The Old New Thing
Practical development throughout the evolution of Windows.
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How does the Windows XP Start menu decide that a program is newly-installed?
Actually, I discussed this topic already, but I'm mentioning it again here since it's thematically related to the other Start menu articles. I'm told that there have been a few tweaks to the rules for Windows Vista. Some installers set the time stamps on the program to match the time stamp of the install media. This makes for pretty directory listings but means that the Start menu fails to recognize the program as new. To address this, the Start menu also takes the creation time of the directory containing the program into consideration when determining which programs are new. Second, a program that appea...
In order to serve you better: Frequent flyer miles expiring sooner
At the beginning of the year, United quietly changed its policy on frequently flyer points. Under the old rules, your account remained active provided there was some sort of account activity in the past three years. The activity could be taking a flight, redeeming points for product, or earning points through one of their partners. Anything that changes the point total resets the clock. Under the new rules, the lifetime of an inactive account has been cut in half, to 18 months. What's more, they made the change retroactive with no grace period. If your account had been inactive for two years, poof, it's gone. I...
More Start menu fine-tuning: Choosing a better representative for a frequently-run program
If you paid really close attention to the way a representative shortcut is selected for a program, you may have noticed a problem with it. Here's the rule again: If there are multiple shortcuts to the same program, then the most-frequently-used shortcut is selected as the one to appear on the front page of the Start menu. Suppose there are two shortcuts to Notepad on the All Programs section of the Start menu, one is the standard Notepad shortcut that comes with Windows, and the other is a shortcut whose command line is . Now suppose the user opens a text document on the desktop. Notepad runs, it "earns a po...
I'm pretty sure he's going to be the envy of his next school reunion
Masi Oka has pretty much everything the dorky nerd geek has ever dreamed of. Right out of college, he lands a job at Industrial Light and Magic doing digital effects, developing complex algorithms for water and other fluid effects seen in movies like The Perfect Storm. That'd already be enough to make him the hit of his next school reunion. And then he scores a major role in the television series Heroes as a, well, dorky nerd geek. But one with a super power. Now at his next school reunion, he's going to be mobbed by people who wouldn't even give him the time of day when he was in school. But wait, there's mo...
What is the impact on the Start menu of long-running programs?
Let's take another look at the basic principle that determines which programs show up in the Start menu: Each time you launch a program, it "earns a point", and the longer you don't launch a program, the more points it loses. If you stare at this long enough, you might see a hole in this principle: What about a program that you launch once and keep running all the time? According to the rule, this program would "earn a point" when you first launched it, and then it would gradually lose points⊜ even though you clearly use this program frequently. (Here, "frequently" is an understatement for "all the stin...
Project Update 3: Voyage to Our Hollow Earth
Alas, the original plan for the trip to the hole in the Arctic Ocean had to be scrapped due to the passing of organizer Steven Currey. But hollow earthers, don't give up hope! U.S. scientist Brooks Agnew has announced his plans to take the place of Mr. Currey, chartering the same ship and taking the same itinerary with the same goal. We'll check in next year to see what they've found.
Why does a new user get stuff on their Start menu right off the bat?
In the initial designs for the Start menu, the list of most-frequently-used programs on the Start menu would be completely empty the first time you opened it. This was perfectly logical, since you hadn't run any programs at all yet, so nothing was frequently-used because nothing had been used at all! Perfectly logical and completely stupid-looking. Imagine the disappointment of people who just bought a computer. They unpack it, plug everything in, turn it on, everything looks great. Then they open the Start menu to start using their computer and they get... a blank white space. "Ha-ha! This computer can't do any...
"Super" watch, episode 2
Not just "super exciting" but "super-super-exciting". (But at least he's not super super super excited.) I don't consider this super encouraging. Episode 1.
What other programs are filtered from the Start menu's list of frequently-used programs?
We already saw that programs in the pin list are pruned from the most-frequently-used programs list because they would be redundant. Another fine-tuning rule was introduced after the initial explorations with the new Windows XP Start menu: Programs with specific "noise" names are removed from consideration. Many "noise" programs were showing up as frequently used because they happened to be shortcuts to common helper programs like Notepad or Wordpad to display a "Read Me" document. These shortcuts needed to be filtered out so that they couldn't be nominated as, say, the Notepad representative. The list of ...