Ask Paul: July 31 ⭐

Happy Friday! We close out July with a delightfully short Ask Paul ahead of a weekend that can’t happen quickly enough. OK, it’s not that short. I have stories. Too many stories.

“OpenAI says its models now have more than 1B active users and are used by more than 2M businesses”

18 users? Incredible! Oh. I see

📖 Reading apps

wmurd118 asks:

Paul, just downloaded your recent version of The Field guide to my iPad kindle reader and Apple Books. Plus a copy on my files app on my iPad. My preference for almost all downloaded material is the kindle reader on my iPad. However, my preference reading this time is on Apple Books. I recently had surgery for a detached retina and kindle reads better and more comfortably than anything else except for your book. Anyway, that’s not my question. I periodically dabble over on a MacBook Air. Which, the download of field guide brings me to wonder is there a comparable download to read similar to the field guide for my MacBook Air?

I don’t have my MacBook Air with me here in Mexico, but Apple Books is available on the Mac, so that should work normally on that computer. Or are you asking if there is a Field Guide-like book for the MacBook Air? If so, Apple produces wonderful and free series of books, basically user guides, using the “Essentials” name. If you search for “MacBook Air Essentials” in Apple Books, you should find it. (There are multiple editions.)

I mostly read on an iPad, and though Apple Books isn’t my first go-to, I’ve found myself using it a lot lately. More on that in a moment, but if you do have the Field Guide or any of my other Leanpub-based books (which Premium members can also download directly here), each is available in PDF and EPUB downloads, and you can download either version in Safari on an iPad, and then import them in Apple Books, which will add either to your collection and make it available on any of your Apple devices. (The EPUB version is likely the better option in Apple Books.)

This hasn’t happened yet, but I’m vaguely planning a tech nostalgic focus month for sometime this year and so I’ve been reading and re-reading a lot of industry books that deal with the events of the 1980s. Among them is Brian Bagnall’s excellent three-books series about the history of Commodore, Commodore: A Company on the Edge, Commodore: The Amiga Years, and Commodore: The Final Years. I’d read each at least a few times all the way through and so I know I own each, but when I looked at my Kindle library, I noticed that I only had the first and third books there, which is confusing.

I don’t know why–I feel like there may have been a Kickstarter or something–but I have the second book in that series in Apple Books and it’s clearly an early version that still needs some editing. So I reread it there. And I really do like the way Apple Books works as well. But as is the case with so much media, I have content all over the place. The biggest collection by far is in Kindle, but I have collections in Apple Books and even Google Play Books, and many books in PDF format that are archived on the NASes. So I always have to hunt around a bit if I’m not sure where a particular title is.

One thing I really like doing with Apple Books is downloading individual issues of BYTE Magazine in PDF format on the iPad and then reading them in that app. It’s just excellent. The Internet Archive has the entire print run of BYTE Magazine (and other magazines, obviously) available for free. It’s easier to just search the site for the issue you want than to use that link; for example, here is the August 1985 issue with the review of the Amiga 1000. Awesome.

It’s too bad that Apple doesn’t have at least a web-based way to read Apple Books, but I guess that’s both typical for the company and among the tiniest of its offenses.

“Apple’s Tim Cook era ends with a record $109B quarter”

Make sense, since history will remember him best for retaining unfairly high app store fees, betraying our country to China, and other abuses that maximize short-term profits and betray the ideal that Apple endlessly promotes. Great guy, that Tim

🎨 Peak Windows UX

jrzoomer asks:

Hi Paul, given your decades of covering the evolution of Windows, you’ve seen every user interface change firsthand, through betas to final release. I’m curious: looking back from Windows 95 all the way to Windows 11, what is your favorite Windows theme or visual style of all time?

This will feel vaguely impossible to most, but I like the Windows 11 user interface and while there were many favorites in the past, as Microsoft evolved the UI in Windows, I generally preferred whatever was current at the time to previous versions. The only asterisk in there is Windows 8, of course, though I did like the flat aesthetic of the Desktop interface and that did carry over to Windows 10. But yeah, I do prefer Windows 11 overall. Really. 🙂

And aside from your favorite, I’d love if you don’t mind going down memory lane and giving your general thoughts on all of them? I’m particularly curious what you thought of the Windows XP “Fisher-Price” aesthetic, and what you thought about Windows Vista and the Aero Glass aesthetic.

It’s interesting that you mention XP and its Fisher-Price aesthetic. I was friends with many people at Microsoft in that era, but among them was a sweetheart of a guy named Marc Croft who was a lead product manager on Windows at the time. He dropped out of my life soon after XP SP2 happened, I don’t recall, but I ran into him several years later. And I don’t know what possessed me to say this to him then, but I half-apologized to him for referring to Windows XP as “a sea of blues and greens.” And he really appreciated this in a way I didn’t expect: Apparently, he was personally insulted by this pithy assessment as he was more involved in that UX than maybe I knew or remembered. I really liked the guy and didn’t mean anything by it personally. But he took it that way somehow, and when I apologized later he was very appreciative. It was nice to get past that.

Anyway. Windows XP is a weird outlier in the history of Windows because that UX was a one-off, never to be repeated. It was built with bitmaps, and not particularly high resolution bitmaps, so it wasn’t scalable, and when Mac OS X came out, it supported higher resolutions and pixel densities and just made XP look silly by comparison. Which is a big part of the reason why Microsoft went with resolution-independent, scalable vector graphics for Longhorn/Vista.

But that wasn’t XP’s only problem from a UX perspective. In addition to still supporting the classic Windows UI (2000 and older) at the time, Microsoft planned to release many theme packs over time with the goal of making XP almost infinitely customizable from a UX perspective. But you may recall that XP shipped with just a few theme choices, the default plus silver and olive green (ugh), but then Microsoft only shipped two new themes in subsequent years, Royale, which came with Media Center Edition and was quite nice, and Zune, which was a dark theme based on the look of the media player. The reason there weren’t more is that the Luna theme engine was incredibly difficult to work with and even Microsoft couldn’t make sense of it. Obviously, it was abandoned quickly anyway.

Windows XP was a high water mark regardless. This was the first release that combined the NT kernel with the app and driver compatibility of the Windows 9x line, and it was incredibly successful and long-lived. In the history of Windows, only Windows 7 and 10 come anywhere close, and while there were more users of those latter versions, Windows XP is unique for its longevity. Helping matters, its successor, Windows Vista, was widely disliked, and this led to things like Windows XP Mode in Windows 7. This was the Windows that refused to go down quietly.

This is all off the top of my head, so there could be minor inaccuracies.

Looking back on the entire run, the early Windows UXes–Windows 1.x and 2.x–were pretty terrible. Windows 1.x was limited to tiled windows, which honestly wasn’t a huge issue at the time, and Windows 2.x added overlapping windows. But Windows 3.0 was the first truly interesting Windows, not just from a usability perspective but also because the interface really matured. At that time, I was still using an Amiga, but I had been following the development of Windows closely and it was pretty obvious which direction things were going. Windows 3.1 was a nice refinement of the same basic UI, and that was used for Windows NT 3.1 (the first version) and 3.5 (Daytona) as well. I used all these products–Windows 3.0, 3.1, and 3.11, plus whatever Windows for Workgroup versions, and NT 3.1 and 3.5–so this UI was familiar. I liked it.

(This is unrelated to UX, but I was always fascinated by certain historic aberrations in Windows. Windows/286 and Windows/386 were branches of Windows 2.1 that supported the 80286 and 80386 processors, respectively, though most associate that with Windows 3.x. Windows for Workgroups 3.11, which I bought for a networking class when I went back to college, had three features everyone associates with Windows 95: TCP/IP networking and 32-bit RAM and disk access; the latter two were optional and had to be enabled. And the unfairly maligned Windows ME introduced UXs and low-level services like driver rollback that everyone misassociates as XP firsts. It was ahead of its time, but also based on the wrong kernel.)

Windows 95 was the first version of Windows with a UX designed by actual designers and there was a concerted effort to create a formal (Apple-like) approach to UX consistency (and many other improvements, of course). It got rid of all the separate “manager” apps (Program Manager, File Manager, Print Manager, etc.), all the UIs had consistent shadows (with lighting always from the upper-left), and there was an object-based nature to the system that fell short of true object orientation but was usable and durable enough that it persisted for several years across multiple OS versions. Lost to history, Windows 95 pioneered a document-based UX as well, but that was never used again (This had later repercussions in things like Windows Phone, which was ‘people-centric’, Media Center, and Zune (the device UI).)

Windows NT 4.0 (Shell Update Release, SUR) was Windows NT 3.51 plus the Windows 95 UX and I loved it. This was by far one of my favorite releases of all time because it combined the modern (at the time) looking Windows 95 with the stable (for the time) NT codebase. Wonderful.

But Windows 2000, despite the brand change, was even better. This was a nicely refined version of that 95 UX, and it added some app design patterns that are still lurking in Windows 11 today, like the Microsoft Management Console (MMC) you can find in Computer Management.

On the side, we had Windows 98 and 98 SE, which were also nice refinements of the 9x UX, and then Windows Millennium Edition (ME), which introduced an incredible web technology-based set of UXes–some trialed through other never-released Windows versions like Neptune–called Activity Centers. This was a cool idea, but the only major app that used it in the final release was Windows Media Player 7. (There were minor Activity Center-based UIs in ME, too, like Print Center, I think it was called.) Fun fact: Media Center is an example of a later-day Activity Center. Hence the name.

Windows XP was described above.

It seemed like Longhorn was going to be impressive on all kinds of levels, but in particular the UX, which would be technically modern and meet/surpass OS X, but also pretty with translucent, resolution independent and scalable apps, a database-based file system that would solve search (hilarious), a library approach that would hide the ugliness of the C: drive and other file system silliness, and so on. The OS that shipped years later, Vista, was stripped down dramatically, and that included the UX. I mostly liked it, but I dinged Microsoft for making the same mistake Apple had made years later in OS X and then corrected in subsequent updates: The transparent menus and windows were badly done and made things underneath look muddy and not just a little blurry. This was fixed in the next version.

Windows 7 was just Windows Vista Service Pack 2 (SP2) and I will fight Steven Sinofsky to the death on that point if needed. But this means it was a nice refinement of what came before and was absolutely necessary. The UX advances here were mild, mostly because Microsoft was coming around to the fact that developers had lost interest. But it brought the (Office) ribbon to Windows, where it was used in File Explorer and WordPad.

Windows 8 was obviously a radical UX change and one that was as obviously inspired by the mobile platforms that had by then taken over personal computing. It was too radical for users, too, so Microsoft quickly worked to reverse all the major UX changes. This effort was called Rapid Release, and while it led to the 8.1x updates that brought back the Start button, Start menu, floating windows, and whatever else, this is perhaps best remembered now as the start of our current monthly feature update schedule; this was called Windows as a Service in Windows 10 and continuous innovation (gross) in Windows 11.

The sad thing about Windows 8 is that the Desktop innovations were a bigger deal compared to its predecessor (Windows 7) than were the innovations in Windows 7 compared to Vista. Windows 8 was so badly received that few even remember this. And had Windows 8 just been that set of Desktop updates, even as an option, I feel like it would have gone on to be one of the most beloved Windows versions ever. Instead, it triggered a longer-than-expected lifecycle for Windows 7, similar to the Windows XP experience.

The move away from the transparent UIs in Vista/7 was vaguely controversial at the time, but it made the transition between Metro and Desktop in Windows 8 even more jarring than it already was, and the flat Desktop UI this system adopted–which went into Windows 10 as well–was less resource heavy so I guess there was a silver lining there.

Windows 10 was a triumph of common sense at the time and a return to the Desktop -centric interface that the entire user base actually wanted, albeit with that flat UX. But Windows 10 was also a victim of bad timing. It uses a Windows Phone-like UX and Microsoft would kill that platform just a few years later, making that familial similarity pointless. But more to the point, the live tiles and other phone-like UXes never made sense on the Desktop, nor did the mobile app platform that started in Windows 8 and continued forward in 10 and 11. This was the brief One Windows era, which winded down with a wimper.

Windows 11 is interesting. Unlike Windows 10, it didn’t feel necessary per se. It’s half-assed like everything else Microsoft does, so there’s a mix of UXes all over the place, and the initial releases were notably incomplete due to basic incompetence. But when you think about it, Windows 11 is to Windows 10 what Windows XP was to Windows 2000 from a UX perspective: It’s a pretty user interface layer (WinUI/Luna) that’s just tacked on top of the UX used by its predecessor, and one that seems uniquely aimed at individuals (consumers) and not businesses.

Windows 11 at least looks modern, which is a moving target, so we’ll see how we feel about that one in a decade. The UX has gotten much more consistent, and this year’s “pain points” work is helping that even more. And as I said, I actually like it. WinUI 3 is top-heavy from a resource usage perspective, so it can be slow, but Microsoft is working on that too. And we’re finally getting more personalization options, which I always felt was important. (The Plus! packs for 95 and 98, at least, always offered themes and other UX customization options.)

And on a personal note, I’d like to add my favorite was Watercolor, which was built and expanded upon my second favorite theme, Windows 2000 (peak Windows Classic). You remember Watercolor in Whistler’s development. It kept the sharp, square edges of Windows 2000 (rather than the rounded corners of XP) and added that soft light-blue and white color scheme with a nice dithered gradient on the window title bars. It also added that flatter modernized look of the Start button and taskbar. Though it never made it to final release, what did you think about that one?

I loved it, too. I was the person who first published Whistler being the codename to what became Windows XP, and Watercolor and other pre-Luna themes were just temporary as the plan for this release was always to do something bold to get consumers onto the NT kernel. So even as this was happening, there was an understanding that it wouldn’t make its way into the final release even though I and many others wanted that to happen.

One final XP story, condensed. When I showed up in Seattle in February 2001 for the Windows XP Beta 2 technical reviewer’s workshop, I checked into my hotel and got a little welcome package from Microsoft that included a pad of paper with the Luna Start button and Taskbar depicted on the bottom. This had never been revealed before, and I had never seen it, so I scanned a page in the hotel business center and published the first look at Luna, sort of. The next morning, I met Iain McDonald, who asked me if I had ever seen Luna before the trip, and when I said no, him and several other Microsofties all high-fived each other. We’re still friends. I wrote more about these events in Programming Windows: Are You Experienced? (Premium), also part of Windows Everywhere, and that article has a Watercolor shot as well.

OK, one more.

When we were in New York for the Windows XP launch that October, I led a group of Microsoft guys that included Joe Belfiore, who helped design Luna, out for dinner. They were looking for a good restaurant and asked if I had any suggestions. I did. I took them to an Italian restaurant in Little Italy named Luna. It’s still there, I think.

“The next measure of AI momentum is work transformed”

Transformed to what? Unemployment?