Microsoft causing lost productivity. A rant.
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There's a lot of talk about how the (ahem) consistent UI, ease of use, interoperability and general ubiquitessness of Microsoft products mean that they enhance productity. While I agree that we can now send email jokes faster and make our power point presentations gaudier in a fraction of the time, the trend over the last few years of making the software more bloated, more "feature" rich, and more resource intensive means, for me, that I've crossed the productivity summit and am now screaming down the slope of lost time spent waiting for a Microsoft application to unfreeze. - IE spends an inordinate amount of time with the little "Connecting" icon when you open a tab. Connecting to what? The blank page? Don't hurt yourself there. - Word makes me feel my computer will burst with the amount of stuff it seems to have to load up just to view a document - Outlook is unable to do anything without an obligatory 10 second pause. Want to preview a message? You'll have to wait. Want to reply? Wait. Want to view a different folder? Go get a coffee. - Visual Studio has lots of nasty little "oops - I pressed the wrong button and will now wait 2 mins for it to rename a key in a resource file or something. - SQL manager studio. Don't even get me started. Does it *really* need that much heavy lifting to show a context menu? Really? It's just dawned on me how much of my time I spend waiting for apps to unfreeze. It's not just the waiting, it's the break in the flow of work which means I'm constantly task switching from Zen Development to Screaming Purple Rage. Come on Microsft. How about we have a year where you spend your time making what you ask us to pay $400 for faster, leaner and more usable. Usability doesn't mean more features and stuff like making it impossible to tell the difference between an active window caption and non-active window caption. Usability means it's simple and easy to use and makes us more productive.
cheers, Chris Maunder
CodeProject.com : C++ MVP
Talk about apps freezing... I HATE it when Windows Explorer goes and freezes up whenever there's a network hiccup. Since Windows Explorer also happens to be the main GUI of Windows itself, everything freezes. It's ridiculous. I've lost count of the number of times I felt like smashing something (thank goodness for self control) because of it. It happens multiple times every day. I believe it's been like this ever since Win95 or something. Whenever I open IE I get a "connecting to proxy" message or some junk like that. Fortunately I don't have to deal with IE often (FF fanboy here)
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There's a lot of talk about how the (ahem) consistent UI, ease of use, interoperability and general ubiquitessness of Microsoft products mean that they enhance productity. While I agree that we can now send email jokes faster and make our power point presentations gaudier in a fraction of the time, the trend over the last few years of making the software more bloated, more "feature" rich, and more resource intensive means, for me, that I've crossed the productivity summit and am now screaming down the slope of lost time spent waiting for a Microsoft application to unfreeze. - IE spends an inordinate amount of time with the little "Connecting" icon when you open a tab. Connecting to what? The blank page? Don't hurt yourself there. - Word makes me feel my computer will burst with the amount of stuff it seems to have to load up just to view a document - Outlook is unable to do anything without an obligatory 10 second pause. Want to preview a message? You'll have to wait. Want to reply? Wait. Want to view a different folder? Go get a coffee. - Visual Studio has lots of nasty little "oops - I pressed the wrong button and will now wait 2 mins for it to rename a key in a resource file or something. - SQL manager studio. Don't even get me started. Does it *really* need that much heavy lifting to show a context menu? Really? It's just dawned on me how much of my time I spend waiting for apps to unfreeze. It's not just the waiting, it's the break in the flow of work which means I'm constantly task switching from Zen Development to Screaming Purple Rage. Come on Microsft. How about we have a year where you spend your time making what you ask us to pay $400 for faster, leaner and more usable. Usability doesn't mean more features and stuff like making it impossible to tell the difference between an active window caption and non-active window caption. Usability means it's simple and easy to use and makes us more productive.
cheers, Chris Maunder
CodeProject.com : C++ MVP
Chris, As an MVP, did you not get invited to test drive Office while it was in Alpha/Beta?
"Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work and driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for, in order to get to the job you need to pay for the clothes and the car and the house you leave vacant all day so you can afford to live in it." - Ellen Goodman
"To have a respect for ourselves guides our morals; to have deference for others governs our manners." - Laurence Sterne
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There's a lot of talk about how the (ahem) consistent UI, ease of use, interoperability and general ubiquitessness of Microsoft products mean that they enhance productity. While I agree that we can now send email jokes faster and make our power point presentations gaudier in a fraction of the time, the trend over the last few years of making the software more bloated, more "feature" rich, and more resource intensive means, for me, that I've crossed the productivity summit and am now screaming down the slope of lost time spent waiting for a Microsoft application to unfreeze. - IE spends an inordinate amount of time with the little "Connecting" icon when you open a tab. Connecting to what? The blank page? Don't hurt yourself there. - Word makes me feel my computer will burst with the amount of stuff it seems to have to load up just to view a document - Outlook is unable to do anything without an obligatory 10 second pause. Want to preview a message? You'll have to wait. Want to reply? Wait. Want to view a different folder? Go get a coffee. - Visual Studio has lots of nasty little "oops - I pressed the wrong button and will now wait 2 mins for it to rename a key in a resource file or something. - SQL manager studio. Don't even get me started. Does it *really* need that much heavy lifting to show a context menu? Really? It's just dawned on me how much of my time I spend waiting for apps to unfreeze. It's not just the waiting, it's the break in the flow of work which means I'm constantly task switching from Zen Development to Screaming Purple Rage. Come on Microsft. How about we have a year where you spend your time making what you ask us to pay $400 for faster, leaner and more usable. Usability doesn't mean more features and stuff like making it impossible to tell the difference between an active window caption and non-active window caption. Usability means it's simple and easy to use and makes us more productive.
cheers, Chris Maunder
CodeProject.com : C++ MVP
Chris Maunder wrote:
SQL manager studio.
I love how this throws 'invalid index' exceptions from time to time. You have to be kidding me. And yes, it occured to me the other day that I post 'VS2005 sucks' messages at least once a month when it decides to freeze on me, for no good reason. It's beyond ridiculous. I have 2008 installed, but I've not really looked yet, I'm scared to.
Christian Graus - Microsoft MVP - C++ "also I don't think "TranslateOneToTwoBillion OneHundredAndFortySevenMillion FourHundredAndEightyThreeThousand SixHundredAndFortySeven()" is a very good choice for a function name" - SpacixOne ( offering help to someone who really needed it ) ( spaces added for the benefit of people running at < 1280x1024 )
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Chris, As an MVP, did you not get invited to test drive Office while it was in Alpha/Beta?
"Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work and driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for, in order to get to the job you need to pay for the clothes and the car and the house you leave vacant all day so you can afford to live in it." - Ellen Goodman
"To have a respect for ourselves guides our morals; to have deference for others governs our manners." - Laurence Sterne
I've begged, pleaded, yelled and even asked Microsoft nicely every chance I've had to please put more effort into responsiveness and resource use. The betas are for finding bugs and suggesting changes to the way things work. They aren't for suggesting subtle but important shifts in programming philosophy
cheers, Chris Maunder
CodeProject.com : C++ MVP
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Chris, As an MVP, did you not get invited to test drive Office while it was in Alpha/Beta?
"Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work and driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for, in order to get to the job you need to pay for the clothes and the car and the house you leave vacant all day so you can afford to live in it." - Ellen Goodman
"To have a respect for ourselves guides our morals; to have deference for others governs our manners." - Laurence Sterne
I don't think I was. I *was* invited to test VS2005, and every bug I reported, I was told was a feature. I didn't install the test version of 2008. To add, I then spent a lot of time on the MSDN forums telling people the bugs I had reported were officially features :-)
Christian Graus - Microsoft MVP - C++ "also I don't think "TranslateOneToTwoBillion OneHundredAndFortySevenMillion FourHundredAndEightyThreeThousand SixHundredAndFortySeven()" is a very good choice for a function name" - SpacixOne ( offering help to someone who really needed it ) ( spaces added for the benefit of people running at < 1280x1024 )
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There's a lot of talk about how the (ahem) consistent UI, ease of use, interoperability and general ubiquitessness of Microsoft products mean that they enhance productity. While I agree that we can now send email jokes faster and make our power point presentations gaudier in a fraction of the time, the trend over the last few years of making the software more bloated, more "feature" rich, and more resource intensive means, for me, that I've crossed the productivity summit and am now screaming down the slope of lost time spent waiting for a Microsoft application to unfreeze. - IE spends an inordinate amount of time with the little "Connecting" icon when you open a tab. Connecting to what? The blank page? Don't hurt yourself there. - Word makes me feel my computer will burst with the amount of stuff it seems to have to load up just to view a document - Outlook is unable to do anything without an obligatory 10 second pause. Want to preview a message? You'll have to wait. Want to reply? Wait. Want to view a different folder? Go get a coffee. - Visual Studio has lots of nasty little "oops - I pressed the wrong button and will now wait 2 mins for it to rename a key in a resource file or something. - SQL manager studio. Don't even get me started. Does it *really* need that much heavy lifting to show a context menu? Really? It's just dawned on me how much of my time I spend waiting for apps to unfreeze. It's not just the waiting, it's the break in the flow of work which means I'm constantly task switching from Zen Development to Screaming Purple Rage. Come on Microsft. How about we have a year where you spend your time making what you ask us to pay $400 for faster, leaner and more usable. Usability doesn't mean more features and stuff like making it impossible to tell the difference between an active window caption and non-active window caption. Usability means it's simple and easy to use and makes us more productive.
cheers, Chris Maunder
CodeProject.com : C++ MVP
Chris Maunder wrote:
IE spends an inordinate amount of time with the little "Connecting" icon when you open a tab. Connecting to what? The blank page? Don't hurt yourself there.
I HATE this. I bet I spend 30 minutes a day total waiting for IE to "connect". Grrr.
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There's a lot of talk about how the (ahem) consistent UI, ease of use, interoperability and general ubiquitessness of Microsoft products mean that they enhance productity. While I agree that we can now send email jokes faster and make our power point presentations gaudier in a fraction of the time, the trend over the last few years of making the software more bloated, more "feature" rich, and more resource intensive means, for me, that I've crossed the productivity summit and am now screaming down the slope of lost time spent waiting for a Microsoft application to unfreeze. - IE spends an inordinate amount of time with the little "Connecting" icon when you open a tab. Connecting to what? The blank page? Don't hurt yourself there. - Word makes me feel my computer will burst with the amount of stuff it seems to have to load up just to view a document - Outlook is unable to do anything without an obligatory 10 second pause. Want to preview a message? You'll have to wait. Want to reply? Wait. Want to view a different folder? Go get a coffee. - Visual Studio has lots of nasty little "oops - I pressed the wrong button and will now wait 2 mins for it to rename a key in a resource file or something. - SQL manager studio. Don't even get me started. Does it *really* need that much heavy lifting to show a context menu? Really? It's just dawned on me how much of my time I spend waiting for apps to unfreeze. It's not just the waiting, it's the break in the flow of work which means I'm constantly task switching from Zen Development to Screaming Purple Rage. Come on Microsft. How about we have a year where you spend your time making what you ask us to pay $400 for faster, leaner and more usable. Usability doesn't mean more features and stuff like making it impossible to tell the difference between an active window caption and non-active window caption. Usability means it's simple and easy to use and makes us more productive.
cheers, Chris Maunder
CodeProject.com : C++ MVP
Chris Maunder wrote:
IE spends an inordinate amount of time with the little "Connecting" icon when you open a tab.
This one does NOT make sense to me. Whenever I use IE7, I get the feeling I'm waiting for a boat to sink. It's a strange feeling. Incidentally, my original bias against Firefox was the time it took to load compared with IE6. Once I finally started using it, I decided that 2-3 second difference wasn't really important to me. Now with IE7, I can gloat that I don't have to wait 20 seconds for the first connection to work, even if it's the about:blank page.
Chris Maunder wrote:
Outlook is unable to do anything without an obligatory 10 second pause.
This has ALWAYS infuriated me. Why in the WORLD is this application (apparently) single-threaded when EVERYTHING it does can fail or take 2 minutes to time out? WHY??
Chris Maunder wrote:
Visual Studio has lots of nasty little "oops - I pressed the wrong button and will now wait 2 mins
My favorite is accidentally hitting F1 when I mean to hit ESC. Great. All I wanted to do was close the Find dialog box. Now, I have to wait 2 minutes for you to FINALLY open Help, only for me to instantly close it again. Yeah. Those are fun. X|
Chris Maunder wrote:
It's just dawned on me how much of my time I spend waiting for apps to unfreeze.
One of the reasons I spend (possibly unnecessarily extreme) amounts of time ensuring every app I write is ridiculously responsive. I HATE that non-responsiveness and it confuses users who think the app is broken.
It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity. - Albert Einstein
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There's a lot of talk about how the (ahem) consistent UI, ease of use, interoperability and general ubiquitessness of Microsoft products mean that they enhance productity. While I agree that we can now send email jokes faster and make our power point presentations gaudier in a fraction of the time, the trend over the last few years of making the software more bloated, more "feature" rich, and more resource intensive means, for me, that I've crossed the productivity summit and am now screaming down the slope of lost time spent waiting for a Microsoft application to unfreeze. - IE spends an inordinate amount of time with the little "Connecting" icon when you open a tab. Connecting to what? The blank page? Don't hurt yourself there. - Word makes me feel my computer will burst with the amount of stuff it seems to have to load up just to view a document - Outlook is unable to do anything without an obligatory 10 second pause. Want to preview a message? You'll have to wait. Want to reply? Wait. Want to view a different folder? Go get a coffee. - Visual Studio has lots of nasty little "oops - I pressed the wrong button and will now wait 2 mins for it to rename a key in a resource file or something. - SQL manager studio. Don't even get me started. Does it *really* need that much heavy lifting to show a context menu? Really? It's just dawned on me how much of my time I spend waiting for apps to unfreeze. It's not just the waiting, it's the break in the flow of work which means I'm constantly task switching from Zen Development to Screaming Purple Rage. Come on Microsft. How about we have a year where you spend your time making what you ask us to pay $400 for faster, leaner and more usable. Usability doesn't mean more features and stuff like making it impossible to tell the difference between an active window caption and non-active window caption. Usability means it's simple and easy to use and makes us more productive.
cheers, Chris Maunder
CodeProject.com : C++ MVP
Chris Maunder wrote:
Come on Microsft. How about we have a year where you spend your time making what you ask us to pay $400 for faster, leaner and more usable. Usability doesn't mean more features and stuff like making it impossible to tell the difference between an active window caption and non-active window caption. Usability means it's simple and easy to use and makes us more productive.
Can't agree with you more! I just threw some rather expensive hardware at it, and the shit still freezes up. It's not even connecting to the net or anything important. Just bringing up a context menu in windows explorer is a dog sometimes (but the icons sure look pretty :) ).
- S 50 cups of coffee and you know it's on!
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I've begged, pleaded, yelled and even asked Microsoft nicely every chance I've had to please put more effort into responsiveness and resource use. The betas are for finding bugs and suggesting changes to the way things work. They aren't for suggesting subtle but important shifts in programming philosophy
cheers, Chris Maunder
CodeProject.com : C++ MVP
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Talk about apps freezing... I HATE it when Windows Explorer goes and freezes up whenever there's a network hiccup. Since Windows Explorer also happens to be the main GUI of Windows itself, everything freezes. It's ridiculous. I've lost count of the number of times I felt like smashing something (thank goodness for self control) because of it. It happens multiple times every day. I believe it's been like this ever since Win95 or something. Whenever I open IE I get a "connecting to proxy" message or some junk like that. Fortunately I don't have to deal with IE often (FF fanboy here)
You can correct the Windows explorer freeze on network hiccup - you can tell it to darn well *do not * go checking the network shares all the time - some registry setting somewhere, sorry you'll have to google for the exact setting. A long time ago I did that and makes my life so much better!
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There's a lot of talk about how the (ahem) consistent UI, ease of use, interoperability and general ubiquitessness of Microsoft products mean that they enhance productity. While I agree that we can now send email jokes faster and make our power point presentations gaudier in a fraction of the time, the trend over the last few years of making the software more bloated, more "feature" rich, and more resource intensive means, for me, that I've crossed the productivity summit and am now screaming down the slope of lost time spent waiting for a Microsoft application to unfreeze. - IE spends an inordinate amount of time with the little "Connecting" icon when you open a tab. Connecting to what? The blank page? Don't hurt yourself there. - Word makes me feel my computer will burst with the amount of stuff it seems to have to load up just to view a document - Outlook is unable to do anything without an obligatory 10 second pause. Want to preview a message? You'll have to wait. Want to reply? Wait. Want to view a different folder? Go get a coffee. - Visual Studio has lots of nasty little "oops - I pressed the wrong button and will now wait 2 mins for it to rename a key in a resource file or something. - SQL manager studio. Don't even get me started. Does it *really* need that much heavy lifting to show a context menu? Really? It's just dawned on me how much of my time I spend waiting for apps to unfreeze. It's not just the waiting, it's the break in the flow of work which means I'm constantly task switching from Zen Development to Screaming Purple Rage. Come on Microsft. How about we have a year where you spend your time making what you ask us to pay $400 for faster, leaner and more usable. Usability doesn't mean more features and stuff like making it impossible to tell the difference between an active window caption and non-active window caption. Usability means it's simple and easy to use and makes us more productive.
cheers, Chris Maunder
CodeProject.com : C++ MVP
- IE spends an inordinate amount of time with the little "Connecting" icon when you open a tab. Connecting to what? The blank page? Don't hurt yourself there. Try set the home page as "about:1" or just "about:" this save sometimes ^.^ (may be just 0.1-0.5 second)
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There's a lot of talk about how the (ahem) consistent UI, ease of use, interoperability and general ubiquitessness of Microsoft products mean that they enhance productity. While I agree that we can now send email jokes faster and make our power point presentations gaudier in a fraction of the time, the trend over the last few years of making the software more bloated, more "feature" rich, and more resource intensive means, for me, that I've crossed the productivity summit and am now screaming down the slope of lost time spent waiting for a Microsoft application to unfreeze. - IE spends an inordinate amount of time with the little "Connecting" icon when you open a tab. Connecting to what? The blank page? Don't hurt yourself there. - Word makes me feel my computer will burst with the amount of stuff it seems to have to load up just to view a document - Outlook is unable to do anything without an obligatory 10 second pause. Want to preview a message? You'll have to wait. Want to reply? Wait. Want to view a different folder? Go get a coffee. - Visual Studio has lots of nasty little "oops - I pressed the wrong button and will now wait 2 mins for it to rename a key in a resource file or something. - SQL manager studio. Don't even get me started. Does it *really* need that much heavy lifting to show a context menu? Really? It's just dawned on me how much of my time I spend waiting for apps to unfreeze. It's not just the waiting, it's the break in the flow of work which means I'm constantly task switching from Zen Development to Screaming Purple Rage. Come on Microsft. How about we have a year where you spend your time making what you ask us to pay $400 for faster, leaner and more usable. Usability doesn't mean more features and stuff like making it impossible to tell the difference between an active window caption and non-active window caption. Usability means it's simple and easy to use and makes us more productive.
cheers, Chris Maunder
CodeProject.com : C++ MVP
I think the NRA defence for Microsoft might be applicable. The problem IE has is the content it is increasingly required to display. If you run a minimalist version, every web site is constantly requiring you to flash, pop-up and all manner of other stuff. I used to have the Sydney Morning Herald as my home page but that became too slow with ads, pop-ups pop-overs, videos, slide-shows and who knows what before even a line of real news made it to the screen. IE has remained constant while that site bloated to unusability It is the same with so many other sites. Word has a similar problem. A good 'executive' document must have all manner of headings, index's references, drawings, pictures.... Word is merely the messenger. Visual Studio has its quirks, but I recently have been working on a project using VCL with BDS6. That has reminded me how easy the entry to VS is. Outlook and SQL Management Studio though...you have identified the dinosaurs.
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There's a lot of talk about how the (ahem) consistent UI, ease of use, interoperability and general ubiquitessness of Microsoft products mean that they enhance productity. While I agree that we can now send email jokes faster and make our power point presentations gaudier in a fraction of the time, the trend over the last few years of making the software more bloated, more "feature" rich, and more resource intensive means, for me, that I've crossed the productivity summit and am now screaming down the slope of lost time spent waiting for a Microsoft application to unfreeze. - IE spends an inordinate amount of time with the little "Connecting" icon when you open a tab. Connecting to what? The blank page? Don't hurt yourself there. - Word makes me feel my computer will burst with the amount of stuff it seems to have to load up just to view a document - Outlook is unable to do anything without an obligatory 10 second pause. Want to preview a message? You'll have to wait. Want to reply? Wait. Want to view a different folder? Go get a coffee. - Visual Studio has lots of nasty little "oops - I pressed the wrong button and will now wait 2 mins for it to rename a key in a resource file or something. - SQL manager studio. Don't even get me started. Does it *really* need that much heavy lifting to show a context menu? Really? It's just dawned on me how much of my time I spend waiting for apps to unfreeze. It's not just the waiting, it's the break in the flow of work which means I'm constantly task switching from Zen Development to Screaming Purple Rage. Come on Microsft. How about we have a year where you spend your time making what you ask us to pay $400 for faster, leaner and more usable. Usability doesn't mean more features and stuff like making it impossible to tell the difference between an active window caption and non-active window caption. Usability means it's simple and easy to use and makes us more productive.
cheers, Chris Maunder
CodeProject.com : C++ MVP
Yes. If I have Outlook running, and I sleep my portable, it is at lesat 3 minutes before I can really use it again after I wake it up -- especially if I leave it sleeping for several hours. It hits the disk _hard_. Looking at the process manager it is clear it is doing lots of paging. I have no idea why every page needs to be touched, and with 2 Gigs and only outlook running why the kernel decided to swap out so much (actually, I guess that might be the way sleep is designed to work)! Actually, also in IE's case, the long pauses almost always come while the disk churns. I hate it. :-) Cheers, Gordon.
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There's a lot of talk about how the (ahem) consistent UI, ease of use, interoperability and general ubiquitessness of Microsoft products mean that they enhance productity. While I agree that we can now send email jokes faster and make our power point presentations gaudier in a fraction of the time, the trend over the last few years of making the software more bloated, more "feature" rich, and more resource intensive means, for me, that I've crossed the productivity summit and am now screaming down the slope of lost time spent waiting for a Microsoft application to unfreeze. - IE spends an inordinate amount of time with the little "Connecting" icon when you open a tab. Connecting to what? The blank page? Don't hurt yourself there. - Word makes me feel my computer will burst with the amount of stuff it seems to have to load up just to view a document - Outlook is unable to do anything without an obligatory 10 second pause. Want to preview a message? You'll have to wait. Want to reply? Wait. Want to view a different folder? Go get a coffee. - Visual Studio has lots of nasty little "oops - I pressed the wrong button and will now wait 2 mins for it to rename a key in a resource file or something. - SQL manager studio. Don't even get me started. Does it *really* need that much heavy lifting to show a context menu? Really? It's just dawned on me how much of my time I spend waiting for apps to unfreeze. It's not just the waiting, it's the break in the flow of work which means I'm constantly task switching from Zen Development to Screaming Purple Rage. Come on Microsft. How about we have a year where you spend your time making what you ask us to pay $400 for faster, leaner and more usable. Usability doesn't mean more features and stuff like making it impossible to tell the difference between an active window caption and non-active window caption. Usability means it's simple and easy to use and makes us more productive.
cheers, Chris Maunder
CodeProject.com : C++ MVP
I've lost count of the number of hours VS has caused me and my colleagues with broken features such as replacing an updated and version controlled copy of a file with an old version and removing the file from version control. DataGrids which cause the properties tab to stop working, a friend of mine had all of the icons for the controls in the toolbox disappear and then there's the unbelievably long wait while it opens a solution with anything more than just a few files. I would love it if just for once Microsoft stopped pushing the .Net framework forward at a pace most can't keep up with with and instead devoted it's resources to fixing the tools which are suppose to make our lives easier. I don't particularly care about features such as SQLinq when the tools which make the new RAD feature don't work :mad: You know I feel just a little better for getting that off my chest :-D
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I've lost count of the number of hours VS has caused me and my colleagues with broken features such as replacing an updated and version controlled copy of a file with an old version and removing the file from version control. DataGrids which cause the properties tab to stop working, a friend of mine had all of the icons for the controls in the toolbox disappear and then there's the unbelievably long wait while it opens a solution with anything more than just a few files. I would love it if just for once Microsoft stopped pushing the .Net framework forward at a pace most can't keep up with with and instead devoted it's resources to fixing the tools which are suppose to make our lives easier. I don't particularly care about features such as SQLinq when the tools which make the new RAD feature don't work :mad: You know I feel just a little better for getting that off my chest :-D
I particularlaly like the way they 'enhanced' the search facility in the document viewer (aka help file). In VS 2003, searching for 'bloat ware' would search for 'bloat AND ware', which, lets face it, is what you want. But, when they released VS 2005 (and this behaviour is 'by design', don't forget), this now searches for 'bloat OR ware'. Or, to put it another way, every search you do returns 500 useless hits. To add insult to injury, installing VS 2005 even breaks VS 2003 in this regard. Words fail me.
Paul Sanders http://www.alpinesoft.co.uk
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There's a lot of talk about how the (ahem) consistent UI, ease of use, interoperability and general ubiquitessness of Microsoft products mean that they enhance productity. While I agree that we can now send email jokes faster and make our power point presentations gaudier in a fraction of the time, the trend over the last few years of making the software more bloated, more "feature" rich, and more resource intensive means, for me, that I've crossed the productivity summit and am now screaming down the slope of lost time spent waiting for a Microsoft application to unfreeze. - IE spends an inordinate amount of time with the little "Connecting" icon when you open a tab. Connecting to what? The blank page? Don't hurt yourself there. - Word makes me feel my computer will burst with the amount of stuff it seems to have to load up just to view a document - Outlook is unable to do anything without an obligatory 10 second pause. Want to preview a message? You'll have to wait. Want to reply? Wait. Want to view a different folder? Go get a coffee. - Visual Studio has lots of nasty little "oops - I pressed the wrong button and will now wait 2 mins for it to rename a key in a resource file or something. - SQL manager studio. Don't even get me started. Does it *really* need that much heavy lifting to show a context menu? Really? It's just dawned on me how much of my time I spend waiting for apps to unfreeze. It's not just the waiting, it's the break in the flow of work which means I'm constantly task switching from Zen Development to Screaming Purple Rage. Come on Microsft. How about we have a year where you spend your time making what you ask us to pay $400 for faster, leaner and more usable. Usability doesn't mean more features and stuff like making it impossible to tell the difference between an active window caption and non-active window caption. Usability means it's simple and easy to use and makes us more productive.
cheers, Chris Maunder
CodeProject.com : C++ MVP
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There's a lot of talk about how the (ahem) consistent UI, ease of use, interoperability and general ubiquitessness of Microsoft products mean that they enhance productity. While I agree that we can now send email jokes faster and make our power point presentations gaudier in a fraction of the time, the trend over the last few years of making the software more bloated, more "feature" rich, and more resource intensive means, for me, that I've crossed the productivity summit and am now screaming down the slope of lost time spent waiting for a Microsoft application to unfreeze. - IE spends an inordinate amount of time with the little "Connecting" icon when you open a tab. Connecting to what? The blank page? Don't hurt yourself there. - Word makes me feel my computer will burst with the amount of stuff it seems to have to load up just to view a document - Outlook is unable to do anything without an obligatory 10 second pause. Want to preview a message? You'll have to wait. Want to reply? Wait. Want to view a different folder? Go get a coffee. - Visual Studio has lots of nasty little "oops - I pressed the wrong button and will now wait 2 mins for it to rename a key in a resource file or something. - SQL manager studio. Don't even get me started. Does it *really* need that much heavy lifting to show a context menu? Really? It's just dawned on me how much of my time I spend waiting for apps to unfreeze. It's not just the waiting, it's the break in the flow of work which means I'm constantly task switching from Zen Development to Screaming Purple Rage. Come on Microsft. How about we have a year where you spend your time making what you ask us to pay $400 for faster, leaner and more usable. Usability doesn't mean more features and stuff like making it impossible to tell the difference between an active window caption and non-active window caption. Usability means it's simple and easy to use and makes us more productive.
cheers, Chris Maunder
CodeProject.com : C++ MVP
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There's a lot of talk about how the (ahem) consistent UI, ease of use, interoperability and general ubiquitessness of Microsoft products mean that they enhance productity. While I agree that we can now send email jokes faster and make our power point presentations gaudier in a fraction of the time, the trend over the last few years of making the software more bloated, more "feature" rich, and more resource intensive means, for me, that I've crossed the productivity summit and am now screaming down the slope of lost time spent waiting for a Microsoft application to unfreeze. - IE spends an inordinate amount of time with the little "Connecting" icon when you open a tab. Connecting to what? The blank page? Don't hurt yourself there. - Word makes me feel my computer will burst with the amount of stuff it seems to have to load up just to view a document - Outlook is unable to do anything without an obligatory 10 second pause. Want to preview a message? You'll have to wait. Want to reply? Wait. Want to view a different folder? Go get a coffee. - Visual Studio has lots of nasty little "oops - I pressed the wrong button and will now wait 2 mins for it to rename a key in a resource file or something. - SQL manager studio. Don't even get me started. Does it *really* need that much heavy lifting to show a context menu? Really? It's just dawned on me how much of my time I spend waiting for apps to unfreeze. It's not just the waiting, it's the break in the flow of work which means I'm constantly task switching from Zen Development to Screaming Purple Rage. Come on Microsft. How about we have a year where you spend your time making what you ask us to pay $400 for faster, leaner and more usable. Usability doesn't mean more features and stuff like making it impossible to tell the difference between an active window caption and non-active window caption. Usability means it's simple and easy to use and makes us more productive.
cheers, Chris Maunder
CodeProject.com : C++ MVP
one of the microsoft bloggers posted that an effort is underway to make a stripped down, fast operating system. That would be nice. Then they would need to go after office. So far VS2008 RTP has been behaving, but I'm not in too deep yet, still looking at the new goodies like LINQ and the SharePoint support. Silverlight 1.1 has me cautiously optimistic.
Len
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There's a lot of talk about how the (ahem) consistent UI, ease of use, interoperability and general ubiquitessness of Microsoft products mean that they enhance productity. While I agree that we can now send email jokes faster and make our power point presentations gaudier in a fraction of the time, the trend over the last few years of making the software more bloated, more "feature" rich, and more resource intensive means, for me, that I've crossed the productivity summit and am now screaming down the slope of lost time spent waiting for a Microsoft application to unfreeze. - IE spends an inordinate amount of time with the little "Connecting" icon when you open a tab. Connecting to what? The blank page? Don't hurt yourself there. - Word makes me feel my computer will burst with the amount of stuff it seems to have to load up just to view a document - Outlook is unable to do anything without an obligatory 10 second pause. Want to preview a message? You'll have to wait. Want to reply? Wait. Want to view a different folder? Go get a coffee. - Visual Studio has lots of nasty little "oops - I pressed the wrong button and will now wait 2 mins for it to rename a key in a resource file or something. - SQL manager studio. Don't even get me started. Does it *really* need that much heavy lifting to show a context menu? Really? It's just dawned on me how much of my time I spend waiting for apps to unfreeze. It's not just the waiting, it's the break in the flow of work which means I'm constantly task switching from Zen Development to Screaming Purple Rage. Come on Microsft. How about we have a year where you spend your time making what you ask us to pay $400 for faster, leaner and more usable. Usability doesn't mean more features and stuff like making it impossible to tell the difference between an active window caption and non-active window caption. Usability means it's simple and easy to use and makes us more productive.
cheers, Chris Maunder
CodeProject.com : C++ MVP
I concur about the Help issue mentioned above. This goes not only for Visual Studio but really ANY Microsoft product, even down to Windows itself (such as using Windows Explorer). Try accidentally hitting F1 while navigating Explorer and then enjoy the minute and a half or more of waiting for 'Help' to show up so you can close it. Why not make some sort of universal "OOPS!" key (maybe put it next to the elusive "Any" key) that means you REALIZE you goofed up and fat-fingered a command you typed or clicked the wrong button or accidentally hit an F key and would cancel it? Surely it can't be that terribly hard, now can it? And while we're ranting about the so-called 'Help', how ridiulous is the standard MS Help you get if you hit F1 just in Windows? Or in any Properties for Hardware, hitting the Troubleshoot... button? You get basically as much help as any standard helpless desk phone call..actually, you get less because it walks you through precisely the easiest steps that you PROBABLY already took, hence why you wanted to troubleshoot it. Then when you FINALLY convince it you're not a n00b and get past the obvious, it just tells you to contact Microsoft for more help. I say it should be just as important as getting better-responsive apps (which I do agree with) to put some resources toward a truly helpful Help!
========================= ~Events occur in real time~
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There's a lot of talk about how the (ahem) consistent UI, ease of use, interoperability and general ubiquitessness of Microsoft products mean that they enhance productity. While I agree that we can now send email jokes faster and make our power point presentations gaudier in a fraction of the time, the trend over the last few years of making the software more bloated, more "feature" rich, and more resource intensive means, for me, that I've crossed the productivity summit and am now screaming down the slope of lost time spent waiting for a Microsoft application to unfreeze. - IE spends an inordinate amount of time with the little "Connecting" icon when you open a tab. Connecting to what? The blank page? Don't hurt yourself there. - Word makes me feel my computer will burst with the amount of stuff it seems to have to load up just to view a document - Outlook is unable to do anything without an obligatory 10 second pause. Want to preview a message? You'll have to wait. Want to reply? Wait. Want to view a different folder? Go get a coffee. - Visual Studio has lots of nasty little "oops - I pressed the wrong button and will now wait 2 mins for it to rename a key in a resource file or something. - SQL manager studio. Don't even get me started. Does it *really* need that much heavy lifting to show a context menu? Really? It's just dawned on me how much of my time I spend waiting for apps to unfreeze. It's not just the waiting, it's the break in the flow of work which means I'm constantly task switching from Zen Development to Screaming Purple Rage. Come on Microsft. How about we have a year where you spend your time making what you ask us to pay $400 for faster, leaner and more usable. Usability doesn't mean more features and stuff like making it impossible to tell the difference between an active window caption and non-active window caption. Usability means it's simple and easy to use and makes us more productive.
cheers, Chris Maunder
CodeProject.com : C++ MVP
The same can be said for a lot of apps from other companies. Adobe Acrobat takes a long time to load itself, even on a dual-core 3.0GHz PC with SATA discs, just so I can view--not edit, just view--a PDF document. Same for Photoshop, just so I can view or edit an image. And what is Firefox doing when I first open it that it takes 30+ seconds before I can browse the internet? It isn't just MS or their products that are bloated and slow.
