Ranting Kenya

To clarify this right off the top, I was already accepted to the Halo 3 beta. I did not buy Crackdown for the Halo 3 beta.That said, I did download the demo. And I played it. And it was ok. I ran around, shot some dudes, died a few times, and I didn’t think much of it. Went back to playing Gears of War, Poker, Geometry Wars, College Hoops 2k7 and whatever else I got.

In the following week or so, I noticed some people on my friends list playing Crackdown. Of course I had heard more about the game itself from Major’s podcast and other web sources. So I went back to the demo, and I tried leveling up. This is where Microsoft made me buy Crackdown, this whole downloading the demo thing is perfectly evil.

Before I knew it, I was jumping from rooftop to rooftop, throwing propane tanks, jumping cars, basically having a blast. One of my “things” about video games is I like to play games when I’m doing things I wouldn’t normally do. That means, I like sports games, but I really like shooting people. Well Crackdown I like a lucid dream. You jump super high and throw cars, neither of which I’ve done in real life.

And then they add character leveling. So I’m leveling up as I go. Now I have the RPG hook in a shooting game. Very hard to put down. This is the first game in a while that I’ve played where late night fatigue is less important than playing “just 10 more minutes”. I’ve had two late nights in a row now, just like back in the day.

Let me begin by stating that I have not used Windows Vista, and I have not seen it in person. All my assumptions are based on the screen shots of vista and on the design of Windows Media Player 11 for Windows XP.Now let me begin with a little background information.

There is a concept called Fitts’ Law. Basically it translates extremely well to computer GUI interfaces (graphical user interface, basically, using a mouse to click on icons etc). In simple terms, Fitts’ law shows that the difficulty to point a mouse pointer at a target is directly related to the distance the mouse pointer must first travel and the size of the target. Seems pretty obvious, I know. There is a mathematical formula to gauge this movement, but I’m not getting into that. Truth be told, you don’t need to be able to use the formula to make better designs with Fitts’ law in mind. Understanding how it works is more than enough.

You may have also noticed that when using a Windows, Macintosh, or a Linux machine, the mouse pointer cannot move outside of the boundaries of the screen. Go ahead and try, you’ll never get that last sliver of the pointer to leave the screen. Now together, Fitts’ Law and the inability to extend the pointer beyond the screen creates an excellent phenomenon. Essentially, the edges of the screen have infinite area.

Something that Apple Computer (now just Apple Inc.) did way back in the beginning of their GUI interface design, was patent the placement of the menu bar on the very top edge of the screen. This lends a HUGE usability advantage to Mac users. It is far easier to target a menu when it has infinite height.

Windows doesn’t have this advantage. But it don’t count it out yet. Windows places the “Close” button in the upper most right-hand corner of the screen. A user can close applications so quickly with the mouse by simply throwing it upwards and to the right. It has infinite width and height. It is much faster to do that than it is to aim right at the center of a little “X”.

Which brings me to the reason for this post. The button design in Windows Media Player 11 is slightly different from that of version 10. The button’s are done using the new Vista style. They are attached to the very top of the screen, but not the right hand side. There is a seven pixel gap.

Users (such as myself) continually fail to close the application because their brains are trained to heave the mouse to the top-right rapidly without regard. The button is less usable than it’s older version, despite being wider (which I believe Microsoft widened for this very reason).

This style of button is present on all Vista windows and programs, as far as I have seen. This is a huge loss of usability to the Windows Vista interface. I can’t and don’t understand why Microsoft would make critical design error, especially since they had already did something good. Of all the features that they’re “copying” from Mac OS X, you’d think they’d try not to give anything up.