I agree with the whole start menu thing. I didn’t know that was coming with Vista, but I found myself wishing XP had something similar yesterday only yesterday.
On the subject of namespaces, I’m okay with the Micro$oft prefix, as it does allow one to not sorry so much about competing for classnames.
@Ian T: MS knows, they don’t care.
Maybe the reasoning behind the Windows prefix is so that people who own Macs and Windows boxes won’t get confused when they see apps like Calendar and Mail and think they are in OS X instead of Windows? 
Well, once they load up an old application and their entire UI is jarred into “Classic” mode, they’ll remember soon enough.
The first thing I’ll do is trying to remove all those unnecessary Windows applications, for most of them there’s a better alternative anyway.
Well, at least they didn’t prefix it with “Microsoft Windows Vista…”
Hang on, excessive branding like in the start menu is one thing, but on the namespaces of the libraries - that means something. It separates ‘Microsoft.IO’ from ‘My.IO’.
Totally agree about the start menu, though.
John:
Windows Update is a good example, particularly since Microsoft now has a combined Windows/Office Updater named “Microsoft Update.”
Now, as for names, there’s a flip side right on the example picture: “Catalyst Install Manager.”
Is that a manager for installing Cisco Catalyst, ATI Catalyst, or the Catalyst web framework? Or something else entirely?
This reminds me of a place I used to work. Not only did they use Hungarian notation (developing in VB .NET), but even for Hungarian, it was excessive. An object was prefixed “obj”; but a collection (being an object itself) was prefixed “objcol”. Then they had the “m” for class-level variables. So in Intellisense you got a long list of crap starting with “mobjcol”, and you had to type all those characters before you got to anything that actually meant something.
(Pointless prefixing was, said to say, the least of their problems.)
Like what pjabbptt said about KDE.
The K’s in KDE are even more annoying as I’m attempting quite hard to just ‘focus’ and with the ‘K’ prefix it’s hard to mentally search for an application you’re looking for.
Type “readme” or “manual” after installing a bunch of programs and you’ll quickly understand why the “search everything” model isn’t working very well.
How would you know what document belongs to what program ?
I think this method is actually a step back, it’s a nice feature but the old fashioned XP folding out program menu should be there as well, right now in Vista we have the “new” scrolling menu which is impossible to find anything in and then the classic menu which is really ugly on Vista.
Typing to find documents and applications reminds me a lot of old commandline based systems, in a way this is a step backwards and not forward, it’s a good side feature but should not be the main way of finding stuff.
The example linked to is typical of the ‘let everything fall where it may’ attitude, but it’s like complaining that a house is badly designed because you didn’t tidy your bedroom and left junk all over the floor.
You can tidy and redesign your Start Menu to suit your pattern of thinking and workflow in any way you please, and when you do it works just fine.
My Start Menu in XP is elegant, to the point, and simple to use, and can be navigated much faster than the Vista Start Menu.
I have full development suites for Office, SQL Server and .NET, a recording/mixing suite, a photographic suite, and a 3D graphics suite with all the bells and whistles and key utilities. Yet, it is not anything like the mess depicted in the linked article.
But, I agree, for the beginner who hasn’t yet learned how to customise the Start Menu, the naming convention in use is horrible.
Regarding the Start menu: I agree with deleting the “Windows” noise everywhere except maybe Windows Update–it’s useful there, as the program actually updates Windows.
As for namespaces, there’s no good way to shorten them. It’s an unfortunate fact of life in the Java world too, where package names (the Java equivalent of namespaces), by convention, are supposed to start with the company’s domain name, in reverse, e.g., com.microsoft.system… Makes for some very long namespaces.
I think the best that can be done is to offer good search (as-you-type, full string) wherever a huge list stuff appears in a UI.
Yeah, like they always put “ms” before every possible dll file. e.g. mscoree.dll
Yes!!! Namespaces are evil!
Let’s use ‘global’ namespace for everything.
Yes!!! Classes are evil!
Let’s put everything in one class.
‘Jeff Atwood’ had a baaaad day…
v
I’d be interested in seeing what benifits in finding the app you want in several formats: The normal Vista format, without the “Windows” words, “(Windows)” appended, and all of the above without icons.
Whilst it’s almost impossible to navigate a list like that based on icons (most people think in terms of the name of the program they are finding, it takes a lot of training to think in terms of the icon) the icons help as a secondary clue. With the “Windows” prefix, the list of names you are actualy looking down is further from the icon and thus the icon seems to have less of an influence. Also looking at it with “(Windows)” appended, and maybe even a shorter prefix, helps determin how much is positioning and how much is visual noise. Doing it without icons helps tell the same.
he revamped Start menu is one of my favorite Vista features
I cannot say the same (I don’t like the new menu).
Maybe because I hated the XP Start menu and never used it (and, in general, the first thing I do in XP is switch to “Classic mode” 
Whine, whine, whine…
Did you forget the ‘good ole days’ when we had a black screen with green letters and $ or or a _ or a ! or a ] staring at us?
When you ‘HAD’ to type everything into it and hope that it was spelled or misspelled correctly?
How soon we forget…
As far as coding namespaces, at least Java confines most system stuff to ttjava./tt and ttjavax./tt. ttcom.sun.*/tt names are thankfully few and far between.
Microsoft definitely wins the narcissism contest
I think John’s right on the money in his assessment.
Personally, I also agree with Jeff’s rhetorical implication that it’s the market-mousketeers who are to blame for the eventual babbling noise we have to endure. Yes I can change the text myself, but I don’t think this particular matter should be a question of personal taste…let the marketers change their menus to add their own names to the front if they want.
As far as namespace disambiguation…that’s a tough one. Perhaps including the vendor/author name as a component of the assembly name (a bit like version and culture, though optional)?
[tongue_in_cheek]And stop picking on the command line! At least learn how to use the Tab key…it may not support synonyms, but it goes a long way toward preventing carpal-tunnel syndrome…[/tongue_in_cheek]
Although this article wasnt really about the new menu let me continue the argument I made earlier.
These are the main issues as I see it:
o Hard to find specific documents or applications that are using the same name. I guess this might be solved in the future by some meta data that the search picks up but it will take a long time until everything uses that.
o You have to type the language the program name is in. This may not sound like a problem but think about it, someone with a chineese keyboard has to write “ThisApp” with latin characters because that’s the name the guy that wrote it gave the program, with a shortcut on the menu all they have to do is click on it.
o You have to know what you have installed, while on a folding programs menu you can see it directly.
o You have to spell correctly, this may change in the final release but as far as I could see it did not correct spelling misstakes.
As I said, it’s a nice added feature but to remove the folding xp menu and replace it with a scrolling programs menu because you think everyone will search instead is stupid, a lot of people have ordered program menus and can find stuff in half a second, now I have to type to find it or scroll in a useless list.
I don’t know what the thinking is with this, I really hope MS throws in the XP folding program menu as an option in the remaining months up to release, it wouldn’t be hard and it would make it much easier for people to switch.
I would much prefer to have “DVD Maker” rather than “Windows DVD Maker”, but it wasn’t my choice.
On the namespace side, the reason everything is in “Microsoft” or “System” is to lessen the possibilities of collision. That allows customers to have namespaces named “System” if they wish.
Another thing about vs and Windows in general… when will Microsoft discover resizable windows. I use the run dialog alot and C:\documents and settings\user\my documents\visual studio 2008\projects\blah doesnt fit in that stupid little window.
Windows has lots of usability problems, were all just too used to them to notice. I think the namespace selection thing should have been a searchable tree view, that way you can seperate your third party libs from your normal .net ones, web from winforms etc…
Maybe.For.Every.Dot.Microsoft.Makes.A.Dollar?