let me get my code working on PDAs and the earliest smartphones. Every attempt Microsoft has made to replace this API has somehow managed to be much more difficult to work with and simultaneously buggy as hell.
I think MS actually used to have some capable engineers (one of them who helped develop the waveOutX API I actually know by name, Larry Osterman) but they all fucked off with their tens of millions of dollars in stock options decades ago and what’s left is a disasterclass.
I’ve been an IT professional for nearly 30 years and it seems like every new version of Windows they do everything they can to make me feel like an idiot who has never used a computer before. Simple things like turning off the computer isn’t intuitive. I only use Windows at work now, my personal computers are all either linux or MacOS… and I just installed linux on my old 2012 Macbook and ‘it just (mostly) works’.
Simple things like turning off the computer isn’t intuitive.
Lol like that’s even possible in Windows. I can’t remember the last version I had where the “Power Off” option actually worked. I still just hold down the physical power button until I hear that click.
It used to be that if you disabled hibernate or something, it would actually shut down completely then start back up fresh when powered on, instead of that hybrid startup thing.
If there’s some new, worse version then I have no idea, lol.
I feel Windows 10 and 11, which I am forced to use on various work computers, represent a new era of impossible to predict UI behavior. Like, hats off if that was intended, they succeeded. I can’t make heads or tails of anything anymore, and the things I want are several options deep now.
You know you’re on the right track when you click something, and suddenly the Fisher-Price interface goes away and it opens a dialog box that hasn’t changed since Windows 2000.
I’ve been writing software synthesizers for Windows since the Windows 95 era. The low-level audio API for that (sometimes called “waveOutX” and “waveInX” was a pain in the ass to deal with programmatically but once you figured it out it worked very well and totally reliable. I’ve been continuously amazed (and secretly happy) that for the last 30 fucking years they’ve just kept bringing that same exact API forward. Even Windows CE/Windows Mobile had that shit in it in the early '00s, which let me get my code working on PDAs and the earliest smartphones. Every attempt Microsoft has made to replace this API has somehow managed to be much more difficult to work with and simultaneously buggy as hell.
I think MS actually used to have some capable engineers (one of them who helped develop the waveOutX API I actually know by name, Larry Osterman) but they all fucked off with their tens of millions of dollars in stock options decades ago and what’s left is a disasterclass.
I’ve been an IT professional for nearly 30 years and it seems like every new version of Windows they do everything they can to make me feel like an idiot who has never used a computer before. Simple things like turning off the computer isn’t intuitive. I only use Windows at work now, my personal computers are all either linux or MacOS… and I just installed linux on my old 2012 Macbook and ‘it just (mostly) works’.
Lol like that’s even possible in Windows. I can’t remember the last version I had where the “Power Off” option actually worked. I still just hold down the physical power button until I hear that click.
It used to be that if you disabled hibernate or something, it would actually shut down completely then start back up fresh when powered on, instead of that hybrid startup thing.
If there’s some new, worse version then I have no idea, lol.