293 words on Software
The major downside of having to test web pages for Internet Explorer compatibility is that you have to use Internet Explorer and Windows. It just makes me want to puke. So much ugliness – it’s beyond belief. (That ‘Clear Type’ option helps a lot but it took me ages to find it and I can’t even remember where it ended up being…)
One thing I just had to do on the Windows install were to make it suck less on the first sight. So I turned off its annoying startup sound – aka the morons’ ‘hello’ in libraries – and to make it look less like Windows I removed the default ‘meadow’ desktop background. Achieving these improvements wasn’t too hard, to be honest. Well within reach of even an old-school Mac user. Although doing it pointed to the major intellectual problems they have in Windows. Many of those settings freely mix software and hardware aspects which makes them more confusing. For example their Display control panel has tabs for ‘Themes’, ‘Desktop’, ‘Screen Saver’, ‘Appearance’ and ‘Settings’ – where ‘Desktop’ has a ‘Customize Desktop…’ button giving you access to another two tabs of settings and both the ‘Appearance’ and ‘Settings’ tabs contain one of the cursed ‘Advanced’ buttons.
But perhaps the Microsoft deficiency is much more obvious in another point. I chose a desktop background which is an image of fish swimming in sunny water. And very soon I had to think about the statement about the lack of taste in Microsoft. Not that this image were as tasteless or bland as their default desktop background. Instead it has clearly visible JPEG artifacts. On a photo-like image. How can that happen? Were they trying to fit their whole OS in 640KB again or what?