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Vista Shell Team now Blogging 202

Posted by CmdrTaco from the wonder-what-they-had-for-breakfast dept.
davevr writes "Have you ever wanted to ask the people behind the Vista UI exactly what they were thinking when they did things like Flip 3D or the windows that turn black when maximized? Want a last chance to complain directly to the source about your favorite Vista UI glitch before it is foisted on you and the rest of the world? Just wondering what sort of people work on Windows all day? Well, look no further. The Windows Shell team now has a blog site for your reading pleasure. Head over to Shell Revealed and check it out. "
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Vista Shell Team now Blogging More

Vista Shell Team now Blogging

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  • Just forget it (Score:2, Insightful)

    by otacon ( 445694 )
    My complaint to scrap the eye candy would be ignored of course, just like myspace ignoring my reccomendation to stop letting people make profiles that look like AOL hometown pages from 1997.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by scumbaguk ( 918201 )
      You know you can turn it off right? Just like you could use classic interface in XP.
      • That's not the point. Someone, somewhere coded this crap up and thought people would like it. Which means they are suffering from a staggering disconnect with reality. Sure, we could ignore it. But it's like hearing "if it weren't for my horse, I wouldn't have spent that year in college." Once you hear about this train wreck, it's stuck in your brain!
        • Actually most comments I've seen have been positive, even from Microsoft haters. I think the new eye-candy looks pretty nice, even it is unnecessary.

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by plague3106 ( 71849 )
          That's not the point. Someone, somewhere coded this crap up and thought people would like it. Which means they are suffering from a staggering disconnect with reality.

          Huh? What? Are you actually claiming to speak for everyone on the planet? Pretty arrogant if you ask me. I remember the same thing said about the WinXP theme. It was different, but I actually like it over the old Win9x win2k style buttons.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by dave562 ( 969951 )
            I remember the same thing said about the WinXP theme. It was different, but I actually like it over the old Win9x win2k style buttons.

            I agree with you. When WinXP first came out and they moved everything from the desktop and onto the Start button I was upset and I switched all the computers that I worked with to "Classic" view. These days I leave it in the default config and I like the Start button. Between the Windows+(E, R, etc) hotkeys and the Start button, everything is right where I need it. My mo

          • Re:Just forget it (Score:4, Insightful)

            by laxcat ( 600727 ) on Wednesday September 20, 2006 @12:49PM (#16147411) Homepage

            Its impossible to speak about something like this in any sort of definitive, because in essence, it all comes down to opinion. But there are alot of definatives that surround the issue of the XP theme.

            One thing that more of us might agree on is that it's definately an interface designed to appeal to a wider audience. Microsoft likes its bright colors because those appeal to the older generation who are still of the mindset: "more colors = better." There are two problems with this. First, here in a slashdot context, we are not the general population. Most of us found this new "candy" style pretty condesending. Second, the "more colors style" goes starkly agains conventional wisdom of almost a full cenury of futurism and the expected styles that are contianed therein. People generally don't see bright colors as a sign of "futuristic high tech," a trait that our society would see as a positive when they're dropping money in a computer store.

            Another big problem with the XP theme is that it added very little, if anything at all, to the actual unsability of the the user interface. It was just an ugly coat of paint, like that one fucia house two blocks over. (You know the one.) All functionality was still in the same place, at best just rearanged within the same window.

            Definatives aside, if we do come back to nothing more than opinion, we can only turn to experts in that particular field to find some sort of authority. This again turns out of favor of the older interface over the XP one. In my 6 years working in various design houses, I've yet to see a designer, web or otherwise, that prefered the "candy" interface over the clean greys of the old Win2K style. Outside of my personal experience, we can turn to the design comunity as a whole. While I can't ask for their opinion personally, their works reinforce my point. Clean lines and muted colors abound, curved edges are easily found but large swatches of garish primary colors are not.

            Now none of this is about Vista, (which from the couple of screenshots I've seen apears to at least be a step in the right direction), but I just had to point out that while an argument like this might seem based in only opinion, anyone with a little art training will realize that that there are definative "rights" and "wrongs" in the art community, and even more so in the design world. The XP style is mostly "wrong." It's the result of an ill-advised corporated campaign to make computers seem less indimedating to Grandma, and we ended up with very little aestetic value.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by cHiphead ( 17854 )
            I didn't take it that way at all. The XP theme is a POS and it eats system resources with all the 'effects' it wastes on window sizing/fake 3d buttons and taskbar/etc. The only thing that grew on me from XP was the new start menu which let me be lazy with 2 clicks for outlook (for work email) and allowing me to unclutter my quicklaunch. But even that took 2 years for me to finally start preferring. The XP theme looks unprofessional, like it belongs on an XBox or a kids 'disney' themed computer.

            Cheers.
      • Which leads to the question of why you would want Vista in the first place if you're not going to be using its ugly "Glass" theme. Just run XP in a non-admin account.
        • Exactly. Who the hell is Vista marketed to anyway? Home users have XP, which, despite its numerous faults, just plain works. Granted Big corps will probably swallow up a ton of licenses without even blinking, but you still have the same problem: there's no killer app/functionality on Vista that you can't get from XP.


          Time for MS to do what Apple did: bite the bullet and start from scratch, otherwise its diminishing returns from here on out.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      They should just include BASH in Vista and call it a day.
      • lets not get carried away here
      • Interestingly enough with the upcoming Longhorn server and future versions this will become more of an option. With Longhorn server there is an install option being refered to as "Server Core" where it just installs the most basic stuff required for a specific set of options (DHCP, DNS, file server, or domain controller roles). This type of install won't even include a GUI.

        This seems to point to MS finally taking modularity seriously at least.
  • This is a shell like the Great Wall of China is simply a wall.

    I little bit bigger than it needs to be?

    Yes.

    A little bit cool and worthy of inspection and use?

    Yes.

    Cool?

    I guess that remains to be seen.

    It is however, not like any other shell.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by daeg ( 828071 )
      More importantly, we probably shouldn't trust Windows for defense systems any more than the Chinese should have trusted the Great Wall.

  • My Internal Struggle (Score:5, Insightful)

    by TrippTDF ( 513419 ) <hiland.gmail@com> on Wednesday September 20, 2006 @11:01AM (#16146563)
    I'm a firm believer that most people act in the best intrests of others. I think this is something that geeks hold especially true, so when I see some sort of error with a computer system, I try to figure out what the developers were thinking when they put the thing together.

    But when it comes to some windows issues... I'm at a loss. I actually have to ask myself how, in good faith, a developer implemented something that either works poorly or not at all. Why keep that "feature" in there (espeically when talking about a GUI) when it doesn't work as adertised?

    I think my answer lies somewhere in management.

    • Re:My Internal Struggle (Score:5, Insightful)

      by kalirion ( 728907 ) on Wednesday September 20, 2006 @11:09AM (#16146624)
      I'm a firm believer that most people act in the best intrests of others.

      Most people action in what they, perhaps subconciously, perceive to be the best interests of themselves. It just happens that being a dick to people is usually not in a person's best interests. BOCTAOE [boctaoe.com]

      • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

        by pubjames ( 468013 )
        Most people action in what they, perhaps subconciously, perceive to be the best interests of themselves.

        If that were true mankind would die out very quickly. Nobody would have kids.
        • Comment removed based on user account deletion
        • Actually I'd think that would explain why people have kids; they want the kid (for some ingrained biological reason), but they often don't think if they can properly take care of said child. Having a kid which you can't care for is not in the kids best interest.

        • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

          by littlem ( 807099 )
          You know you're reading Slashdot when... someone says it would be in their own best interest never to have sex!
        • "If that were true mankind would die out very quickly. Nobody would have kids."

          Well why do you think it evolved to be so pleasureable?

    • Re: (Score:2, Offtopic)

      by goldspider ( 445116 )
      "I'm a firm believer that most people act in the best intrests of others. I think this is something that geeks hold especially true"

      Ahh, so that explains why so many geeks download copyrighted music, movies, and software they haven't paid for.

      Yes, it's offtopic, but I thought your analysis was most interesting.

      • "I'm a firm believer that most people act in the best intrests of others. I think this is something that geeks hold especially true"

        Ahh, so that explains why so many geeks download copyrighted music, movies, and software they haven't paid for.

        Well, ignoring modern copyright laws is technically in the best interests of others (i.e. society as a whole, as opposed to the big media companies) since modern copyright law stifles the progress of the sciences and useful arts.

        • That being said, I encourage people to still buy the stuff they pirate (if they can afford it). It's just that copyright terms should be more reasonable, like five years or so.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by pubjames ( 468013 )
      I'm a firm believer that most people act in the best intrests of others.

      I think you're probably right. However, it is a sad fact that this isn't true of most people that get into positions of power - you generally don't get into a position of power by thinking of others.

      I think my answer lies somewhere in management.

      Bingo.

    • Re:My Internal Struggle (Score:4, Funny)

      by Otter ( 3800 ) on Wednesday September 20, 2006 @11:30AM (#16146788) Journal
      I'm at a loss. I actually have to ask myself how, in good faith, a developer implemented something that either works poorly or not at all.

      Man, if you have this much existential angst over unreleased software (have you even used a beta of Vista?), I sure hope you never get near Lotus Notes!

    • A 1990s answer... (Score:5, Informative)

      by dpbsmith ( 263124 ) on Wednesday September 20, 2006 @11:40AM (#16146885) Homepage
      ...I have no idea what goes on at Microsoft in 2006 but let me tell you what went on circa 1990 at a (now-defunct) Fortune 500 minicomputer company, in the days of so-called "CHUI" interfaces (GUI-like interfaces implemented via line-drawing and X-Y character addressing on 80x24 green-screen terminals). I think I've told this story before on Slashdot, so apologies if you've heard it.

      A developer was proudly showing off his spiffy new application. I started playing with it, and discovered that there were _three consecutive screens_ each containing the same field, into which the user was required to type the same entry, manually, three consecutive times. And there were no "copy" or "paste" functions. You actually needed to type your phone number or your SSN whatever it was three times in a row.

      When I asked about this, he pulled a 150-page functional spec out of a drawer and showed me that he had implemented that the spec called for. It had slipped by. It's not that easy to previsualize how a UI will work based on a paper description.

      When I suggested he change it, he said "No way. It took nine months to get that spec approved. Any change would require a review cycle and several meetings to get it approved. And if I change it without getting the spec changed, it won't pass SQA. This project is already behind schedule. I'm implementing it exactly the way this piece of paper says."

      Another source of UI weirdness at another company I worked at was a CEO who fancied himself a UI expert. Or at least felt entitled to have the UI tailored to his personal tastes. He was always dictating changes in details of UIs. Unfortunately, he sometimes didn't previsualize how that change would interact with other details, and if you wanted to ask him "Say, now that we've done this thing here hadn't we better change this other thing there so that thus-and-such-bad thing won't happen," his secretary would schedule the appointment for a date a couple weeks from today.

      I don't say this is how incomprehensibly strange UI happens at Microsoft. I say these are two ways in which it can happen.

      • I don't say this is how incomprehensibly strange UI happens at Microsoft. I say these are two ways in which it can happen.

        UI idiocy happens in more places than Microsoft's development division. Take for example one of the iterations of the Red Hat setup utility which had this nifty window requiring you to fill out a large form. Unfortunately you needed information from the previous window to complete the form and there was no [ < Back ] button so you had to write it down before proceeding since you could

      • The developer was at least partially correct in his attitude. I suspect he had been ground down by the organisation and was now watching his back. He was right not to change the spec unilaterally. He was wrong not to point out to the spec-meisters as soon as he spotted it that the spec was probably wrong, and that it should be amended. He should also have pointed out in writing that if the spec was not amended and approved within a day there would be a developmental delay.

    • I'm a firm believer that most people act in the best intrests of others

      This goes against social order. People act in the best interest of THEMSELVES FIRST, and if the individual isn't sociopathic, they excercise empathy towards others and generally will act in others best interests unless it impacts their own self interests anbd goals.

      So applied to a corporation, the corporation is always going to do what IT THINKS is in ITS best interest first and then, if they feel any empathy towards you, you may get tre

    • Why keep that "feature" in there (espeically when talking about a GUI) when it doesn't work as adertised?

      Because you advertise that the feature works and the more features you advertise that they work the more lemmings you can get to buy your product. Then you try to eliminate competition so that when the lemmings realize that the feaure works like crap, or doesn't work at all, they don't have a choice but to continue using your crappy product. At least with Linux, the programmers actually want to fix fa
    • Since support (that is managment mucking with it) has been dropped,it might just be the oportunity we have been lookin for to upgrade to the one stable Microsoft product: Windows 98

  • Bad name (Score:5, Funny)

    by radicalskeptic ( 644346 ) <x AT gmail DOT com> on Wednesday September 20, 2006 @11:05AM (#16146590)
    "Shell Revealed"? I think "Shell Shocked" would have been a much more apt name :-/
  • I don't mind all the eye candy. Some if it's new, some not. But the thing that baffles me is that Microsoft needs the equivalent of a super computer's worth in graphics processing to make the stuff work. I haven;t seen anyting that I feel warrant that kind of power. Have you seen OpenGL? All the eye candy, and it runs on my old laptop.

    ___________________________

    Free iPods? Its legit [wired.com]. 5 of my friends got theirs. Get yours here! [freepay.com]

    • 100% correct (Score:5, Interesting)

      by brunes69 ( 86786 ) <slashdot@nOSpam.keirstead.org> on Wednesday September 20, 2006 @11:17AM (#16146689)

      Have you seen OpenGL? All the eye candy, and it runs on my old laptop.

      I think you mean Xgl [wikipedia.org], but your point is still valid. For anyone who has not seen Xgl in action, head over to YouTube and search up some videos.

      I have Xgl running on my Xp1800 computer with a Geforce2MX video card from 2000 in it, and it is *smoking fast*, and the effects are far beyond anything that Vista does. The parent is really 100% correct - why does Microsoft need this much CPU power to do it's (relatively simple) GFX in Vista? Seems like they are a bit behind the times in terms of software here.

      • video [youtube.com]
        another video [linuxedge.org]
        yet another video [dailymotion.com]

        I looked at those videos, I found them to be cool in terms of the special effects that the desktop is offering. I also never want to use a computer that way. Any time I am infront of a machine that has any of those special features turned on (sliding menues even, shadows, windows showing contents while dragging etc.,) I just turn them off.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by orasio ( 188021 )
          That might be a problem with default configuration, because of the constant development in that specific area.
          For example, wobbly is good, if it affects only regular and splash windows. With tooltips and menus it's just annoying, but if you uncheck "unknown" windows, it works great, and doesn't bother regular work. It feels very natural to have windows move as if they were actual physical objects.

          With that exact change in config, it work perfectly, and is very nice to use, things like unfolding the cube are
          • I do not view desktop as a physical object though, thus I do not want it to behave like one. But it's me, whatever rocks your boat.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by orasio ( 188021 )
              Of course you don't, but your eyes and brain are designed to recognize actual physical objects, not abstractions of them. Of course, the screen you are looking at is a physical object, and it's easier to understand at a lower level, and then being able to exploit things like spatial memory, and that kind stuff we have.

      • Re:100% correct (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Phisbut ( 761268 ) on Wednesday September 20, 2006 @12:29PM (#16147264)
        I think you mean Xgl, but your point is still valid. For anyone who has not seen Xgl in action, head over to YouTube and search up some videos.

        Yes, I have seen Xgl in action, I have even used Xgl for a while on my box. While the spinning cube and the wobbling windows are nice and all, it is simply hell when you try to simply resize a window. I don't know the inner-workings of Xgl, but how can they make such 3D stuff and wobbling windows so efficient, while totally killing the actual usefulness of managing windows by resizing them? They don't show *that* in the videos.

        I'll use Xgl again when I see a video of a window being resized as fast as it is with a regular 2D desktop.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by JustNiz ( 692889 )
        >> why does Microsoft need this much CPU power to do it's (relatively simple) GFX in Vista?

        Because they never sweep old code away, They just build layers of on layers on layers. Its quicker and easier (and dirtier) than actually doing proper refactoring. Microsoft engineers get recognition/rewards from Microsoft by coming up with a new schema, when all they've done is encapsulate an old macro-based API with another layer of macros so microsoft can then say they developed a new technology like .net, CO

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by namekuseijin ( 604504 )
        "the effects are far beyond anything that Vista does"

        hey, i'm an Xgl fan myself, but let's not blow smoke, ok? There's the useless jello windows that i'd gladly switch for Aero's ability to draw stuff underneath transparent layers with a distinct Gaussian Blur. It's good because that way things are not so confusing: you can read first plane stuff without writings underneath getting in the way. OTOH, it's bad because of the same thing, for control freaks...

        granted, putting Gaussian blur in Xgl doesn't se
      • To answer the question -- from screenshots I've seen of Vista -- the answer is that vista performs some per-pixel convolutions. For example, the blurring effect on the titlebars of what's beneath is actually a fairly expensive computation. I've done GLSL gaussian convolutions, and without taking a number of shortcuts ( specifically, bi-directional separation, and performing my blur on an averaged/downsampled copy ) my nVIDIA 5200 barely made 7 fps on a 800x600 scene. I know, 5200 == crappy card, but it's wh
      • Amen...I have wondered the same thing. I mean, back in college, I had a PII-400, a 3Dfx Voodoo2 card, 128MB of RAM and 3D-intensive games like Quake II ran very well. All Windows has to do is render and animate simple stuff like buttons, windows, pull-down menus, etc. and it requires a freaking Pixar rendering cluster? Just how incompetent are their GUI developers?
  • http://shellrevealed.com/photos/blog_images/images /584/original.aspx [shellrevealed.com]

    Everytime I see this I can't help but chuckle. I can just imagine a family with their Kitchen, Bathroom and Basement Computers. I can just see the kitchen computer sending a message to the bathroom computer telling the person in there that their microwave burrito is ready...

    • Out Of Order (Score:3, Funny)

      by brunes69 ( 86786 )

      I can just see the kitchen computer sending a message to the bathroom computer telling the person in there that their microwave burrito is ready...

      You've got things reversed there. The microwave burrito comes first, then the bathroom.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Churla ( 936633 )
        I can imagine it as some kinda of SNMP trap sent from the microwave to the toilet warning it of "abusive traffic headed your way"

    • OK, so I haven't read TFA.

      But take a look at the pic... both the Before and the After... now, why, oh why the two buttons?
      Call them join and Rename, call them Network ID and Change, however you put it, you'd get a cleaner interface with just one button.

      Or am I missing something?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by malakai ( 136531 )
        You only see two buttons if you are currently a member of a domain. In workgroup mode (which 99% of home users would use) you just see a single button. And in the case of Server 2003,that single button simply says:

        To rename this computer or join a domain, click Change.


        There should be lower hanging fruit for them to pick from this tree.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by malakai ( 136531 )
      Guilty.

      Have a kitchen computer with wireless mouse and keyboard, mainly used for recipes/google. Have a basement computer which is tucked out of the way in a closet because the fan bearing makes a unsettling noise. I then have the media computer which is the xbox (Could call it Familyroom PC). And then the two desktops and one laptop elsewhere.

      Now, for me, naming them Phoenix, Vega, Ripley, Hermes... whatever is ok. But for people like my parents, naming it "Kitchen" and "Basement" is more in tuned with how

  • If... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by UltimApe ( 991552 )
    If I can get aero's under the hood benifits (graphic card rendering of windows, graphic card ram virtualization)) with the "classic" gui, I might think about buying vista. Time and time again I run into problems where it's not my program, but the display that causes me problems.
  • I see you have one of those web sites with the dark brown backgrounds with off-white, off-off-white, salmon and off-salmon text in little bitty fonts. Trying to read it makes me squint and my head hurt.

    What was that about eye-candy?

  • My Question (Score:2, Interesting)

    by RAMMS+EIN ( 578166 )
    I haven't really seen a lot of Vista that impressed me enough that I remember it now...but I have one question. What the heck _were_ they thinking when they made that Expose knock-off (I don't know what it's called) that puts the windows _behind_ one another?! I mean, the whole point of Expose is that it arranges windows so that they _don't_ overlap, so you can see everything at once.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by cp.tar ( 871488 )

      Never tried Vista, but that sounds rather like the ancient Windows "Cascade windows" feature.

      I always hated it.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by johneee ( 626549 )
      If you dig around the site, you'll find this answer from one of their usability people:

      Expose actually does not have great usability results. The primary problem is that the position that the windows are placed in is not predictable. Users have to search the desktop to see where Expose decided to place the app they are looking for. Many Mac users continue to rely on the Dock and Apple-TAB to switch tasks. Flip 3D keeps the windows in their front to back order and aligns them on a known curve. Most user

  • random response (Score:5, Funny)

    by smcdow ( 114828 ) on Wednesday September 20, 2006 @11:37AM (#16146850) Homepage
    Have you ever wanted to ask the people behind the Vista UI exactly what they were thinking when they did things like Flip 3D or the windows that turn black when maximized?

    No.

  • Why can my video card play most of the best games and some of the latest just fine but it isn't adequate for the Vista Aero Interface? What is Microsoft doing to ensure that cards such as the gforce4 ti cards which are 128mb of ram run the AERO interface being that nVidia doesn't provide modern drivers any more? Why is the interface the main selling point behind Vista (along with alleged security that has no promise from Microsoft actually about security) the Aero interface? How can this OS be anything m
  • Vista sure is pretty.

  • First off, when I (and many other /.ers) think shell, we think command line. This site obviously isn't about Monad (or even DOS). Windows doesn't have anything that resembles a typical shell. Call it desktoprevealed.com or something.

    Then I go there, and get greeted with a masthead image that fills 2/3 of my window. I don't want to see a picture of where they smoke their crack. That and the light text on dark backgrounds design (harder to read) exemplifies the UI team's (subconscious?) philosophy: scr

    • Here is the location of the Monad (Windows Power Shell) blog:
      http://blogs.msdn.com/powershell/default.aspx [msdn.com]

      To the parent, MS spends a lot on usability testing; geeks and programmers are the LAST ones I'd ask to comment on UI. I'll take real world testing over what programmers/geeks have to say about UI, thanks.

    • When MS finally realizes that all design (phisical or virtual) must adhere to "form follows function", rather than "function follows form", "function follows corporate strategy", or "form follows corporate strategy" then they will produce a natural, usable interface.

      You should really be talking to Apple about that. They have excellent UI simplicity, but there are so many times when I just wish they'd show me what is going on, a progress bar or two here and there. Or being able to right-click at almost all t

  • Dear Win32 developers, why is the API so ugly? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by master_p ( 608214 ) on Wednesday September 20, 2006 @11:55AM (#16147010)
    Dear Win32 developers, why is your API so ugly?

    Here is a short temp list of problems:

    1) why did you force an object-oriented system on your window system? why each window has to be an object? why didn't you separate the windowing system from the widgets library? the OO system you have adds an additional overhead for languages that want to have their own OO system.

    2) why only one message queue? why not multiple message queues? why each windows message can not have an arbitrary amount of data?

    3) why do I have to register a windows class? the API could have been much simpler if I simply passed a set of attributes in the creation routine.

    4) why the return value of WindowProc is so strange? sometimes the valid return value is 0, sometimes it is 1.

    5) why the function GetMessage returns a BOOL which actually has 3 values (TRUE, FALSE and -1)?

    6) why your widgets are not autosizing? I have to manually resize each widget when its content changes (for example text or font). Why there isn't geometry negotiation as in MOTIF?

    7) why every window has to have a frame? why didn't you separated window frames from windows? all the messages like WM_PAINT, etc are duplicated as WM_NCPAINT etc.

    8) why didn't you use a property system for windows and you had to use the problematic 'set values' interface?

    9) why the text resources of a GUI app can not be changed on the fly? why text is not a separate file?

    There is no doubt that the Windows Shell is and has always been eye-catching...but to program it, one needs to use an API on top of it that abstracts its ugly details. And don't tell me it is because system-level programming of GUIs is difficult, because there are many window systems around that prove you wrong.
    • Some good questions in there, but you posted them in the wrong forum!

      Try theirs instead and you're much more likely to receive a reply, but maybe you aren't interested in that?
  • Shouldn't these guys/gals be spending their time, uh, finishing up with the code rather than blogging? I mean it's not like Vista is ahead of schedule or anything.
  • You know, the Sharepoint team has been blogging [msdn.com] for quite some time [msdn.com], and they've got a product that quite usable. Hell, why not use their own blogs.msdn.com? And when it comes down to it, why not use one of the millions of free blogging services or apps already available?

    Instead they're running off Community Server [communityserver.org]. Just look at their prices [telligent.com].

    I'm just saying it's interesting that they've got in-house products they're not using, there are free services they're not using, and there are free packages they could
  • Enough obscure Steisand references...

    Could Microsoft finally be edging towards a more open-to-the-customer development process?

    I'll be interested to see if any suggested actions make it into a service pack.

    Back in the day, if you could chat or email a Microsoft coder, they would respond to cogent suggestions...

  • UI as important as stability and security??? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 20, 2006 @12:21PM (#16147197)
    I couldn't believe when I read that...

    "Some folks I talk to say that the UI is just as important as performance and system stability. Others say performance, stability and security come first.

    For me - the UI is just as important as performance, stability, security and everything else."

    http://shellrevealed.com/blogs/externalnews/archiv e/2006/09/19/So-just-how-important-is-the-UI_3F00_ .aspx [shellrevealed.com]

    http://www.mstechtoday.com/2006/09/18/so-just-how- important-is-the-ui/ [mstechtoday.com]

    That explains *many* things.
  • From TFA:

    shell:revealed isn't about Windows Vista, it's about Windows. Many of the people on the Windows Client team have been here a very long time and have plenty of knowledge to share with the world. This is the place to find out what we're doing, how we're doing it, and why. This site is dedicated to all Windows users.

    I realize that is probably where their efforts are but it is not dedicated to Vista as the headline states.

    qz

  • This whole discussion on this article is absolutely appalling, I've not read one modded up comment in which the author seemed like he had a clue about the subject matter in the article.

    It's always been the case on here that technical articles about Microsoft ccontain quite a bit of offtopic general slagging of Microsoft, however there's usually one or two comments modded up that genuinely shed some intelligent light on the topic, this is probably the worst discussion I've seen on here. Why are moderators m
  • I already skip ads when watching movies. Why would I now deliberately go out of my way to watch one?

  • Don't blog, CODE (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Gothmolly ( 148874 ) on Wednesday September 20, 2006 @10:24PM (#16151311)
    Stop blogging, listening to your iPods, and buzzing over 'Web 2.0'. CODE THE FARKING SHELL TO BE USEFUL. What do we pay you for?

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