I want clock, calendar, notes, CPU and system stats, pull out or slide out menus with shortcuts, quirky ones like this one.
Instead what I have is ads.
And copilot everywhere.
With touch screen laptops today you can do so much more. My levono also folds 360 and let's me use it as a full touch screen desktop. There is so much potential for productivity hacks and interactive UX ideas if Windows customization and widgets ecosystem was alive and thriving.
Windows used to be cool! As a kid I remember the Dangerous Creatures CD [1] came with a custom theme for Windows 95. It would change all the icons to cool animal stuff. The "My Computer" icon would change to a frog, the Recycle bin icon would change to a fish, and my favorite, the waiting icon for the mouse cursor would change to a Wasp!
You raise a serious point, oft discussed here (about the sorry state of the OS)
I actually think the "whimsical", nostalgia these kind of apps (toys?) point to is actually indicative of a more serious "yearning" for simpler, higher quality, more user-configurable computing. As it was not so long ago ...
… When computers didn’t all have permanent internet connections, which limited the damage it was possible to do by having a persistent executable running on someone’s computer.
There was little to no spyware or malware risk because this was a time when stealing CPU cycles couldn’t make you money, machines couldn’t be used to anonymously generate internet traffic, and exfiltrating captured data was essentially impossible.
As soon as all the computers went online, the frivolity had to stop.
> As soon as all the computers went online, the frivolity had to stop.
Very insightful. They ceased to be "our" (user's) machines and became "everybody else's" (vendors, criminals, scammers, "debug-by-update" OS-vendors, etc., etc.)
At some point these existed. I'm not sure, maybe on Windows 7?
But they were really sluggish, which made them useless in my opinion. If I have to wait seconds for my widgets to load or react, I'll just write my notes in notepad++ and look at the clock on the taskbar.
For a short while, Windows has come out with desktop notes and system stats widgets. I'm not sure it has those anymore, but the problem is that people's desktops are always covered-up with windows, so those things aren't very helpful.
It would be nice to have a taskbar calendar with appointments and notifications though. But Microsoft will never make something that is both pluggable and simple here. (Android used to have a mainscrean one, but it stopped being pluggable a long time ago. For some reason Linux people don't write those things.)
You want widgets. But you don’t want the average user to slow down their computer with malware infested widgets. You don’t want to spend thanksgiving weekend disinfecting your aunt’s laptop of all the fun toolbars and cute widgets she installed.
So you set a good example. You don’t install frivolous widgets. You tell everybody never to install things that claim they will just make a cute animal appear on their desktop. And even though you know that this bouncy ball widget is safe and fun because you built it from the GitHub repo… you can’t install it because you can’t explain to average user why it’s okay for you to install the fun bouncy ball but they can’t install the kitten that chases a ball of string.
aye, at this point desktop linux is pretty dang mature, and doesn't stream telemetry or error codes unless you explicitly tell it to.
the holdout was gaming, but Steam and Proton work practically flawlessly. one or two other occasional challenges -- a big one was MS Access that was needed for Master's program -- but other than that nothing on Windows that can't ignored / discarded
I have all I need right on my desktop. Expedia deals? Check. Candy Crush? Check. The current weather on the other side of the world using units I don't understand? Check. Everything came pre-installed too, so it's just the out of the box apple experience.
totally reminded me of the days with Windows Blind(?) some crazy dock... you could customise widgets showing bandwidth/disk io/ram/cpu the usual. man those were FUN. but possibly quite power hungry so wouldn't fly nowadays...
There was a very good one, I think back in 2005 - 2007 as part of Google Desktop / Google Desktop Search.
That was back when Google was a respectable company that in addition to the mandatory EULA had a separate notice that informed very very cleary, something like:
READ THIS CAREFULLY
THIS IS NOT THE NORMAL YADDA YADDA
... and then a relatively description of what they were going to to and not.
It had an amazing RSS feed reader widget that would automagically subscribe to feeds from pages on sites I visited and present a relevant selection of links.
Vista was bloated for its time, but man those widgets it had were so fun. Clock, dual car-like speedometers for CPU and RAM, calendar, weather, stocks, sticky notes. Luckily Android copied the idea soon after.
You mean the tabloid news panel? I know it’s called widgets but it’s actually a tabloid news panel. I have no idea why MS thinks people need tabloid news inside their OS but alas. You can’t turn off the tabloid news without turning off the entire panel, ergo effectively Windows doesn’t have widgets.
I want clock, calendar, notes, CPU and system stats, pull out or slide out menus with shortcuts, quirky ones like this one.
Instead what I have is ads.
And copilot everywhere.
With touch screen laptops today you can do so much more. My levono also folds 360 and let's me use it as a full touch screen desktop. There is so much potential for productivity hacks and interactive UX ideas if Windows customization and widgets ecosystem was alive and thriving.