The Old New Thing

October 2008 - Page 4 of 4 - The Old New Thing

The dangers of setting your double-click speed too short

October 2, 2008 Oct 2, 2008 10/2/08
Raymond Chen
After I noted how the window manager uses the double-click time as a basis for determining how good your reflexes are, people got all excited about reducing the double-click speed to make Windows feel peppier. But be careful not to go overboard. Back in the Windows 95 days, we got a bug from a beta tester that went roughly like this...

An artist’s conception of the new citizenship test

October 1, 2008 Oct 1, 2008 10/1/08
Raymond Chen
Today is the first day of the controversial redesigned United States citizenship examination. For the next year, candidates who applied before today can choose whether they want to use the old test or the new one. To help prepare for the new examination, I propose the following warm-up, which I tested (with the assistance of another United...

Why do maximized windows lose their title bar translucency?

October 1, 2008 Oct 1, 2008 10/1/08
Raymond Chen
If you have translucent title bars enabled,¹ you may have noticed that the translucency goes away when you maximize a window. Why is that? This is a performance optimization. Opaque title bars are more efficient than translucent ones, and when you maximize a window, you're saying,² "I want to focus entirely on this window and no...