Syd, that title bar thing happens with regular, built-in, XP themes. Notice also that the console window is unthemed in XP.
It’s no surprise that Vista is half-baked, since it builds on half-baked foundations.
Vista has, for me, become the very definition of too many features for an operating system. Remember the good old days when the OS was the thing that ran all your programs? Now it’s become all your programs, all at once. Microsoft blew its production into full overdrive to maximize the volume of code the end user is purchasing, rather than blowing its production into full overdrive to maximize the transparency of the operating system.
Maybe I’m too much of a *NIX fan, but the OS should just be the environment in which you do your work, play your games, etc. It should not be an imposing juggernaut who watches over your shoulder. Vista is the epitome of overdesigned glut.
I’m surprised you did not mention Office 2007. The ribbon is a big deviation from everything else on the system. How long did it take you before you figured out the glowing meatball was a button?
I never can decide whether small mistakes mean a lot or not. On the one hand, yes, “if they can’t get that right, what CAN they get right, ya-know-whatta-mean?” On the other, when I make small mistakes (a typo here, a misremembered fact there), usually they are, in fact, quite small—trivial to the overall argument, a matter of style and not substance.
Bad GUI design could mean bad overall design, or it could not. It could mean, “our middle managers changed the GUI specs in the middle of production and nobody was really sure what they were supposed to be.”
I worked at a company that had to implement EXTREMELY rigid design standards (government imposed design standards, if you can believe it) in creating some technical manuals for said government about subway trains. Halfway into the project said state government body changed some aspects of their standards and made us go back and try to remember which was the right one and which was the wrong one. Inevitably there were some inconsistencies. It had nothing to do with whether we worked hard, were well run, knew what we were doing, it was all about bureaucratic confusion.
And we all know that consistency is (usually) best of all, but lord knows that’s a high standard on a massive project. I can barely keep my own notes consistent when I’m only talking about a few hundred documents. I would imagine maintaining consistency is probably THE problem of massive software design.
Anyway, I’ve never used Vista to any degree, so I can’t draw any strong conclusions—just some general thoughts.
could be worse. could have made no improvements at all since windows 95 like excite (http://www.excite.com/)
No. Microsoft Bob still takes the cake.
I guess I was so pleased with how Vista looked - compared to XP - I haven’t noticed a lot of the inconsistencies. Now I’ll be looking for them. Darn it, Jeff. Why d’ya have to do that and mess up my “Vista Experience”? 
Consistency is a tricky thing, especially as you add new features, try to keep things looking fresh and new, leverage the latest hardware, and at the same time strive for backwards compatibility.
I appreciate when the Windows developers work to make things consistent, but I can understand when it doesn’t happen. I’d also say that if resources and time are limited, I’d take things functioning correctly over making them 100% consistent.
@Simon: it’s not windows '95 style, it’s windows 3.11 style.
In 16 years nobody took the time to update its design nor get rid of it.
Note specifically a Vista U.I. clunker, but for fun try to use Outlook to print two specific pages of a multi-page email.
You can print Odd pages, or Even pages, but not, say, pages 3 and 4. This oddity is all the more incongruous because Outlook is part of Microsoft Office wherein all the other family members permit very specific selection of pages or pages ranges to print…
I tend to view the inconsistencies in Vista’s UI as a symptom of major faults in the design of the Windows build process. It would appear that every dialog is handcrafted - those “completed” before the availability of the swanky new fonts just kept to the old ones. It would go some way toward explaining why there’s such a long rollout process for other languages, too.
You would think (and would presumably be wrong, although I’d love to hear otherwise) that there would be a dialog development framework, which references a global styling engine and that rendered (resizing where necessary/appropriate to ensure font changes don’t cause problems) dialogs at build time.
But I suppose if you have a few spare billion to throw a it, why bother?
Vista is the counterpart of the vitamin-laden sugary drinks from Coca Cola. Looks good on paper, but delivers a punch at (or below) the waistline. And you pay premium for a drink even though it is loaded with a cheap commodity (sugar).
It seems that a lot of Windows development is outsourced to people and places where attention to detail does not matter.
Even Bill Gates shouted out that Vista is the best six billions he ever spent on an operating system.
How do you build an incomplete OS with virtually unlimited resources at your disposal?
I can’t argue with the point you’re making - consistency is important, sticking to the UI guidelines is a good idea.
I do wonder about the “fit and finish” of Vista relative to earlier versions, though. It seemed to me that Windows 95 was full of Windows 3.x-style dialog boxes, and that even Windows XP had plenty of throwbacks lurking just below the surface. I don’t think it’s surprising that Vista, which is far larger and more complex than previous versions, provides more opportunities for these sorts of inconsistencies.
What’s a desktop application developer to do right now, with a market split between XP and Vista? At least if he develops an XP-style UI, his app will work in a correct and reasonably familiar way on both systems.
In the end, this may be a good illustration of how Microsoft’s devotion to backward-compatibility is (for them and for us) both a blessing and a curse. They’ve been able to sell new OSes because the new OSes don’t break old stuff; because the new OSes don’t break old stuff, app developers (inside and outside Microsoft) won’t fix things until they absolutely must.
The ribbon is a big deviation from everything else on the system.
I heard Windows 7 is going to use the ribbon a lot more. Office often seems to be the place where MS tries out new UI ideas.
To go along with the XP, Vista, and Apple guidelines you posted above, here is a link to the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines: http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/hig/
Does MK Publishing Pay you to pimp their books Jeff?
XP was a security mess and heavy handed MS licensing enforcement, Vista is more or less a failure in both execution and user acceptance.
I still use W2K, and am now contemplating upgrading to Windows 2008 Server.
I just HATE how broken Office is now. A program, with a OS style Start Button!?!?!? Where you wouldn’t expect one, nor are told that that’s what it is?? Ribbons stink as well.
implementation of the new look that Office brought along for NO APPARENT REASON
This is a clueless statement in reference to Office 2007. The new UI was not for NO APPARENT REASON but a crystal clear reason. MS research revealed that by almost every measure of user experience the old office had failed completely. They even published some of this in order to explain the changes starting with the fact that 9 of the 10 most requested features in office were already there. They have click maps and videos of users searching in vain frustration to accomplish a given task that was often right in front of them. I’m glad they had the guts to reinvent it and find it hilarious that people try to legend and defend the old crapulance. Every interface MS has should be torn down in a similar fashion.
Vista’s inconsistency is almost too great to catalog. But I do seem to remember Xp being full of it too as evidenced by the fact that some of the stuff still in Vista is freaking Win98ish.
I would say that with leopard apple has finally pulled in a lot of loose strings. But even Tiger is full of inconsistencies and early versions of OS X were downright disasters. I never understood the half metal/half aqua phase which was as big a disconnect as I’ve seen in any os. Many people had harsh things to say about it then they do vista now. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2002/01/03/how_i_learned_to_stop/
It’s cute that you say that John Gruber has been critical of Apple in the past; it harkens back to the day when Gruber could be critical of anything Apple, rather than his current low-signal-to-noise-ratio fanboydom.