Windows will no longer have an integrated basic rich-text-based word app.
Could they please retire modern Windows UI design?
Those contrasting color squares are not the zen those designers think. UI layout being different in paradigm for every application is not the productivity improvement they think. Using titlebars for something other than titles and control buttons is not optimization. Those buttons being some scratches on the screen barely visible is crap from any PoV I can imagine.
And somebody should explain to them that a good design for a billboard, a good design for a glossy magazine, a good design for a shop front, a good design for an office, a good design for a videogame, a good design for a movie and a good design for a workstation are all mutually incompatible in vast majority of cases.
And again about zen, simplicity, air and all that. I understand they think they are very smart and understanding of aesthetics. But zen would be having clean window borders and clearly visible control elements, for starters. And buttons not being just color squares. And in general solutions being subordinate to functional goals of the UI being usable. Industrial ergonomics are zen.
EDIT: I know it’s offtopic, not interested - keep walking
The drop-down text menu with dense options was good design. Adding the quick toolbar for more common tasks was also good design.
Moving everything from the text menu to the quick toolbar was bad design.
Just like the evolution of their search functionality. Started as an explorer feature (good), added to the start menu with a focus on program names (good), then they mixed web results from Bing and it’s unclear if a program I’m searching for is installed and it found that or if it exists and the result is a link to some website (bad, if I wanted to search the fucking internet, I’d launch a fucking browser), also insisting on using their browser (wtf, they should have been broken up 20 fucking years ago, instead the courts decided to just fucking ignore them doing the same shit they lost the lawsuit for only much worse now).
“We need to recapture the Apple market share!”
“Got it boss, we’ll make it stupid.”
I remember a while back Microsoft did an market research thing and found that of their brands, “Xbox” had positive consumer feedback while many of their other product names weren’t nearly as favorable.
So what did they do? Did they try to understand what Xbox did differently to leverage that strategy elsewhere? Did they promote the Xbox marketing team to give them a wider purview?
No. They just renamed Zune Music to Xbox Music and Games for Windows to Xbox for Windows. THAT’LL FIX IT!
That’s fine. Its usefulness dried up decades ago. There are better, free, non Microsoft word processing apps, and notepad always exists for your unimportant note taking.
Wordpad always seemed like an annoying and unnecessary half-step between notepad and word to me.
I liked having the minimal formatting options in WordPad without the bloat of Word.
Wordpad is also able to open large text files without having a stroke. RIP
In the nineties it produced the cleanest .rtf output of all the editors. Word makes toxic .rtf that unnecessarily turns formatting off and on at every line break and elsewhere too.
If it weren’t for wordpad I wouldn’t have learned how to output .rtf from my code.
RIP WordPad.
This is my most common use. It is grrat for opening large log files on servers.
its pretty neat if you dont have access to word, which is likely why they want to get rid of it
Doubtful. There are a myriad of free and FOSS options that are available right now to people of even limited technological skill. WordPad isn’t damaging their bottom line, but since it’s certainly not adding to it, there’s no point in maintaining it.
Thing about wordpad at least for me is that its just there if you need to make quick document that doesnt have to be as specificially made as you need to use word, but still more nice looking than just using notepad. You also dont need word to read stuff made with it.
T
Ah. Are you trying to write about Theodore Roosevelt? Bing can help!
The
Here are 10,000 links to Theodore Roosevelt
The fox…
It was very niche, but it’s great for viewing docs or other light work on a system you don’t want to install a whole office suite onto.
You can still do that but it’s through word webview. Some people won’t like that option.
I don’t want to install “word webview” on a server in order to look at a large log file or peruse some XML.
Can’t say I ever needed it in the 28 years I’ve been using Windows. I’m sure there are plenty who did, though.
Microsoft’s business model has often gotten in the way of anything they do making sense.
I need any note taking app to require at least half a gigabyte of memory
They should open-source it, as they did with Calculator.