if you grew up in the 2000s the namenorton probably doesn't mean much to youother than the name of an antiviruspackage that you don't respect very muchhowever norton used to be a verydifferent name with very differentconnotations and they used to beassociated with much better software thenorton name began with peter nortoncomputing which was founded bypeter norton in the early 80s whodeveloped an undelete utility forrecovering some files he deleted off hiscomputerhe went on to build an empire aroundthis and other little pieces of softwareincluding the norton utilities which itseems like everybody owned a copy of inthe late 80s and 90snorton utilities was stuff like a discdefragmenter and a file system integritychecker and a whole bunch of otherlittle things that just made use in thecomputer a little less intolerablethere's also norton commander their filemanager which almost everyone seems toremember because it got cloned ontoevery single platform in existencein addition to that he had a book abouthow to program the ibm pc that wascalled the pink shirt bookfor obvious reasons and with all thesethings combined by the end of the 80shis company wasthriving and was pretty much a householdname for computer usersin 1990 however he sold the company tosymantec i'm not sure how big a dealthey were at that point but they turnedaround and started putting the nortonnamewhich was highly recognizable onto theirproducts including their antiviruspackagewhich began the long slow slide to thepoint where norton now just meansantivirus this was probably inevitablesince most of the stuff that the nortonutilities were doingended up getting rolled into operatingsystems things like disk defragmentationand file system integrity checkingare now done transparently by your osand have been for decadesso the norton utilities were not goingto stay relevant but it stilljust really frosts me when a companytakes somebody else's recognizable andrespected brand and starts putting it ontheir stuff just to increase the salesof their stuffeven though there's nobody from thatcompany actually working on the stuffit's just a huge dick move at any ratethe norton brand was still quiterelevant throughout the 90s they had alot of irons in the fire under thattrademark and people remember a lot ofsoftware from that timebut of course the thing i'm interestedin is the one i don't ever hear anybodytalk aboutnorton desktop never heard anyonemention it in passing never heardanybody give an opinion on it nobody'sever said oh i missed that thingbut i've seen it mentioned in variousabandonware websites and magazinesjust by name and i've always wonderedwhat the heck it isso i finally recently decided to goinvestigate and find out what it was allaboutand it was not at all what i expectedit's actually quite a bit moreimpressive than i expectedso brass tacks norton desktop is aninterface enhancementfor windows 3 which overhauls the gui togive it a lot of thingsthat really should have had from theget-go they had three major releases in91 92 and 93.the first two will run on windows 3.0the third one will only run on windows3.1i don't have time to show you all threein depth so we're gonna go with versionthreebecause it's the most impressive of thethree i'll show you a couple screenshotsof the other ones later they're stillpretty coolbut three is really cool also sincewe're talking about years i want to makeone important point before we continueeven in the last year of norton desktopsdevelopment nobody knew what windows 95was going to look likeso anything you see here that looks likeit could have been cribbed from 95was actually taken from something elsemost likely mac osso let me begin this demo by showing youwhat the basic windows 3experience looked like at the time soyou understand where we're coming fromi just installed this copy of windows3.1 now while this was a significantimprovementon windows 3.0 compared to otheroperating systems that existed in theworld at this time and the capabilitiesof the pcwindows 3.1 was shockingly barrencompared tomac os for instance it just doesn'tprovide much firmamentand i'm speaking literally when i saythat when you first launch the os youseeprogram manager just floating in themiddle of the screen andthat's it this is the only thing you getthis one windowfloating in a sea of teal from here youcan navigate through these folders tofind shortcuts to all your installedprograms andthis is how you get to everything inwindows 3.0 this is not just areplacement for saythe start menu this is a replacement foreverything the entire windows interfacein version 3 consisted of just thiswindoweverything else you could do was aseparate program you had to launchif for instance you just selected allyour program groups and deleted themwhich was not difficultyou were left with essentially a uselesscomputer the only way you could doanythingwas to go up to the menu go to run andtype in the name of a program that youwantedwhile you might call the big teal spacebehind the program manager the desktopyou can't actuallydo anything with it like a desktop youcan't put icons on it you can't interactwith itin any way the only thing that ever goeson the desktop is minimized windows ifyou minimize a window it becomes anicon over in the corner and that's itnow if you grew up on windows 95 orlaterlike me this interface might actuallymake you uncomfortablebecause there's nothing to pin you downthe window is just floating here in thesea of colorand there's nothing behind it nothing toget a grip on nowhere to put your feetit feels like you're mario standing on aplatform with justsky and clouds all around you and youcan stomp on a koopa and knock him offand he just flies off and disappearsand you know that if you stepped off youwould just go nowhere the desktop hereisintangible it is only there becausesomething has to fillthe void windows has to put somethingwhere there's nothing so you've gotthe desktop just a solid color or if youreally want to you could put abackground image back therebut i don't think it really helps verymuch you still just feel like you'refloating in this infinite spaceand since you can't put anything therewindows 3 to me has this feeling ofimpermanence there is nothing to theoperating systemeither it's just the programs you'rerunning on it even program manager feelslike a program you can customize programmanager to some extent but it feelsshaky and impermanent with windows 95the desktop changes into anactive living thing you can putshortcuts to your programs there or youcan even putfiles there that you're using right nowit realizes the desktop metaphorthe desktop being a big flat spot whereyou just pile stuff because you're toomuch of a mess to put it awayyour tools are there the things you'reworking with right now are there thethings you were working with two weeksago are still there because you haven'tput them away but it's your place to doit as you like and a computer shouldfeellike that the moment windows 95 came outpeople immediately knew what to do withit they treated itlike their living space if you worked ona computer as a technician you neverknew what you were going to seemaybe the desktop would have just thedefault icons or maybe it would have acarefully arrangedset of links to everything they use onthe computerorganized into folders with categoriesor maybe it would just be 500 filesbecauseall they ever do with the computer isjust drop stuff on the desktop it had aphysicality to it it could be livedin and that's why windows 95 had such anindelible effecton culture the reason so many peoplehave this powerful brainbug about windows 95 is it was the firsttime that pcsfelt like an old worn couch that you hadgottenjust the way you wanted it we rememberwindows 95 as this house that we allonce lived in yes we moved out but itwas the first place that was oursnow it's very peculiar that whenmicrosoft made windows 3 and they werestealing ideas from apple or whoeverelse they didn't steal this one theytooka lot of other ideas but they didn'ttake the desktop metaphor it's such astrangedecision mac os would let you storeanything you wanted on your desktop fromday one and that is a big part of whythe macintosh becameso loved so quickly it's bizarre thatmicrosoft passed up the opportunity tosteal thatbut that's where norton desktop comes inin 1991 nobody knew yet what windows 95was going to look like but they had seenmac os among other thingsand they knew that windows 3 was not atthe top of its game so i think that aspeople started to domore things on the pc and particularlymore things they used to do on themacintosh they started to get reallyirritated at the ui on the pc being soinferior now an important thing tounderstand about windows is that it hasalways included mechanisms forcustomization pretty muchfrom day one so in windows 3.1 you canalter a lot of parts of the osif you have software development skillsbut the most basic one you can change isthe shellprogram manager is just a program it'sjust an exethat's launched when windows launchesand if you close it it forces windows toclosewindows calls that program the shell andyou can simply edit in any file tochange thatso when we install norton desktop that'swhat it does and let's look at what thatlooks likeinstalling it is not difficult it comeson six floppies you feed them in one ata time follow the wizard stepsand when you're done windows launchesinto a completely different interfaceinstead of launching program manager thenorton desktop is launched insteadand it is dramatically differentimmediately you'll notice that there'sicons on the desktop now or perhaps morescathingly there is a desktop nowthe ground has arrived so we've got ourdisk drives just a and c if i had acd-rom driver loaded i'd have a ddrive and then we've got a trash canwhich makes it pretty obvious thatthey're cribbing ideas from mac oswe also have shortcuts for norton backupnorton antivirus and norton viewerto sell you even harder on the softwareyou already bought at the top of thescreen we have a system menu bar that'sgot everything that was inprogram manager plus access to thenorton program groups access to nortondesktop customization and a couple otherthingsquick access brings up norton desktop'sreplacement for program managerit actually loads all the same windowsprogram groups but you can do a fewfurther customizationsfor instance if you'd like a much morecompact program window you can change itto toolbar mode where it changes all theicons into these nice little compactbuttonsbelow the menu bar we've got thistoolbar that gives quick access tovarious things in norton desktop likerun dialogor the program groups or a dos box sothose are all the parts of the basicdesktop that you see right awaywith one final crowning achievement ifwe open up a file managergrab a file and drop it on the desktopwe can now create a shortcut to itit's a simple feature but i'd call itthe worst missing feature in windows 3.side by side these two interfaces arenearly unrecognizablenorton desktop has ship of theseuswindows into a completely differentbeast you don't even have to run programmanager all the time anymorethat was a mandatory feature of windows3. it wasalways there so norton desktop hasfundamentally alteredwindows 3's user experienceunsurprisingly since they were making somany changes alreadythere are tons of customizations theuser can then go applythe customizations window is in fact sodeep that it has a graphical map to makeit easier to pick the thing you want tomodifyin fact check this out let's swap thedrive icons from left to rightremove the norton shortcuts apply adesktop background disable the toolbarin the title bar and then rename thetrashand you could be forgiven for thinkingfor just a second that you were lookingat macintosh system sixi mean you wouldn't be fooled for longbut you would be fooled and you wouldn'texpect that to be possible from windows3.now this is not quite mac os for onething it might be obvious butthe menu bar at the top does not displaythe menu for the currently selected applike it doesin mac os this is pretty much impossibleon windowsyou're not supposed to be able to do ithowever about 10 years later there wereprograms for windows customization thatwould do this they were justvery janky and were doing stuff you werenot supposed to be doing at any ratenorton had not figured that out so thisdoesn't do it and it's a littlefrustrating because it really would havesealed up the experience and given you alittle moredesktop real estate it's also a littleirritating because when you maximize aprogram it coversup that menu bar it makes sense sinceit's not actually the menu bar for theprogram you're usingbut it means that you can't treat it asa proto start menu which would have beena nice touchalso while we have a trash can on thedesktop it's notthe macintosh trashcan on the mac thetrashcan is basicallyjust a folder the only special thingabout it is that you can empty it veryeasily by going to the menu bar andemptying it otherwise you can put a filein there and use it as storage if youwant it's pretty muchjust a folder the way it's implementedis more meta than that butthe point is the user can treat it asjust a folder you put filesin there when you think you don't wantthem and then when you're sure you don'twant them you get rid of them for goodnorton desktops trash can is nothinglike that it seems more like anundelete utility with some dippingmustards included if you're not familiarwith undelete it's a technique forrestoring deleted filesuh by using a exploit in the file systemwhen you delete a file under a normaldosfat system the file isn't actuallyremoved from the disk it justflags it as deleted in the file table anundelete utility can go through the filetable recover the originalinfo about the file and then go recoverit off the disk if it has not yet beenoverwritten by another filethis is again what got peter norton onthe map to begin with but that was10 years earlier we would have hoped fora little more sophistication at thispointbut unfortunately the trash can hereseems to justbe an undelete utility for the most partit includes something extra calledsmart can i couldn't understand how itworked from the documentation i couldn'tfind any info about it online oranythingit claims to protect deleted files but idon't understandhow it does that and i really wish thatthey had just hooked the dos delete apiand redirected it to custom codethat would make it behave like themacintosh trash can soa funny thing about that i couldn't findany documentation on smart can in nortondesktop but while collecting footageafter my recording session i discoveredthat norton utilities for dosdoes contain documentation for it and itdoes exactly what i wantedexactly the way i proposed smart can isa type of program called a tsr whichreplaces the dos delete command andredirects it to norton's own code whichinstead moves deleted files to a hiddendirectorymimicking the macintosh approach now whytheir interface for this in nortondesktop is this list view i don't knowit easily could have been a simplefolder view just like the mac or thelater windows 95 recycle binwhich would have made the underlyingfunctionality much clearer and theycould have explained how it actuallyworked in the norton desktop help filebut instead they don't mention any ofthe details that are clearly spelled outin the dos versionso if you weren't familiar with smartcan already this would not have beenvery reassuringwhich is a shame because in reality thisseems to be just as solidand trustworthy as the macintoshtrashcan it's still a missed opportunityif you ask me just due to poorcommunicationbut i wanted to give credit where creditwas due it looks like they really did dothis the right way and it's a very coolimprovement to windowsone of the things that you might notnotice at first if you started lookingat thisis the de-parenting of several majorprogramslet me explain what the heck i mean bythat let's take the file manager underwindows 3 it's a program calledfile manager it uses a windowing stylethat was extremelypopular throughout the 90s calledmultiple document interface or mdimdi is not well loved anymore for themost partthe idea is that when a program has subwindowsthose sub windows should live inside ofthe main parent windowtreating it like a sub desktop forinstance in the original windows 3.1if i open file manager then open twofolders when i minimize one you can seethat it becomes an icon in the cornernot of the desktop but of file manageritself there are a bunch of downsides tothis paradigmfor instance if you want to open twofile folders put one in the lower leftone on the upper right of your screenyou can't do it unless youmaximize the file manager windowotherwise when you drag the sub windowspast the edges they'll just disappearthis means that you can't interleavethese folder windows with anything elseon the machineif you open up a notepad and then youclick on one of your folder windowsit will bring the entire file manager tothe foreground covering up everythingelsethis unequivocally sucks now there are abunch of programs that legitimately usemdiand there are still some that use it nowa lot of creative software likephotoshop is based on an mdi designand it works fantastic for those but inthe 90s people were applying it to allsorts of things it didn't belong inwindows 3 is full of unnecessary mdiapplicationsprimarily program manager and filemanager in addition the clipboard viewerfor some weird reasonnorton desktop doesn't change theseprograms howeverif you open up for instance its filebrowser you'll see that it isnot part of a parent window it's its ownfirst class windowof course it's also a completely newprogram that norton has written fromscratch but we'll get into that laternow i can open up two folders and anotepad and interleave the windows i caneven open a program groupbecause norton desktop replaced programmanager as well and none of theseprograms are mdithey've been replaced and in doing sothey've been broken out of their mdiprisonsand it seems completely normal to use acomputer like this nowbut these major parts of the windows 3operating systemdid not let you use them in a sensibleway and norton desktop fixing themi would say is the crowning achievementof the entire package like lock it upboys go home we're donejust that enhancement alone justifiesthe cost of the whole program if we takea look at this new file browser at thebottom there's a bunch of toolbarbuttonsamong them is one called view you mightthink this would just open the file inan editor but actuallyit expands the window and adds a previewpane now remember that windows 3 did nothave thumbnails in fact i don't eventhink windows 95had them i don't think they added thatto windows 98 so if you were goingthrough a folder with several hundredbitmaps in 1993you had to open the first one in mspaint and then drag eachfile one at a timeto see what you had with this newpreview pane you just press down downdown down you can look at each one asquickly as you can pressthe key and it can load from the harddrive and that could save you hours ofworka day dragging things into ms paint ifyou were a person who dealt with a lotof mediaalso this is not just for images it'sactually an embedded version of anotherapp called norton viewer which is sortof auniversal file viewer you can drop justabout anything into it it will try andfigure out how to display itif you drop in a text file you see textif you drop in an image you see theimageif you drop in an exe or dll you see thefile headersif you drop in a zip file you see thecontents of the zip i'm not sure all thethings it supports i'm sure there's ahugelist but this is a pretty cool utilityto have built in to your file browserhell the current windows thumbnailswon't even show you the contents of zipfilesanother new feature is the ability toright click for a context menu thismay seem absurd but the right mousebutton was not very heavily usedin this era yeah it was there anyprogram could use it but a lot of stuffespecially in the base windows os didn'tactually do anything with itin fact in the original windows 3.1 filemanager right-clicking doesnothing now context menus were notexpected yet at this timeso norton desktop also does not bydefault give you oneif you right-click in a file view youactually just add files to yourselection like control clicking doesnow but you can go to the customizationsand turn on a context menu that's muchlike a modern one which would be a hugeproductivity boost there's all sorts ofother little enhancements of courseyou can filter your file listing indifferent ways you can invert yourcurrent selectionyou can launch a dos box that's in thecurrently selected folderall neat things but there's one featurein norton desktop's file browser thatrisesso far above the rest that i can'tbelieve it's realit's one feature and this feature reallytruly is worth the price of admissionjustthis nothing else if this was the onlything that it did i think the packagewould have been worth buyingfolks norton desktop has zip integrationi can select a group of files i can goto the file menu and i can selectcompressand make a zip file on the spot i canput a password on it and of course i candecompress zip files as well but evenmore exciting than thesei can go to the menu and turn on viewzip files as folders and this allows meto expand themlive in the tree view and see theircontentsi can then drag files out of a zip toextract them or drag filesinto it to add them to the archive thisis an astonishing feature to find in1993it would not appear in mainline windowsfor like five more yearsat which point it was only in thewindows 98 plus pack so the first timeyou would find thisfor sure on a new computer would havebeen in windows me which i think was in2000. i think mac os didn't get this foreven longer and even when all those os'sdid it actually wasn't as slick as thisi don't even think it's this slick nowconsidering that a tremendous number ofpeople at this time were still usingpk zip on the command line for their zipoperationsi think anybody would have fought youfor this program if i'd had this in 1993you wouldn't be able to pry it out of myfingers okay well i was five you wouldhave been able to but i would have beenreally mad at youokay so so far we've seen changes tomost of the corewindows ui norton desktop has achievedreally impressive changes toeverything that constitutes windowsitselfbut what's left to do on the computer isall going to be in individualapplicationsand of course norton desktop can'treally enhance those too muchthat's not to say it doesn't enhancethem at all however here's a little bitof windows trivia foryou when you go to open or save a filein most programs the window that pops upwhere you can pick the file to open orsaveis not actually generated by the programitself most programs don't have theirown custom file selector dialogs theyjustask windows to give them a file pickerui and then after the user finishestheir selectionwindows goes back to the program andsays okay the user picked this filethis is called a common dialog and it'sa technique that microsoft introducedto allow programs to automatically getimprovements when the oschanges how it does something so if theopen dialog in windows gets anenhancement because there's a new filesystem featureall the programs that use the commondialogue get that enhancementautomatically without even needing to berecompiledif i open up notepad in the originalwindows 3.1 and i go to file openyou will see the incredibly crustywindows 3file picker and it is truly awful youcan't doanything from here you want to make anew folder to save in tough you want torename a filetough you want to delete a file to makespace tough you've got to goto file manager and do that separatelywell now let's go to our norton desktopmachineopen notepad and go to file open this isthe exact same notepad.exebut you can see there's new stuff herein the windowi'm not 100 sure what trick they used toaccomplish this i didn't think there wasan apito do this but norton desktop hascompletely overhauled the windows commonfile dialogstheir version of the file picker addsthis row of toolbar buttons that letsyou search for files rename files deletefiles and make foldersall stuff that you couldn't do inwindows 3 that was super painfulthere's also this description fieldwhich is kind of weird if you click on afile and then type something init will save whatever you type in alittle hidden database somewhere so youcan have a comment on every fileit's a weird feature but the really wildthing is if you press the view buttonhereit turns your file dialog into afull-fledgedfile manager you get all the powers ofthe full file manager interfaceeverything works you've got all thebuttons you can drag files into and outof it you can doeverything from here and when you'redone and you have the file you want youjust select it hit okand it's fed back to your program justlike a normal file selector dialogthis is really impressive stuff thisback ports capabilitiesthat would not appear in mainlinewindows for like eight yearsi mean this is a huge leap forward it'sparticularly impressive when you realizethat no one knew any of those thingswere going to happen yetso there's more we could go over i meanthere's all sorts of things that itchangeseverything in the os has been touched insome way it seemsand we could be here for hours goingover the details but i really recommendyou just check it outyourself however let's look at the lastpart of norton desktop which is thebundled applicationsi think the bundled applicationsconstituted a pretty significant chunkof the value proposition for nortondesktopsee as i said there was norton utilitieson the market for quite some timebut norton utilities were only providedas a dos applicationup until the windows 95 era so i thinkthat at this point in 1992-93norton considered norton desktop to bethe norton utilities for windowsso if we pull up the norton quick launchgroup we can see the whole menagerieand there's a ton here i'm going to gothrough them very quicklyday planner is exactly what it says aday planner windows 3 included one butit was pretty crappy this one's muchbetterspeed disk is a disk defragmentermonitos do this transparently andautomatically but back in the 90s it wassomething you had to buy a program andset time aside forthis doctor checks your file systemintegrity which would also be an osbuilt-in feature by windows 95smart erases the trash can as wediscussed rescue disk makes a disccontaining a bunch of stuff like yourmbr partition tables auto execconfig.sys and some useful utilitiesnorton antivirus is antivirus martinbackup is for backupsscheduler looks like another datebookbut it's actually an automation toolsimilar to the scheduled tasks featurethat would appear in windows 95 whichallows you to run programs on a regularbasissystem information gives you a report onyour installed hardware desktop editoris a text editor that's a bit betterthan notepadnorton viewer we described earlier superfind is an enhanced find utility it letsyou search for files based on textinside of them and a lot of other thingsscriptmaker and dialogue editor willcome back to screensaver is what youthink windows 3 had screensavers fromthe get-go but holy god the 90s werelousy with screensaverspeople bought tons of them and they wereeasy to make so they showed upeverywhereicon editor does what it says disk copydoes what it says format disk does whatit sayskey finder is basically a font exploreruh true type fonts with custom sybilswere becoming a big thing in this eraand this program would have helped youlocate which character corresponded to acustom symbol which would have beenuseful when you were programmingnew software that used a custom fontthere are three calculatorsthe first is a financial calculatorwhich i think most people call ascientific calculator because it hassquare rootssecond there's a tape calculator which ithink most people would call a financialcalculator since it mimics thefunctionality of an adding machinefor totaling up receipts the third oneis a scientific calculator which mostpeople wouldn't recognize since hardlyanyone uses reverse polish notationanymoreall three calculators are pretty good sothat looks like quite a load of softwarebut out of the 25 programs there onlyaboutfive help you accomplish an actual humangoal and three of those are calculatorsby that i mean that most of these aremeta software they're ways to make yourcomputerless irritating or to make it workbetter but that's sort of the way thingswere back then it's not only what nortonutilities was aboutit's kind of how software worked peoplewould buy dozens and dozens and dozensof very cheap programs to make theircomputerless intolerable and then they wouldspend 300on one big program like a word processoror spreadsheetthat constituted most of the actualusefulness they got out of theircomputerit still would have been cool if likethey'd included a rudimentary wordprocessor or something like that but itwas never in the cardsnow inarguably the most interestingprogram that comes with norton desktopif notthe most useful is scriptmaker in thisera it wasn't really unusual to seerandom software packages just include ascratch built scripting languageand in fact the first two versions ofnorton desktop had included somethingcalledbatch builder which was that nortonbuild this as an enhanced batch filebut if you look at it it's not reallytrue at all it's more like its ownscripting language that's purpose builtfor the sort of stuff that nortonthoughtyou might want to do if you were a poweruser i'm notsure how far it goes but it's fairlyaspirationalbut not as aspirational as scriptmakerscriptmaker seems to be like a homebrewvisual basici could be wrong about this but it surelooks like basic syntax to meand it appears to have much moreextensive features than batch builderdidfor instance it looks like you canactually call out to windows dllsi'm not sure if that's the case but itreally looks that waythere's actually a complete gui dialogbuilder so you can designforms just as easily as you did invisual basicand this was pretty wild stuff for 1993i mean you would pay a lot of money fora development environment that could dothis sort of thingand here it is just rolled in as thislittle icon hanging out in the nortondesktop a completely unrelated piece ofsoftwarei get that their intent for this wasagain to help the userautomate their system you know launchprograms and then interact with themonce they're launchedin a non-user interactive way but ithink what they did is theyscope crept all the way up to oops wejust made visual basici'm not sure how capable this languageis but i get the strong feeling youcould do almostanything in it if you were willing toput in the effort so that's anincredible piece of scope creep butthat's really at home with uienhancement softwaresee think about how people designsoftware if you're designing anoperating system for instance you need aone sizefits all product so every time thatsomeone has an idea for something to addto the user interfaceyou have to sit down and go okay whowill this work for who will this makethings harder forwho will want to turn this off and beirritated that we left it on by defaultand how many things do we want to leavein as switches that we have to keepmaintaining them even though maybenobody is using themui enhancement packages on the otherhand are entirely for power users andpower users are willing to put upwith all sorts of stuff in order to maketheir computer more usable so as aresult these end up beingan object lesson in scope creepeverything goes in put it all on thepizzaby the time you decide that every usermight want to edit their context menuswhy not decide that they might want todo regular expression file renaming witha keyboard shortcut if you're going toenhance their taskbar by putting alittle flyout menu on there so i can putmore shortcuts on it uhwhy not put a weather widget on therewhy not put two more taskbars on thereand four weather widgets on each one thesky's the limit there's no reason tostop when you check inon a program that's been in developmentlike this for a while you tend to findout that the default settingshave become absurd for instance when youfirst start norton desktop 3this huge toolbar that shows up isincredibly intimidatingif you ask me it's so central and solarge that it feels like it's sayingi should want to do the things that areon that toolbar more than anything elsewhich is not actuallythe case when i discovered i could turnthat toolbar off i actually felt reliefit felt like it had been yelling at methe buttons are sobig they're bigger than the desktopicons i mean whose decision was thati think what leads to this is that whenyou're working on a ui enhancementat the outset you're trying to onboardnew users just like an operating systembut by the end of developmentyou're only thinking about the powerusers because they're the ones who havebeen in contact this whole time askingfor you to do thisand that to make their special uniqueworkflow work bettereventually the developers start to enterthe twilight zone where they think thatthe average individual wants to haveseven weather widgets on their task barby default this sort of behavior isall over modern software for instance7-zip by default adds a context menuitem toall your folders that adds a file to azip and thenemails it i cannot imagine this isuseful to more than a quarter of apercent of their usersi can't even picture what i would everuse thisfor it is such a wild decision butfor those few people who want it it isextremely helpfuland they don't want to have to go andturn it on manuallyevery time they install 7-zip on a newmachine and so the developers havefavored themwith the defaults instead of me the guywho just wants extractyou have to pick someone to be yourprimary user base that you're going tomodel things for and i think with uienhancementsit is commonly the case that you end upmodeling after the wildoutliers because they're the ones whoare actually involving themselves in thedevelopment process and getting back toyou so norton desktop has a certainamount of odddefaults but in addition to that there'salso a certain amount ofjank for the most part there aren'tfunctional issues although i did finda couple for instance if you open up theenhanced file selector and then youdrill down to a zip file you can't picksomethinginside of it and i can understand whythat happens but they don't even giveyou an error message or anything youjust think you didn't double click fastenough also if you then cancel out ofthe enhanced dialogue it takes you backto the original old style dialogand i can kind of see why they did thatbut it still feels really jankymostly however i just think the ui iskind of uglywhy are the toolbars in the filebrowsers at the bottom instead of thetop which i think was standard at thispoint in other softwarewhy are they text instead of icons whichwas also standard in other softwarewhy is the title bar on the desktopbackground on by default it doesn't seemto serve any purpose except to take upspace why is the desktop toolbar sobig why the quick launch icons on thedesktop have these thick 3d bordersaround them you can't turn off insteadof just looking like the drive icons andwhy our user created shortcuts also madewith a thick 3d border but a differentonewhy does every single norton programgroup window have this little treasurebox button that just takes you to thetip of the dayi've played with thousands of uienhancements in my life it was a thing iwas fascinated withway back when i was a kid and theyalways kind of end up like this notquite polished you can see how theycould have looked like an intrinsic partof the operating system but they don'tquite get there they fall just short andoften through what appear to bedeliberate decisionsin the enhanced file picker dialogsthere's this bright blue text in thecornerjust to remind you that they've enhancedthe dialogue why did they do that and ifthey were going to do it why not make itblackwhy does it have to be blue it totallyviolates the windows design guidelinesit looks completely out of placeyou already bought the program what'sthe point of this so this sort of thingbugs me because i i can't square myselfwith tools that feel unpolished but ithink a lot of people probably don'thave this issueand norton desktop was probably verywell loved by the people who bought iti'm not really sure i didn't go throughyou know a bunch of magazines lookingfor reviewsbut when i did see it in magazines thepeople seemed to like it and symantecdid make it for three years running sothey must have thought there was somedemandand on its face it looks like a greatenhancement i think that norton desktopis an incredibly impressive piece ofsoftware with a lot of potential i thinkif you installed thisin 1993 and got yourself to learn how touse it integrated into your workflowthe ways in which this would speed upand streamline how you use your computerwould have been dramatic you would nothave regretted purchasing thisi just think there were probably a lotof people who bought it and then justkind of went uhwhat is this and then took it back i'msure i'm going to get tons of commentsfrom people telling me they love thisprogram or they hated this programback in the day i can't put myself inthe shoes of someone from 1993i wasn't quite there but to me thislooks like amassive improvement for the windows 3interface and i should point out thatwhile this is the windows 3.1edition and while it does make moreimprovements than the previous versionsof norton desktopthey were not small enhancements ontheir own the file manager for instancemight be a huge improvement in 3.1 butthe improvements that it offered the 3.0wereeven bigger because the windows 3.0 filemanagerwas basically the dos der command withdipping mustardsand of course there's just the desktopadding a desktop to windows 3.0was bolting on an improvement that wouldnot appear on the pc until 1995.it's a remarkable achievement forsymantec and if you're interested inpoking around with it i highly recommendchecking it out there's a lot more inthere that i haven't describedso anyway there's my review of a programfrom 1993 such as it isif you liked this it'd be cool if youcould subscribe to let me know you likethis sort of thingif you really liked this it would becool if you could go support me onpatreonso i can afford to buy software likethis from ebay that has not yet beenarchived there's lots of programs likethis that have not been preserved andi'd like to go buy them but peoplecharge ridiculous prices for them 30bucks 60 bucksit's hard for me to afford them i'd liketo start buying these things before theydisappearforever and your money would help a lotwith that projecti would like to shout out the people whohave recently subscribed to my higherpatreon tiersunfortunately i'm recording this videobefore i go on a big trip so i don'tactually know who that will bei will shout you all out when i get backi will however shout out all the peoplewho are currently on there in thoseupper tiersthank you so much it has made it so mucheasier for me to do what i'm doingi appreciate all your support and allthe people who are watching thisthank you