Hello there,
As the title implies, Windows 7 seems ugly compared to Windows XP. When i look at the List View controls, i see there are no lines anymore. I also see a throwback to Windows 98 (Yikes) where the color settings are very very limited. In XP there were more options to alter the colors, and the fonts showed up better in Windows Explorer (the file manager). That's pretty nutty. Also a throwback to Windows 95 (double yikes) is the Message Box is now limited to 85 characters across when in XP it is something like 131 characters. That means if you programmed an application to show a regular path or something in XP it will show up in multiple lines in Win 7, very very strange. That also means if you've done any text formatting in the message box in XP it will break at seemingly random places in the lines because it will think it should, and there is no way to stop that from happening.
The solution which is not a solution at all as suggested by a Windows representative is to simply make your own Message Box, where you can make the line length any length you care to. You can make it 85 chars, 95 chars, 105 chars, or 1005 chars (if it fits on the screen) and all is well.
But as usually, their suggestions are simple minded and not well thought out. Of course we can make our own message boxes, with any line length we want. But we also expect to get reasonably constant results from the Windows API without this kind of change up, but that's not the worst case.
What is the worst is that while we can program our own message box with fancy lines and graphics and make it real nice looking, what about in program code that has already gone out the door long ago? What about the 100 applications that people are using out there that have already been written? Do we have to do a "total recall" just so we can reformat the text in the message boxes for all those applications?
At the very least they should have supplied an alternate message box where we can alter the width of the text box. That would have solved the program forever if it was done long ago. But since it wasnt the least they could have done was leave the darn thing alone. Instead it is hard coded into the op sys.
Also, the Aero desktop graphics are pretty nice, but they dont give you many options there either. Either you turn it on or your turn it off, and when you turn it on you get a "cloud" that appears behind all the Title Bar window text that obscures the text to some degree so it is actually much harder to read. Everything else about Aero seems ok, but that is definitely nasty and if there was a way to turn just that 'feature' off then it would be much nicer.
As the title implies, Windows 7 seems ugly compared to Windows XP. When i look at the List View controls, i see there are no lines anymore. I also see a throwback to Windows 98 (Yikes) where the color settings are very very limited. In XP there were more options to alter the colors, and the fonts showed up better in Windows Explorer (the file manager). That's pretty nutty. Also a throwback to Windows 95 (double yikes) is the Message Box is now limited to 85 characters across when in XP it is something like 131 characters. That means if you programmed an application to show a regular path or something in XP it will show up in multiple lines in Win 7, very very strange. That also means if you've done any text formatting in the message box in XP it will break at seemingly random places in the lines because it will think it should, and there is no way to stop that from happening.
The solution which is not a solution at all as suggested by a Windows representative is to simply make your own Message Box, where you can make the line length any length you care to. You can make it 85 chars, 95 chars, 105 chars, or 1005 chars (if it fits on the screen) and all is well.
But as usually, their suggestions are simple minded and not well thought out. Of course we can make our own message boxes, with any line length we want. But we also expect to get reasonably constant results from the Windows API without this kind of change up, but that's not the worst case.
What is the worst is that while we can program our own message box with fancy lines and graphics and make it real nice looking, what about in program code that has already gone out the door long ago? What about the 100 applications that people are using out there that have already been written? Do we have to do a "total recall" just so we can reformat the text in the message boxes for all those applications?
At the very least they should have supplied an alternate message box where we can alter the width of the text box. That would have solved the program forever if it was done long ago. But since it wasnt the least they could have done was leave the darn thing alone. Instead it is hard coded into the op sys.
Also, the Aero desktop graphics are pretty nice, but they dont give you many options there either. Either you turn it on or your turn it off, and when you turn it on you get a "cloud" that appears behind all the Title Bar window text that obscures the text to some degree so it is actually much harder to read. Everything else about Aero seems ok, but that is definitely nasty and if there was a way to turn just that 'feature' off then it would be much nicer.