So I just realized that after umpteen years of whining about the useless little green button next to the Close and Minimize buttons, Apple has finally given me what I always wanted: a true Maximize button!
I click the top-right corner of a supported app and watch as the window fills the screen, just like I have been doing in Windows since the beginning of time.
I am pleased with this feature.
[quote=“Gary “Wombat” Robson, post:60, topic:592869”]
Sure. Windows never stops supporting your old software when you upgrade. And it never causes network failures because one version won’t network properly with another. And, Lord knows they don’t completely change the UI so you can’t find anything anymore. :rolleyes:
[/QUOTE]
Goodness. Defensive much? Methinks he hath pricked a sore spot with his jest… 
Though, come to think of it, I’ve never had any trouble with any of the things you’ve mentioned. shrug
Defensive? Of what? I’m griping about Windows, not defending anything.
[quote=“Gary “Wombat” Robson, post:60, topic:592869”]
Sure. Windows never stops supporting your old software when you upgrade. And it never causes network failures because one version won’t network properly with another. And, Lord knows they don’t completely change the UI so you can’t find anything anymore. :rolleyes:
[/QUOTE]
Windows does not support software, software is written to support windows.
All versions of windows speak standard networking just fine. It may not hand it to you on a silver platter with wild rice stuffing and a nice garnish but its all still there.
MS office, yeah, they went a little apeshit on 2007, but vista and 7 still work the same way, start button, most start menu items structured in a similar fashion. Moved a setting or two, yup, but not so far that someone who took 2 seconds to look at what they were clicking couldnt figure it out.
No, they do not. Microsoft is notorious for incompletely supporting, or worse yet, introducing their own proprietary incompatibilities into standard Internet protocols. Even where they do offer standard protocols, they are often not exposed by default; this way they can pay lip service to standards compatibility while pushing their own proprietary protocols.
Good grief, drachillix, stop playing Windows fan-boy and pissing in the Mac griping thread. Go start a “Windows is wonderful” thread somewhere else.
Semantic games are fun, aren’t they? I mentioned that certain of my (expensive) programs don’t work in the latest Mac operating system. This has also happened many, many times in the history of Windows. Just as it has happened in the development of virtually every other non-trivial and long-lived operating system. That’s how things work. I know that, but it won’t stop me from bitching about it.
Get real. I ran mixed enterprise networks for years and I used to develop network training programs for Cisco. But I still had a home network where the new Windows system and the old Windows system wouldn’t talk to each other properly, but the Mac talked to both. When I had Windows 98, Windows NT, Linux, Solaris, and Mac systems on the same network, there were lots of inter-version compatibility issues.
Yep, Office 2007 is what I was talking about. They took a user interface that the whole freaking world is comfortable with (pull-down menus) and replaced it with one that ground productivity to a near-halt while everyone retrained. And if you skip a version of Windows, it takes many hours of fiddle-farting around to figure out what they did with everything in the control panel – ESPECIALLY in networking.
[quote=“Gary “Wombat” Robson, post:66, topic:592869”]
Yep, Office 2007 is what I was talking about. They took a user interface that the whole freaking world is comfortable with (pull-down menus) and replaced it with one that ground productivity to a near-halt while everyone retrained.
[/QUOTE]
That was going to be necessary sooner or later, though. Replacing the hideously bloated interface, I mean, not specifically replacing drop down menus with a tabbed strip.
Each version of Office added more and more and more features, but they were buried in sub-sub-sub-sub-sub-sub menus, since they were added to the existing interface. Microsoft conducted a survey about Office and asked what sorts of features people would like. Survey result after survey result would ask for features that have been in Office products for years, but were totally buried in those sub-sub-sub-sub-sub-sub menus. And let’s be frank, here: Clippy had the best intentions, but never could actually give any useful advice, bless his heart. 
If you have that many people unintentionally telling you the interface is crap? It needs to be changed. You’re going to piss off a chunk of people (power users, those who just hate change, infrequent users who knew exactly how to get to the handful of options they used, etc.) no matter what you do for the redesign. And if anything, I should be one of those people pissed off at Microsoft, because I had to field countless calls (non-MS corporate IT) from users who had no idea what to do in Office 2007.
But I’m not. Know why? Because their redesign concept was solid. I went through the Big Four (Word, Excel, Outlook and Powerpoint) and saw that the ribbon organization was far more intuitive than the bloated drop-down menus*. Did it slow me down for a little while? Sure. Were there times where I’d instinctively go to click on “Edit” at the top? Yep. But that doesn’t mean the redesign is bad. If you look at it through the eyes of someone actually trying to explore and see how things are grouped, it’s a lot better; but too many people look at it through the eyes of “WTF? this is different! What the hell do I do? I just want to do x, y, z! Stuff isn’t where it used to be. This sucks!”**
The bloat and unintuitive UI was only going to get worse and worse, so they bit the bullet and did the redesign now instead of waiting until the drop-down menus were basically unusable. Keeping the same UI just because it’s what people are used to isn’t a good enough reason. Plus, the loudest 2007 complainers I came across? Were also the loudest complainers about Office’s interface before the redesign.
** And of course I’m not saying that everyone would love it if they just really gave it a chance, maaaan. There are some that will just dislike it or not find it intuitive, but that’s no different than people who disliked the old drop-down menus.
You have some valid points, zweisamkeit, but the my original point remains: software companies make dramatic changes to their user interfaces. Apple isn’t the only one in the world that’s done this.
The ribbon bar pisses me off mostly because (a) it eats up a bunch of valuable vertical real estate on my screen and (b) I knew where everything was on the menus. I dearly wish I could go back to the old version, but I need to keep up with the times whether I like it or not.
Did anyone actually pronounce it like the word “me”? Everyone I know said “em ee.”
Actually, I’d say both of those are accurate. Software is often written geared towards Windows, yes, because it has such a huge market share. But part of the reason that Windows tends to be much less stable than Macintosh OSes is because of its ridiculous amount of backwards compatibility with old software, old drivers, old hardware. So in that sense, Windows *is *written to support software.