Microsoft decides it's a good time for bad UI to die We may not know exactly when or how, but we do know that the Windows Control Panel is gasping its last. Hurrah. Death Microsoft sends Windows Control Panel to tech graveyard READ MORE A living fossil in the platform's user interface, it is many things, none of them good. A direct link to the DOS app called Windows 1.0, its …
Huh? If m/s have decided it's a good time for bad UI to die, why aren't we going back to the windows 7 UI? Because that was so much better than windows 10/11.
What this article means is microsoft have decided everything should look like a dull and lifeless web page and to kill of usual visual prompts, but aren't actually dealing with what needs to be dealt with - such as storing user settings outside of the registry so that when you update your machine, reinstall your favourite gam-err-software and restore everything from backup, you don't have to go through various voodoo rituals to get things working again.
And it's not like settings actually makes it easier to find anything. Because it doesn't.
I'm not sure what the author of the article is drinking, But it should probably be prescription only.
There is a looong list of things you could do in the old WinXP control panel, but you simply can't with the new Win11 "Settings" contraption. Too many to list. And, as already said above, even those you can do, require more time for less efficiency: I remember being able to totally customize my Windows XP GUI in under a minute (border sizes, colors, sounds, explorer settings), doing the same thing in Windows 11 takes half an hour and several items won't stick for more than a couple days/weeks.
Oh wait, I forgot, this allows the PowerShell cowboys to show off their superior skills, who cares about those who just use a computer to do work. Windows is now a lifestyle, not an OS.
Or, say, un-mute a mic that Windows 10/11 has decided to mute for reasons not forthcoming. that toggle isn't in the settings app either, which is *quite* frustrating when it does that.
(the only way to fix that one is to go into the Sound control panel, select the device in question, go into it's properties, click on the Levels tab, and unmute it from there.)
Or when windows just randomly decides "oh, you are connected to a 4K TV? I'll make the display 1080p and 300% size, so you have icons that are 10 cm wide and tall, until you go back in and change the resolution back to where it was at the last boot, and then futz around with the icon/UI zoom to get it back to something resembling what it was.
I could go on, but you get the idea.
> when windows just randomly decide
Yes, that's the extremely infuriating tendency of "don't you tire your pretty little head about things, we know better - not only how you should do things, but also what exactly you should do (specifically, just pay us, pay us encore, pay us more!)".
Seriously, Windows UI has clearly not been created with the end user in mind, but loosely following a marketing checklist: "Mute switch? Check!". Who cares if it's hidden in the proverbial disused lavatory--It's there, you can't deny it. It's the same for the rest, (mostly) everything is there, but don't ask where exactly, or if it works. The important thing was to put check marks in all boxes of the marketing checklist.
In the author's trashing of the control panel, he seems to miss that the windows registry is the closest we have to a "shared, structured way of describing internal settings" that we use control panel, settings, local and group policies, powershell and regedit to fight with (the "stable" registry plus the "volatile" in-memory registry). From Windows 3.1 days.
However many applications such as .net applications have reverted away from the registry to unix-alike usually human readable config files, altered by non-standard application specific configuration tools.
Out of the list of possibilities above, which would I choose to walk a teacher through enabling ease of access configuration over a phonecall?
The control panel Ease of Access at least makes an attempt at using the whitespace to describe the tasks someone arriving on that page might use it for.
There will probably be a microsoft store app at some point to store and offer the user preferences along with the Microsoft account to push the rented cloud windows.
For Windows 10 at least: Settings -> Network & Internet -> WiFi -> Manage Known Networks.
That's with the 22H2 that I have on this box. It's quite possibly different on Windows 11, or indeed other builds of 10.
If you'd rather use the Registry, it is - I believe, but not 100% certain:
HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\NetworkList\Profiles\{GUID list, each one contains a ProfileName key, some but not all are WLAN profiles}
The could call it HKEY_CURRENT_USER, store it in NTUSER.DAT, and send it back to 1993, when it was invented.
Admittedly the issue is that there's so much GUID-specific stuff in there that importing it into a different user is problematic without third-party tools, but the concept has been around literally as long as the registry.
Indeed. Control Panel and Settings are different flavors of crap, but they're both still crap.
(Of course, anyone using the analogy "driving a Tesla around with a set of spanners in the frunk" is already on thin ice, since that assumes 1) spanners aren't useful, and 2) a Tesla is something to aspire to.)
Well your best hope is that your arsehole is not removed - might it be thought not to be so useful these days?
When operating systems were created then virtually all users needed to work occasionally to keep them running well - so having a control panel was helpful but every "upgraded" (like removing your arsehole from you) has changed our operating system world ... these days everything works most of the time if we're lucky, otherwise we need to buy a new computer.
Especially as, quoting Tom Cavalier-Smith (anus is the "scientific" word for arsehole): "The anus was a prerequisite for intelligence; Without it, heads and brains would not have evolved" (eg. see this cartoon, 4 slides from the end).
Not 100% sure this applies to Windows' Control Panel though ...
Oh right, so the mess that is the Settings App is better, is it?
Utter bullshit.
If Microcrap really decided that the "bad UI" should die, we'd be back on the Windows 7 interface immediately with none of the crappy leftovers from the awful Windows 8 debacle.
They would never have implemented default scroll bars that are invisible until you mouse over where they ought to be and extremely narrow so they disappear again if your hand trembles the tinyest bit. Or, for that matter, borderless windows that make identifying which stacked window you want harder than need be. They seem to believe that using their systems should be a challenge independent of the task you're trying to perform.
Ah, but who cares that, as a dynamic UI that people actually need to interact with, it's only one step away from a completely blank screen in terms of useability - just look at how sublime it looks when presented as a static screengrab, printed on glossy paper as part of an expensive brochure or magazine article to promote just how utterly wonderful it all is...
This trend for making UIs look drop dead gorgeous when viewed as a static image, at the expense of making them genuinely useable in real world conditions, is something that really needs to disappear ASAP. That, and the ever increasing numbers of cutesy transition effects added to modern UIs - how much time is now wasted by people having to wait a second or two for a panel to ooooooooze open, or a slider to swiiiiiiiiiiish from position to position, instead of them simply snap snap snappity snapping into place as quickly as the underlying hardware can render them?
This article is weird and hard to understand. I get that the author disliked the Control Panel and dislikes the new Settings UI.
After that, the author seems to be telling me that he has a better idea, but I'll be damned if I can figure out what it is or even what it looks like.
My suggestion would be to find something that exists and that works the way the author likes, so that we have a real-world example of it.
And if it turns out there's nothing out there that matches, well, that would also tell something.
Seems like allowing the user to save settings in the MS/Apple/Google account which are then automatically applied when logging into a new computer. Already done in a way with Windows user profiles in enterprises, but difficult to do fully since many settings are per device instead of per user.
If I read the article correctly, the answer is... semiotics?
Maybe the author is giving us the answer, but the problem is we don't understand the question. It should be straightforward enough to build an artificial intelligence that can determine the question to this answer. I'll volunteer to work on the fjords.
Control Panel is bad because:
1. Control Panel didn't contain all settings and wasn't really a central place to go for all fixes
I guess I might end up in Regedit occasionally but Control Panel usually does pretty well, unlike the new Settings
2. Users could break their PCs using Control Panel
Users will break their PCs with or without Control Panel. In my long support career Control Panel misuse never registered as a blip on the chart of things user's get wrong.
3. 3rd party peripheral settings apps don't get added to control panel
I'd say this is HPs fault (or your sound card manufacturer). The manufacturer's advanced settings app often pops up when you open the related Control Panel app though.
4. Central settings apps shouldn't exist because of an unspecified 'better way'
Having one place to go to for all system settings sounds like a great idea to me (even if Control Panel never quite managed that). Having my devices store their config in the cloud so all of my devices can use that config is the type of setting I would immediately switch off on new machines.
5. At least the new Settings app has search
Yes - a search that requires you to know the exact name Microsoft has given the setting you are seeking, which negates the usefulness of a search.
One of the issue I have to deal with is laptops, usually after an OEM warranty repair, default to US instead of UK keyboard. It take s a wander through at least three different parts of "Settings" to sort that after a re-install. It's reaching the point where this issue may have to be pushed up the chain so the guys doing the autopilot shit can take it into account. Or complain to the OEM that their repair techs are shit and not doing their jobs properly because they frequently forget to set the generic language motherboards to the correct locate[*]
[*] Yes, this is an issue. I've done that sort of work, and the field tech should have the OEM tools to set up a new mother board correctly, eg embedding the correct systems serial number and any other localising functions, up to an including making sure the correct, usually latest, firmware is applied to the UEFI and any integrated devices.
In my experience as a field tech fixing all the big brands, it's only Lenovo which requires you to enter the keyboard language when a system board is replaced. And then only on a very select few models.
HP packs all that config info into the product sku which is one of many things you need to program into a new board. It is all taken care of by a nice step by step config tool, the HP SBCT USB key.
Lenovo has a similar tool for configuring the new board, but it doesn't usually include keyboard locale.
Dell only asks for the serial number and asset number to be set in the BIOS screen during the first boot on a new board.
One of the issue I have to deal with is laptops, usually after an OEM warranty repair, default to US instead of UK keyboard.
I sympathize from the other direction: Windows VMs created in our UK infrastructure default to UK keyboard, and after remoting into one I have to battle with it to add the US keyboard and enable the taskbar thing that lets me switch between layouts, so I don't break it for everyone remoting in from a UK-keyboard machine.
Windows could make this a lot simpler. For example, if more than one keyboard layout is installed, the taskbar language-switching thing should be turned on by default. And, really, disk space is cheap; why not install all the keyboard layouts for the installed languages from the get-go? Why make it a separate installation?
There are two types of settings.
The first affect the whole device. Eg, hardware, ip address, driver for a new peripheral, ODBC connections, etc. This is the "computer" or "system".
The second affect just the user profile. Something like "My Settings".
Is a new Bluetooth connection "my setting" or "computer setting"? Yes.
Hey, MS! How about one controls the system through a panel of settings ... sort of like, um, dunno ... a Control Panel? Then, something that says, "give me the windows 2000 interface", but only for ME, in a Settings app?
Microsoft seems to have had an obsession with using "Search" to control PCs since at least Win8, instead of organisation. I suspect that this is why they make the Start Menu harder to organise each time they update Windows. It's as if we aren't meant to find programmes, documents or settings by having stuff in a logical location, grouped by subject or function. No, their sooper-duper indexed search will find it for us from out of the Windows soup.
Except that this is just bollocks.. Search is of no use when you think, "I'm sure I had to write a similar kind of letter to someone a few months back" unless you can remember who you'd written it to.Nor is search in the Start menu an use when you want to find a programme you used last 18 months ago, that did <something useful> but is named after the publisher's grandmother - which curiously, I can't remember.
And as to settings, until search can find, "that setting that makes the thingamajig change the what-ever-it's-called to the off setting" it's not going to be any help there either.
To be fair, this is one of the few potential use cases for LLMs. If I ask ChatGPT
“ Where is windows would I configure the infernal device that acts as a personal version of gutenberg’s press?”
It tells me where to look (and describes the phrase as poetical, a nice touch). Aside from latency and GPU cost (you’d want to use it only as a backup), there’s no reason this couldn’t be integrated into the start menu. Though on an optional basis, one hopes.
If you really can’t remember *anything* though, I agree it won’t help (and it can’t do anything with your question, mind you neither can I!)
is a great idea even if it is just to disconnect the 12v battery and reconnect it again when the computer gets its knickers in a twist.
I had to do that with my Model Y on Saturday. Just turning it off and on didn't fix it but a 12v disconnect/reconnect worked a treat.
I have just got an alternative brand of BEV, but my toolkit from the old ICE is in and ready (few basic tools, drviers, spanners, sockets).
I have read about possible 12v battery issues in quite a few cars so wondering if to put my old portable jump starter in the car....
Having at least a basic toolkit is a good idea in *any* type of vehicle. Because, unless I've missed some radical new announcement from Tesla, they haven't yet managed to design out from their vehicles all of the general mechanical gubbins that are entirely independent of the type of motive power employed by said vehicle and which sooner or later will therefore benefit from the attention of a spanner, screwdriver or similarly ancient yet still (no matter what the author might think) entirely relevant piece of kit.
I’m no mechanical genius but I can’t really think of anything that I could, or would want to, potentially fix on the road providing I had a spanner or screwdriver. And even less so with an electric motor, which really does get rid of most of the mechanical gubbins that can be tinkered with.
Most faults will be sensors which even if you could repair would likely require the error flag to be reset. There’s no spare tyre, and changing lightbulbs on the go is a non starter, Maybe changing a fuse but you could probably get away with a key or coin to access the panel (if you even carry fuses - who does?).
Which just leaves duct tape and cable ties which will fix broken bodywork and leaks. But everyone carries those all the time anyway, right?
I consider my vehicles "modern", and they still have some incandescent lights. But I'll agree that many, likely most, vehicles manufactured in the past several years are amenable to few side-of-the-road repairs, beyond perhaps changing a flat tire. Another reason not to use them.
I also carry fuses, to answer one of Mr Jones' questions. Of course, replacing a blown fuse rarely in itself fixes a problem — why did it blow in the first place?
Search, both in Settings and in Control Panel, is often the best way to find something if you're not quite sure where it lives. But Control Panel has the advantage of being able to type e.g. "control ncpa.cpl" into the Run dialog to go directly to the Network Connections dialog, if you know the necessary invocations, whereas if Settings has equivalent such shortcuts, I didn't get the memo. Hence I commonly do things via the Control Panel applets rather than settings because it's much faster and more convenient. However I guess that's of no relevance to the average user, which is who Microsoft is primarily concerned with.
"control" is actually unnecessary in Windows since, oh, Vista, maybe? You can run "ncpa.cpl" directly from Run or a command prompt.
And if you add ";.cpl" to the PATHEXT environment variable (in the system environment, if you want this to work with Run), you don't even need the ".cpl"; you can just enter "ncpa".
I think this even worked in XP, come to think of it.
Somewhat oddly, you get different options depending on whether you search for "color" or "colour".
Color finds:
Choose your desktop background
Text cursor indicator colour
Choose your accent colour
View advanced display info
Colour filters
Colour finds:
Choose your desktop background
Mouse pointer style
Apply colour to Start, taskbar and Action Centre
Choose your accent colour
Colour settings
And there are even more differences if you choose Show all results.
(Windows 11 for ARM installed with English (United Kingdom.)
> I do like the search option as that works reasonably well.
Only if you know precisely what everything is called, and where you will find the setting you're looking for. Because normal people just want to do a specific task, and need to explore where the dickens Microsoft has hidden the relevant feature, and under which name. If it exists. And Internet is no help at all given the "Settings" panel UI changes all the time.
The old Control Panel was utterly logical: Things were stored in a consistent hierarchical tree structure, for instance everything network was inside "Network" (duh). You hadn't to explore 2-3 idiot "wizards" which each hold half the truth and ideally cancel each other out, like if their developers were oblivious to the rest.
I lay the fault for that with wireless card manufacturers for making their own little applets that either ran from the start menu or the taskbar, and had nothing in the control panel to assist in the days before windows had that functionality built-in. (the transition time with XP SP3 and windows 7 was... aggrevating, because some manufacturers refused to let windows manage the SSIDs, so you had to interfaces trying to set the same thing, and it was utter bollocks.)
Windows 8.1 and windows 10? still have to use the "Network and Sharing" control panel if you want to manually set IP addresses or other information with the NIC, along with some of the more esoteric wireless configuration options like certificate authentication and such.
This reads like the author had a highly traumatic experience within Control Panel / Regedit once upon a time, and never received the post-Windows care that is still needed.
Don't worry mate, we've all been there, but to blame the tools for the underlying mess, or the flack received after the overseeing manager didn't get what he wanted, is not the solution.
I find one of the biggest bugbears trying to support friends and family is that the default user account is administrator. SO all kind of things get installed and settings changed without a thought. If a password had to be entered every time a potentially serious change is made it might concentrate the mind. Several friends simply have one account, administrator, called "User" with no password at all!
"I used to have that, but setup al lthe machines I needed to with them as a user and an admin account I knew."
That's ok so long as you are the administrator :-)
But don't forget, there are things the Administrator account can't do, only MS can access or change them. Some sort of "super" Administrator account they won't let us mere mortals access.
And then you get some app from an ISP (hello BT) trying to be helpful and changing all the mail settings so that they no longer work. The first action on being asked by a friend with this problem is uninstall said app.
But yes I remember the mess of the WiFi days so it was clear MS never designed the control panel to be extensible by vendors. At least Apple learned.
Writing your own control panel applet was documented in the Windows 3 SDK about 30 years ago. I don't know if that counts as "design" but it is clear evidence of an "intent" that third parties should join the party. Over the years, I've seen quite a few vendors who did, too.
Yes, first they went with "Windows 365", which was an idiotic name, and then they doubled down to "Windows App". It's hard to believe the people who made that decision are smart enough to breathe, much less function in society.
(Windows App is also a piece of crap. It's just a bunch of annoying, pointless UI noise around "here are the connections you've set up". It's quintessential current Microsoft.)
They (and they are not alone here) love fiddling with UI's just for the hell of it.. Some jerk decides that adding oodles of vertical white space in a control panel is a good thing. Yeah right... making us scroll down when we didn't need too before is a productivity gain! In what world/dimension are these people on.
Windows Server 2008 was about right. After that things got moved around and white space dominated.
I'm so glad that I gave MS the finger in 2016 before everything went to pot with the powershell. One mistake in a patch sent working MSCS clusters into a death spiral.
KISS is probably banned inside the MS gulag.
Why make the scroll bar auto hide ? And even worse, shite like Teams cannot change the width as it has its own controls.
I also want the notification area on all screens and not just one - why, after all these years ? The taskbar is on all screens as is the clock.
Also, the extremely useful clock on the clock to see a calendar function has been removed for all but one clock. I know it’s the clock with the tray icons next to it in my head, but it still feels like playing three-card monte as I look for which of my three screens is number one today!
I use the rather excellent Desktop Fusion for managing multi-monitor, (mostly for the wallpaper rotation, but there's a few other nice features that are included in the purchase price) but even it screws up things like showing the clock / calendar on a secondary monitor- there's a border where it should be, but the calendar itself is offset to the right by enough pixels to clip off one of the calendar columns, which is annoying as hell. I should probably swap monitors around on that system, but I'd rather be dipped in bees.
Why have a scroll bar at all? I much prefer the android-with-a-mouse interface.
The whole window is a "scrolbar" (both vertically and horizontally if required).
You just click anywhere and drag. It's lovely (Most systems treat the same operation as a selective copy. On Android, this mode is activated by holding the mouse button without moving the mouse for a second)
I miss that interface. I haven't been able to get a decent android desktop for some time... I even bought a ChromeOS box in the hope it would have a similar UI, but it doesn't (though it does for Android apps, but not all of them (!))
"Why have a scroll bar at all?"
Because...
"On Android, this mode is activated by holding the mouse button without moving the mouse for a second"
Whilst that sort of spatial+temporal UI might work nicely for you, I prefer differing functionality to be rather better segregated so as to minimise the risk of the UI doing one thing when I thought I was telling it to do another.
Note that this isn't me saying I'd be opposed to a desktop OS offering that style of interaction, so long as it also continues to offer the classic style - I'm more than happy for UI designers to strut their stuff and show off their ability to come up with weird and wonderful new methods of interacting with systems, I'm rather less happy if, in order to offer these new ways, they decide to simply dump the older ways and force their users to adapt whether they like it or not. Letting the end user choose how their system should behave, what a radical concept...
I never implied this should be the only way - in fact, I ranted elsewhere about the curse of UI developers removing the ability of users to set things as they want.
> Whilst that sort of spatial+temporal UI might work nicely for you, I prefer differing functionality to be rather better segregated so as to minimise the risk of the UI doing one thing when I thought I was telling it to do another.
The current functionality you describe is the highlighting of text, which is even more differing, and destructive.
I wasn't suggesting you were implying anything, I was merely responding to your "why have a scroll bar at all" question from the differing perspective of someone who has no desire to see scrollbars disappear...
And yes, the current functionality when clicking and dragging is to highlight text, but that's the only functionality that would be exposed in my preferred style of UI. Which is *exactly* the point about keeping things segregated based on the manner in which you interact with the UI - yes, the action taken is potentially destructive to the text (as it would be in your scrollbar-less UI if the user dwells long enough to invoke the text selection rather than the viewport move functionality when they then start moving the mouse), but it isn't differing because there's nothing for it to differ from. Click and drag immediately, or click, waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaait and then drag, and the text is selected either way.
Remember Andriod was originally designed for touch, like iOS. So alight touch will scroll whereas a firmer touch will bring other options up.
Personally, on Windows/Linux workstations, I prefer scroll bars; it’s not like there isn’t space on modern displays (*)
(*) if you wish to complain about the lack of space/real estate, I suggest you haven’t run Windows on a VGA or lower resolution screen.
Yeah, I know, but I feel the concept extends well to mice too.
As for my display, it's a 130inch 4K projector - it's not lack of space, more the opposite - having to sweep the cursor all the way to the other side of the screen just to scroll. (Invariably, pages are designed so that page-up/down and cursor keys don't work appropriately.
Leaving aside the other options that ought to be available to you to perform scrolling in ways that remain distinct from other UI interactions, but don't actually require physical manipulation of the scrollbar elements themselves (e.g. getting a mouse with a tilt/scroll wheel), note that scrollbars *also* (provided they don't randomly disappear...) provide a very handy and useful visual indication as to which part of the thing being visualised is actually being shown to you right now.
"if you wish to complain about the lack of space/real estate, I suggest you haven’t run Windows on a VGA or lower resolution screen."
I've often said that, with the way modern UI design is going, it feels like our desktops these days are LESS spacious than those desktops of old. My earliest experiences of mouse-driven UIs were on screens that were (exactly or close enough) QVGA, yet which for the UI design themes of the day were surprisingly useable - when everything in the UI is controlled either from simple drop-down/pop-up menus or keyboard shortcuts, and the application window frames are therefore unencumbered with toolbars, ribbons and all manner of other clutter so common these days, the ratio of pixels taken up by UI elements vs the stuff you were working on was actually pretty decent.
And all the way through the later VGA, SVGA and into the UXGA era, whilst OSs continued to adopt that pared-back approach to the stuff THEY dumped onto the screen, it felt like each time I upgraded my graphics cards or monitors to unlock these higher resolutions, I actually was getting genuine benefit from doing so as the amount of useable desktop space for MY stuff increased.
But then came the modern UI invasion, where whitespace is king, and no matter how many pixels your desktop contains, the UI will simply scale accordingly so that IT continues to consume the same, excessive, amount of space, leaving you to wonder how the desktop can feel so cluttered and constrained when its being rendered on a screen that is, both in terms of physical size as well as in pixel count, gargantuan compared to what you remember from those halcyon early days of desktop UIs.
"Windows Server 2008 was about right. After that things got moved around and white space dominated."
When learning about publishing and page layout, it's emphasised how important white-space is to guide the reader from place to place, paragraph to paragraph etc. Os obviously the extension to this is that if white-space is good, more white-space must be better, right? Right?
<pagebreak>
This page intentionally left blank
</pagebreak>
T'was explained to me many eons ago that the whole 'this page intentionally left blank' was due to government references which specified a page number for the information and they would get huffy if you changed the numbering.
Seems plausible but I have no confirming data.
The control panel can't be fixed because it implements older APIs, to remove all the classic screens by definition means either reimplementing every old piece of hardware/software in the new scheme, or more likely dropping support for them.
There might be some advantage to that, but personally I'd say leave it alone. If you want to use new hardware, use entirely new hardware. Otherwise stay away from the control panel and let people with old hardware continue to use it
Then again, I don't want to move to Windows 11 given the requirements and direction of Windows, the dropping of WMR headset support etc, this is simply another reason not to move.
@xyz
Why are you sitting on your telephone. Surely you be sat on a seat in a pub whilst you wait?
P.S. I feel your pain. Apple updates are notorious for being Regal, nay Stately, nay positively fucking Glacial to apply...
Though I can choose when to apply them (always during pub opening hours)...
Have a few of these to ease your pain.
This article has achieved its aim ... namely to invoke ire from the people who used 'Windoze' in anger.
Control panel is the only way to do some things.
Control panel is not perfect but is 1000% more logical to use than 'Settings' et al.
Deleting it will *not* solve any problems ... but will create many many more.
The replacement will not be complete ... this is a given based on MS past actions.
It will not be intuitive or logical, also a given based on the 'horror show' that is Windows 11.
As I have stated recently, reskin the 'Control Panel' to fit with the Windows 11 'Fisher-Price' UI.
[See https://forums.theregister.com/forum/all/2024/08/22/windows_control_panel_deprecation/#c_4918200 ]
This, of course, will not happen !!!
:)
I think part of the problem is that the desktop UI paradigm is still stuck in the early 1980s. Yes, the graphics are flashier, and yes there are new apps that weren’t around back then - but, ultimately, everything either works the same way or is forced to fit that old way of working.
It seems to me that there’s something of a usability bell curve. V1 is rubbish, V2 is less rubbish and V3 is pretty good. From a Mac perspective, the pinnacle of control usability was in System (MacOS) 6.0.8. After reaching that peak (for whatever OS) either the functionality gets overloaded and increasingly unusable - or the paradigm needs to be changed entirely.
Windows and MacOS have both been completely rewritten under the hood (DOS to NT, Classic to Unix) - but the fundamental paradigm hasn’t significantly changed. iOS was a paradigm shift - but that too has now been overloaded past its breaking point (when was the last time anyone found it truly intuitive?), ditto Android, tvOS and… I suspect that Vision is still on the upswing - but I wouldn’t know ‘cos I’ve never used it. But even if it does end up reaching perfection, we all know that the next update will begin to break it.
The problem with a paradigm shift though is that it alienates the established users. They don’t like change. Well, perhaps some do - but I don’t know many. I certainly don’t (I still think of C++ as being something of an upstart, so don’t get me started on Rust!) - but that’s a me problem, and I know I’m being silly.
> I think part of the problem is that the desktop UI paradigm is still stuck in the early 1980s.
Not that I necessarily agree on the "stuck in the early 1980s", but out of (genuine) interest, in what specific ways do you think that current desktop UI paradigm(s) are no longer fit for purpose?
No longer fit for purpose might be putting it too strongly - but certainly no longer intuitive. The more controls there are, the more things there are to control, the less user friendly the whatever-it-is is going to be.
Years ago I had a 1968 Beetle. There weren’t very many switches, knobs or dials - how it worked was pretty obvious. With my current car, all gizmos and level whatever autonomous driving, I’ll be buggered if I can work out all the functions. I’ve given up to be honest. It’s not intuitive anymore. I’m certainly not going to attempt to repair it myself.
Similarly, buying shampoo (or anything) at the supermarket. Too much damn choice.
Can anyone else hear the sound of an old man shouting at clouds?
Indeed. Personally I'm stuck in the late 90s - been using Fluxbox for over twenty years, Blackbox before that. Minimalist, customisable and ergonomic, with a distinctive aesthetic. Not for everyone, but I've found no reason to switch (aside from the odd foray into Xfce - ironically, perhaps, mostly for it's well-organised UI options for system and peripherals configuration).
> it alienates the established users. They don’t like change for change's sake
Fixed it for you.
If it isn't broken don't fix it. The Control Panel is a tool, and as such it is just supposed to be efficient and get a job done. Nothing more, nothing less.
I'm expecting the day marketing will give hammers the "much-needed overhaul" to "bring them into the 21 century". After all, who wants to work with a tool which hasn't significantly changed since the middle ages? Hammers have to be redesigned, from top to bottom, ASAP.
> The design of the hammer and the algorithm of hammer use goes back to the time before we knew about time.
Exactly, and that has to stop immediately! We need the 21st century hammer! We definitely need to get away from that primitive T-shape which hasn't really changed since the stone ages, we need design, a vision.
I'm off to patent the new, modern Ꝣ-shaped hammers, subscription- and cloud-based, with automatic tweeting (X-ing?).
No one has tried (as far as I can tell) to add too many new functions to a hammer. But, even so, I’d argue that a lump hammer (symmetrical head) is easier to use* than a ball peen or a claw hammer.
Now imagine a hammer which has been overloaded with twenty different functions. Does that sound like a good idea?
Really?
*easier to use, not necessarily the right tool for the job!
Well, that's the thing. There are a whole bunch of different types of hammers. For most hand-nailing jobs and striking nail sets I generally prefer my 16-ounce straight-claw hammer; but occasionally if I'm just doing a little rough work I'll use the curved-claw one, which has poorer balance but makes it easier to pull nails. (If I'm using the straight-claw, I'm generally pulling nails with nippers, which are the proper tool for the job, or with a flat bar if I'm doing demolition, or with a cat's-paw if I need to dig them out from below the surface of the wood.)
The straight-claw hammer also has that T-cut in the top of the head with a magnet, used for one-handed nail-starting. (Yes, you can do the same by holding the nail to the face or cheek with your hand and smacking it into the wood, but you can't get a good swing that way.) That's a useful innovation that came out, what, 20 or 30 years ago?
If I did much framing with a hammer, rather than using the air nailer, I'd have a framing hammer, probably a 22-ounce with a waffle-pattern face and a straight claw. Significantly different from the 16-ounce smooth-face one.
I have a short-handled 5-pound sledge and a long-handled 10-pound one. Same design, different sizes, quite different applications.
I have three different sizes of ball-peen hammers, for various tasks.
I have rubber-headed and wooden-headed mallets. I have a dead-blow mallet. I have a double-faced tack hammer, with a slotted head on one side. I have a couple of pickaxes, which are hammers — or are they?
I've seen many debates over hammer handles over the years. Many professionals prefer a plain wooden handle, but some like fiberglass and some like padded steel. My father for many years used an old 16-ounce straight-claw nailing hammer that had a handle made of leather disks (elliptical, actually) stacked on a steel shaft; I don't know that I've ever seen another like it. There are those framing hammers with eccentric shafts that are popular these days.
In fact we have quite a large array of hammer designs. The principle remains the same, but the design and implementation have most definitely seen extensive innovation and variation.
Well, that woke me up on a Monday morning, startled by someone shouting "TWADDLE" and "has this guy ever USED a computer?".
And, Reader, the person shouting was me.
> There is still a lot of affection for the Control Panel, especially among those who've spent time for pleasure or profit making Windows do what it's damn well told
Like, EVERY user WANTS Windows to do?
> Built by engineers for engineers may have been fine when knowing 9600 8N1 made your serial printer work, but we've had USB since 1996.
At least with serial port settings (which, BTW, are still present after you've plugged in your USB<->Serial adaptor, "hidden" behind the USB socket on the device) anyone has the chance to work through all the combinations until it works. When the USB fails you have bugger all chance and we are all[1] reduced to randomly plugging into other ports, adding and removing hubs, uninstalling drivers[2] and throwing the damn thing at the wall.
AH HAH!
*That* is the point of the article! He just wants everybody to be reduced to the same sense of helpless despair he faces when trying to use a computer!
[1] ok, there are a few ubergeeks with a USB Buddy, Wireshark - and probably *nix OS - who can figure it out
[2] and how do you do that with the Windows Settings? Seriously, no idea how to attempt that.
I did, but reading your post the first person that came to mind was Keith Floyd - a man whose finest moments involved lurching blind drunk around a French country barbecue. I'm not sure how that is relevant to the Windows Control Panel, beyond that his signature Big Fat Glass Of Wine may conceivably make it a little less stressful coping with its successor.
And yet only yesterday I had to use a Control Panel applet to change a setting in Windows 10 because the shit, sorry the modern, settings app just doesn't include all of Windows settings.
I've never had Windows shut down when I didn't want it to and I've used every versions since Windows 1.0. Maybe the author needs to learn from an engineer.
When the headline for an article includes the words "bad UI" in reference to something which, for very many of us, is anything BUT an example of a genuinely bad UI, then you just know the article itself is either going to be a complete pisstake, or a complete shambles. And boy, was it ever.
I'm not going to expend any energy going through the whole thing to pick it apart, because that's already been done rather well by all the comments already made at the time of writing this. I will just pick out one thing that particularly stood out to me as a classic example of the "well, it's not something *I* ever need to do these days, so it clearly isn't something anyone *else* will ever need to do either" simplistic thinking that so dangerously pervades the minds of those now in control of designing the UIs we have to use on a daily basis...
"Built by engineers for engineers may have been fine when knowing 9600 8N1 made your serial printer work, but we've had USB since 1996"
Some of us still are engineers, and still using "legacy" connection methods (whether in their original physical form, or as a virtual COM port) because that's what the nature of our work requires.
This staggeringly egotistical presumption from the author that people aren't doing stuff like this anymore makes it clear that they simply don't understand the myriad of uses people make of their systems, and without that level of understanding, any attempt to pen a reasonable article on why things do or don't make sense is doomed to failure. Unless of course you happen to be reading it from the perspective of someone who's own PC usage requirements align exactly with those of the author, at which point you may well be nodding along in agreement and similarly guffawing at all those old farts resisting change for no good reason whatsoever...
For a supposedly tech-oriented website, where it's not unreasonable to presume articles would be written with a broader understanding of how tech is used in the real world, this was a truly shockingly bad example of how to alienate your audience. Do better el Reg, do better.
More evolved than what ? A flatworm ?
Thank you for demonstrating your buy-in to Borkzilla's agenda : continually deprecating anything that works to replace it with some beautiful UI bullshit that isn't clear and simple to use but looks better (aka : looks like the current fads wants it to).
Yes, that was what stood out to me the most too. Settings is not more evolved. It's a new creating that is evolving. It's by no means evolved to where it is fully functional yet. It might *look* like it fits in better with the general design ethos of the GUI, but that's as much credit as I will give it. (and no, I don't agree with the general design ethos of the GUI as it is now, too much confusion in the layout and not enough emphasis given on what is clickable, the entire visual "appeal", (pale grey text anyone? How stupid, and possibly a disability access breach in some legal jurisdictions).
The current MS "design ethos" seems to be dumb it down and remove stuff instead of doing the hard task of working out how to make it actually work.
Every "development" like this is a further exercise in dumbing things down, removing options and making built-in assumptions about what the end-user wants (whatever their level of technical ability.)
"Smart systems make for dumb users," the kind that are MORE likely to foul things up when they encounter a need that can only be met by getting into the weeds of the system - and, trust me, just about everyone does sooner or later. This is a phenomenon made more frequent, not less, by "simplifying" the settings tools. This is where you get the phenomenon of uninformed folks diving into regedit after watching a partially-understood youtube "tutorial" on how to "fix their problem" and screwing up their system way worse than they could do with cpanel.
My old mentor in systems administration, many decades ago, would go so far as to opine that pronouncing "GUI" as "gooey" was highly appropriate - because it was something you got stuck in! These days, I wouldn't go that far but in any OS there has to be a reliable and accessible way to make the system behave according to your own personal and unique needs. Every user is different and there is no "one holy workflow" that works best for everyone. Users like myself, and - I suspect - the majority of El Reg's readership, are knowledgeable enough (in particular where it comes to knowing what they DON'T know) that regedit is not a scary beast in the dungeon. "Regular guys/gals" should have something powerful enough that they don't need to touch regedit and intuitive enough that while they CAN screw up their system with it, it's relatively easy not to - unless you need to put both feet down one knicker leg to manage a synapse! Cpanel was that thing. The lobotomised mess that is the settings app is not.
Was/is cpanel perfect? Not by any means. In fact there was so much wrong with it, on many levels, that some kind of reimplementation was long overdue. Limiting user choices in a dumbed-down, highly inefficient and organisationally opaque settings app was not the reimplementation that was needed. Nor was it truly a "reimplementation" as laboriously drilling down into the "advanced options" of the settings app all too often brings up dialog boxes very familiar to cpanel regulars.
Not to put too fine a poiont on it, this article is utter bunkum. It advances down the wrong road, all the while ignoring every sign that indicates the proper destination is somewhere other than where it is heading. It responds to the accumulated experience of the failings of the settings app in the time-honoured manner os stickign its fingers in its ears and chanting "lalalala I can't hear you."
I work in IT support. When people ask what I do for a living, I usually add that my primary role is to act as 'Professional Microsoft Apologist'. Likewise, the word 'update' in Microsoft land can be loosely translated to mean 'pointless sofware change that breaks or entirely removes functionality'. After 12 years, I'm so sick of grovelling to rightfully fed up users on Microsoft's behalf, that I'm planning my exit from IT entirely.
I'm not a windows user, but I'm fed up of applications, operating systems, UI's and websites dumbing down because "the stupid user knows no better".
I have better uses of my time than try to fix or reverse engineer out other peoples dumb decisions.
No, removing ability to control your own device is NOT a good thing. If you want, stick things behind a "developer mode" but stop removing functionality all together ! (I'm looking at you, YouTube, android, ChromeOS, ... all Google, funny that.)
That is one of the weirdest articles I've read here. Not because of the opinion it's pushing (it's, well, an opinion, to each their own, right?) but because there's close to no argument backing it. Only assertions.
Eg:
"Breaking out of the Control Panel and Settings mindset is hard, because it's always been that way."
Wouldn't it be because there's no good replacement for it? After all, we did successfully break out from the Program Manager, which is from the same era as the Control Panel, when it was replaced by the Start menu. It successfully proved itself a better option.
of something.... bad
Quote
"Built by engineers for engineers may have been fine when knowing 9600 8N1 made your serial printer work, but we've had USB since 1996. "
I'm an engineer and I need to talk to equipment via serial cables, after finally getting a handle on control panel, and how to get the serial port to do my bidding without resorting to violence was an achievement in itself....... then along comes USB... and the USB-serial dongle "that will do the job" as the non-techie production engineer told me..... until it did'nt (they have trouble because some machines/PLCs insist on using software control AND hardware control and the USB does not play nicely in those situations)
"But just upgrade the machine" comes the siren call... with the siren being asked for £250 000 to replace the entire cell(and thats a cheap one)
And after all that , when I've finally got things running nicely... m$ rip out the control panel and say "Just use the settings page thing ... where we hide the settings, and if enough people find the setting, we'll move it to another section to stop you from using it"
And then m$ begin to wonder why so many folks are evaluating linux for their desktop needs....
PS. who commissioned this piece?
It would have been good to have some discussion of different UI design methodologies piecing together Win10/11. The category view is derived from this: https://web.archive.org/web/20080828113751/http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms997506.aspx apparently influenced by MS Money 2000. It includes what appears to be a prototype screenshot of the control panel.
There's still a version of that article on MS's win32 site, dated 2019. It would appear no one at MS has read it for a while.
> You may have felt the thrill of wizardry as you right-clicked on that driver entry sporting the Tiny Yellow Triangle Of Shame
I bought a bunch of cheap Prolific clones (UART USB / RS232) and was met by this. Prolific did something weird to break the clones (and their own) as the drivers would keep re-updating to the newer but non-working ones because they kept the same ID.
But the best bit was the badly translated document on how to install it. It would literally refer to the "failed to attach driver" marker as Angry Bang. It went something like this:
"In order to Bang Angry Bang out of your PC, put Bang, big Bang, Bang, Bang"
Best technical documents I have ever had the fortune to read.
"Breaking out of the Control Panel and Settings mindset is hard". So... what then?
It appears that Rupert Goodwins failed to gather his thoughts before writing this article, or maybe this is just an AI-misguided rant.
At the end, Goodwins hails "semiotics of machine behavior" without going anywhere -- as a tech meme he's heard about but doesn't understand.
unless one can be arsed it is usually compmgmt.msc which gives some / many of the basics on windows in one place.
Or then on win10 (dont know or care about 11 sry)
- make a new folder on system drive root
name it (witth the final dot)
GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}.
then open it with windows exploder or something.
Mainly admin stuff of course. I guess that was the point that the unwary F things up with admin tools.
Well we like to provide options so there ya go!
Suits everyone from aunt Martha to "power users"
Macs eliminated the traditional "System Preferences" which has been with macs for decades with Mac OS 13 Ventura. Now it is called "System Settings" and is set up like those of an iPhone or the "Windows Settings". System Preferences on a Mac and the Windows Control Panel are similar in how they worked in a general sense. They took up less screen space. In my opinion, using System Preference and Control Panel are far easier to use than the newer "System Settings" and "Windows Settings." The "settings" that people want to change seem much more buried in the newer "Settings" interfaces.
Some of this is my familiarity with using Control Panel and System Preferences over the past 35 years. Also the fact that things in terms of technology seem to become more complicated. I think the change can be compared in a couple of different ways. One can be going from an older car with mechanical gauges and a radio with a tuning knob to one with a digital interface for everything. The radio with a knob for volume and another for tuning is easier to use. Another is that younger people are more familiar with the settings on a cell phone vs those on a computer. That might be another reason for the change.
It is like the the ribbon interface in MS Office. Some people love it, some hate it (like me), and others don't care. Apple and Microsoft should give you a choice of which interface to use in changing settings. Office should also. Control Panel and Settings have coexisted for a long time. Eventually we will get used to the new ways of doing things, but my thinking processes of changing a setting are geared to the older ways. I am still hoping ways will exist to keep the old Control Panel in Windows just like the ways to keep the older Start Menu styles. We will adapt hopefully or we'll all switch to a version of Linux that will work for us! ;)!
We poor proles don't need a clear and unabiguous way to control the hardware and software we have paid money to use.
Far be it from us to try to look under the covers an possible makes thing run they way we want.
And I'm totally sure that the idea of hiding the great MS's privacy theiving controls as deep as possible never crossed their benevolent minds.
Never has Linux looked so appealing as now
I have no particular love for control panel. It is ugly. But it does have most of what I want. It is far easier to solve problems there than settings, which in its current state often lacks any way to do things. I get that the author dislikes both, bit their solution is awful. I have multiple computers using the same account with very different configurations. Why would I want those settings to follow me? I'd rather start at a blank slate than some weirdly halfway configured system I need to modify.
Quite frankly all the rambling about it giving novice users too much power to screw up their computer is nonsense. That isn't how people do that.
> It is ugly
OMG! Is beauty really the most important thing on a tool, especially one you use rarely if ever once the computer is set up?
Oh yes, the Control Panel has no "Social Media" connection either, complicating its use. I'm sure you could improve it with some AI, too. And what about playing some soothing music when you open it? So many things could be "improved". Jeez!
Seriously, the "Control Panel" (or "Settings Panel", or even "Ytbsvxdgr" if you like) is a tool, and as such it should be efficient and easy to use. Those are the only two things required.
Everyone is entitled to their opinion. But this article is a master piece of rubbish by an uninformed idiot obsessed with current fashion for form over function.
Look at the facts.
The current "modern" replacement for the printers control panel applet is appalling for anything else other than printing a test page.
Until the operating system is able to handle issues like driver incompatibilties without losing all functions associated with that driver, replacing the control panel is MS suicide, never mind it being another example of the MS ability to shoot itself in its foot.
An automatic update system where OEM driver releases often trash manufacturers version of graphics and network modules would be a better thing to concentrate on fixing.
This author looks to be one of those people who want a system to use where you don't have to worry your pretty little head on how something works. If it stops working you then happily trot off to the nearest manufacturer's shop and pay through the nose for them to fix it having been bled dry buying it in the first place. We all know who that is don't we.
Please Register stop supporting this kind of article which is ill-informed and a badly disguised fan boy attack.
MS is in big danger and needs to rid itself of a design team obsessed with beating Apple/Google at the expense of a workable operating system.
Opinions - just like butts: Everybody has one, but not everybody should shine theirs.
What a load of crap. Opinion piece - my butt. A full page hopelessly trying to counter what can be resumed with one line:
"I don't care how old Control Panel is or why it shouldn't have existed in the first place. It's simple, it's easy to use, it's logical, it's elegant, and it works"
Don't you have a piece to write about why touchscreens and capacitive buttons in cars are better than knobs, buttons and stalks.
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