It's an interesting change. I remember watching a documentary recently about the development of motorway signs in the UK. When considering the psychology of recognising words quickly, Jock Kinneir and Margaret Calvert realised that the caps-only typography of the time would slow down the time it took for drivers to recognise a sign- properly capitalised sentences have more distinctive shapes, allowing people to skim read them. more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_font
It's interesting that when using VS 2012, I do tend to actually have to read the words, rather than just recognise them.
I often think, on seeing new releases of Microsoft products with "features" like this, that they simply have too many people who don't know how to leave well enough alone. Each of the last few versions of VS seems to include a lot of unnecessary UI churn - 2008 had a bunch of subtle but pointless changes, 2010 looks gratuitously different to every other Windows app and now in 2012 they're fiddling with the menu capitalisation. I'd much rather that they left all that alone and spent half that effort just fixing bugs - better C++0x support, make Intellisense actually work (I hear that one may have happened anyway in 2010?), fix the funky weird bugs in the text editor, fix some crashes.
I can only assume that they're adding a lot of visible bling changes because they think that will drive more upgrades, but honestly, the menus were fine as lower case. Leave them alone.
The Developer division is just another group of people within Microsoft with their own goals. The connection between them and the Office division or the Windows division is incidental. In my opinion, Visual Studio has been going downhill ever since version 6.
I'm not quite sure, but assume that the connection to Windows/Office you talk about is in response to my suggesting that the menus should be consistent with everything else? I see that as more of a UI principle than a consequence of how closely the teams are bound within MS.
I think there have been good features since; the VC++ compiler improved a lot in 2003 and the ability to debug into STL containers (IIRC, 2005?) is brilliant. I just wish I could get things like that without the bloat* and UI churn.
*: yes, I know "bloat" is an overused term, but honestly, VS2008 is several gigabytes and takes an hour and multiple reboots to install, plus another half-hour for the service pack. I find that a bit extreme for what is basically a compiler and, as described in another thread, a glorified text editor.
The only reason that makes any sense is that this feature is a distraction, to draw criticism away from the rest of the UI changes (flat, grey) and other issues like the overwhelming crazy focus on Metro.
This way, they can do something visible, moronic, then backpedal, and claim "hey we fixed the issue requested by 95% of customers!"
Or at least I want to believe that, because the alternative is too horrible to contemplate.
In the UserVoice site linked on the announcement there is a feature request to remove ALL CAPS. It already has 2000 votes, maybe they could change their mind? After all, they did for the colors given the huge feedback.
In their article where they announced the new UI, the explicitly stated that they removed all caps from the panel headers as people didn't like it, and then in the line below immediately said they'd put the menu items in all caps.
I actually read it twice and laughed out loud. No idea what they were thinking. Thankfully it looks like we can turn it off!
Years ago, I overheard a hallway conversation about some performance tuning they were doing in VS 200x. Apparently they discovered several thousand hash tables during the startup of the IDE.
Not instances of hash tables. They found several thousand /implementations/ of hash tables.
While I'm sure this story expanded every time it was told, I'm also sure there was a kernel of truth to it.
Not insignificant at all. Good product and interface design is the accumulation of 1000's of details all done right.
Just a couple of interface missteps can have a hugely negative effect. In this case, many people are justly bothered by the sight of a menu appearing to yell at them, a menu that may sit on their screen for eight hours a day.
More than this, such a bad design decision is a symbol of a broken product design process at Microsoft, which means it's probably not just the menu bar alone.
It's a freaking IDE !!! There's no good interface design when it comes to IDEs. Everything that matters is to make everything configurable cause people will tweak things to their own liking.
Also i'm not even looking at menus. Keyboard shortcuts FTW.
