How to delete a shortcut in 7 easy steps
by Volker Weber
Windows Vista is supposed to be more secure than Windows XP. It asks permission before doing something potentially 'dangerous'. Multiple times. Such as deleting an unwanted shortcut from your desktop. Here is what happens.
Comments
Yeah, but it looks very pretty. Really, very pretty.
Thinking more about this, it reminds me of exactly the old saw about how a camel is a horse designed by a committee.
Clearly they've built this graphical UI with the hooks they expected to need to watch out for our safety. The added on file system permissions manager with the hooks the expected to need to watch out for our safety. They added an anti-malware engine with the hooks they expected to need to watch out for our safety.
Of course, its also clear they didn't talk to each other or make some kind of central management engine which of course would be vulnerable since its not possible at this point to have it built into the kernel.
They've just built more mess with a pretty UI on top.
That said, I'll probably end up running it on something.
Andrew are you being sarcastic? I *ass*u*me so :)
A confusing Ugly UI mess would be my take..
* Huge ugly grey space around icons
* Inconsistent usage of icons,
* Completely different looking dialogs
* Button text needlessly using different terminology - [Yes, No] and [Permit, Deny] and [Continue, Skip, Cancel]. Why? Also, what's the meaning of the Skip button in this context?
* Why do some buttons get an icon (Continue button) and the rest don't?
That all adds up to a *really really* *Ugly UI*. When you add in the 6 or 7 mouse clicks, and answering 5 questions along the way it also gets the Ugliest usability award.
Well, let's be fair here - on the second dialog if offers you the option to 'repeat this answer each time this occurs' - does that circumvent all the following steps? Also, it is not a live release yet.....
Which by the way makes it very odd that the UK 'PC-Pro' magazine (dated July) has done a comparative review of Tiger and Vista operating systems, and decided that the vapour around this future operating system makes it a better option than the existing operating system that's out there now - amused and enraged me hugely, but they don't seem to have printed my sarcastic letter to them...
Now we see what happens when you "port" bureaucracy to software. And Microsoft seems to have finally implemented one thing by the book ;-)
I think I am going to buy stocks on Champagne. The OSS community will need a lot when Windows Vista is finally being released.
The admin confirmation functionality appears to get some beating.
AFAIK, Ubuntu also asks you to enter password, bladibla for things you'd never expect they need admin rights (that's at least what happened in my out-of-the-box ubuntu installation). Even so, nobody appears to have a problem with that one.
But I agree that the shown example looks pretty foul and will need quite an overhaul before letting it loose onto unsuspecting windows users. Looks like there is an interaction transaction engine missing! :)
My suspicion is, that this behavior is fully intended and was based on a discussion similar to this:
(1) We have a couple of icons here, that we don't want people to remove, be it that WE want them to keep (and use) them or be it that some partner company paid us $$$ to have these icons on each installed system.
(2) We can hard-code these item into the Desktop code. Or we run some background thread that always recreates these icons if not present.
(1) Nah, that would cause tons of bad press again. Also, the EU will beat us up again if we do it that way. So they must be removable - at least in theory.
(2) Well - then let's not make it strictly impossible, but make it VERY hard to remove them.
(1) That's what I was aiming at! Can we make it really annoying to remove them, so that 99% of all users will give up along the way...
(2) Sure - we can do that. I already have a few ideas for dialogs and what kind of questions we could ask the user when attempting to delete such icons. We will make them feel VERY exhausted after the first time and they will never want to do it again (giggles...)
Um... I realise there is a lot of passionate hatred of Microsoft represented on this board (and frankly it is not often that I would seek to defend them) but my point still remains:
'stage 4' permits you to set the default so that the other actions happen 'each time this occurs' - presumably then, there is no need to go through this palaver for each shortcut.
Seems to me that it is perfectly logical that a 'microsoft beta client' shortcut would be owned by the system and that special circumstances would apply.
This is not a new phenomenon - how about trying to delete the 'network' or 'recycler' icons from the desktop of Windows 98, and beyond? What happens then?
How about taking a slightly more balanced and less cynical view here? Just a thought...
> how about trying to delete the 'network' or 'recycler' icons from the desktop of Windows 98, and beyond? What happens then?
That actually once happened to me! By accident I deleted the trash and
I can tell you: it took me a couple of hours of research and some serious registry hacking in the end to recreate it! Not something that you would want to do every other day!
Michael
