The Old New Thing

June 2006 - The Old New Thing

Congratulations, Montréal, on finally paying for the 1976 Olympic Games

June 30, 2006 Jun 30, 2006 06/30/06
Raymond Chen
Assuming everything went according to plan, Montréal today made the final payment on Olympic Stadium (or Le Stade Olympique), originally built for the 1976 Olympic Games, and nicknamed "The Big O" (or "The Big Owe", if you prefer). Before you snicker, at least you have to give them credit for keeping the stadium until it was paid off...

Generating tooltip text dynamically

June 29, 2006 Jun 29, 2006 06/29/06
Raymond Chen
Our multiplexed tooltip right now is displaying the same string for all items. Let's make it display something a bit more interesting so it's more obvious that what we're doing is actually working. Instead of providing fixed tooltip text, we generate it on the fly by setting the text to and producing the text in response to the ...
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Multiplexing multiple tools into one in a tooltip

June 28, 2006 Jun 28, 2006 06/28/06
Raymond Chen
The tooltip control lets you set multiple "tools" (regions of the owner window) for it to monitor. This is very convenient when the number of tools is manageably small and they don't move around much. For example, the toolbar control creates a tool for each button. But if you have hundreds or thousands of screen elements with tooltips, ...
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… so it doesn't poop all over your office

June 27, 2006 Jun 27, 2006 06/27/06
Raymond Chen
The other day I caught a fragment of a conversation, namely somebody concluding a sentence with the clause "... so it doesn't poop all over your office". I don't know what they were talking about and I'm not sure I want to find out. (Ry Jones thinks I was the victim a game of tomato funeral. I'm not convinced; it was a conversation that I ...

Using custom-draw in tooltips to adjust the font

June 27, 2006 Jun 27, 2006 06/27/06
Raymond Chen
Last time, we looked at in-place tooltips. In that example, we finessed the font problem by simply setting the destination font into the tooltip control. We got away with that since we had only one tool. But if you have multiple tools with different fonts, then you can't set a font into the tooltip control and expect it to work for every ...
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Look who bought my name

June 26, 2006 Jun 26, 2006 06/26/06
Raymond Chen
Commenter Pavel Vozenilek noticed that if you type my name into Google, there is only one sponsored link, and it's from Google themselves, inviting you to apply for a job there. (Maybe I should sue. Perhaps I can get a settlement.) When I mentioned this to some other people at Microsoft, they started hunting around to see what sort of ...

Coding in-place tooltips

June 26, 2006 Jun 26, 2006 06/26/06
Raymond Chen
Today we'll look at how to implement in-place tooltips. These are tooltips that appear when the user hovers the mouse over a string that cannot be displayed in its entirety. The tooltip overlays the partially-displayed text and provides the remainder of the text that had been truncated. The keys to this technique are the notification (which ...
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The subtle usability considerations of conference nametags

June 23, 2006 Jun 23, 2006 06/23/06
Raymond Chen
When you go to a conference or some other event where everybody wears a nametag, pay closer attention to the nametag design. There are many subtle usability mistakes that I see far too often. First of all, is your name easy to read? It's called a nametag, after all; the name and affiliation of the wearer should be the most prominent thing ...

The continuing phenomenon of size inflation in fast food

June 22, 2006 Jun 22, 2006 06/22/06
Raymond Chen
Wendy's is getting rid of "Biggie" and "Great Biggie" size drinks and fries from their menu. Oh, they're still offering them, just with a different name. What used to be "Biggie" is now "medium" and what used to be "Great Biggie" is now "large". Even the "small" drink is a massive 20 ounces, or two and a half FDA servings...