Usability Rants (I)

[stobor]

So, Ive decided that I get involved in some fairly involved useability / gui design type discussions at work (even though that has very little to do with the software we write). Its usually me and another guy debating about stuff, like wether the xp blue theme or win2000 theme is better on winXP, and how buttons and stuff should be laid out, etc

Comments

[wrexen]

This feature was in VS7.1, too, so it definitely has been around a while. We've probably had it since we made the floaty/docky/poppy tool windows. I haven't heard anyone complain about it, but it is a valid point.

The best way to dismiss a tool window that popped up unexpectedly is to click your focus back to the code/designer window (it'll unpop immediately). The delay between when you mouse over the tab and when the window appears is intentional (so you don't get stuff popping up all over the place when you're moving past it)

Also, I can assure you that we don't know how many times you restarted that paragraph.

[stobor]

Yeah, I figured out how to dismiss it easy enough, but that wasn't the issue as much as keeping it around. I really like using the task list and 'find in files' tool window while writing code, which required turning on and off the auto-hide. If i had done it, I think i would have tried a toggle-style button - hit it once to open it, hit it once to hide. I understand what was being attempted with it, and it probably works for people like my coworker, but I just turned it off. I find using sun-style braces saves me more vertical space anyway :)

The delay probably made sense as well, it just seemed like a strange delay - maybe on the short side.

Speaking of the task list... any tricks for getting 'comment tasks' (like TODO: and HACK: ) from files other than the current one to show up in the task list? It only shows the tasks that apply to the current file, which makes it hard to track down which file(s) i acutally have TODOs in...

[wrexen]

It looks like the TODOs only show up for files that are open. I can't speak with authority, but it's very likely this is by design so that you don't get overwhelmed with thousands of TODOs in a large project when you only want to fix those in the files you have opened. There's always the lame work-around of Find "TODO:" in all .cs files.

[argen]

Are the rest of your weekly articles going to have the word "involved" twice in the same sentence?

[stobor]

yeah, thats what happens when i start a sentence one way and end it another. plus i do like zero editing on my blog, because i dont care enough. its like talking on aim, except to everyone and no one at the same time.