Why do GUIs jump around like a demented terrier while starting up? Am I on my own? “For heaven’s sake, stop waggling it in my face! Kuh-rist, keep still! Right – you’ve asked for it!” Alerted by the commotion, colleagues struggle to hold me back as I try to give my computer the damn good kicking it deserves. That’s unfair: the computer itself didn’t deserve such rough treatment. More importantly, it is not …
Actually, Microsoft isn't the only random "time-to..." reporter. I ran an "update" of Opensuse from 13.2 to LEAP 42.2. The "time left" randomly flicked around from in excess of five days worth of 24-hour days to 2 minutes in random fashion. Ultimately it took six hours. Even so I went back and ran a clean install to get thing running sanely. So - as pleasurable as it is to blame Microsoft, they were merely trend setters. I can't even find a decent desktop look now. For some silly reason the developers of KDE have concluded that someone actually likes the cartooney Windows 10 and cell phone look. They never asked me though.
I really must get diagnostics on my media library external USB hard disk - replacement purchased: the sick disk rattles while reading files, and sometimes just stops - file unreadable. And at this point, the remaining time (Windows 10) goes from minutes to days. Or it may be "more than one day". Eventually, an error message does appear.
Re dancing interface... I'd approve a general rule that a user interface element can't be clicked or keyed when it has only just appeared on the screen. I don't know if that could be done without rewriting the OS. Maybe with a third-party utility that spots the screen or the focus changing and then blocks inputs for a couple of seconds, beeps at you instead.
Re: general rule that UI element can't be clicked when it just appeared.
Eh, what? Do you realise that is going to piss nearly everyone off nearly every day to fix an infrequent problem of the few?
How about a blanket OS rule that shit apps can't grab focus unless the last user command was to launch that app? How about shit devs go die in large holes rather than allowing elements to move after display, unless user directed?
NB: last coffee was three hours ago and ive got kids inside on a rainy day. It is possible my tolerance is lower than normal.
NB: last coffee was three hours ago and ive got kids inside on a rainy day. It is possible my tolerance is lower than normal.
Nah... you're just a normal tech type who's spent too long in the trenches. I think any of us who have been doing this more than year are like that. In WWII, they called it "combat fatigue".
> How about a blanket OS rule that shit apps can't grab focus unless the last user command was to launch that app?
I've written software that needs to grab focus (yeah we all claim that). In my case, it is in response to a biometric hardware events, so you need the "interruptions" and you are pretty forgetful if you don't remember presenting yourself for authentication under a second earlier.
Just here to point out that Microsoft have made this harder to achieve over the years. Back in win 9x, there was a pretty simple call. It got abused. They then changed what it did in XP to flash the window orange and introduced some other method to do it. That got abused too. So i think they just dropped support for that. There is an always on top mode that the OS these days basically ignores too.
I'm not going to share publicly how it gets achieved, but it's a big waste of everyone's time but at least bofh would get a snigger. All they needed from the get go was a control panel applet where users could whitelist applications they want to do this and ignore the request from anything else.
>> How about a blanket OS rule that shit apps can't grab focus unless the last user command was to launch that app?
>I've written software that needs to grab focus (yeah we all claim that). In my case, it is in response to a biometric hardware events,
So that's a user command, it's just not a mouse/keyboard command.
Rule not violated (in fact it is supported).
Anything that want my attention can send a terminal bell, which can be represented by some audio and/or visual representation of a toddler.
Flash the task bar button, IIRC MacOS does it by bouncing items in the dock.
The PC speaker beep used to be a good option, but I'm not convinced they even exist any more on many machines...
In any case the OS can have the appropriate response configured.
"Re: general rule that UI element can't be clicked when it just appeared."
"Eh, what? Do you realise that is going to piss nearly everyone off nearly every day to fix an infrequent problem of the few?
"How about a blanket OS rule that shit apps can't grab focus unless the last user command was to launch that app? How about shit devs go die in large holes rather than allowing elements to move after display, unless user directed?"
Punishing developers is attractive but sometimes I am one. A developer can't anticipate every circumstance where a program is used. On the other hand, sometimes the intruding message comes from the same application.
I say that a new prompt or dialog shouldn't accept input until a user has had time to read what the prompt says, textually or iconically. If that means waiting a little longer while you're working.... how often aren't you doing that with your computer?
Or how about this - a new dialog or whatever has to slide in quite slowly from the side of the screen to the centre, and until it gets there you are still typing in your original focus...
....or even, while you're typing, a new prompt isn't allowed to appear? Except by projecting noises at you.
"a user interface element can't be clicked or keyed when it has only just appeared on the screen"
This exists. When installing extensions in Firefox, the install window needs focus for a couple of seconds before the "Install" button will activate. Until then it sits there greyed out - just long enough so you can't accidentally click to install malicious software, but not quite long enough to annoy you. Very well designed, but nobody else seems to have copied them.
I don't have a screenshot (t'was lost in the mists of time), but back in about 2004 we were copying a bunch of files from a 250GB external hard drive - t'was a forensics dump of several million email messages all in single small files, typically 1-4kB in size (and over the brand-spanking-new USB2) - and from the number on screen the estimated completion time to begin with was longer than the current estimated age of the universe.
This is the closest equivalent I could find with some google-fu, a scant 9 years.
"I'm curious - what's the longest "X hours remaining" any of you folk have seen Windows display?"
Sufficiently long that I was pretty confident the the HDD would die before the transfer completed is MS was to be believed (it was several decades, but is now so long ago (hey it might have finished) that I genuinely cannot remember exactly how ridiculous it got)
(This would have been with Win95, maybe 98, with thin coax)
"(This would have been with Win95, maybe 98, with thin coax)"
Ah, Win 98! Back in the day, the latest version of Firebird no longer supported Win 3.11, so I reluctantly* decided to retire my old 486 after over a decades worth of use, and purchased a second hand PII machine with Win 98 loaded on it.
Hooked up the two with a LapLink cable, and started transferring the hundreds of megabytes of files across.
The transfer time was given as 1. (string of numbers)E(two digits) minutes!
Left it running nights, and every night the 98 machine would crash, leaving the Win 3.11 machine waiting**.
The transfer took the better part of three weeks.
*I had beaten, bullied, and abused that machine into performing exactly how I wanted it to perform, I was loath to give it up.
**Used Calmira as the UI on Win 3.11. It made it remarkably bulletproof. http://www.calmira.de/
>Nah, I rode that dinosaur (486), long after it was supposed to be extinct!
Was it as frustrating as having a 286 with 512k base memory and 512k extended memory and no way to get at the extended memory?
Moving GUI elements? In my day, we 'ad an IBM text-only display... an' we were glad of it!
But yes, I'm looking at you, iphone, with your "all appearing buttons shall be in this place, especially the 'reject call' button when pre-empting my current application."
One of my favourites is MS having the menus alphabetically for (file) explorer, so "edit" and "delete" are next to each other.
Yeah .. and Windows explorer' right click menu, 'Format' option is just pixels away from 'eject USB' in the menu, so a mis-click can see you about to format your USB data into oblivion instead of unmounting and removing it. dunno if thats still there in Win 8 / win 10 .. i gave up after 7 ..
Not sure what the longest I have seen is, but it was several decades..
We run a scanning bureau and in the past we have had to dump several hundred million tiffs from one hard disk to another.. Through Windows this turned out to be so time consuming that in the end I just wrote a batch file and did it through dos / command prompt.. the copy took about a week that way!
"I just wrote a batch file and did it through dos / command prompt.. the copy took about a week that way!"
I hope you used xcopy instead of copy then! IIRC, copy did one file at a time, in 64KB chunks if the files were big. xcopy would fill a ram buffer with as much as possible then write it out, noticably faster on big files, but lots faster when coping many small files.
"I'm curious - what's the longest "X hours remaining" any of you folk have seen Windows display?"
Not strictly Windows, but it was on my Microsoft Xbox 360; for a while GTA Online was telling me that my average session time was over 584 million years...
My favorite has always been when the timer shits itself & gives me a remaining time measured in negative numbers or, and this made me go crosseyed in confusion, alien looking symbols that I couldn't make heads nor tails of at all.
"Let's see... that's a squiggle with horns, five radiating lines, & a splat effect... the symbol for roadkill perhaps? Ok, next rune... That's a... monkey being buggered by either a space alien or Tom Cruise... Rune 3 is, OH!, that's obviously the hubcap off an old VW Westfalia camper van!"
I'd waste hours trying to figure out the math for negative numbers, or the "runes" on the "alien messages" in the progress bar.
By the time I thought I'd figured them out, the bar would vanish & the program either start or crash.
Does that count?
What do you mean, "back in the day"? I routinely get this still on Win 8.1 (corporate install, not my choice). Combined with the other silly things like being able to checkout files with a path length >254 chars but then being unable to delete them. And of course, the all-time classic message "Access Denied" when you try to delete a file, which really means "Hey sucker, somebody else has it open and our file sharing model's broken".
I gave up using a browser to actually download stuff; and now copy "whatever" to the paste buffer and use curl -O http:/www.whatever... in a terminal window. I get a nice restful screen that shows how big the file is, how quickly it is downloading, how much has downloaded, and a reasonable estimation of how long the rest will take.
Tools like curl and wget are roughly 20 years old. Why can't the GUI/Web people get something as basic as this right?
Not just you Dabbsy, I was once looking at the network card properties of an ISA Server in Aberdeen and got the similar jump. And of course the disable button is next to the properties button, it's after lunch on a Friday afternoon, I'm in Stirling which is at best a 2 hour drive and the client whose server it is wouldn't splash the extra cash for iDRAC in his servers.
Much sweet talking of the office manager got it sorted without a trek north thankfully.
"And of course the disable button is next to the properties button"
A few years ago I was using xemacs which by default included a button bar of "frequent actions" that in reality I rarely used. One day when moving between windows I think I was aware that I'd accidently clicked as I passed over this and had prbably selected "print buffer" but thought nothing of it. Next day someone sent an email around (fortunately they said they would not reveal names) suggesting that the person who had printed a rather large file might like to colelct their output and I had a sudden bad feeling. Went to the printer (a *big* Kodak network printer) to find a huge pile with my name on the coverr sheet - turned out xmeacs focus had been on a "buffer" where one of the modes I used was dumping copious diagnostic info which had been enough to cause the pritner to empty both its A4 paper bins (probably 1000 sheets each) and then decide that as it had no A4 left it better shift to A3 and emptied the A3 bin before running out things to print on!
Firefox has that count-down-to-install for installing plugins/extentions. It means you can't accidentally click on "Install" just because it happened to pop up as you hit space/enter. The bigger evils in my book are applications who believe they're so super important that they have to raise themselves to the foreground and/or insist on stealing focus from the entire desktop.
That, combined with incremental rendering, makes for occasional crap shoot interactivity.
RE: "Firefox has that count-down-to-install for installing plugins/extentions"
I think that's a security thing rather than a helpful thing, otherwise they wouldn't bother doing it. It's so that anything with less cognitive ability than a human is less likely to install something behind the users back. A definition which fits several acquaintances.
"I can't install this!"
"What's happening?"
"............Oh....Its working now."
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