These days, it seems like I've already become obsolete. All the tech I use is at least three or four years out of date and multiple generations old. What's more, I have no desire to move where modern technology is headed. The current and potentially permanent rise of slates was far predated by microsoft's tablet initiative, which, to me, was and still is superior to any android, apple, or windows 8R platform. Full speed hardware with OEM hardware and software tweaks for low power and TDP outshine gimped tablets. I don't want 2 different infrastructures and UIs and systems to get used to. In the past, one might have said i should go apple. But even iOS doesn't mimic OSX in interface and usage.
What happened to the start menu? I will concede that old windows mobile devices were hampered by their contemporary technological failings. Large resistive touchscreens were hard to make in high quality, capacitive screens were usually restricted to POS and terminals, battery technology was poor(er) and as a whole, the stylus was a must on a 1.5" touchscreen. But honestly. If you took iOS and scaled it to a 1.5" screen, I'm sure you'd be complaining about how hard it was to use too. Capacitive touch has no accuracy, you have to use your entire fingerpad. A good resistive screen is both responsive and inherently more accurate than a respective capacitive screen. However I digress. What I am saying is that the dumbed down "finger friendly" interfaces were a result of the inadequacy of capacitive touch, relegating information density to the pits of hell. And if you put winmo 6 and up into a 1.2GHz dual core system, I'm sure it would be quite peppy. If you took the latest android build and slapped it on old winmo 200MHz hardware, the cause of a lot of winmo hate, I doubt you could even get out of the lock screen.
The start menu in windows mobile is what keeps me coming back, despite the Windows CE's obvious flaws and shortcomings. Consistency in behavior and design is just as important as the actual interface.
And as far as I'm concerned, current trends in UI development are disturbing. What happened to colors and borders? Sure, they may look garish and ugly, sure a monochrome button and UI element scheme looks pretty against a blank desktop, but then it becomes fine art rather than a tool. In my experience, color and well defined buttons and borders increase efficiency and recognition speed. Even as I type this, I look at the blogger wysiwyg interface and see... tons of white with closely spaced, poorly defined, and most importantly, a pitifully small color pallet. White, very light grey, and a splash of orange on buttons I only need to use once. Items in a vertical column should be divided with explicit horizontal dividers that stand out from the background. A one or two pixel bar with a low contrast color does not a divider make. Yes, when you mouse over the button, it is highlighted by a very low contrast orange hue, but it's barely visible if the mouse is left over the button and more importantly, I'm not a blind old man. I don't need to hover my mouse over every letter I see. I use my eyes first and the mouse follows when I begin to recognize the button I want.
I was just looking at Onenote 2013's new interface and it's the same issue. The notebooks are separated by... white space which happens to also be the color of the background for evey single UI element in the program. In ON2007, the notebooks, tabs, taskbars, etc. are all in their own boxes, where you can find them and where they don't run into the workflow. Can you imagine typing text next to the list of notebooks? Where does the label end and the document begin?
Windows 98/95 UI styling may be ugly as sin, and the color choices were crimes in and of themselves, but they worked and you didn't have to worry about loosing the command line in your word document. If they start making everything white with no borders and distinguishing elements, I'm going to get lost trying to navigate my folders. Oh, but wait. That's the whole point of libraries and file managers isn't it? With things like winamp, foobar, WMC, windows libraries, tablet file systems, and the myriad of other hands-off file systems, you let the program decide where things should go. Well sorry if I want to have control over where things are kept. Nothing beats a well designed hierarchical file system that doesn't rely on a third party to find you things. Metatags get corrupted, programs stop working, but the basic, NTFS or ZFS files organization remains. I've always hated windows libraries. Sure, it makes finding things easier, but that assumes I only consume. If I want to chose where a file is saved, I have to leave the library system and hunt down the folder I want anyway or the library might steal it away and hide it somewhere I'll never find it without another third party search program like "everything" and then we are right back where we started.
In closing, long live the start menu and window borders!
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