Читать книгу Windows 10 All-in-One For Dummies - Ciprian Adrian Rusen, Woody Leonhard - Страница 85

There have been many harsh words about the lowly hamburger. On the one hand, the icon doesn’t really say anything. On the other hand, so many systems and programs now use the icon that it’s close to being universal. Even cross-platform.

Ends up that the hamburger icon (like so many things we take for granted today) was designed at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, PARC, for use on the first graphical computer, the Xerox Star. Norm Cox designed it at PARC, and you can see its first appearance at https://vimeo.com/61556918. Software designer Geoff Alday contacted Cox, and this is what he said:

“I designed that symbol many years ago as a ‘container’ for contextual menu choices. It would be somewhat equivalent to the context menu we use today when clicking over objects with the right mouse button. Its graphic design was meant to be very ‘road sign’ simple, functionally memorable, and mimic the look of the resulting displayed menu list. With so few pixels to work with, it had to be very distinct, yet simple … we used to tell potential users that the image was an ‘air vent’ to keep the window cool. It usually got a chuckle, and made the mark much more memorable.”

That’s why, 30 years later, Windows 10 uses the hamburger icon that, when clicked, opens a contextual menu with options that differ based on your context and the app you use.

Whether you like having your news boiled down into a sentence fragment, that’s for you to decide.

Unlike the left side of the Start menu, the right side with the tiles can get gloriously screwed up. You can stretch and move and group and ungroup until you’re blue screened in the face.

I tend to think of the tiles on the right side of the Start menu as the next generation of Windows 7 Gadgets. If you ever used Gadgets, you know that they were small programs that displayed useful information on their faces. Microsoft banned them before releasing Windows 8, primarily because they raised all sorts of security problems.

Windows 10 Start menu tiles don’t have the security problems. And the infrastructure that has replaced the Gadget mentality has taken Windows 10 to an entirely new level.