System Tray Escapists

Continuing my earlier post about the system tray, here are the little icons that have somehow managed to jump out of the tray and consume additional precious taskbar realestate:
Meet the escapists (Left to Right): Language indicator (I need my Russian keyboard layout periodically), Language bar help icon, Language bar maximize and hide micro buttons (stacked on top of each other and sized so small so that one has to hunt them with the mouse as a lion hunts a gazelle), battery meter, and power system status indicator (shows if I'm plugged in or using the battery).

Let's talk about the Language bar first:

1. Why does the Language indicator need its own bar? Can't that little icon reside in the system tray along with its brethren? It has no need for extra space, unlike the battery life icon, which probably needs to be bigger than the other icons in the system tray in order to be legible.
   
2. Why is the Language help icon displayed? I never click on it. It's wasting very precious real estate in the taskbar.
3. Why do we waste space with the maximize/hide buttons for the language bar? Can't those functions be accessible when clicking on the language icon?
4. Why does the Language bar whimsically and capriciously change how it is displayed:
   

Where'd the maximize/hide micro buttons go?

Oops! I guess I don't know what language I'm typing in. And there's obviously no help for my situation!
At least now I know what language I'm typing in, but what's with the partial display of the help icon? It should be either present or absent - this partial display is just lazy programming at its finest.


On to the other escapists: the battery life indicator and power system indicator. The battery life indicator is quite possibly the worst example of programmer art that I've seen on a contemporary computer. Back in the 1980s and early 1990s, programmers used to create all the artwork (icons, logos, etc.) that their programs used. Computers were UGLY. Things have gotten much better, but this always visible battery life indicator is an miserable vestigial gill slit from a time before the computing community had managed to crawl out of the sea.

You'll notice the color of the battery life indicator: lurid programmer green: #00FF00. Such colors are easy to program, but should never be used for anything people are going to look at often. The only way we know that the crude rectangle with text inside is representing a battery because of the even cruder battery nipple drawn on the right hand side. Ugh.



Finally, like the language bar, the power bar escapists are plagued with rendering bugs. Take a look at the extra rectangle that appears and disappears randomly around the power bar. What the heck!

Moving on to a larger problem, why do the language bar and power bar even exist? Can't their functions be put in the system tray? Maybe even Microsoft realizes that the system tray is so hopelessly overloaded that important stuff like power and language has to be offloaded to its own section of the taskbar.

I'm being pedantic, I know. But these little bugs and thoughtlessnesses are signs that Microsoft just plain doesn't care about getting things done right. As far as I'm concerned, these niggling little details are warning signs and symptoms of a much bigger problem - the internals of their software are can't be more beautiful and elegant than the parts people see and interact with.