rowan.bradley
New Member
I've been persevering with Vista for the last year, even though I frequently think that I'd get my job done better if I reverted to XP. Some of the things that I find absolutely insane are the following:
Rowan
- Why did they decide to make the visual sign for the active window a very subtly darker header bar than other windows, and a subtly more significant glow around the edge of the window? I just don't notice these things, which means that I often think a window is active and try to type into it when it's not. Surely it would be better to distinguish the active window from others by some competely different featrure that's obviously there or not, rather than subtly different amounts of things. How about a blue header bar, rather than a grey one for non-active windows? I wonder where that idea came from...
- Why did they decide during system start-up to put the prompt "Press CTRL/ALT/DEL to log on" a long time before the system is ready to accept a press of these keys? It means that anyone watching the screen and doing what it says thinks their computer has broken or crashed. Surely you should never prompt for things until you are ready to respond to them?
- Why did they decide not to show the little "expand/collapse" triangles next to items in the Explorer's tree view unless you hover your mouse over them? Surely the point of showing things on the screen is to show people things they can do, so they can look at the screen, decide what to do and then do it. If you don't show the objects until the user approaches them, you are relying on the user knowing that he can do this, and starting to do it, before you show him what he can do.
- Why did they make the highlight for selected files in Explorer a very subtle shade of blue, and why, even more bizarrely, did they decide also to give any file over which your mouse was hovering a suble shade of blue? I have not even been able to work out whether the two shades of blue are exactly the same, or even more subtly different. Surely you want to show people instantly which files are selected, by making their appearance markedly different, and not confusingly similar to other things that you may want to be informing the user of? Like so many things in Vista, they actually had a perfectly acceptable solution in every previous version of Windows that I can remember, and they have made Vista more difficult and less intuitive to use.
Rowan
