On Wed, Nov 10, 2010 at 9:02 PM, Steve <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Nov 11, 2:18 pm, Cédric Beust ♔ <[email protected]> wrote: > > > > That's a myth. If you look back over the past fifteen years, you will see > > that Windows has innovated in the GUI department more than any other OS, > > including Mac OS. > > > > Examples? > > The search dog was pretty cool. > I think I started paying attention to Windows' GUI innovations when Internet Explorer 3 came out (1996). I'm not sure how many of you remember, but it featured a toolbar of flat buttons. This was basically unheard of. Windows 3, Windows 2 and the Visual Studio libraries had been shipping for a while with the standard toolbar of 3D buttons, but Microsoft decided that the look was too encumbered, so they decided to flatten it, and it looked great. Strangely enough, the disappearance of the 3D affordance was really not an obstacle to people realizing that they were actually buttons. Needless to say, all the toolbars are flat these days. My next observation was with Powerpoint, I believe. I noticed that when I was using the scrollbar, Microsoft had added a little tooltip that was informing of which slide I would land on if I released the thumb at that moment. That was extremely clever and very useful too. This idea is still alive today and they actually improved it by showing whole mini previews of the destination slide as you scroll the thumb. I thought the Windows 95 "Start" button was pretty innovative too and widely copied (except by Mac OS. Maybe Microsoft has a patent on that one?). I have quite a few other examples in mind but I'll give you just one more innovation, which I think is absolutely revolutionary: the Ribbon. If you have no idea what it is, Jensen Harris wrote an entire series explaining in details how they designed it, all the usability studies they did, how they went, the mistakes they made, etc... Here is one his many posts on the subject<http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jensenh/archive/2005/09/14/467126.aspx>. I guarantee that you'll end up respecting Microsoft's innovations a lot more after reading the entire series. I can think of five or more right innovations just off the top of my head, but I'll stop here for now. I just love this stuff and I think Microsoft deserves a lot more credit than they are usually given in the area of innovations. -- Cédric -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en.
