Windows will no longer have an integrated basic rich-text-based word app.

41 points
*

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

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1 point

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).

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21 points

“We need to recapture the Apple market share!”

“Got it boss, we’ll make it stupid.”

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7 points

It just pains me to see, remember Chinese websites and software around 2007-2008?

Everybody (aware) looked at that with terror.

Now it’s the same everywhere.

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1 point

“Get rid of those ugly strain reliefs on the plugs!”
Uh, we don’t make hardware.
“I don’t care, get rid of them!”

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12 points

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!

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10 points

And then they tank the name X-Box

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32 points
*

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.

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4 points

I didn’t mind having something light and built in for when I just wanted quickly to create a little rich text doc and not boot up full fat Word and the corresponding jump in resource usage and file size.

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209 points

Wordpad always seemed like an annoying and unnecessary half-step between notepad and word to me.

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102 points

I liked having the minimal formatting options in WordPad without the bloat of Word.

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111 points

Wordpad is also able to open large text files without having a stroke. RIP

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2 points

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.

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14 points

This is my most common use. It is grrat for opening large log files on servers.

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48 points

its pretty neat if you dont have access to word, which is likely why they want to get rid of it

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22 points

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.

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4 points

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.

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73 points

Word is now so bloated that I fear using it. It’s nice to have Wordpad.

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45 points

T

Ah. Are you trying to write about Theodore Roosevelt? Bing can help!

The

Here are 10,000 links to Theodore Roosevelt

The fox…

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13 points

As if Clippy wasn’t doing that 25 years ago.

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29 points

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.

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2 points

You can still do that but it’s through word webview. Some people won’t like that option.

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2 points

I don’t want to install “word webview” on a server in order to look at a large log file or peruse some XML.

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15 points

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.

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7 points

I used it all the time to save text temporarily in. Note worked too, but i like the line break that WordPad had. It made reading and formatting easier.

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3 points

Best Windows built-in way to open files with Unix end lines.

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7 points

Microsoft’s business model has often gotten in the way of anything they do making sense.

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5 points

Is there anything left to microsoft that makes sense at this point? Maybe the physical doors to the microsoft offices still function… after you watch an ad?

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9 points

As others have said, fast opening quick notes with basic formatting.

For example, if I get an unexpected call I need to write down more than a call back number, Wordpad was my go to.

Well, at least when back when I used Windows regularly.

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6 points

Rtf is far more lightweight than docx. It’s closer to markdown.

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5 points

It was created for people to open Word docs at home before everyone had Office.

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13 points

I need any note taking app to require at least half a gigabyte of memory

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31 points

They should open-source it, as they did with Calculator.

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6 points

Libre office writer is a thing

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2 points

As is Abiword, which is a bit more of a direct comparison.

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14 points

Another thing. But there’s a lot of markdown and other lightweight markup editors.

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3 points

Yeah, sure, a really nice thing.

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