Microsoft formally deprecates the 39-year-old Windows Control Panel
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Until they allow you to open multiple settings app windows at the same time, I'll stick to cpl as much as possible.
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Not kinda like - it was Server 2003 x64 with a few licks of paint.
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You're not far off, since SOME control panel options use interfaces from even older versions of Windows, predating the Vista or even XP implementations. They never even finished moving everything into the more modern "control panel".No, "Settings" is clearly fundamentally flawed (e.g. the "only one instance open at a time business"). But "Control Panel" is old and clunky, probably difficult to maintain.
So they need to start from scratch again, with a new application, called (say) "Options", to combine the best features of "Settings" and "Control Panel".
And in twenty years' time MS can decide if it's matured enough so that "Settings" and "Control Panel" can both be removed.
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I am old enough to remember when Microsoft had the greatest software engineers in the world. I guess my main question is what the hell happened? The more they work on Windows the worse it gets. It is truly baffling how terrible their software has gotten and the settings app is just one of the many examples of that fact. I really don't understand how a trillion dollar company cant put together a better flagship operating system.
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YMMV with this. I have a desktop shortcut to get to where the above takes me.
Target:
c: \Windows\explorer.exe shell:::{A8A91A66-3A7D-4424-8D24-04E180695C7A}
Start in:
C: \Windows
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steelcobra
Ars Tribunus Angusticlavius
Or opens a control panel item, like when you need to change the actual settings on a network adapter.
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Terms like "deprecate" mean it's less about the cpl applets that MS authors -- it's about CPL as a platform for 3rd party OEMs / ISVs and driver vendors etc, to author plugins.
What I really wish they'd focus on is deprecating MMC.exe .. all the first-party uses of it, and as a third-party plugin framework.
What I really wish they'd focus on is deprecating MMC.exe .. all the first-party uses of it, and as a third-party plugin framework.
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How unmodern and unexprienced of you.
UIs are out, UXs in. It should not be a bunch of buttons, but an emotional journey of discovery.
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Let's just move on to whatever interface they were using in 90's Star Trek. I like to imagine those touch screens had pressure sensitivity and even had tactile capability so the buttons could be "felt" and users even felt a "click" when they were pressed.
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steelcobra
Ars Tribunus Angusticlavius
By official word of god (Michael Okuda) they were a software-defined interface with user-configured layouts. And in Voyager during Year of Hell, when Tuvok is blinded he sets the tactical station to Tactile Mode and can read and operate it as well as he could when he could see.
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D24tYFIVyv0
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Apple fanboy 101
Ars Tribunus Militum
... underneath it all, it's still Windows.
I like what MS has done with 11, probably because it gets closer to MacOS, but I still become mad 10 times per week at how stupid their Windows is.
I like what MS has done with 11, probably because it gets closer to MacOS, but I still become mad 10 times per week at how stupid their Windows is.
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Practice, musle memory, familiarity, or experience with something.
Whatever you call it, it overrides the results of fancy UX survey results or the judgement of UX designers who do not use anything in real life. I have an old MBP (Mid 2012). I think I started with OS X Lion and ended up with MacOS Catalina (10.15). During this long time, the Preferences pan remains virtually the same. They might have moved things a little but have not faced much difficulty finding things. Some grouping may have been not very logical but I (and I presume most users) got used to that grouping. People use a computer every day and they get used to finding things at specific places. That is more important than having a logical grouping of things. One reason Mac was always treated as more user friendly because it do not shuffle things around just for the sake of shuffling. QWERTY keyboard is less scientific than DVORAK but should we change all keyboards now?
You will always have different opinions of how an UX should be. Especially now things are like Fashion industry where you need to redesign everything every two years to look new and cool. But you do not put your tools to a different location.
The office ribbon is another example. When I use an Office application, screen space is the most important thing. It was a good design to have the menu and two rows of icons. Now we have large ribbon which takes a significant screen space and headache finding some commands. Not good at all.
Whatever you call it, it overrides the results of fancy UX survey results or the judgement of UX designers who do not use anything in real life. I have an old MBP (Mid 2012). I think I started with OS X Lion and ended up with MacOS Catalina (10.15). During this long time, the Preferences pan remains virtually the same. They might have moved things a little but have not faced much difficulty finding things. Some grouping may have been not very logical but I (and I presume most users) got used to that grouping. People use a computer every day and they get used to finding things at specific places. That is more important than having a logical grouping of things. One reason Mac was always treated as more user friendly because it do not shuffle things around just for the sake of shuffling. QWERTY keyboard is less scientific than DVORAK but should we change all keyboards now?
You will always have different opinions of how an UX should be. Especially now things are like Fashion industry where you need to redesign everything every two years to look new and cool. But you do not put your tools to a different location.
The office ribbon is another example. When I use an Office application, screen space is the most important thing. It was a good design to have the menu and two rows of icons. Now we have large ribbon which takes a significant screen space and headache finding some commands. Not good at all.
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Changing something just because it is prettier basically throws away all that muscle memory countless people already had managing systems. In the case of windows it is hundreds of millions of users having to waste countless man hours learning and troubleshooting a new way of clicking through things necessarily. It is also because the newer software engineer hires didn't learn enough to conform to existing software, user interfaces and formats and made inferior ones just because of looks and some ever changing useless new framework that always never increases productivity because you had to now learn both thebold and new paradigms and waste double the time learning everything the system can offer.
The same goes with all new software projects that replace older ones.
The right solution is to train software engineers to use the older system and expand that, not shoe-horn some executive marketing terminology like agile as a poor excuse to get bigger budgets to waste on new systems that was already implemented with existing software.
But c-suites learn from marketing magazines, they don't bother learning that whatever they're spending that new drop in turnkey replacement that will crash the business while pulling that multimillion dollar budget for is just a few clicks away hidden in the settings of existing systems.
The same goes with all new software projects that replace older ones.
The right solution is to train software engineers to use the older system and expand that, not shoe-horn some executive marketing terminology like agile as a poor excuse to get bigger budgets to waste on new systems that was already implemented with existing software.
But c-suites learn from marketing magazines, they don't bother learning that whatever they're spending that new drop in turnkey replacement that will crash the business while pulling that multimillion dollar budget for is just a few clicks away hidden in the settings of existing systems.
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So it's true then, it DOES have tactile feedback! This is the touch screen interface of my dreams!
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Why don't they just rename the Control Panel the Settings App and be done with it. If your job requires you to open the Control Panel several times a day on many different computers the Settings App, as currently configured, is a pretty crappy alternative. If you're a home user who has his cousin fix all your problems then the Settings App is a sure way to have your cousin not answer the phone. MS has tried to re-invent this particular wheel for years and failed. Give it a rest. Rename the CP to Settings. Add some cool colors or fonts to make the 80K MS developers happy and call it a day.
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Don't encourage them! MS already has enough of a problem constantly renaming everything they make every couple years.
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They try to invent tasks. So they keep breaking perfectly functional things.
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My theory is that Windows Mobile first took the best engineers from WindowsCE (leaving CE to languish), then in the pivot to MobileNT it took the best engineers from WindowsNT (leaving NT to languish) and when Windows Mobile was finally taken behind the shed they were all moved to Azure.
The Developer Tools guys probably escaped, I'm not hearing any grumblings about lowering of standards on that product line. Good thing too, since they're the roots of Microsoft. Apps and OS are johnny-come-latelies.
AFAICT, WindowsNT has been put in maintenance mode. Windows 11's UI is a retooling of the effort made for the last Windows Mobile spin: what if Windows but Android and the UI converted to cross-platform Web technologies? (we've just re-written the whole shell, can't let it all go to waste!). Meanwhile IMO the only way NT proper got some dev time was because of Azure, otherwise we'd still be on Vista's NT kernel. And Windows Server only got some attention again when Azure HCI showed up as a product to justify the investment (meaning, development is paid for and driven by Azure HCI but backported to Windows Server).
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steelcobra
Ars Tribunus Angusticlavius
Windows Mobile 10 was a branch of desktop Win10, just like the XBox OS.
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I always loved how people wnated to have LCARS in real life but thenr elised it's a pretty horrid interface. Just endless sreams of numbers, no clear navigation, color scheme, pretty much anything that makes a good UI.
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Which you can navigate to and select from most file dialogs. If not it's one click to show the path
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steelcobra
Ars Tribunus Angusticlavius
To be fair on this, what's on screen was based on what would show up on camera mixed with the actors knowing they just had to be confident about tapping at it.
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It's a fictional UI not really thought out other then "future" and "bright". That beings aid about 90% of all shot of it is a wall of numbers, sometimes on multi colored background.
Maybe the future is spreadsheets for all UI controls
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Lcars24 for dos, LcarsDE for linux, LCARS system 3 for rainmeter, LCARS theme for conky, system 42 screensaver for macs, TREK:Total interface for android and lcars.org.uk ?
Shall I go on?
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Did people all hate them? Do the developers consider them mistakes?
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steelcobra
Ars Tribunus Angusticlavius
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They are not the same exact LCARS as in Star Trek. They all make changes to make it more usable.
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Well of course. I always imagined that clicking on different bigger headings altered the layout to "pop out" whole categories of buttons, and that's just one example. It's a conceptual thing and I really like the flow of it, but no one's going to ask for literally "the same thing", because it's a made up artistic expression.
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They can break the UI however they want, as long as they leave MMC alone.
I do feel bad for the people who will lose functionality because of this. It seems emblematic of Microsoft's current focus on building new stuff instead of creating feature parity with the old stuff or continuing to provide what used to be a long support tail.
Looks like they've been leaving the documentation alone for a while:
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steelcobra
Ars Tribunus Angusticlavius
To be fair, it hasn't needed major changes since then. AD doesn't need a fancy new interface, it just needs to give you a clean tree view of all of your OUs and objects. Same with DNS, DHCP, Printer management, etc.
I'd argue that locally hosted AD is also easier to work with in some ways, a User object has a lot of fields that are just missing in Azure AD (but can sync to Azure) that are handy for working with software like CodeTwo so you can force the entire org to use the right signature format.
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My biggest issue with group policy objects is just inconsistent labelling and incomplete descriptions from one object to the next. One policy might define each option in a positive tense "This enables this, this disables that", while another speaks in a weird negative tense "This enables this feature being off, this disables the feature being on". While a lot of the descriptions tell me everything I need to know, there are also a decent number with no explanation, like "The HGXPP policy enables HGXPP" with no further explanation of what "HGXPP" is, though that's usually a quick web search away.
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Shouldn't be very hard to import the Excel PS Module, digest the GPO Spreadsheet and then filter it with where/select/sort - then pipe it to New-GPO (or take the Registry key on the spreadsheet and add it to a MOF).
Just tried it and it's not too hard, but it's not ideal (column titles have spaces which means you have to quote them in full to filter). It shows the Registry key that corresponds to a GPO, but not what kind of value we have to set (DWORD, etc.). Each policy has the full Help text that appears in GPO Manager.
Does Microsoft have a canonical place where to get the spreadsheets from or am I at the mercy of Google/Bing and direct links to the specific download page (sometimes Server 2016, other times Windows 10)?
Just tried it and it's not too hard, but it's not ideal (column titles have spaces which means you have to quote them in full to filter). It shows the Registry key that corresponds to a GPO, but not what kind of value we have to set (DWORD, etc.). Each policy has the full Help text that appears in GPO Manager.
Does Microsoft have a canonical place where to get the spreadsheets from or am I at the mercy of Google/Bing and direct links to the specific download page (sometimes Server 2016, other times Windows 10)?
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and the process you described sucks because it's like a maze trying to find the link to the original control panel applet that contains settings missing in the new Settings app. They name the links for the original Control Panel widget with ambiguous names like "Advanced settings" so it's not even obvious if it will open the control panel or another Settings page. And those shortcut links to Control Panel don't always open the Control panel that you want.
And the links to control panel widgets are sometimes hidden at the side or bottom despite being important, and they don't always show in the Settings App search box (IIRC) making it undependable as a search. (If I recall correctly you can't search for the Control Panel adapters screen, which shows all network adapters. The only search results is for the settings page which only displays active network adapters. And there's other weird oddities like the printers page on this new settings app missing functions from the old printers page. If I recall correctly, something to do with drivers or printer settings. )
The settings app has some shortcuts to the control panel integrated nicely, in the normal settings list vs the links on the side.
But in any case, the shortcuts to the Control panel sometimes open the wrong widget. I remember if I click the advanced adapter options button, it'll open an unhelpful control panel widget when the helpful one still exists.
If Microsoft is transitioning to the settings app to make a more touch-friendly interface, it doesn't help that some links open the old control panel without a warning. It'll help touch users to know when they'd like to grab a mouse for the best experience.
Microsoft needs to make an obvious dichotomy between the settings available in the new app versus control panel so people know where to look.
And some links seem like they'll open another Settings page, but it just opens up a browser window with a prefilled search like "get help with sound settings in Windows." (Just an example from memory) Why not add a little icon to designate what is a link to the control panel or the browser?
Sometimes Microsoft has transitioned functions to the settings app but excluded helpful features. So the control panel version is superior and may or may not still be available under several extra clicks. The new sound settings doesn't have VU meters or a "test sound" function while control panel does and that's very important for changing sound settings!
Changing settings is harder than it used to be.
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All in the name of a "modern interface" no one really asked for, all because they noticed just how many people are confused by the settings in control panel. Well, the only thing they ever needed to fix was wording and accurate descriptions. The UI was just fine. Heck, I PREFER having to hit "OK" or "Apply" for a setting to take effect, in case of accidental clicks.
And with all their changes to the UI, they never did solve one longstanding issue, and that's the sudden box appearing RIGHT under your mouse just as you're about to click on something else, so you have no clue what you just agreed to! There's a simple fix for that, and that's making sure Windows checks to see where your mouse is before generating a window and then making sure the box appears somewhere ELSE so that the area under your mouse is exactly as it was a second ago.
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