... and the UI is also going back

Following my last post on concurrent processes, my good friend Effie Nadiv noted that the UI is also getting backwards.


Back in the old days, Lotus 1-2-3 had a menu line that was not opening to overlay your main screen but was instead changing the menu line each time you make a menu selection. One can argue that this is not optimal, but I remember it as something very useful. Today in some cases you find yourself struggling to open the sub-sub-sub-menu to select something, trying not to close the entire thing before you make your selection.

It becomes also a common practice that any new dialog or window may hide previous ones, extra info may hide the main data etc. Effie argues that it all becomes from the philosophy that the application may do whatever it wants. Restrictions would heart creativity and we don't want that. So you have creativity in the new versions: my new version of Babylon has a fancy UI, ignoring the fact that it is not working, and the old one with the standard Windows UI was OK, it's a real charm. The new office is a nightmare, after you got used to something. Any new version of a SW tries to justify itself with a new fancy visual design which you don't want. You just want it to work.