Also you get reliable sound quality. The DACs in the iPhones were always decent. Now you have no idea what kind of quality you're going to get from a given listening device. Plenty of them are noisy POSes; my girlfriend had a Belkin adapter that had automatic gain (!) and would ramp up to blast hiss through the car stereo during quiet segments... and sometimes even during non-quiet ones.
The phones will always have to have DACs in them, to drive their speakers if nothing else. Denying customers a physical connection to them is just a dick move.
Windows is such an offensive, defect-ridden pile of shit now that every PC maker should be blaming Microsoft for their inability to compete with the Neo.
I bought my parents Asus laptops years ago, and can't wait to replace them with a Neo.
Microsoft has spurned and scorned users. Now it's time for computer makers to push back and reject its shit. I'd love to see a consortium of computer makers come together to refine a Linux distro that's consumer-friendly enough to oust Windows and compete with Mac OS.
>I'd love to see a consortium of computer makers come together to refine a Linux distro that's consumer-friendly enough to oust Windows and compete with Mac OS.
System 76 already has Pop!_OS.
Lenovo.com/linux will redirect you to a list of linux compatible lenovo laptops that's a mile long.
That's cool, but they need to mount a marketing campaign to announce the arrival of a "new OS" to the everyday user. They need to go on the offensive against Microsoft and educate consumers.
I got an xps long time back that had the option to pay extra for ubuntu. I'm not going to pay to plug in a usb and I also get the joy of erasing a windows install from the face of this earth.
BUT... Pioneer put AC-3 (Dolby Digital) surround on LaserDiscs before DVDs came out. So LaserDiscs were the first video medium to offer digital sound at home.
And at that point, most players sold were combo players that could also play CDs.
And there was one more disc format: CD Video. It was a CD-sized digital single that also had a LaserDisc section for the (analog) music video. I have a couple; one is Bon Jovi.
No; it was analog LaserDisc video. I think "Video CD" was a flavor of CD-I, which was very popular in China and was used way, way beyond the introduction of DVD. Well into the 2000s, I think.
no, apparently there was both. i was familiar with video cd which was mpeg-1 on a cd-rom (with some weird partitioning scheme). cd video is apparently a very obscure hybrid format with an analog video section and a digital audio section. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CD_Video
No; it's strictly a reference to constant RPM or variable RPM.
CAV discs contained one frame per rotation. While this meant you could only fit half an hour on one side of a disc, it did give you perfect slow-motion and freeze-frames.
I worked in a video store and loved LaserDiscs. The Duran Duran video album was CAV, and the Pioneer LD-700 had such a fast transport mechanism and remote control that I could to DJ-style "scratching" with it.
Yep. I always cite XP as being Windows's peak, but I forgot that it shipped with their insulting Fisher-Price motif enabled by default. Step 1 was to switch the UI to "classic" (essentially Windows 95) mode, and all was well.
Windows 95 is a great case study because with that release, Microsoft did more for GUIs than Apple did through the entire decade of the '90s... and beyond.
All of it is now out the window (pun invited). It's a race to the bottom between Microsoft and Apple, with Microsoft having a HUGE head-start. But Apple has really stepped up to the plate with Tahoe, crippling it with big enough UI blunders to keep them in the enshittification game.
XP in early betas released had that slightly upgraded 9x interface called Watercolor [1] and if they'd keep it, surely majority would pick it up over plastic Luna.
Early experiments with totally new theme were rather unpleasant [2] and Watercolor was abandoned in favor of more familiar 9x looking theme as an option. W11 still comes with that old 9x widgets look - slightly flattened because of that trend but it's still there buried beneath for compatibility reasons. And I'm pretty sure they won't escape with that like Apple did with Aqua away from Platinum.
I always installed Watercolor on a new computer. It's still beautiful and definitely the look they should have chosen and played to their strengths.
I think they were so caught off guard by how incredible Mac OS X _looked_, that they didn't realize it wasn't just veneer, but a genuine evolution and improvement of how Mac OS _worked_. This became Apple's competitive advantage for over a decade as Microsoft chased different styles while consistently botching how it would impact usability.
I really liked XP (and 7) because for me, having a capable theming engine built in that didn't take a ton of extra resources or cause instability (unlike Stardock's WindowBlinds) was a real value add. There were some absolutely gorgeous third party XP/Vista/7 themes on sites like DeviantArt that worked extremely well within the limits of the engine, had a unique look and feel, and were just as usable as the "classic" theme.
When MS gutted the theming engine with the release of Windows 8 (flat rectangles only) I was devastated.
Absolutely. I always hated the inverse color scheme that Windows defaulted to, but that was OK because Windows had its color-scheme editor that let anyone create a global scheme he liked. I created a charcoal-toned one that was right in line with today's "dark" themes, and used it throughout the '90s.
Then Microsoft buried and ultimately removed the color-scheme editor... just in time for people to realize that inverse schemes suck.
So now Microsoft and Apple have dribbled out hard-coded "dark" themes, which every application developer has had to cobble together support for separately. Windows had this problem solved more than 30 years ago. Think about it. But then they deleted the solution from their product.
At least Apple NEVER had a proper global color palette for its UI. The fact that Microsoft did, but shitcanned it, stands testament to its complete abandonment of anything resembling good design. Hell, you can't even select multiple PNGs in Explorer and say "Open with..." anymore. The option is just totally GONE. Windows is rife with regressions like this. It's unbelievable.
Design is getting shittier and more ignorant daily. It's depressing.
The engine itself isn’t gutted - it’s full of functionality that was never lost. MS just (correctly) reasoned that transparency effects in the UI - introduced in Vista simply to show-off the capabilities of the DWM compositor - ultimately detract from a good UI.
From what I remember it lost the ability to render rounded window corners, because while Windows 8 msstyle themes existed they all had the hideous boxed corners that clashed hard with many looks.
I don’t agree that transparency is always a detractor. Judicious use can be a net positive, but it doesn’t work for all themes and there should be an option to turn it off. Personally I didn’t find the W7 variation of Aero to be bad at all.
> From what I remember it lost the ability to render rounded window corners,
...I'm guessing you haven't used Windows 11?
--------
By "rounded corners" are you referring to rounded-off corners in the nonclient area (such that the hWnd's rect is not clipped at all)? If so, then no: those would be rendered using a 9-grid[1] and have always been supported.
If you're referring to how so many fan/community-made msstyles for Windows 10 retain the sharp corners, I understand that's not a limitation of DWM or msstyles, just more that you need to do a lot of legwork when defining nontrivial corners in an msstyles theme; it can be done (there are plenty of examples online, e.g. look for Windows XP's style ported to Windows 10), it's just that most people don't go that far.
-----
[1] In msstyles, the 9-grid defines how a rectangular bitmap is stretched/scaled/tiled to fill a larger area; it's very similar to how CSS image borders are defined with `border-image-slice`.
I’m speaking specially about Windows 8/8.1. Obviously 11 and the new Fluent design language it brought don’t suffer the same issue.
Whatever the case, rounded corners on the titlebars and window chrome were common in XP/Vista/7 custom msstyles but were nowhere to be seen for 8/8.1 custom msstyles. It was one of the most frustrating aspects of that era of Windows for me.
Look how crisp, professional, and usable it all is.
This is a very good write-up. There's no way this level of testing and dedication could have resulted in the execrable shitshow that is Windows today.
Mac OS is going backward with accelerating speed, too. They had just started to recover from Jony Ive when they put a packaging designer in charge of UI... resulting in the "Liquid Glass" debacle, and all the other incompetent UI changes that accompanied Tahoe's rollout.
Ranting on UI, I think I might blame MS for this but I feel like many shortcuts for customization in apps and OS are a net negative.
The first example I remember was ~2003ish when MS Office did a big redesign and got much bigger toolbars. That they were big is a matter of taste but that's not where I'm going with this. No, the issue was that they made too easy to ACCIDENTALLY mess up the UI. They added all kinds of customization (which is fine) but then made it so just dragging a little too long an a button would let you move the button somewhere else. So, grandpa drags the button, possible off the bar, deleting it, and now for all intents and purposes the app is unusable to him. IMO, the customization options should be buried deeper where they can't happen by accident.
This "ACCIDENTAL" modification is all the rage now. On iPhone, holding on the lock screen puts the phone in "edit the lock screen mode". Several family members have asked why the image they put on the lock screen was gone. It was because they "butt edited the screen". Put the phone in their pocket and it felt a press and went into edit mode and edited the lock screen. AFAIK, almost no one needs this shortcut. It would be fine to just go into Settings->Wallpaper->Lockscreen or something like that. But, I'm just guessing (1) some UX designer needed something todo (2) someone working on lockscreen options got tired of doing the Settings->Wallpaper->Lockscreen dance and put in a shortcut that no-one but them needs.
This same issue is all over the place. The iPhone's lockscreen while charging mode has the same issue. The user (me) picks the clock face I want. And, one of 10 times I reach for the phone from the charging stand I accidently touch the screen which changes the face. I NEVER NEED THIS. Again, this should be buried in Settings->Lockscreen->Clock Face. The shortcut a net negative.
> Put the phone in their pocket and it felt a press and went into edit mode and edited the lock screen.
This is why I hate the flashlight and camera buttons on the lock screen - which you can activate without unlocking. When you have your hands in your pockets during cold weather you’ll suddenly be ”filming”… I never use the camera on my phone anyway. Thankfully at some point they added support for removing them.
There are a lot of UI concepts that are foreign to younger developers, simply because they grew up using web apps and smartphones. I think computer science departments need to make a class on human-computer interaction a mandatory part of the curriculum, and those classes need to require students to sit down with and actually use a variety of UIs from two, three, four decades ago. There's a ton of value in being conversant in the basic building blocks and paradigms of multiple UI systems, and in knowing what problems have been solved in the past so we don't keep badly reinventing the same features or failing to learn from the mistakes of the past.
There are a lot of things in older UIs that I think every developer should have hands-on experience with, eg. using nested menus in classic Mac OS; using an MDI application on Windows 9x; using the file browser and dock on NeXTSTEP; using X11 with focus follows mouse; anything with pie menus. Not because those things are necessarily the right choices for today's GUIs, but because there are valuable lessons to be learned from them, and reading an article like this or studying an old HIG document doesn't have the same impact.
Interesting that you bring this up. I'd wonder what you're talking about, since I (while having a huge shitlist of UI complaints for Apple and Microsoft) seldom if ever encounter this...
But I deal with this for my parents ALL THE TIME. They manage to delete core, included iOS apps every month or two; in addition to invoking other bizarre configuration options that I've never seen in my life (and that make no sense and shouldn't exist).
Over and over I have to visit the bizarre app graveyard that exists beyond the last iOS screen... the "app library," and restore something they managed to move there. As far as I can tell, relegating an app there from the home screen is a multi-step, long-press-riddled process. How do they keep doing it accidentally? I have no idea.
And several times my mom has ended up with an idiotic keyboard stretched across the middle of her iPad's screen, with no way to fix or dismiss it. Even typing this out right now, I don't remember WTF causes it or how we fixed it.
GUIs used to be designed by power users, who would start with an advanced design and strip it down to a simple version the average user could use. Now GUIs are designed by average users who have no idea what to do with advanced features, because they're stuck thinking about the GUI as an average user does.
Power users understand many different levels. Beginner/average -> professional -> advanced -> power user. But the average designers nowadays only understand two things: average, and everything beyond that. This is why professional, advanced, and obscure features are all just one long-press away - they literally have no idea which category each feature falls into, so they're all equally valid.
To be fair, Apple has always had a penchant for removing important features because they don't like how they look. I cannot count how many times I got a CD/DVD stuck in a Mac, and due to a lack of physical eject button and the software eject button not working, resorted to the emergency eject sequences. Just put a button to eject the disk, ffs.
Apple was very early to remove floppy disk drives, then later DVD drives from their computers, even when those media were still commonly used. At least that fixed your problem of the stuck DVD :)
Apple has long been a "style over substance" company, unfortunately. Not always (I mean, you couldn't accuse the Apple II of being stylish for example), but certainly since the year 2000 at least. It has often meant that their products were less pleasant to use because someone refused to add functionality that wasn't as sleek-looking.
I wonder if The Nightfly has now been ruined with dynamic compression (AKA "remastered") like everything else over the last couple decades.
My CD player came with Brothers in Arms by Dire Straits, as a demo of dynamic range. That album (a digital recording) has, shamefully, been "remastered" and dynamically compressed.
My uncle had the vinyl, and I got the CD a couple of years later. I see it has "manufactured by Columbia House" on the back. ;-) No loudness war back then, but the treble is brighter than most recordings of the time, leading to a potential tweaking of the knob for the album.
Some early CDs were mastered with pre-emphasis. On players that don't recognise and correct (de-emphasize) this, the sound can sound full of treble. Every hardware CD player should be able to play such discs as intended. iTunes knows about such discs and will rip them correctly, maybe Foobar2000 and CUERipper, but most other software has no clue. I know The Blue Nile "Hats" it's one such disc in my collection. I believe some pressings of The Nightfly were mastered with pre-emphasis. https://www.tnt-audio.com/vintage/procrustes2_pt1_e.html
The phones will always have to have DACs in them, to drive their speakers if nothing else. Denying customers a physical connection to them is just a dick move.
reply