Originally posted by: Smilin
Understood. It will take some time to get used to something new. I would like to see people recognize the fact that they are in a learning curve and expect the adjustment instead of griping about it. Once the adjustment was over were you faster in 9x than in 3.1? 2000 vs 9x? XP vs 2000? Will Vista suddenly reverse the trend? Silliness I think.
Yep. I customize the crap out of every OS I use. As an example I leveraged favorites in my start menu back in XP to navigate quickly. Every box I "moved in" to I had to get this setup before I was happy. In Vista I've moved on but I'm already developing new tweaking preferences.
Objectively it does not take more clicks to get things done in Vista. If it does you are using it in a way it was not intended and probably to satisfy subjective XP preferences. In Larry's example 90% of the time you should be navigating to a common location. It may indeed be slower when using the other 10%. If you try to make it to work like XP did I'll agree that it would be annoying.
The objective example:
1. In XP...File | Save As.. | n number of clicks to navigate to a folder, 1 click to save.
2. In Vista trying to behave as XP...
couple clicks to bring up the file menu | save as.. | n+2 clicks to navigate to a folder (extra click to hit 'folders' and extra click since it's not expanded by default, 1 click to save.
3. In Vista the way it was meant.. Page | Save as | 1 click to navigate, 1 click to save.
#3 of course assumes you've been using Vista the way it was meant all along. If you've been using it like XP then your favorites list is probably not populated.
Regarding the harshness of my post. It was not an attempt to put down someone because of their subjective views. The harshness of my post is a futile attempt to "nip it in the bud" with Larry. There is a history here that you may not be aware of (someone shout amen smilin!). You'll note I didn't jump Sunner for his subjective view and I've tried to provide rational argument in response to yours.
Well, for me it goes a bit beyond getting used to new things as well.
I primarily use Windows and Linux for desktop/workstation type work, sometimes Solaris as well(though I'd rather not...it's a lovely server OS, but desktop...meh...).
Thing is, I like to have things work similarly across these OS's.
On my boxes, I setup directory structures in pretty much the same way, substitute slashes for backslashes and you could navigate my folder hierarchy using the same command line arguments on any box I use, logon to my XP or my Linux box and they'll look and behave rather close to each other, etc etc.
And I might add that I've never been a fan of the favourite stuff to begin with, KDE introduced some similar stuff with the 3.x series, and never liked it back then, same as I didn't like Gnome's new(well, decently new...2.14? 2.16?) Save File dialogue, same as I don't like Vista's new equivalents.
I guess you could say I'm not only used to the Win95 like look and feel(which Win2K, XP/Classic, etc are all evolutions of), but it's so easy to "emulate" on any OS I like as well, so it's become the common way for me to interface with my desktop regardless of OS.
To draw a parallel, I played huge amounts of Doom and Quake 1 back in the day.
Eventually this led to a rather odd ball(for other people) setup of key binds and controls.
But I've used it for a long long time, I've adapted it to other games, some adapt more easily to it(Yet Another FPS Game would be an obviously example), some not so good(Racing games, etc, where you don't Run&Shoot), so it turns a little into trying to fit a cube into a round hole, but I still do a good enough job of rounding out the corners of that cube, and I've always felt that the deficiencies of doing it this way are worth it for me.
Or maybe a better parallel would be my choice of browser.
I use Firefox, and even if IE was better(which 7 might very well be, I really can't say, looks fine from what little experience I have with it), I wouldn't use it, simply because it isn't available on the other platforms I use.
Well, unless FF turned into a complete turd that is, in which case I'd be screwed
Same with XP, Gnome, KDE, and hopefully Vista.
I may not always use them the way the developers intended, but that's still worth it to me, it's an overhead cost I pay for having a common ground for every environment I use.
And of course there's a much more common, stupid, and therefore human explanation.
I'm a stubborn bastard that hates change of almost any kind