* <<G1P.0093>> Win 10 My wife bought a new PC today, and it came with Windows 10 installed. I played with it a bit since I don't have too much contact with Windows anymore, and I wanted to see what was new. Y'know, some people got bent out of shape when Matias Duarte said that Win 10 was "[[https://twitter.com/matiasduarte/status/661255019082088448][basical ly XP with a flat design skin]]", but he was right. I actually appreciate Microsoft's attempts to do something new with their Metro UI — it's a shame Windows users have been so hostile towards it — but the fact is that within two minutes of poking around Windows 10, there you are, looking at the same ugly Common Controls interfaces people have been suffering for decades. Come on, Microsoft. Go look around DeviantArt or something. You've had Visual Styles since 2001 and you still haven't figured out how to use them to make the legacy stuff look good? Lots of young people with too much time on their hands have made better attempts. And ...the icons. FFS. Stop hiring those designers. Just stop. You've got this dead-flat Metro window manager and Start-screen/bar/menu, then this flat~ish~ Visual Style on all the system utilities and legacy apps, and then these corny icons all over the place. What a mess. I know that the X desktop is a visual clusterfuck — we've all had those days where we're staring at a screen full of windows and every single one has been programmed with a different widget toolkit — but that's because it's a free-for-all over here. You're Microsoft. You ~own~ Windows. Your resources are ~vast~. Is it really beyond your capability to, I dunno, design a new file manager in Metro and stop farting around with File Explorer? Or reimplement the Control Panel entirely in Metro and not have it launch a bunch of legacy dialogs? Unify that shit. Is it 2016, or is it 2001? Is this a workstation or a mobile device? -- Excerpted from: PUBLIC NOTES (G) http://alph.laemeur.com/txt/PUBNOTES-G ©2016 Adam C. Moore (LÆMEUR) <adam@laemeur.com>