I’m still not over the last major redesign of Microsoft Word, which has made 60 percent of it useless to me.
And now the latest update of Itunes has changed the way album art appears, annoying me to no end. (And why did Itunes take away the option of not displaying art on the Ipod in the first place?)
Why do software updates so commonly remove functionality that users have been relying on?
What functionality did Word remove? AFAIK, it’s all there, if in different places.
And I don’t think anyone “relies” on being able to see the album art. The music sounds the same no matter how the art is displayed – and iTunes is a music player, isn’t it?
Which basically makes it non-functional to me. Because I don’t have the time or inclination to relearn where everything is.
If I am using a certain functionality, then I am relying on it.
For me, Itunes is not just a music player. It’s a database of all my music. I spend time and effort making sure that all the metadata fields are filled in and display and sort in a particular way.
When I open an Itunes window, I want it to look a certain way, and I frequently rearrange columns, etc., for different purposes. By changing the way the album art displays, it throws off my columns, and pushes some information that used to be on the screen off the side.
For commercial software, it’s so they can have an excuse to sell a new version. Sure, most people are still content with Word 97 or 2000, but Microsoft needs to make money somehow.
iTunes, I dunno. It probably screws with the jailbreakers.
Sometimes the implementation of it conflicts with new functionality they want to add and, while they could reimplement it, they decide that it’s not worth the time to do so, because not enough people use it.
Sometimes it’s little-used enough, and it’s removed because you can’t just let software get more and more complicated forever. It’s a support nightmare, often leads to bad code and design decisions, and too many options and features tend to confuse and frustrate the user.
Sometimes they’re just a bunch of jerks.
in the case of Office, the ribbon UI came about to make features more discoverable. I forget where I read it, but apparently a huge chunk of feature requests they received were actually already in Office, but people just couldn’t find them easily.
the menu and toolbar model eventually breaks down.
No, M$ just added a new layer of menus. Some things are located sensibly in the ribbons. Many features I use are not located sensibly.
M$ obviated a billion hours of training in one release, and had everyone paying for the privilige. :mad:
If it weren’t for Google, Office 07 would be useless for experienced users. When I can’t find a feature from Office 03 in '07, Google finds if almost as quickly as I can type. Google: not evil.
Many features you use. Office has how many users, now?
“Everyone?” please.
Oh, and
There was a very large userbase of people who had learned the software one way, and they have reported a lot of problems learning the new interface.
I’ve been certified for Office 2003, and now I’m at a disadvantage to those who came in fresh. Why the hell shouldn’t I be mad, when they had the option of leaving both interfaces out there?
It’s not the same as using a $ in the title: it’s pointing out a legitimate flaw. It may have helped Microsoft, but it still was a “fuck you” to all the people who had taken the time to learn. Every other software package uses gradual changes, so that what you learned in the previous version is not completely useless.
And I still hate the ribbon because it is inconsistent. No other application uses it. If it was so great, why aren’t other software companies rushing out to use it? You know what? I didn’t even have to be certified in Office, because all the commands were where they are in other programs. But now I have to learn an entirely proprietary interface–one that even makes customization difficult.
So I wish people would stop with the childish insults. It says a lot more about you than it does about the person you are insulting. It says “I don’t have a legitimate argument, so I’ve got to try and make the other person feel bad for arguing with me if I want any chance to win.”
your option is to continue using 2003. You can be as mad as you want, but supporting both old and new interfaces would have a significant cost in testing and support for Microsoft, and only to keep some stubborn people happy.
untrue, in Win7 it’s used by Paint and Wordpad. Hardly big applications, but it is used elsewhere.
because they’d rather keep charging you for just a handful of new features for every version.
What I want to know is why do people hate Microsoft for “not innovating,” but when they do, the very same people hate them for “making unnecessary changes?” Meanwhile, Apple throws away things that people depend on all the time, and people just can’t wait to throw more money at Apple…
There’s a big difference between changing things to add new functions, and changing things for the hell of it. Microsoft delights in the latter kind.
They didn’t change for the hell of it. They’ve did a shitload of research in showing that there was a problem with the last UI, and how best to fix it. The result was the ribbon. Have you ever seen Office with all the tool menus turned on? How long could that shit go on for? Something had to be done.
But, for fucks sake, how long does it actually take you to adjust to the new UI? A day at the most?
Translation: “I have no idea what I’n talking about, but I hate Microsoft so I’ll make up whatever reasons I like whether or not they have any basis in reality.”
Not Software exactly, but Google has been going stupid lately. The horrible bloated new image search and the incredibly annoying Google Instant for example.
For image search they decided that it was a jolly good idea to hide the image size, web page and description, now you have to hover your mouse over every.single.image to see the information or scroll all the way down to the bottom of up to 1000 thumbnails to switch the version to the “Basic” view. Funny how the “Basic” version actually presents you more information.
Then you click on an image and instead of sending you to a page with a bar on top showing the image and a link to the full size they improved it by adding a huge side bar on the right (the Image Search options bar is on the left, smart move) and an enlarged preview of the image you want to open on top of a greyed out version of the website… so you have to click on that preview to close it, wait for the webpage to load again and then you can see the image. To add insult to injury if you then want to navigate back to the search page and click back or hit Return it first loads again the sidebar and preview image and then you have to hit Back again to go back to the search page. It makes me want to put a fist through the screen.
Google Instant is just plain annoying, is like taking a drive with a kid on the backseat reading out loud every street sign, shop name and billboard along the way.