Windows Format dialog waited decades for UI revamp that never came
- Reference: 1711534506
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2024/03/27/windows_format_dialog_temporary/
- Source link:
[1]Plummer is well known for beloved and not-so-beloved elements of Microsoft's flagship operating system. While some of his projects, such as the Windows Task Manager, have received a fresh lick of paint over the years, others have not.
A case in point is the Format dialog, one of those bits of Windows that looks decidedly retro when compared to the shiny new world of Windows 11, yet is still used in the latest installations of the operating system.
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In a [3]post on X , Plummer set the wayback machine to a rainy Thursday in late 1994. "We were porting the bajillion lines of code from the Windows95 user interface over to NT, and Format was just one of those areas where WindowsNT was different enough from Windows95 that we had to come up with some custom UI," he wrote.
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"I got out a piece of paper and wrote down all the options and choices you could make with respect to formatting a disk, like filesystem, label, cluster size, compression, encryption, and so on.
[6]Plummer talks to us about spending Microsoft's money on a red Corvette
[7]USB Cart of Death: The wheeled scourge that drove Windows devs to despair
[8]Remembering the time Windows accidentally sent Poland to the bottom of the sea
[9]Don't fear the Thread Reaper, a Windows ghost of bugs past
"Then I busted out VC++2.0 and used the Resource Editor to lay out a simple vertical stack of all the choices you had to make, in the approximate order you had to make. It wasn't elegant, but it would do until the elegant UI arrived."
Thirty years on, and we're still waiting for that "elegant UI."
While Windows has evolved over the years, the Format dialog persists in Windows 11. It is a reminder of when Plummer was elbow-deep in the operating system's internals. Sure, it might feature some creative use of colons in its captions, yet it also speaks of simpler times.
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It is also a warning from the past of the dangers of quickly putting together a temporary solution to a problem. The anticipated permanent fix might never arrive, and decisions taken decades ago could leave users born after the event scratching their heads.
In Plummer's case, he also had to decide how much "cluster slack" would be too much, which wound up constraining the format size of a FAT volume to 32 GB.
He said: "That limit was also an arbitrary choice that morning, and one that has stuck with us as a permanent side effect.
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"So remember... there are no 'temporary' checkins!" ®
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Easy to use, direct and no fuss
It's kind of what a user needs: no fuss or drama, no complicated options or pointless cruft.
Shame the onward development of the OS departed from this ethos in so many ways.
> a simple vertical stack of all the choices you had to make, in the approximate order you had to make. It wasn't elegant,
Yes, yes it was elegant: neat, tidy, no guff, sensible, easy to use.
What it wasn't - and, thankfully, isn't - is garish, over-designed, spread out over too many subdialogues or needing to use a search box just to find the option you *hope* is still available.
> constraining the format size of a FAT volume to 32 GB.
Ok, unintended side effects are not what you want - OTOH by the time you get to 32GB aren't you glad to be using something a bit more capable[1] than FAT?
[1] hmm, except that FAT is easy enough to patch by hand, with a copy of Norton by your side, so maybe that counts in its favour re getting your data back when things go awry. Choices, choices.
It's far from the worst piece of UI design still kicking about. The way MMC windows scale for what looks like 640 x 480 monitors means every emergency trawl through an event log begins with setting the window to a usable format first.
The list of ports (IP addresses) on the printer Properties / Ports tab is a mess too - the selected one is always at the bottom of the list, there's not enough lateral space to display the useful bit of the IP address and as soon as you expand it to show that, it knocks the selected line off the bottom of the list. Burying it behind a load of submenus in Windows 11 hasn't helped. Thanks, MS.
The worst I ever had to deal with (thankfully no longer) was the list of mobile phones associated with a user account in Exchange - it was slightly less than one line deep IIRC, floating in a large grey empty dialogue box with space enough for a decent 10 line select. Like a lot of Exchange, it gave the impression it had been thrown together by the work experience kid.
"'Temporary' isn't always"
"There's nothing as permanent as a temporary fix"