From: Earle Martin Date: 20:16 on 25 Feb 2007 Subject: Dragging to the Taskbar in Windows XP Good God but this is stupid: http://downlode.org/Pictures/Stupid_Software/Windows_XP_Drag_to_Taskbar.png How did this even make it to release? Didn't the fact that this situation evidently occurred often enough in testing that someone had to implement this incredibly verbose and annoying message suggest that maybe they should ACTUALLY IMPLEMENT THIS BEHAVIOR? Sigh.
From: Dave Vandervies Date: 20:23 on 25 Feb 2007 Subject: Re: Dragging to the Taskbar in Windows XP Somebody claiming to be Earle Martin wrote: > > Good God but this is stupid: > http://downlode.org/Pictures/Stupid_Software/Windows_XP_Drag_to_Taskbar.png > > How did this even make it to release? Didn't the fact that this > situation evidently occurred often enough in testing that someone had > to implement this incredibly verbose and annoying message suggest that > maybe they should ACTUALLY IMPLEMENT THIS BEHAVIOR? Most windows I've dealt with behave differently on drag-and-drop depending on what part of the window you drop in. Trying to guess what you meant would be far more hateful than giving you an easy way to bring the window to the front so you can drop it where you want it. dave
From: Aaron Crane Date: 20:40 on 25 Feb 2007 Subject: Re: Dragging to the Taskbar in Windows XP Dave Vandervies writes: > Most windows I've dealt with behave differently on drag-and-drop > depending on what part of the window you drop in. Trying to guess > what you meant would be far more hateful than giving you an easy way > to bring the window to the front so you can drop it where you want it. Ah, the old defence of "the software is hateful because it was designed to be hateful". In my book, that still makes it worthy of hate. There's no reason why a Windows-like GUI couldn't have made this work as users expect. The only thing needed would be to allow applications to specify the behaviour for drop events on their taskbar icon, just as they currently specify differing behaviours for drop events on different parts of their windows. I don't know anything about Windows GUI programming, so I might be wrong; but I suspect that a future Windows release could acquire this functionality without affecting existing software (for which you'd presumably get a variant of the existing stupid error message, with additional text along the lines of "this application does not support drag-and-drop to its taskbar icon").
From: demerphq Date: 20:50 on 25 Feb 2007 Subject: Re: Dragging to the Taskbar in Windows XP On 2/25/07, Aaron Crane <hateful@xxxxxxxxxx.xx.xx> wrote: > I don't know anything about Windows GUI programming, so I might be > wrong; but I suspect that a future Windows release could acquire this > functionality without affecting existing software (for which you'd > presumably get a variant of the existing stupid error message, with > additional text along the lines of "this application does not support > drag-and-drop to its taskbar icon"). The old behaviour was just not to do anything at all. So in some respects the new behaviour /is/ an improvement. Albeit a tiny one. Yves
From: Dave Vandervies Date: 21:45 on 25 Feb 2007 Subject: Re: Dragging to the Taskbar in Windows XP Somebody claiming to be Aaron Crane wrote: > > Dave Vandervies writes: > > Most windows I've dealt with behave differently on drag-and-drop > > depending on what part of the window you drop in. Trying to guess > > what you meant would be far more hateful than giving you an easy way > > to bring the window to the front so you can drop it where you want it. > > Ah, the old defence of "the software is hateful because it was designed > to be hateful". In my book, that still makes it worthy of hate. No argument there. But sometimes (way too often), this indicates an inherent hatefulness in the software, and the observed behavior really is the least hateful. > There's no reason why a Windows-like GUI couldn't have made this work as > users expect. The only thing needed would be to allow applications to > specify the behaviour for drop events on their taskbar icon, just as > they currently specify differing behaviours for drop events on different > parts of their windows. > > I don't know anything about Windows GUI programming, so I might be > wrong; but I suspect that a future Windows release could acquire this > functionality without affecting existing software I suspect it would require something other than a brain-dead-simple extension of the current drag-and-drop model, but this would probably be The Right Way to deal with it. It would just move the hatefulness to the implementation of the new model and the backward-compatibility hacks for programs that don't use it, though. This would probably be The Right Thing (deal with the hate once when you build the software instead of every time somebody has to use it), but it still wouldn't eliminate (and probably wouldn't even reduce) the overall hatefulness. > (for which you'd > presumably get a variant of the existing stupid error message, with > additional text along the lines of "this application does not support > drag-and-drop to its taskbar icon"). ...and we'd still be complaining about that, of course. dave
From: Andy Armstrong Date: 20:52 on 25 Feb 2007 Subject: Re: Dragging to the Taskbar in Windows XP On 25 Feb 2007, at 20:23, Dave Vandervies wrote: > Trying to guess what you meant would be far more hateful than giving > you an easy way to bring the window to the front so you can drop it > where you want it. Presumably the application could easily specify what a taskbar drop was equivalent to.
From: jrodman Date: 22:27 on 26 Feb 2007 Subject: Re: Dragging to the Taskbar in Windows XP On Sun, Feb 25, 2007 at 03:23:18PM -0500, Dave Vandervies wrote: > Somebody claiming to be Earle Martin wrote: > > > > Good God but this is stupid: > > http://downlode.org/Pictures/Stupid_Software/Windows_XP_Drag_to_Taskbar.png > > > > How did this even make it to release? Didn't the fact that this > > situation evidently occurred often enough in testing that someone had > > to implement this incredibly verbose and annoying message suggest that > > maybe they should ACTUALLY IMPLEMENT THIS BEHAVIOR? > > Most windows I've dealt with behave differently on drag-and-drop > depending on what part of the window you drop in. Yes, of course, the interface would not be completely "for free", but it would be damn cheap, and people have been trying to do this since Windows 95 gave them a taskbar. Consider that pretty much every application handles a drop of a document onto its icon in a manner that would be pretty much identical to a drop onto its button. How the program receives the document is indeed different, but the overhead of implementing the call path... A single function call most likely. Hell, you could even kludge it for the 95% case by launching a new app with the document as an argument. That would be hateful too, but it would mostly work. -josh
From: Joe Mahoney Date: 22:53 on 26 Feb 2007 Subject: Re: Dragging to the Taskbar in Windows XP Various theories and explanations here: http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2004/11/24/269237.aspx Joe
From: Peter da Silva Date: 01:10 on 27 Feb 2007 Subject: Re: Dragging to the Taskbar in Windows XP On Feb 26, 2007, at 4:53 PM, Joe Mahoney wrote: > Various theories and explanations here: > http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2004/11/24/269237.aspx What a load of codswallop.
From: jrodman Date: 01:38 on 27 Feb 2007 Subject: Re: Dragging to the Taskbar in Windows XP On Mon, Feb 26, 2007 at 07:10:38PM -0600, Peter da Silva wrote: > On Feb 26, 2007, at 4:53 PM, Joe Mahoney wrote: > >Various theories and explanations here: > >http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2004/11/24/269237.aspx > > What a load of codswallop. Here you see the core of microsoft culture. My paraphrase: Improving the situation is _impossible_ because it would require the cooperation of two teams. -josh
From: A. Pagaltzis Date: 00:40 on 28 Feb 2007 Subject: Re: Dragging to the Taskbar in Windows XP * jrodman@xxxx.xxxxxxxxxx.xxx <jrodman@xxxx.xxxxxxxxxx.xxx> [2007-02-27 02:45]: > Here you see the core of microsoft culture. My paraphrase: > > Improving the situation is _impossible_ because it would > require the cooperation of two teams. For reinforcement, consider this glimpse into Microsoft: http://www.drizzle.com/~lettvin/2006/11/windows-shutdown-crapfest.html If that doesn't prove Conway's Law, I don't know what could. Regards,
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