The Old New Thing

Other - The Old New Thing

Solving one problem by creating a bigger problem

March 22, 2006 Mar 22, 2006 03/22/06
Raymond Chen
Often, people will not even realize that their solution to a problem merely replaces it with another problem. The quip attributed to Jamie Zawinski captures the sentiment: Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I'll use regular expressions." Now they have two problems. For example, in response to "How do I write a ...

Why doesn't Windows File Protection use ACLs to protect files?

March 21, 2006 Mar 21, 2006 03/21/06
Raymond Chen
Windows File Protection works by replacing files after they have been overwritten. Why didn't Windows just apply ACLs to deny write permission to the files? We tried that. It didn't work. Programs expect to be able to overwrite the files. A program's setup would run and it decided that it needed to "update" some system file and attempt to ...

You never know until you test it with real users

March 17, 2006 Mar 17, 2006 03/17/06
Raymond Chen
Speculate all you want about what users expect, what they want, what they care about. There's no substitute for actually running experiments to find out. Those who haven't already been following Jensen Harris really ought to be, because he talks about user interface design in a highly practical way. Consider this entry on deciding how the ...

On the fuzzy definition of a "Unicode application"

March 15, 2006 Mar 15, 2006 03/15/06
Raymond Chen
Commenter mpz wondered why the IME cannot detect whether it is sending characters to a Unicode or non-Unicode application and generate the appropriate character accordingly. But what exactly is a Unicode application? Actually, let me turn the question around: What is a non-Unicode application? Suppose you write a program and don't , so you'...

Top ten things to do to make your application a Vista application

March 14, 2006 Mar 14, 2006 03/14/06
Raymond Chen
On MSDN, there's a series of articles on the top ten things to do to make your application a Vista application. The series began last December, and just this month, they covered a topic dear to my heart: Application compatibility. [Update 2pm: If you have feedback about these articles, posting that feedback here won't accomplish much since...

The peculiar appeal of the Baseball Uncyclopedia

March 3, 2006 Mar 3, 2006 03/3/06
Raymond Chen
NPR's Only a Game interviewed the authors of The Baseball Uncyclopedia, an irreverent guide to our national pastime, and it was a blast to listen to. The two authors clearly are huge baseball fans, but they bring to it a fascination not with mind-numbing statistics but with the deep history of the sport. (Plus the fact that they disagree ...

Why can't I disable the Cancel button in a wizard?

February 24, 2006 Feb 24, 2006 02/24/06
Raymond Chen
The macro lets you manipulate many of the buttons on a wizard, but the Cancel button remains elusive. Why can't you disable the Cancel button or the "X" button? Because our users tell us they don't like it. Observation of users in our labs and interviews with them reveal that wizards that disable the Cancel button cause them stress and ...