The Incredible Vagueness of Being Microsoft

Once more we venture into another rant about MS products. This time, not Vista, which I have so far managed to avoid, but MS Office 2007*.

I received a new machine at work, fair dinkum, quad core 2.4 Ghz 3 GB machine. All is wonderful 'cept I had to re-install all me apps, but it gave me a chance to clean up my desktop and bookmarks and update a bunch of stuff so that was OK. However, the pre-installed Office "package" is really a lame chihuahua when I was used to a greyhound.

Vague Windows I call 'em. These kind of ghostly soft-edged pastelly boxes with Outlook, Office, Excel etc. inside. They do not inherit the desktop theme from the OS! Why not, you b*stards! Isn't that the rule of UI, do what the user wants and has come to expect? At my advanced age (100 at least), I do not want to be pleasantly surprised by your UI designers hoopy new ideas. They are really bad for the upgrading user, and I haven't a hope of explaining it to my non-computer literate folks.

I have at least dual 21" monitors and I often have 20+ windows open at the same time so your app is not the only focus of my attention, even when I'm typing in it. It is constantly annoying to be unable to distinguish the border of the window and to accidentally click on the wrong thing. Aack! I did try changing the office theme, and it went from vague grey to pastelly blue to a kind of washed out black. Sigh. I'm surprised the freaking things don't come with doilies and antimacassars. Design can be a lovely thing when done well, when done badly it's worse than no design (or the old design anyway).

And don't even get me started about the "ribbon" thing and moving familiar landmarks and tools of the expert Word user to new and unexpected places.

I truly think this UI is an abomination. Open Office for me, I think.

* Pay no attention, I'm taking antibiotics and feel horrid.

Self-customizing computer interfaces

Developers do a lot of arcane stuff on a computer. Building, deploying, content mapping, code repository check-ins, viewing/approving code fixes, bug tracking...and so on. All of this requires a set of tools, sometimes chosen by an employer, sometimes a collection whacked together as an ad-hoc suite in order to get the code done.

The use of these tools is often blindingly fast...you don't need to look at that menu or dialog box to know that you should click here...or here...you know the path to the particular group of files by heart...you don't read an entire file path, you grok it. Recognize it by sight. This is another kind of automaticity and is, probably, the same kind of thing that any craftsman does, whether it be building a house or machining a piece of metal.

Having learned to use a set of tools, with a habitual technique for performing various tasks, it is very irritating when the computer, or part of the software on it, decides in its wisdom, to reconfigure a menu, change a dialog box, change a familiar icon, or move all the shortcuts on the desktop.

Windows is dreadful for this. Unix didn't do anything remotely like this. It's clearly some kind of prank pulled on the unsuspecting public, in order to "help" someone who is a dope*. It is really bizarre, perhaps there are usability studies that say that this does help the hapless, I doubt it. Most people learn to use a windowing interface in a rather geographic way...the icon for a tool is a nice bright thing in the middle of the second column on the left hand side of the desktop for example. So when the computer is updated with some "security"** fixes, and the icon changes colour to a kind of wishy-washy wimpy thing and gets moved...well...steam emits from orifices, I'd say.

It's one thing to set up ones own machine and stop these things from happening, but when you go and use another machine, or have remote access to dozens of desktops, finding a way of achieving your objectives becomes a more interesting challenge.

This is like the negative billing of the software world; programs usually do this - without asking- and you have to find a way to turn it off. Eventually you give up, live with it and try to "f%ckin' stay awake" (to quote Billy Connolly).

However, when I suddenly got the error pop up above, and I found that Windows has rearranged the Right-mouse click menu on my machine so that the previous "Open with MyEclipse" is now just number 4 on the list (and double-click doesn't work the same as it did yesterday), I thought...why? Why do we do this? What possible reason could there be for the machine customizing my interface in any way? I've been doing it this way for months and it didn't interfere before. Did I do something stupid***? The arrogance of the people who decided to do this renders me, well, not speechless, more's the pity, but I'm left feeling that this is horribly wrong.

There's got to be a better way...how about a nice conversation?

"BTW, Sue, I've noticed that you use this thingy more than you use these thingies in this menu. Or you're installing something to do with this thing. Can I make it easier for you by putting this on the top of the menu, or by reminding you of the keyboard shortcut you so obviously need to remember?"

"No, get lost."

"OK! CU later."


* - only a dope wouldn't be disturbed by this behaviour.
** - unlikely, but now everything's about security apparently. The new 's' word.
*** - well, that goes without saying.

Windows Quick Launch management and obsolete links

Our sainted IT person, Sean the Magnificent, removed a network drive from our Windows network and caused all the system desktops to go nuts, presumably hunting for the lost resource ad infinitum...

Over the course of 2 days, my system crept to a halt. Finally Sean told me to edit the registry to remove all the occurrences of the offending drive name...aack!

Using regedit to edit the registry is like going into an abbatoir in satin ballet shoes! No...perhaps doing brain surgery with a teaspoon... not to be undertaken by the faint of heart.

Anyway After deleting about 90 entries...and removing references in the "Network Places" thingy, everything was back to normal...or so it seemed.

After about 2 weeks I started tidying up the Quick Launch part of my Toolbar (being lazy I like to have about 40 items in here). Any obsolete shortcuts here that referred to the removed drive could not be removed directly via the Quick Launch icons. Clicking on the or right clicking on them caused the machine to go have a little think for a long while. And then did nothing.

Hmm...so we open up the C:\Documents and Settings\[your.name]\Application Data\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Quick Launch "folder" and remove them there. Silly Windows.