I'm sorry, but I find the Calculator app woefully unimpressive.

I can't even type a simple expression with parenthesis. There's no RPN option. There isn't a "financial" setting (only scientific and programmer, for some reason). The list goes on; I'm sure I'm not alone on this one.

It is so, so, so basic it's essentially useless, I end up being forced to open Excel, run Python in the terminal, go on Wolfram Alpha or, worse yet (!!) grab pen and paper to perform basic math.

I know this is unrelated to UWP, but I'd rather they focus less on improving an UI that is inevitably trivial (little boxes with numbers arranged in a grid within a bigger box) and instead added some much needed features.

The fact that I am using a computer must be lost on whoever decided to green light this abomination as the default calculator in any OS ever, let alone one released in the 21st century.

The regressions are in that it is much slower and wastes screen real estate. 90% of the window size is for faux buttons that have zero purpose for anyone who doesn't use a touch screen on their Windows computer (ie. at least 99% of the Windows users) and the 10% that remains uses oversized elements with wasteful padding.

Here is what i use as a calculator on Windows: http://runtimeterror.com/tools/calc/calc.hta.txt

It looks like this: https://i.imgur.com/eWZfcXB.png

and not only is much faster to open than Windows Calculator (ironic, considering it loads an entire browser engine) but also more compact and doesn't waste any screen space (100% of its window is dedicated to its actual functionality instead of being an obsolete skeuomorphism that was originally made to help people associate desktop calculators with the virtual desktop metaphor used on the Macintosh back in 1984 when actual physical desktop calculators could be found everywhere).

There's nothing uwp-specific about that behaviour though. The classic calculator could be made resizable and gain a "stay in top" option.

There was a brief period in Windows 8 where (proto) UWP apps launched smooth and fast and the Win32 desktop took several additional minutes to launch. With so many stacks living side-by-side on Windows it seems an interesting trade-off between past apps, present apps, and future wishes.

> They have obstacles to overcome, and then there is just the glaring fact that they had so much momentum with Win32.

Do you feel the same about the macOS Carbon-Cocoa transition? Nobody misses Carbon anymore, and Win32 is as old as the classic Mac Toolbox.

Eventually they have to shed the old API.

MS shot themselves in the foot with the store on PC. I don't get why I can't use the store from my browser. I want to sign in to the bloody store from any browser of my choice, click the download button and have store app do the downloads in the background.

One other problem the store has is that it handles poor network horribly. Or rather, it just can't work with poor internet.

Play store on the other hand is a master piece. It will open even offline (I tested it right now). It will show a cached page from last time.

Even settings work offline. And finally, the play store will alert you when you're back online.

MS store on the other hand will throw an incomprehensible ERROR Code at you.

UWP is what .NET should have been since the beginning, an improved COM, and an alternative design solution to Longhorn ideas.

From that point of view it makes perfect sense.

What it did not make sense was creating an incompatible .NET runtime for it, or the way it was introduced with device specific APIs (Win 8, Win 8.1), using shared code folders.

I use speedcrunch(open source and super fast) for my quick calculating needs.

I dont see any advantage of win calculator over it.

They would have to do some sort of virtualization since there's literally no restrictions on what APIs you can access. There's so much cruft and invalid paradigms in the old APIs it makes sense to roll new ones.

I think the approach they're taking to refactoring the Control Panel into the Settings App is smart. They're dog-fooding the Frameworks they're expecting others to use, slowly migrating functionality that's relevant to a modern Windows platform, and keeping existing functionality around until they've replicated it.

I also like that the apps are responsive. I use the snap feature a lot and it's nice that the Apps will adapt to the dimensions I relegate them to.

The Windows 10X preview actually does this by running Win32 apps inside their own container, with their own registry, kernel, drivers, and isolated from the rest of the rest of the system.

I think they do?

I’ve definitely enabled/disabled the tiles on an individual basis. I just don’t recall whether it’s universally available to all programs, or a particular subset.

Windows seems to be designed for people who aren’t savvy enough to use Linux, and don’t want to buy a Mac. They get away with egregious design practices, because the OS is ubiquitous and the common user has no other choice.

Mac OS on the other hand, has kept a fairly consistent design, mostly due to the obvious barrier to entry for most people ($$$), so any mistakes that would impact usability could easily give someone a reason to not spend $1k on a laptop or even more on a desktop.

Microsoft needs more competition. What’s stopping them from re-skinning Windows 10 to resemble Windows 7, and add actual functional improvements? They’ve done that recently, but they didn’t need to redesign their start menu to add workspaces (just one example).

I don't know what people said about Carbon, but i do know that many people do miss it - like the Lazarus developers that had to throw away years of work.

> It already is gone to a major extent: when was the last time a new Win32 app, written in Win32 with C++, made the news?

Every single PC game made since the mid90s?

Also why the restriction to C++? A big benefit of Win32 is that being in C it can be used by many other languages since pretty much every language has some FFI that speaks the platform's C ABI.

>(It already is gone to a major extent: when was the last time a new Win32 app, written in Win32 with C++, made the news?)

Windows 10, for example. And the compiler stacks for Windows. I can go on forever.

When was the last time a new UWP app made the news (except that development on it was stopped). Nearly all apps are written for Electron now, and that sits on top of Win32 ;)

I'm not sure if this is what you have in mind (because sandbox/container can mean several things, including things i wouldn't like to see like limiting what applications can do to each other) but one thing that i'd like to see is something like a "desktop chroot": being able to right click an EXE (or zip/installer/msi/whatever) and select "Run this in fresh Windows 10 VM" where the application runs in a VM (either inside its own window or seamlessly, could be an option) as if it was the only application installed in a fresh Windows 10 installation, optionally with a way to make this VM permanent as a desktop shortcut, until you decide to delete it and remove the entire thing as if it never existed. This would make it easy to experiment with applications you do not fully trust or simply trying out applications in an environment that wont affect your real working one.

It is kinda/sorta possible to do that now using something like VirtualBox, but you need to create a full Windows 10 installation (which takes several GBs), it takes time to install (you can save some time by exporting a fresh installation to an appliance - at expense of more space - though you'd also need to disable networking otherwise after a while the moment it notices internet will start upgrading) and it can't use the computer resources properly (it runs much slower, you have no access to the GPU, etc). A properly integrated Windows 10 solution would be to map existing files to VM so that it reuses 99% of the stuff that would be the same and, if needed, do a copy-on-write in cases where these files are altered inside the VM (it could also help to see what exactly the programs inside the VM touch, sort of a system-wide diff... though that can also have false positives if the changes are by the OS itself).

Would sandboxing make my old 32bit midi apps stop talking to my new 64bit midi apps? If yes, that would be a shame, since the ability to still use ancient midi software and hardware is one of the things that’s nice about Windows 10.

One of the first I ever saw was Tron Script, here's the subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/TronScript/

> I realize I can probably get my low-latency UI fix with various Linux installs... Anyone have any recommendations? Who has the fastest window manager these days?

LXDE (the original, not LxQT) is still well-supported on Debian Stable, and that's probably the closest thing to a 'XP-like or better' experience on Linux these days. Xfce is not far behind, though. Or you can experiment with more niche stuff such as WindowMaker, Fvwm95, IceWM and whatnot, but you're more likely to run into unimplemented stuff and these are simple window managers, so utility programs must be installed separately.

Of course, you should be mindful of RAM requirements. A modern Linux install will need at least 1GB to feel really snappy, which is far above the typical XP machine.

Even the nicest Linux desktop has more lag than ~KDE3 days. I think that's a global shift in how rendering is done, it used to be crude and glitchy but extremely cheap cycle wise, now you have compositing ... smooth matrices but maybe (I never wrote code for composited DE) this cause a fixed offset in response ?

>To see what I'm talking about, just run something extremely lightweight like mspaint, then right click it in your task bar...

>I'm looking for a snappy UI.

Problems like these I think stems from poor design decisions made at Microsoft as a whole.

Take ARC compared to Garbage Collection as an example. Not sure why Microsoft chose a Garbage Collector design when implementing .NET, but given how Garbage Collection works, there's always risk of it causing UI stutter when it's doing its thing. Apple in comparison chose an ARC design when implementing Swift to avoid potential responsive UI issues... even if ARC is overall less performant.

Then you also have the decisions to support backwards compatibility and you have a mess on your hands.

Frankly, I hate it somedays when I click on my windows calculator app and it opens a blank window and just sits there. I have to kill it and restart it 2-3 more times before it actually opens up. Stuff like this should never happen!

> I think what happened was eventually the designer types got their hands in there

No, what happened is Microsoft placed a bet on us moving to a multi-platform future where there are many fewer PCs and more tablets, hybrid devices, whatever, all with the need to use touch, pen as well as keyboard for input. The existing start menu and taskbar would be hideous on mobile devices.

The problem is they were wrong. But I'm not going to blame "designer types". If you ever used Metro UI on a Windows Phone device you'd see that it was a truly remarkable system... that was bent to fit a task it didn't fit.

Busy work - that's what they are doing.

That's exactly what happened, and it all started with the damn ribbon BS in Office.

To me, the "advancement" of the human-computer interface came to a screeching halt at that time. People grok menus. Memorizing sequences of Mnemonic accelerators is natural when overlaid on a haptic path created by mouse movement/menu navigation.

Then you take everything and throw out the baby with the bath water by trying to put every past bit of functionality on screen at the same time when what one needs is to be able to set up a work bench quickly, and just do your work, and if necessary save said work bench state to return to later.

I've seen more and "better" advancements in UI design in exactly 1 place, in all the different software suites I use, and that is in IDEs. Ironically, the one place that programmers have to make due day in, day out.

It makes me wonder whether anyone who presides over these programs is actually proficient in the non-computing version of said task. A Typesetter/document composer for instance. Nothing about the modern interface leads me to believe that any actually invested individual is involved, and that the design was pushed by the need for someone at Microsoft to be seen as needed in order to change something.

Then again... Can"t judge 'em for that. We all want to be wanted.

Or the actively developed fork linked to from that site, Open-Shell: https://github.com/Open-Shell/Open-Shell-Menu

Don't Android's widgets provide the same functionality? And they aren't forced to fit into the space of a tile but can be resized.