dashboards

I've played with the voice control but never found it to be able to do anything useful. Except perhaps dialling a phone number "oh - one - three

- six ... call" very slowly and carefully!

nib

Plenty of those!

The PHEV always defaults to the driving mode you don't want. If you try to select EV after it happens to have started the engine for some reason it'll ignore you until it's run the engine enough to warm it up - very annoying!

On control locations: though older designs like our EV and PHEV have the direction control where the gear level would have been, later ones seem to have it up as a column stalk or a knob up by the "instrument cluster" (aka screen). Shades of old US auto column selectors!

nib

Despite years of asking, no one has ever been able to provide a sensible reason why if I have my speed limiter enabled when I stop the car, I wouldn't want it still enabled when I return to it.

To be fair one person did claim that if the car were to be towed to a location with a higher speed limit it could be problematic. But they then rather over egged the pudding by claiming they did it "all the time".

On the flip side, fog lights that return to off when the ignition cycles should be a no brainer.

What about ... (three dots) for a menu, as in Edge? What's that called? Or the Favourites menu, which is a pentagram with three lines stuck in the RHS? You have to have a recognised name for such things, or how would you direct someone to select it, by phone or email?

It's called more bollocks imported from mobiles. If it's a menu, it should look like one. We've had menus since 1984 and everyone knows what they look like and while something smaller on a mobile might be considered useful for those doing stuff on mobiles, we don't need them on desktops.

Oh, another menu looking completely different to the first menu. That's clever.

Didn't Xerox start windowed software (GEM ?) in the 70s ?

We had menus on green 80x20 text screens back then

Menus always used to have text labels so you tell someone to go to menu aaa, then select bbb and from that the ccc submenu. (Some programs will show these menus if you press the Alt key.) Better than having to describe obscure icons.

Which was fine, when the developer was sitting next to the user, and both individuals used the same language. I don't think our first text menus were available in anything other than English, even though the country has two official languages. The concept at the time, of localization, was a foreign one. Nobody worried about it (there was no library in the OS for it). There weren't usernames or passwords either, to give you some idea how long ago this was.

A hamburger icon, needs no "localization". For whatever that is worth (which is not much).

You can see what the cost of localization is. A complicated server menu. And this only covers a subset of languages, not all of them.

I don't know whether the two are linked or not.

I think that GEM was an alternative to Windows in the 1980s - I used to run a desktop publishing program on it, diplayed on an amber monitor, via a Hercules graphics card.

Xerox PARC (Paulo Alto Research Center) came up with WIMPs (Windows, Icons, Mouse, Pointer) in the '70s. Which has gnerally been ripped off left-right and centre since - so it always amused me when Apple and Microsoft countersued each other over such things.

As anybody I am likely to be communicating with isn't going to know what they are called and even less likely to care, I would describe it on the phone or, as I have in the past, attach an image to an email.

So you do a screenshot and crop out the image of the icon. So much easier with a text label. It must have been really hard to describe the difference between a cow and a horse before language.