Where has all my stuff gone?

Michael Gartenberg | March 07, 2006, 02:51 PM

You know the feeling. Your work space might seem cluttered but you know where every item is. Then, someone comes and cleans up your space and you can't find anything. That's just how I'm feeling using the latest betas of Office, Windows and IE. I'm not suggesting Windows was perfect but I've got a lot of time invested in it. I've got six years alone in XP. More in Office. I know where everything is and can get there in a moment. With these new versions, nothing seems where it belongs. Once I find something, I sometimes understand the rationale why it might have moved but so far, nothing beyond the basics seems to be natural. It seems like several decades of UI guidelines were tossed out the window. Worse, it seems I'm required to have even finer degrees of mouse dexterity in order to hit all the tiny little targets on the screen. Seriously, who thought putting the menu bar under the address bar in IE was a good idea? Why is the zoom command in Office buried in the bottom of the screen? Now I understand this is a major re-write but it feels like there's a lot of change for the sake of change. By contrast, when I switched from OS 9 to OS X, there were a lot of things that were different but everything made sense. Everything core pretty much still worked the same and for some reason my mouse ended up making the correct choice when I needed to do something different. At the moment, Vista feels very alien, Office even more so and I've banished IE 7 from my XP machine.