Re: Did we lose the RadioCheck property on menuitems

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Microsoft's recent crop of developer hires seem to come from another world
camp... possibly Unix C++ folks or something. And, MS has no master "Steve
Jobs" type person overseeing the quality and consistency and aesthetics.....
it's all *Marketing* that is "overseeing" stuff at at Microsoft and Radio
Checks and Consistent User Interfaces is at the BOTTOM of their list.

If you take a look at how Office implements SDI... even in Office 2003...
you'd see what I mean. I mean it's one thing that Word implements true SDI
and Excel and PowerPoint implement Fake-SDI (via "Windows In Taskbar"
feature).... I'm OK with that. BUT even between them Excel and PowerPoint
implement it DIFFERENTLY. If you click on the pop X close button in
PowerPoint (when Windows in Taskbar setting is ON) only the current window
closes (I like that... it's very SDI-like). If you do the same in Excel ALL
your open documents on your taskbar close. This is RETARDED.

Also, Outlook 2003 puts an icon in the tray (you have no choice) and you
have the option to "Minimize to Tray." Which is great...... but if you close
the main Outlook window you close the icon too. NO OTHER application in the
world that makes use of the tray behaves like this. Instead the option
should not be "Minimize to Tray" it should be "Allow Outlook to run in the
background" and you can close the main window and still keep the tray icon
along with e-mail notifications, task notifications, and calendar
appointment notifications, bla bla bla.

I saw in the latest Visa UI Guidelines that they were actually incorporating
the Outlook way of doing the tray thing into the Guidelines. That is
RETARDED. No other app behaves that way. I want MINIMIZE TO MEAN MINIMIZE.
Those guys at MS are on Crack nowadays.

OK. Now I feel much better too. :-)


--
-C. Moya
www.cmoya.com
"Mitchell S. Honnert" <news@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:OoxLhp8OGHA.3576@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Whew! I thought I was the only one irked by the removal of native support
for radio button-style menu items in VS05. I think I did the same thing
you did when I first discovered the feature loss, looked around at other
MS applications to see how they represented a mutually exclusive list of
selectable menu items. Your example (MS Word's use of menu item images)
is an OK way to go I guess, but in most cases I don't have a team of
artists I can call on to create custom images for each one of my mutually
exclusive options. Microsoft should allow me to create a
"quick-and-dirty" implementation of radio button-style menu items without
having to resort to using menu images or customizing a control.

What really gets me about this is that the principle of a mutually
exclusive set of options is at the heart of the Windows GUI. If for some
reason you had to explain the Windows GUI standard in a paragraph or less,
there'd surely be something in there about radio buttons. Along with
stuff like text boxes, check boxes, list boxes, and combo boxes, radio
buttons are one of the most fundamental building blocks of any GUI
interface. I just don't understand how this could have been omitted from
the new menu controls. Bring back the dot!

OK. I feel much better now. :-)

- Mitchell S. Honnert


"CMM" <cmm@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:eWbeXn3OGHA.648@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Homer, User Interface Conventions call for mutually exclusive checkmarks
on a menu to be rendered as a Radio "dot" or "ball." WindowsForms normal
menus had the RadioCheck option which caused checkmarks to be rendered as
a dot.... though they (WindowsForms' normal menus) didn't actually
"enforce" the mutual exclusivity of the checks like a real set of radio
buttons, they did support the glyph (via the RadioCheck property).

With the "new" ToolStripMenuItems I guess you're supposed to convey this
mutual exclusivity using images. If you look at the View menu in
Microsoft Word you'd see what I mean (Normal, Page Layout, etc etc are
mutually exclusive). Still, the ToolstripMenuItem supports a regular
built-in checkmark so it's retarded that it doesn't support a RadioCheck
property as well. It's just one example of something I call "the little
things" that matter.

There's no Unit Test for follow-through failures like this. It's just one
example of the general decline of quality of certain aspects of MS
software. Every day I run into something in Visual Studio 2005 or Office
2003 that makes me want to tear my hair out..... it wasn't so with VS2003
or Office 2002.

--
-C. Moya
www.cmoya.com

"Homer J Simpson" <nobody@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:u6qMf.5412$Cp4.967@xxxxxxxxxxx

" academic" <academic@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:eZRvW%23xOGHA.3276@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

But I want the little ball to indicate it's a radio button.
From what I read I'll have to draw it myself.

Don't remember that being there. IIRC, you fake it with software so as
you check one item it unchecks the others.








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