Posted by
Paul Parks on
13 November 2009, 10:27 pm
I’ve been hearing this a lot lately (you know who you are), so rather than pull all of you aside privately and give this lecture, I thought I’d do it once, publicly. You’re not running a DOS prompt.
When you click on that shortcut that says, “Command Prompt” in Windows XP, or you run cmd.exe from the “Run” box, you’re not starting a “DOS prompt.” What you are starting is a command line interface, or just “command line” if you prefer. If you haven’t actually run COMMAND.COM, it’s not DOS!.
So, please, next time don’t tell me to run your favorite utility “at the DOS prompt.” Let DOS rest in peace.
The first person to call Powershell a DOS prompt will get the lecture in real time.
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Larry Osterman talked about Windows 7 user interface changes in a post today, and it generated a minor comment storm, in which I participated. He talked about some buttons that used to be obvious buttons in Windows Vista, but which were made “flat” in Windows 7 so that they’re no longer obviously buttons until the user hovers over them with a mouse.
I gave my opinion a couple of times, coming down on the side of non-flat buttons. The whole discussion, though, reminded me of a couple of passages from The Hitchhiker’s Guide To the Galaxy that describe the design of the ship The Heart of Gold.
The cabin was mostly white, oblong, and about the size of a smallish restaurant. In fact it wasn’t perfectly oblong: the two long walls were raked round in a slight parallel curve, and all the angles and corners of the cabin were contoured in excitingly chunky shapes. The truth of the matter is that it would have been a great deal simpler and more practical to build the cabin as an ordinary three-dimensional oblong room, but then the designers would have got miserable.
That sounds like everything I dislike about UI design these days, particularly in Flash and Silverlight apps where designers feel compelled to recreate UI widgets that behave almost, but not quite, entirely unlike standard widgets.
A loud clatter of gunk music flooded through the Heart of Gold cabin as Zaphod searched the sub-etha radio wave bands for news of himself. The machine was rather difficult to operate. For years radios had been operated by means of pressing buttons and turning dials; then as the technology became more sophisticated the controls were made touch-sensitive — you merely had to brush the panels with your fingers; now all you had to do was wave your hand in the general direction of the components and hope. It saved a lot of muscular expenditure, of course, but meant that you had to sit infuriatingly still if you wanted to keep listening to the same program.
That sounds a lot like where flat buttons are headed. In fact, it sounds strikingly like an iPod.
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I guess I would never make it as the CEO of some electronic gadget company, because I would never dream of loading down every gadget with a web browser and a picture viewer. I love my Nintendo Wii; I’ve spent hours playing Mario Kart or bowling with the kids. I even got Wii Fit, though I use the Balance Board more for Shaun White Snowboarding (and get a better workout doing it). But I’ve never looked at pictures on my Wii. I’ve only browsed the web just to see what it looks like, and whether a couple of my sites were readable (not very).
So, I’m dying to know why gadget companies feel that it’s necessary to load down every product with useless stuff like this? If a professional geek like me doesn’t even bother to use these features, then who is using them?
I’d much rather see gadget makers spend some time and resources on the core functionality of their gadgets (do you hear me, phone people?) than on browsing, social networking, or photo viewing.
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