Micorosoft UI designers and their 1px wide grab bars
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Today I was in a jam and had to remote desktop to a machine while on my laptop tethered to my iPhone to get internet connectivity. Needless to say the experience was a little jerky, but was pretty good all things considering. Except when I need to do do two things: 1. Resize the columns in Windows Explorer in details mode. Instead of grabbing the divider I kept grabbing the column header and rearranging the columns. 2. Resize the read pane in outlook 2010. The bar you grab is 1px high. The "resize" cursor appear when the cursor is about 5px udnerneath the resize bar, so you have to ignore what the cursor says, hover very carefully over the single pixel, then press, hold, wait, pray, hope, and finally you sometimes manage to grab the bit that does the actual resizing. Lord help us if Microsoft ever moves to "retina" displays...
cheers, Chris Maunder The Code Project | Co-founder Microsoft C++ MVP
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Today I was in a jam and had to remote desktop to a machine while on my laptop tethered to my iPhone to get internet connectivity. Needless to say the experience was a little jerky, but was pretty good all things considering. Except when I need to do do two things: 1. Resize the columns in Windows Explorer in details mode. Instead of grabbing the divider I kept grabbing the column header and rearranging the columns. 2. Resize the read pane in outlook 2010. The bar you grab is 1px high. The "resize" cursor appear when the cursor is about 5px udnerneath the resize bar, so you have to ignore what the cursor says, hover very carefully over the single pixel, then press, hold, wait, pray, hope, and finally you sometimes manage to grab the bit that does the actual resizing. Lord help us if Microsoft ever moves to "retina" displays...
cheers, Chris Maunder The Code Project | Co-founder Microsoft C++ MVP
I have suffered that pain time and again. What I reckon is needed is a resize-by-proximity splitter -so it can sit there at 1px until the mouse comes near, then grows in width(without resizing the adjacent panes) making it easy to grab if you want to.
MVVM# - See how I did MVVM my way ___________________________________________ Man, you're a god. - walterhevedeich 26/05/2011 .\\axxx (That's an 'M')
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Today I was in a jam and had to remote desktop to a machine while on my laptop tethered to my iPhone to get internet connectivity. Needless to say the experience was a little jerky, but was pretty good all things considering. Except when I need to do do two things: 1. Resize the columns in Windows Explorer in details mode. Instead of grabbing the divider I kept grabbing the column header and rearranging the columns. 2. Resize the read pane in outlook 2010. The bar you grab is 1px high. The "resize" cursor appear when the cursor is about 5px udnerneath the resize bar, so you have to ignore what the cursor says, hover very carefully over the single pixel, then press, hold, wait, pray, hope, and finally you sometimes manage to grab the bit that does the actual resizing. Lord help us if Microsoft ever moves to "retina" displays...
cheers, Chris Maunder The Code Project | Co-founder Microsoft C++ MVP
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Today I was in a jam and had to remote desktop to a machine while on my laptop tethered to my iPhone to get internet connectivity. Needless to say the experience was a little jerky, but was pretty good all things considering. Except when I need to do do two things: 1. Resize the columns in Windows Explorer in details mode. Instead of grabbing the divider I kept grabbing the column header and rearranging the columns. 2. Resize the read pane in outlook 2010. The bar you grab is 1px high. The "resize" cursor appear when the cursor is about 5px udnerneath the resize bar, so you have to ignore what the cursor says, hover very carefully over the single pixel, then press, hold, wait, pray, hope, and finally you sometimes manage to grab the bit that does the actual resizing. Lord help us if Microsoft ever moves to "retina" displays...
cheers, Chris Maunder The Code Project | Co-founder Microsoft C++ MVP
Remote Desktop can be 'twitchy' like that. I'm guessing it's due to latency in the cursor and mouse handling. The normal cycle is probably an order of magnitude or more faster (the mouse moves and Windows moves the cursor to match). Your reactions and muscle memory are programmed for the faster time, which causes you to over-compensate. I use Remote Desktop a lot to telecommute, and there are certain tasks I've learned you can't do. Visual Studio's image editor is impossible. Even at the 8x zoom you spend too much time fixing errors. The same goes for resource editing, where you're polishing a layout. Anything that requires pointing precision of 10 pixels or less is very difficult. All of that aside, Microsoft are still morons for using (or even implying) single-pixel selection targets. It wouldn't be that hard to detect Remote Desktop usage and to broaden the target area.
Software Zen:
delete this; -
I have suffered that pain time and again. What I reckon is needed is a resize-by-proximity splitter -so it can sit there at 1px until the mouse comes near, then grows in width(without resizing the adjacent panes) making it easy to grab if you want to.
MVVM# - See how I did MVVM my way ___________________________________________ Man, you're a god. - walterhevedeich 26/05/2011 .\\axxx (That's an 'M')
Like what Ubuntu did? (the only good UI design I've seen from them recently, unlike Unity >_< )
500 characters in this space, 500 characters in this space, paste the above, write a bit more, 369 characters left in this space...
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Today I was in a jam and had to remote desktop to a machine while on my laptop tethered to my iPhone to get internet connectivity. Needless to say the experience was a little jerky, but was pretty good all things considering. Except when I need to do do two things: 1. Resize the columns in Windows Explorer in details mode. Instead of grabbing the divider I kept grabbing the column header and rearranging the columns. 2. Resize the read pane in outlook 2010. The bar you grab is 1px high. The "resize" cursor appear when the cursor is about 5px udnerneath the resize bar, so you have to ignore what the cursor says, hover very carefully over the single pixel, then press, hold, wait, pray, hope, and finally you sometimes manage to grab the bit that does the actual resizing. Lord help us if Microsoft ever moves to "retina" displays...
cheers, Chris Maunder The Code Project | Co-founder Microsoft C++ MVP
So, so true. In Windows 7, I keep getting this details pane and not enough room to read my file names, and it some times takes several tries to grab the stupid slider. What happened to UI cues to tell me when I was in the right spot ?
Christian Graus Driven to the arms of OSX by Vista. Read my blog to find out how I've worked around bugs in Microsoft tools and frameworks.
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Today I was in a jam and had to remote desktop to a machine while on my laptop tethered to my iPhone to get internet connectivity. Needless to say the experience was a little jerky, but was pretty good all things considering. Except when I need to do do two things: 1. Resize the columns in Windows Explorer in details mode. Instead of grabbing the divider I kept grabbing the column header and rearranging the columns. 2. Resize the read pane in outlook 2010. The bar you grab is 1px high. The "resize" cursor appear when the cursor is about 5px udnerneath the resize bar, so you have to ignore what the cursor says, hover very carefully over the single pixel, then press, hold, wait, pray, hope, and finally you sometimes manage to grab the bit that does the actual resizing. Lord help us if Microsoft ever moves to "retina" displays...
cheers, Chris Maunder The Code Project | Co-founder Microsoft C++ MVP
Who is this 'Micorosoft' you are talking about? ;p
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Today I was in a jam and had to remote desktop to a machine while on my laptop tethered to my iPhone to get internet connectivity. Needless to say the experience was a little jerky, but was pretty good all things considering. Except when I need to do do two things: 1. Resize the columns in Windows Explorer in details mode. Instead of grabbing the divider I kept grabbing the column header and rearranging the columns. 2. Resize the read pane in outlook 2010. The bar you grab is 1px high. The "resize" cursor appear when the cursor is about 5px udnerneath the resize bar, so you have to ignore what the cursor says, hover very carefully over the single pixel, then press, hold, wait, pray, hope, and finally you sometimes manage to grab the bit that does the actual resizing. Lord help us if Microsoft ever moves to "retina" displays...
cheers, Chris Maunder The Code Project | Co-founder Microsoft C++ MVP
Now, try that setup with Adobe Illustrator - a bit of (attempted) vector editing should drive you pretty mad :laugh:
Espen Harlinn Senior Architect, Software - Goodtech Projects & Services My LinkedIn Profile
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I have suffered that pain time and again. What I reckon is needed is a resize-by-proximity splitter -so it can sit there at 1px until the mouse comes near, then grows in width(without resizing the adjacent panes) making it easy to grab if you want to.
MVVM# - See how I did MVVM my way ___________________________________________ Man, you're a god. - walterhevedeich 26/05/2011 .\\axxx (That's an 'M')
The clickable area of a splitter normally is larger than the splitter looks visually. In my WPF application, I've implemented this by giving the splitter a transparent border and a negative margin of the same width (so that the invisible border ends up being outside the splitter's layout rect). The normal Windows list view does the same: the splitter between the columns looks 1px wide, but the clickable area extends 8px in both directions, resulting in a target the size of a small icon! (17px). However, Windows Explorer in Win7 screws this up by putting that useless grouping dropdown button to the left of the splitter, so the splitter's clickable area only extends to the right; so it's only 9px wide and more to the right than one would expect.
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Today I was in a jam and had to remote desktop to a machine while on my laptop tethered to my iPhone to get internet connectivity. Needless to say the experience was a little jerky, but was pretty good all things considering. Except when I need to do do two things: 1. Resize the columns in Windows Explorer in details mode. Instead of grabbing the divider I kept grabbing the column header and rearranging the columns. 2. Resize the read pane in outlook 2010. The bar you grab is 1px high. The "resize" cursor appear when the cursor is about 5px udnerneath the resize bar, so you have to ignore what the cursor says, hover very carefully over the single pixel, then press, hold, wait, pray, hope, and finally you sometimes manage to grab the bit that does the actual resizing. Lord help us if Microsoft ever moves to "retina" displays...
cheers, Chris Maunder The Code Project | Co-founder Microsoft C++ MVP