My last system tray post (I hope)

Ok, I'm slightly embarrassed to admit that I find it difficult to remember what the date is. Time is somehow wired into my subconscious, so I usually know about what time of day it is, and I usually remember what day of the week it is, but remembering the date is hopeless. Besides, what are computers for if not to remind me of the things I'm too lazy to remember?

On OS X, it's fairly easy to get the menubar's clock to display the date as well. Maybe it's possible in Windows, I don't know. But I do know that if you mouse over the time in the system tray, Windows is supposed to tell you the date in one of Windows' highly obnoxious "tooltips". [An aside: the word "tooltip" is horrible. It feels like a word a programmer would invent just because he needed some word to describe 'a small box with supplementary information which appears upon hovering over an item without clicking' and "tooltip" was the first thing that came to mind. Seriously, why "tooltip"??]

Getting to the annoyance which caused this particular post: as you can see, the tooltip doesn't render on my system. More than half of it is stuck behind the system tray, making it basically illegible (it says Friday, July 13, 2007 if you're wondering). Gotta love it!

Conflicting Volumes

Windows often ends up hanging itself because it allows user applications to control things that should be taken care of by the OS alone. Case in point: the volume control on my laptop. IBM includes dedicated keys to adjust the volume. Usually, when you press them, the following icon shows how loud you've got the volume set:I'll take a moment to pause here and abuse the artwork here: notice the lurid programmer green, which looks bad regardless of what the background is, and also notice how low-resolution and aliased the icon is (translation: it's jaggy and looks like a holdover from the 1980s). Why does life need to be ugly?

But it gets worse. Notice in this picture, there are three displays controlling volume. Two of them are superimposed on the screen, and the standard Windows volume control is on the right. You can see that the larger of the two indicators is linked to the Windows volume control, but the smaller one is doing it's own thing. All of the volume bars of the smaller one are empty, meaning that it's completely muted. And guess what - the smaller one is the one which actually matters! I have no idea how to influence the smaller one. Usually, it will stay in sync with the larger one, but now that they are out of sync, I can't figure out how to enable sound on my computer. I guess I'm glad that it decided to be stuck on mute, since otherwise it could be embarrassing at work.

But why do we put up with this kind of chaos and thoughtlessness?

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.

System Tray

My system tray is grossly overloaded. It seems every application has a need to insert some illegibly tiny icon (or two or three) down there. And the logic for which ones of them are being shown at any given time escapes me. People at Microsoft don't seem to understand the needle in the haystack principle: the more icons I have lying around in my system tray, the less useful any of them are. Instead, my window bars get scrunched, making it even harder to switch applications (where are you, Expose??)

What a waste of real estate.

And can we get rid of the programmer generated art, please?

Intrusive USB Remounting

To set the stage: my iPod was plugged into my Windows XP computer and charging, and I was listening to some music from the iPod. I then plugged in my cellphone to another USB port on the computer to charge it, which shouldn't affect the iPod at all. However, Windows decided to remount the iPod, which then locked up the iPod user interface and stopped my music. I had to go eject the iPod from iTunes in order to listen to my music again.

There is no good reason for Windows to remount my iPod when I plug in something else to another USB port. I know this isn't a big deal, and it only took a few seconds to fix the problem, but now that I've gotten used to OS X, I expect seamless, unobtrusive behavior from my computer. Windows is just plain clumsy.

Introduction

I've been using Mac OS X for the past 3 years as my primary OS, although I still use Linux and Windows as needed. Lately, I've had several friends insinuate that I'm being picky and snobbish when I tell them how much better OS X is than Windows. I've also started working with Windows more than usual, since my workplace requires it (although they've started a Mac pilot program!!)

So - this blog will document all the various inconveniences and thoughtless idiocies that define the Windows experience. My friends will still think I'm being picky and snobbish, but at least I'll have all my thoughts collected in one place. =)