Re: Override OnNcHitTest and return HTNOWHERE not working

Tech-Archive recommends: Repair Windows Errors & Optimize Windows Performance

Well, I never used the search bar. But I rarely need to search extensively. And due to
some totally terminal brain-damage in the Windows group, they think that the indexing
service should not apply to network drives. My machines have practically no files except
the installed apps, and have trivial (100GB) drives; all my real work is kept on the
RAID-6 (up from RAID-5; RAID-6 will sustain two drive failures) terabyte file server I
have. So the search rarely does anything useful. Generally, I know what I'm searching
for, and a text search in a subdirectory suffices.

Note that the improvements "under the covers" (such as your reference to the audio engine)
could have been done WITHOUT making a SINGLE change in the basic UI paradigm. The same as
the security improvements in Vista could have been done without a single change in the
basic UI paradigm.

The customizable toolbars are so critical to my work that I cannot use Office 2007 at all.
EVERYTHING I do is somewhere between 3 clicks and 4 clicks away in cascaded menus (those
silly little dropdown arrows on buttons are just menus in sheep's clothing).

The Alt-Tab preview is a minor cosmetic *improvement* on the display of tasks, and could
have trivially been done in XP. It doesn't require a complete rewrite of the task bar and
menu.

The loss of the quick-launch bar in Win7 illustrates the levels of stupidity that the UI
tems exhibit. Not ONCE did they ever ask if this is important to experienced users! I
rarely launch anything from a menu; my 20 most popular programs all have quick-launch
icons. My next 20 most popular programs are in my own custom menu ("Flounder Goodies").
The several hundred other apps are in "All Programs". But nobody said "What do
professional users need?"; instead they say "If there is a feature that a new user with
two weeks' experience doesn't use, we can get rid of it".

To create a custom ribbon, I should be able to click "Tools -> Customize ->New Ribbon" and
then just like in Office 2003 I should be able to drag icons to it. Anyone with two
functioning neurons would recognize how essential this is. But no, we get some bizarre
design intended for first-time users, with *no customization* possible! And an interface
that is *completely incompatible* with all previous versions. My mother uses Word. She'll
be 90 in a few weeks. I could not *imagine* teaching her how to use Office 2007, yet she
keeps up an active correspondence with a large number of people using Word 97. Word 2003
isn't that much different. But Word 2007 is absurd! Imagine if I had 1500 employees who
had to learn their basic tool ALL OVER AGAIN and there is not a SINGLE feature in it that
improves their work in the SLIGHTEST!
joe


On Wed, 19 Aug 2009 01:16:18 +0200, Giovanni Dicanio
<giovanniDOTdicanio@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Joseph M. Newcomer ha scritto:
Actually, it is suffering badly.

Shortly after I posted this, I got a call from an old friend. He works in the user
interface domain, building new and innovative devices. He's tired of having to learn
entirely new paradigms every few years just so some programmers can get warm fuzzy
feelings about their work. His goal is to change basic input devices (let's just say that
multitouch is so yesterday to him that it is boring...he did it 20 years ago!) but feels
that gratuitous change that does not improve the experience is pointless. [Read here:
ribbons, flat buttons, Aero]. He says that until we get to a new paradigm of interaction
(his direction of research) that there is nothing new that is going to happen, and all
change is therefore gratuitous and serves no useful purpose. He's sticking with XP.

Nobody at Microsoft seems to have noticed that the resistance to the new products like
Vista, Office 2007 and Win7 is largely because they change the patterns of the interaction
without adding a SINGLE THING to the quality of the work environment! Nobody who uses
Word extensively and professionally has told me that the ribbon is an "improvement"; all
of them have gone back to Office 2003.

And even shallow, glitzy, pointlessly cute code should work *correctly*.


Hi Joe,

regarding Vista, while I don't consider the semi-transparent
alpha-blending thing of Aero very important, I do like some other things
in the UI, like the search bar in the Start Menu (I dual boot with XP on
a machine of mine, and I miss it in XP!).

And ClearType technology in Vista and Win7 seems to me very good as well.

And I also like the preview of applications when you hover the mouse on
the toolbar icons, or when you press ATL+TAB to switch between apps.

(There are however other things that I don't like, like the annoying UAC
prompts; but it seems that things improved in Win7 in this regard, and
I'm glad for that.)

Moreover, it seems that they did a great job in improving things "under
the cover", like the audio engine, see for example this interesting
interview here:

http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/Going+Deep/Elliot-H-Omiya-Larry-Osterman-and-Frank-Yerrace-Inside-Windows-7-Audio-Stack/

And they did a great thing in putting an XP virtual machine in Win7, so
old legacy software can be run in it.

About Office 2007 UI, I confess that I like the old-style classical UI
with menus and *customizable* toolbars (like it was in Office 2003).
I can accept the ribbon, but I fail to understand why the ribbon is not
*easily* customizable. We had great customizable toolbars in O2K3, and
this customization feature was removed in O2K7 for unknown reasons for me.

Another thing that was easy in O2K3 was the "Insert Image from Scanner"
thing; instead now in Office 2007 they made it unusually complicated,
and we need a Microsoft KB article to do something that was trivial in O2K3:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/924462

However, there are some things like the horizontal scroll bar to perform
zooming that can be useful, and are not present in O2K3.
And the quality of graphs in Excel 2007 seems to me better than what we
had in Excel 2003.

I hope that in next Office they resume some good things that we used to
have, like *easy customization* of toolbar/ribbons.

My 2 cents,
Giovanni
Joseph M. Newcomer [MVP]
email: newcomer@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Web: http://www.flounder.com
MVP Tips: http://www.flounder.com/mvp_tips.htm
.

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