But after forcing myself to use the newer version, I have found I can get to programs faster from the Start Menu by having Printers, Control Panel, My Computer, Network Neighborhood, etc. on the Start Menu, and keep my Desktop less cluttered.
Likewise, a quick glance tells me what that person's default browser is, as well as the default email program: They will be at the top of the first column.
At times, I will take the time to present these observations to those clients and I find that some will consider converting, while others will shoot me down, because change=evil.
The ribbon in Office 2007 seems to be the same deal: Since I am a previous version user, finding things is aggravating. If I hadn't clicked on the "glowing" round Office icon, I would have searched for Save for quite some time. This in a word processor!
But to a new user, the most obvious things I might need to do are right there, without all of the noise of all of the items I don't need in my way. The most basic markup tools are on the first ribbon presented. If I move to a slightly more advanced task, like outlines or inserting graphics, I get a different ribbon that has the exact tools I need.
Just because I forced myself to get used to the structure of the menus does not mean it was the most efficient way to organize those tools. Reminds me of what I have heard regarding qwerty vs. Dvorák.
So, just like going to a new restaurant and taking a chance on the house special outside of my comfort zone rather than ordering what I am used to, with each new operating system and version, I try them out for a few months before passing judgment.
I just keep a folder of program icons that I can launch from the taskbar, much easier to deal with.
That and I do love pinning programs to the taskbar as I can keep the things I run all the time in the exact same position.
It makes me simultaneously feel like an old fogey
shaking his cane at progress
Was the world mad?
OSX has somehow pushed everyone (including competing systems) into a state of madness where gaudiness is prized. But phones will encourage sensible interface developments because normal people find them less intimidating and have increased expectations of a clean, powerful, responsive interface.
(a) Right click on the terminal app in the dock for a list of open windows.
(b) Use command + backtick to cycle between windows in the same application.
(c) Just use tabs in the terminal app instead of opening separate windows.
So it's kind of hard to take this as a legitimate usability complaint.
Also, I am kind of doubtful that you have actually used OS X. If you had, you would surely know that you cannot use Command+Tab to switch between multiple windows within the same application. I.e., it is not even an inefficient way of doing this, it is simply not a way of doing it at all.
I was suggesting that I could cycle through all open windows with Command+Tab, not those in the same application. Isn't that what Command+Tab does?
No, it switches between applications, not windows, which you would know if you'd ever actually used OS X. Why are you complaining about an OS which you've never even used?
A fogey shaking his cane at progress? No, I like progress. I like the new start menu design. I don't like the fact that I have a Core i7 with 6GB of RAM and the start menu still takes as much time to start populating results as it takes to open a TCP socket to somewhere tens of miles away over half a dozen intermediate systems, submit a search query, Google to run it through ~700 servers and return the results.
Or that it doesn't match substrings, so 'irefox' has no results. Irefox? IREFOX? Are you an idiot, there's no program called irefox!
Or that it sorts in useless order - so a search for 'i' shows "IBM National Support BBS.ht', a Hyperterminal shortcut I've never used, above 'Internet Explorer'.
But even with that, the start menu is good. It's progress. I like it.
I don't like the changes to Sharing and Security and Ownership on files and folders going from XP Pro/2003 Server to Vista Pro/2008 Server. That's not progress, that's just adding extra button clicks and extra popups for no benefit to me.
I don't like the magic directory tree either, where 'my computer' is inside 'desktop' and the tree structure is hidden by default so folders like "work - october" float around in a detached and ethereal fashion, instead of making it clear that they are located somewhere. I don't see how non-technical people don't find that immensly confusing and unhelpful, because I do.
Progress is good, but I'm not feeling progress, I'm feeling 'paper over the complex stuff we don't want to change so it wont look so scary, even if that means what you see has little relevance to what's going on thus making it more difficult to understand'.
It's the same thing with OS X. Right now my favorite UI to use is Gnome, because it acts mostly like Win98 with a few improvements that make sense to me (primarily virtual desktops). It makes me simultaneously feel like an old fogey shaking his cane at progress, and also like those ratpoison and xmonad users I could never understand.
I have often asked myself why this is. The obvious answer is I'm set in my ways and don't want to learn new things. Certainly possible, but I don't see that in other areas of my computer usage (programming languages, web design, etc). Sometimes I wonder if it's because these new UI improvements are largely meant to help your average user, but don't help me much. For example, both OS X and Win7 are optimized for only having one window per program open at once, but I often have many open. It frustrates me that it's harder to switch between those windows than in Win98.
I wonder if any of you other power users are experiencing the same thing.