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Dec. 10th, 2008 08:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
torkellI apparently have two choices when it comes to computing:
a) stick with obsolete, buggy, insecure programs that actually work and actually have a sensible user interface
b) upgrade to current, less buggy, marginally more secure programs that don't work and have truely awful user interfaces
This is why I still use IE6 (the IE7 interface sucks under XP), why I still use a 15-year-old FTP client (nothing else actually does what I want), why I still use mplayer2.exe (clean, simple, effective) and why I still use an 8-year-old cellphone (it Just Works, damnit). Sometime in the past few years almost all of usability and practicality went out the window in favour of shinyness and buzzwords.
This rant brought to you by discovering that RealPlayer 11 only lets you resize using the bottom-right corner of the window.
a) stick with obsolete, buggy, insecure programs that actually work and actually have a sensible user interface
b) upgrade to current, less buggy, marginally more secure programs that don't work and have truely awful user interfaces
This is why I still use IE6 (the IE7 interface sucks under XP), why I still use a 15-year-old FTP client (nothing else actually does what I want), why I still use mplayer2.exe (clean, simple, effective) and why I still use an 8-year-old cellphone (it Just Works, damnit). Sometime in the past few years almost all of usability and practicality went out the window in favour of shinyness and buzzwords.
This rant brought to you by discovering that RealPlayer 11 only lets you resize using the bottom-right corner of the window.
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Date: 2008-12-11 07:54 pm (UTC)Firefox's tab recovery still won't help you with the example that I gave in a different comment (unkillable deadlocked process).
Realplayer has several uses: the realmedia format is about the only one that *actually* understands streaming media, it can play QuickTime stuff better than Apple's own player, and it understands mp3 streams. The interface to realplayer 10 was very nice as well, but then I made the mistake of upgrading to fix various gaping security holes. Hah.
If all you want to do is play a single file, then mplayer2's interface is far better than WMP. If you want to manage a music library then I'll grant you that WMP is pretty awesome, but unfortuantly it won't play half the music I've got.
The GSM network isn't going to go away any time soon, and to be honest most people still just use a phone for voice calls and texts. Old phones also have the advantage of being more reliable (I've managed to crash mine *twice* in over 5 years) and in some ways more secure. Then again, I am actually looking for a possible replacement phone. The trouble is I really like flip phones (as opposed to clamshell), and flip phones have disappeared.
You do make some good points, and I'm sure that the new interfaces in Windows and Office are good - Microsoft are usually pretty good at usability. The trouble comes when people either a) go for shinyness at the expense of usability (realplayer and their broken resizing), or b) attempt to shoehorn new shinyness into old interfaces (IE7).