Day 9, Ooh Shiny

Microsoft have been banging on about Aero being a revolution in interface design. To put it in a nutshell; it isn’t. It’s tacky, gimmicky, and just plain ugly. MS are actually charging extra to have this function-free, 3-dimensional desktop. I really can’t see one good reason for it whatsoever. I for one do not care than Microsoft ‘ripped off’ OS X with many of the features. It’s only natural, everyone steals ideas. Too bad they made a total mess of it.

As you can see, all of the windows are obscured by the one in front of it, rendering them basically useless. As you scroll through they slide in and out of view in an overly sleek way. Logic would dictate that clicking on the desktop when you have the window you want to view in the forefront would bring said window into focus. But, alas it doesn’t. Instead it brings your previous window to the front and focuses on the desktop (which when the window is maximised is invisible). I really can’t see the point in this. The whole things seems a little tacked-on at the end to compete with Exposé in OS X and XGL/Beryl.

I also made the grave mistake of opening the infamous Windows Media Center. Why, oh why did I do that? I have never seem such an awful mix of blue glass and, what I can only assume, an underwater light. Unfortunately I could not take a screenshot of Media Player, it just gave me a solid black image. It must be an ugly-face-breaks-mirror scenario, so I had to borrow an image from about.com:

As you can see, it’s completely tasteless. But the shine doesn’t stop there. All throughout the Vista interface there are litterings of repulsive touches, such as the hideous bright, blue light that appears when you mouse-over the maximise or minimise buttons. It’s little touches like this and the image that remains stationary on the window menu bar when you move it, and the glow around the title of each window which add up to create a truly intrusive, and revolting place to work.

Why on earth is there half a centimetre of fake glass surrounding all my windows? It’s bad enough I only have one desktop, but having windows bigger than they need to be is really taking up space.

EDIT:

I’ve been having some interesting feedback from readers about bias in this post. I’d like to make it clear that, yes, it may be my personal opinion (and the opinion of many graphic designers, and illustrators I know) that the interface is grotesque. But it cannot be argued that it is obtrusive and distracting. Also, it is impossible to change how it looks other than the colour of the menu bar (which it changes by itself anyway). Pictured below are all the options for changing how Vista looks.

Very sparse if you ask me.

Edit 2:

As shocking as it may sound, I have found some things that I like about Vista’s interface. Chief of which are the radio buttons, they could do with being a little duller, but a vast improvement over FF in Linux:

Also, I like the way the window warps when it is minimised: