Windows comes with a calculator your grandmother can use.
If you really want you can get free the power calc from microsoft at their website.
The classic calculator that exists at least since windows 98 is fine for 90% of the people.
Windows comes with a calculator your grandmother can use.
If you really want you can get free the power calc from microsoft at their website.
The classic calculator that exists at least since windows 98 is fine for 90% of the people.
For me, polish is important and the bulkiness keeps me away. That calc looks great!
If they did that (on all apps) on vista I’d have switched.
I’m easy I guess…
Don’t bother improving your product unless it results in visible changes the user can see, find, and hopefully appreciate.
pfff rubbish.
The first thing I do with a new instance of an OS is remove the crud such as visual styles. I want things fast not beautiful, does a performance increase result in what you call visible changes?
Are you trying to suggest that ever iteration of an application should require the users to learn how to reuse it???
on the other hand, many people stick with IE6 because MS changed the UI too much in IE7. If they made the transition to IE7 less painful by sticking to the old interface (but with tabs), IE6 wouldn’t still have a market share of 60% and the lives of web developers would be much, much easier.
People won’t upgrade when there’s no visible change, but people won’t upgrade either when they need to re-learn too many things!
Ps. The new calculator is looks a lot like the Mac Calculator with some buttons in awkward places (AND and OR should be next to each other!):
www.pixelbart.nl/files/calculator_xp_vs_windows7_vs_osx_leopard.png
You know, if Windows 7 lives up to its initial promise, and makes itself more friendly for a unix user, I might not shun windows so much. Still, you can’t beat linux for the easy availablity of plenty of quality software
Contrary to your opinion, not only visual changes are required, but also keeping known conventions.
Vista included many changes of how the OS reacted and had a too high learning curve.
For me, windows 7 is vista relaunched - it still has the same learning curve, and unless proven otherwise, the same limitations of having a resources hungry OS.
windows 7 is Vista relaunched
Vista calculator is clearly diferent from XP calculator. In XP I can do 1440 * 900 - ( 1280 * 1024) without crashing the calculator
The innards of Calc - the arithmetic engine - was completely thrown away and rewritten from scratch.
He’s kidding, right?
A calculator’s internal is a trivial Programming 101 task. And the calculators which have been included for years in Gnome, KDE and MacOSX (which also has the awesome 3D graphing app) have run circles around it. And probably still do.
It’s still no match to speedcrunch. Won’t use.
But in general I guess that users are less interested into a new look. What they want to have is that damn thing running (as easy and fast as possible).
I saw a screenshot a few days ago that
made me think Windows 7 Beta might actually
be worth checking out.
I dare you to check out Leopard’s Calculator. Tell me what you think.
How about this statement:
Visitors to this blog are not a good representation of Windows users in general
So if we use an ultra geeky mentality (like me) to judge an OS, the outcome is rather skewed away from reality.
Calculator and Paint are updated. Paint has a nice Office 2007-like ribbon. Notepad still the same.
For notepad, it’s particularly annoying. A decent software developer could write notepad by himself in under a week, and that includes unit tests. Ditto Wordpad. In fact, in some ways Wordpad is easier. Just plop an RTF Textbox on a form, and most of it is done for you already.
I haven’t checked the font installer to see if it’s still ugly.
Did they fix the dos prompt or do I still have to right click to paste? I hate right clicking to paste…
I agree with pixelbart, that making too many changes to the UI is a major pain point with users.
I don’t like Vista because it took away the interface for the way I did almost everything in XP and previous versions of Windows. They moved things and took away easy routs to get to certain configuration options.
It felt like I was using an operating system designed and polished by non-Windows users. It was more foreign to me than many of the Linux Distributions I have tried over the years.
Freecell looks all pretty now too.
I tried the beta and liked it, still feels like vista but with lots of fit and finish.
The Task Manager update is also very nice with all the new graphing for disk usage and some more process information
I saw a screenshot a few days ago that made me think Windows 7 Beta might actually be worth checking out.
If the calc screenshot is what motivated you to check out Windows 7 Beta - I’m very worried about you!
And with Calc, that’s exactly what happened: Massive technical improvements. No visual improvement. And nobody noticed.
There are plenty of people who only care about visual improvement. There are plenty of us who only care about technical improvements. To please both types of people, you would need to improve both the technical AND visual attributes.
It’s evidence that Microsoft is going to pay attention to the visible parts of the operating system this time around.
Did you not see all the transparent effects in Vista?? Perhaps calc didn’t get a visual overhaul, but Vista itself had PLENTY of visible upgrades. The problem is that it lacked any USEFUL non-visible upgrades. UAC and DRM were not features people wanted to use. So while it might have pleased some of the visual crowd, it did nothing for the techies.