Everyone knows that when we did the reset, a lot of features that were anticipated for Longhorn didn't come back. Furthermore, those who have been in the beta program for a long time know that there are even some features that were in one or more betas but that didn't make it into the RC, like Advanced Query Pane and Lists.
One of the most common requests I get from people is a list of other features that didn't make it. I thought it would be interesting for readers to hear about some of these things, along with some screen shots.
Mimesweeper
As you may know from my previous blog entry, we have taken flack in the past for Minesweeper and the use of mines. Although we don't have land mines in the USA, in many countries they are experienced in daily life, and not something to make light of in a video game.
So, for Vista we wanted to replace mines with something that people also wanted to avoid finding. Thus we came up with the concept of Mimesweeper:
In Mimesweeper, you uncover street intersections on a black and white striped grid in which several mimes are hidden. Just like wandering around Paris, the goal is to figure out where all of the mimes are without actually encountering one.
Unfortunately, beta feedback revealed a tremendous amount of controversy over the use of mimes. Although we do not have many mimes in the USA, apparently there are many countries where running into a mime is common occurrence and not something to make light of in a video game.
In the end, we pulled the concept and replaced it with a garden of flowers.
Safe Delete
Lots of people complain about the abundance of warnings and cautions and confirmations you have to get through to do even basic things in Windows. Even a simple task like deleting a few files can entail multiple confirmation dialogs before you get it fully deleted from your system. At the same time, the news is full of stories about identify theft being caused by files not being fully deleted from used computer hard drives or memory sticks. In fact, there is no built-in way to truly forensically delete a file in Windows, no matter how many confirmation dialogs you click.
To address both of these things, we added a button called "Safe Delete" to every explorer window. Clicking this button would instantly delete all of the files shown in the window permanently from the system, overriding every confirmation, bypassing the recycle bin, and also zeroing out the space on the disk that the files used to occupy (hence the "safe" name).
We wanted to button to be in a prominent place in the UI, since hiding it would defeat the purpose of a fast and easy delete mechanism. However, we also felt it was important to indicate to users that the button performed a destructive action and wanted to make sure they didn't hit it by accident. Therefore, we made it RED (the universal color for danger) and put a large X on it. Here is what the UI would have looked like:
(note that the close button was moved in and the icon changed to a neutral image with a less intense color, indicating that at least in Explorer, closing a window is a benign task with no possibility of data loss. Non-explorer windows would still use the standard buttons.)
Despite our enthusiams for this feature, it didn't do as well in usability testing as we had hoped. In our tests, more users experienced unwanted data loss with the safe delete when compared to the standard delete. Here is the chart:
As we can see here, among 14,000 users, there was a statistically significant increase in the incidence of data loss (13,982 with safe delete vs. zero without it). Now - we all know that statistics are tricky to interpret, and just because people find something confusing now doesn't mean that they won't ultimately grow to love it. But in this case, we ultimately decided to pull the feature. If we get a lot of response, maybe we can bring it back for SP1.
Start Menu Action Field
Many people berate us for dumbing down the operating system and taking away power from the people who bothered to learn how to use it. We are really sensitive to this issue, and that is why it was so painful to remove the action field from the start menu.
The original design was that by pressing the Windows key on your keyboard, your insertion point would be automatically placed in a special field in the start menu where you could enter not just search but other powerful commands, like in a UNIX shell environment.
The hardest part was actually just determining the syntax used in the field. We had many requirements, such as being language neutral (we are a global product) and working with the maximum amount of legacy code. In the end, we decided that the easiest and most powerful thing to do would be to embed a TECO interpretter. This let users do things that were difficult to impossible to do under XP. For instance, in this screenshot you can see me using the action field to replace all of the tabs in a file with the appropriate number of spaces:
Can you imagine how convenient that would have been? In XP you would actually have to launch a program like Word to do this. This was really a great feature, and it was nice to cater to the power users for a change and not coddle up to wimpy users who need sissy languages like EMACS to get anything done. It was also a low dev hit. An anaysis of the 350 million lines of windows source code revealed that there were four unused TECO interpreters in there already, so it was very easy to add a fifth one.
Sadly, once again usability results killed the feature. It seems that many users would use this box to type in text strings, expecting that the system would then find documents that contained those strings. This was often disasterous, as almost any string in any language is a well-formed TECO program. In the end, we decided to just change the functionality to do the full text search like the basic users were expecting. Hopefully we left the code in there so we can reenable it with a regkey or a powertoy or something...
Conclusion
So, that should give you a little taste of what didn't make it. I know it can be disappointing, but I hope everyone can see the difficult choices we are up against.