The Old New Thing
Practical development throughout the evolution of Windows.
Latest posts
When advanced users outsmart themselves: The device removal notification icon
A customer submitted a suggestion to the user interface team about the device removal notification icon. The device removal notification icon is far too hard to use. When I click on it, I get a menu that says Safely Remove Hardware, and when I click on that menu item, I get a dialog box that lists all the removable devices, with vague names like USB Mass Storage Device and propeller-beanie details like Connected on Port 0006, Hub 0004. When I click the Display device components check box, I'm presented with a tree view of hardware devices that only a geek could love. This is far too complicated. When I click...
Identity theft via repeated name changes
In the United States, it is legal to change your name as many times as you like, and you don't even have to have a reason, as long as you're not doing it with fraudulent intent. The ease with which name changes can be accomplished has been exploited by people who use it to carry out identity theft. Creditors coming after you? Change your name, attach it to a stolen Social Security number, and off you go. The story about name changes reminds me of a friend of a friend who lives in Taiwan. As a teenager, she was somewhat unhappy and changed her name on the advice of a fortune teller. (I get the impression that f...
Those notification icons, with their clicks, double-clicks, right-clicks… what’s up with that?
(A completely feeble attempt to mimic Michael Kaplan's blog entry titles which carry a much stronger voice.) Jonathan Hardwick made a short table of inconsistencies in how various programs handle clicks on their notification icons. How are these supposed to work? The final decision is up to the application, since it is the one that receives the mouse clicks and decides what to do. But what were the intended semantics for clicks on the notification icon? Left single click: Display a simple interface item targetting the casual user. In most cases, this would be a context menu, but if you are something lik...
Qrystal does more research into those spam blogs
Blogger Qrystal got hit with blog trackback spam and did research into the phenomenon, even discovering the author trying to sell the spam blog. And he had to cut the price because Google AdSense has cut him off. Ha, ha, haaahhhhh~! (Read the blog entry for the spammer's for-sale offers and other linkity goodness.)
Why is there sometimes a half-second delay between the click and the action?
There are places in the user interface where you may click to perform an action, but the action doesn't actually take place until a half second later. Why is there a half-second delay? Because it's waiting to see if the user is on the way to a double-click. Some users simply double-click everything in sight, and depending on what the single click action is, this may or may not be a problem. If the click launches a modal dialog, then the second click is mostly harmless because the modal dialog appears on the same thread group as the window that received the stray second click. When that thread group next ...
A simple bar chart on letter distribution
I was visiting a colleague's office in another building and I spotted a whiteboard on which the following enigmatic bar chart was drawn. The source data for the analysis was left unspecified. It looks like there's an entire Web site devoted to profound charts like this. For example, a graph of beer bottle distribution as a function of the number of bottles taken down and passed around. When I showed this Web site to one of my friends, he responded, "Oh, great, now I'm not going to get anything done for a week and it's all your fault." Unfortunately, the charts on graphjam appear to have diverged in re...
What kind of uncle am I?
The terminology of family relationships.
The Start menu pin list is just a list of items; there’s no magic
Commenter Kevin Dente asks, "Is it possible to put a folder on the Start Menu Pin list and have it cascade?" No. The last time I checked (which was back in Windows XP), the Start menu pin list was a list, not a menu. (Specifically, a list view in tile mode.) When you click on the icon, it launches. There is no code to say "Oh, if this flag is set, then let me draw a little menu arrow next to the item, and if the user clicks the arrow, bind to the target of this shortcut, enumerate its contents, and create a menu from it." Remember, features don't exist by default; somebody has to implement them.
No, we’re not nerds, why do you ask?
Last year, to celebrate successful completion of a project milestone, our group went on a "cultural expedition" to a glass-blowing studio where we were to learn about the craft of glass blowing and even do some of it ourselves. (By the way, it was fun.) One of the glassblowers had been making a lot of little jokes about Frodo and Mount Doom. Working with molten glass does that to a person, I guess. When it came time to break up into smaller groups, each working with a different glassblower, the Tolkein-obsessed glassblower announced, "Okay, let's do it this way. Lord of the Ring fans on this side of the room, S...