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Timecodes
0:00 Introduction
0:57 Sponsor: TuxCare
01:54 The office
04:33 Launchers, application grids and Start menus
08:03 The system tray
10:06 Menu bars and ribbons
12:54 Windows and title bars
14:47 Parting thoughts
3:31 p.m. Sponsor: Tuxedo Computers
4:25 p.m. Support the channel
If you think about productivity, you can't help but think that the fact that your computer's default state is an image with a few icons is less than stellar. To open files it will never be tidy enough to give you access to everything you need, you need a launcher or folder structure, which means desktop is bad for that. To open applications, having visual shortcuts on the desktop is a copy of the panel or launcher you have.
Next come the launchers: Start menus, application grids, application lists, etc. If you think about it, these things aren't really that effective: you either have to scroll through a list of categories, click on one, then click on the app you want, or scroll through an even longer list of programs sorted by name, which makes no sense since most app names have no relation to what they do.
Most of these menus or grids therefore add favorites, so you can place your favorite applications in a favored place, but in a small menu you will never have enough room. This inefficiency is also why most app grids and menus implement an active text field by default, so you can type in the name of the app you're looking for. Which is also not great, because it requires you to know the name of the app.
Next comes the good old system tray: this little area is by far the thing I despise the most in any operating system. Not because it's useless, because it's not, but because it's completely ineffective. You start apps from somewhere else, and some of them will stay in the status bar, some won't. Sometimes the icon disappears when you close the application window, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes the icon is colored, sometimes not. If you have too much stuff inside it tends to bend, so you have an extra click to see what's running. Click targets are small and imprecise. It mixes applications and system features. Some apps will respond to a right click, some will open a window with a left click, some will open a context menu.
The old menus continue to evolve and do not improve. The traditional menu bar isn't great. It's small, the click targets aren't big enough, keyboard navigation is slow, and the sorting of these menus is random and application-dependent, meaning you need to know where every option is for every program that you use. If you put this in a global menu you save space in the application window and make the menus easier to click on since they are always in the same place, but it doesn't solve the menu sorting problem , and small click targets. If you put everything in a hamburger menu, you simplify the default interface, but make it harder to find advanced features.
Finally, Windows and title bars. We use application-based metaphors and so we need to have a visual representation of each. Whether floating or tiled, we all have windows that we move, resize, maximize, minimize, or close.
Again, this is not effective. Resizing windows to fit a task isn't great, title bars are small and hard to grab and drag, window buttons are small and move targets depending on where you placed the window. If you tile elements, you will have to adjust the layout several times to have enough space for what you want to do.
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