Software Annoyances

Adding your favorite Search Engine to FF2 & IE7

2006-10-24T10:10:00.000+02:00

As I was trying out the new Internet Explorer 7, I was trying to see whether I could add one of my favorite search engines (the superb Leo english-german online dictionary) to the search bar, as I was able to do with Firefox 2.

This is how I got to add the Leo search engine in FF2:

In the Search drop-down list, click Manage Search Engines.
In the following dialog box, click Get more search engines....
In the Web page that appears next, click Browse through more search engines at mycroft.mozdev.org.
In the search box, enter 'Leo', and then click Search.
Click the language you would like to use (I picked de<->en).
The following dialog box appears:

Click Add (check Start using it right away to make this your default search engine). My Leo search engine has now been added:

Internet Explorer 7 does not have the search engine Leo available. However, it uses fascinating technology to add any search engine you can think of yourself!

To add the Leo search engine to IE7, do the following:

In the Search drop-down list, choose Find more providers. The Add Search Providers to Internet Explorer 7 page appears.
In the Create Your Own section, enter the URL of the search result in your favorite search engine for the search term 'TEST', as described online.
Enter a name for this search engine (in our case 'Leo').
Click Install.

Lo and behold, this stuff really worked...good job, Microsoft!

IE7 Disappeared Menu Toolbar

2006-10-24T00:58:00.000+02:00

One of the first things one notices after having installed Internet Explorer 7 is that the Menu Bar has disappeared.

To make the Menu Bar permanently visible again, do this:

Press ALT to make the Menu toolbar temporarily visible:
In the View menu, point to Toolbars, and then click Menu Bar, as follows:

The Menu Bar will now stay permanently!

For those nerds that like the color blue

2006-10-20T10:07:00.000+02:00

From Miguel Carrasco's Real World: the Blue Screen of Death Top 10.

It also comes in a Mac and a Linux flavor. And the winner is:

'Arrogant Software'

2006-10-12T17:47:00.000+02:00

Jacob Proffitt on The Rabid Paladin blog rants, and rightfully so IMHO:

Ever notice that software seems to have a personality? Some programs are desperate for approval, some eager to please, some like to show-off all their cool features, some calmly wait for their opportunity to be useful.
And some programs are simply arrogant jerks. There are a couple of utilities that are useful enough that, like in real-life, you simply put up with their crappy attitude and count the days until a competitor comes along that will offer a viable alternative.

How true. More here.

Shared Sentiments about OpenOffice.Org

2006-10-12T13:03:00.000+02:00

I share many of Piotr's sentiments as expressed in his post called "Open Office Imperfect" on his Corvus Frugilegus blog.

A fragment:

Perhaps Open Office itself can be transformed into something better. After all Firefox is transformed Netscape browser. In the latter case the transformation was somewhat drastic. I do not see Sun doing any kind of “Open Office reborn” project anytime soon.

Me neither. Bugs filed are never ironed out unless someone feels like fixing it or if Sun happens to have a customer that puts pressure on them to improve things.

Read it all here.

Error Message of the Month

2006-10-09T16:30:00.000+02:00

This must be Internet Explorer's biggest error screen:

Very concise and descriptive, ain't it?

More Keyboard Shortcut Madness: Shift + F8

2006-09-05T05:14:00.000+02:00

From The Old New Thing:

One of the most obscure keyboard shortcuts has got to be Shift+F8, which is used for listbox discontiguous extended selection. Man, what a mouthful. KB article Q301583 doesn't help matters by listing this keyboard shortcut under "Dialog box keyboard shortcuts" even though it isn't a dialog box keyboard shortcut. It's a listbox keyboard shortcut.

If the listbox supports extended selections (via LBS_EXTENDEDSEL), then you can use the Shift+F8 shortcut to create discontiguous multiple selections from the keyboard. (Via the mouse, you can just Ctrl+Click to create a discontiguous multiple selection.) Type Shift+F8 once to enter extended selection mode, then use the arrow keys to select an item and press Ctrl+Space or Shift+Space to select (or deselect) it. When finished, type Shift+F8 again (or just move focus to some other window).

And yes, this particular keyboard interface is pretty wacked out. A more natural mechanism would be to have Ctrl+Arrow move the focus without changing the selection, then using Ctrl+Space to select (or deselect) the focus item. Thankfully, the list view control went for that approach rather than emulating the crazy Shift+F8 keyboard shortcut.

All I can say is: Thank God for mouse devices!

OpenOffice.org Usability Absurdity of the day

2006-08-30T12:44:00.000+02:00

So here's for my first OOO absurdity:

In OOO, filling cells with a background color using the toolbar is an awkward experience, especially if you move from Excel.

In Excel, the behavior of the toolbar button is:

Click the toolbar button itself to fill a cell with the last used or default color:
Click the toolbar button's drop-down arrow to unfold a drop-down menu from which you can chose a color:

In OpenOffice.org, the behavior is like this:

Click either the toolbar button itself or the drop-down arrow:

The following undocked toolbar will pop-up:

My questions:

Why have a drop-down arrow if it does not unfold a drop-down menu?
Why is that a disconnected, undocked, toolbar that pops up?
Why does clicking the toolbar button not behave the same as Excel (fill last or default color)?

I filed Issue 68950 with OpenOffice.org called: Background and font color buttons improvement.

OpenOffice Easter-egg

2006-08-25T10:46:00.000+02:00

OK, it's still a long time before Eastern, but...for some people OpenOffice is apparently too fast...which leaves you time to play some exciting, hidden Easter eggs games!

From eeggs.com:

create a new sheet in openoffice.org Calc (spreadsheet)
enter this formula in a cell:

=game()

and validate (validation button or enter)
the cell will display "say what?"
Enter this formula:

=GAME("StarWars")
a new window will open with a little game star wars game.
But if you type again this formula, the cell will return the display "oh no, not again!"

To be able to play again, you need to close the file, close openoffice.org and the QuickStarter, and then make the same.

Here's a screenshot:

BTW: This works with the latest version of OpenOffice.org 2.0.3 as well!

Getting Gmail Sorted Out

2006-08-18T10:58:00.000+02:00

Generally, I have been quite happy with my Gmail account: it is fast, has lots of more storage than my Hotmail account and has a pleasant interface.

There is, however, one thing I can't seem to be able to get a handle on: sorting by mail size. All I want to do is to clean up my mail account in the most efficient way, looking through my e-mails sorted by size in ascending order. This way, all large e-mails can be dealt with first.

I tried it all: search for all mails that have attachments, create a filter, browse through Gmail help, but nothing helped.

Anyone an idea as to what I can do to delve through my 390 e-mails and bring down my mailbox size efficiently?

Please drop me a line if you know. Thanks!

Blogging offline: Where Microsoft seriously rocks!

2006-08-17T14:18:00.000+02:00

Also tired of inefficient, built-in, not-really WYSIWYG blog editors? Well, there is an alternative now: Microsoft Windows Live Writer.

Now, you might have thought such a tool would be a trick to get people away from the competitor's blog sites to Microsoft Live Spaces. However, Live Writer is actually compatible with all major blog hosters.

Live Writer, to me, seems to be the first product from the Windows Live series that really rocks. And this also seems to be the first beta I have tried from Microsoft that is not buggy... ;)

Some forum posts already whine and sulk about Live Writer, probably because they find it hard to digest that Microsoft came up with a solution that good, that simple and that useful. One wonders why the competition could've come up with a proggie like this ages ago.

One of the tool's greatest advantages is that the WYSIWYG preview is really WYSIWYG. My blogger.com preview and online editor is plain annoying. I'll give you one example.

Compare this:

To this:

Notice the way my blog's template has been already applied in the preview as opposed to the blogger.com preview (theme, fonts, etc.)!

Good job, Microsoft!

Live Writer Links
Writer Zone
Windows Live Writer: Video Review
Windows Live Writer Tips & Tricks

"You don't need to defragment this volume"

2006-08-16T16:59:00.000+02:00

I don't really bear a suspicion anymore. I am convinced, seeying Microsoft's track record over the years, that Microsoft closes pacts with software vendors to produce inferior software on purpose so they can sell us software we should have gotten for free in the first place.

One of the programs in question is the Disk Defragmenter program called 'Microsoft Windows XP Disk Defragmenter'. (For some Wikipedia information about disk defragmenting, click here.)

Defragmenting ensures that all files are reorganized on your hard drive in such a way that they are not scattered all over your hard drive anymore, thereby improving performance and reducing the risk to get a hard disk crash.

Microsoft Disk Defragmenter allows you to first analyze the disk, and then let you decide, based on a well-informed advise of the tool itself, if you need to defrag it or not. It looks something like this (clickto enlarge):

Issues with this tool:

Disk Defragmenter is slow (Diskeeper, e.g. claims to run at 5 times the speed!)
Even though the graphical representation shows that some files are fragmented (see the red lines) and the disk is not used contiguously, it recommends not to defragment the volume (see screenshot above). This is because it only looks at the percentage of fragmented files and not at the amount of fragmented files or empty disk space
Disk Defragmenter does not offer to run before startup in order to defragment the page file
It does not defrag the registry
Disk Defragmenter only does a partial job (notice this screenshot, clearly showing empty spaces and unfragmented files)
Click Defragment again and you will see it will defragment some more, clearly showing that defragmentation was not finished after the first time around!

My conclusion: Microsoft has made a pact with other software vendors to only create a basic version of their defrag tool so the software vendors can still sell software that should have been included with the OS in the first place.

Mousearm m(o)usings

2006-08-14T12:21:00.000+02:00

Perhaps, this post does not belong in the Software Annoyances department. Still, this post may be of interest of many of our readers who may suffer from RSI (Repetitive Stress Injury).

I have suffered in the past from great RSI-related discomfort as a result of being in the IT business and sitting behind the PC the whole day (let alone my chubby figure, which is also directly related!).

So I went to doctors and the best they could tell me was to use a brace for my arm or to apply some cream to my wrist. If you have such doctors as well, make sure to look for a new one. After having to sleep with a wrist-bandage for weeks and the pain becoming only worse, I decided to use my own brain instead (should've done that to start off with!).

Since the problem was caused by my repeated usage of the mouse, I decided to look for another type. After days of surfing and queries, I decided for the Logitech® Cordless TrackMan® Wheel:

Never had a problem since.

Same key, different behaviour

2006-08-04T12:33:00.000+02:00

This is definitely a post for the usability department. It concerns the Swiss-German keyboard, but perhaps this behavious is found elsewhere as well.

I noticed that, although there is no difference in behaviour between the left and right Ctrl keys (besides for switching input languages), there is a difference for the Alt keys.

Besides the fact that the left one is marked 'Alt' and the right one 'Alt Gr', I found amongst other these differences using the Internet browser (Friefox and IE6):

Left Alt+Home= Go to your browser home page; Alt Gr+Homedoes nothing
Left Alt+Left arrow key = Go one page back; Alt Gr+Left arrow key does nothing
Alt Gr + 2 = @; Left Alt + 2 does nothing

All this is, of course, difficult for disabled people: how can people with only one hand use any of these shortcuts?

But the main question is: If the alternative to the keyboard shortcuts have no use (e.g. Alt+Home works, but Alt Gr+Home has no function whatsoever), why do we at all have an Alt and an Alt Gr key? Why the difference and why not just two Alt keys?

I am looking forward to your inputs.

100 yummy free XP goodies

2006-08-03T15:35:00.000+02:00

Blake Handler, a self-proclaimed Tech Evangelist & MS Consultant, has published "The Ultimate List of Free Windows Software from Microsoft" on his blog The Road to Know Where.

I have added the RSS feed to my Mozilla Firefox. Sorry, Blake!

Windows Vista Speech Recognition

2006-08-03T14:37:00.000+02:00

I am so much looking forward to Windows Vista...with thanks to Lior:

Which reminded me of a defining moment in Microsoft's history: the Windows 98 bluescreen.

Cleaning up forwarded e-mails

2006-08-02T14:41:00.000+02:00

I am not a big fan of forwarded e-mails since most of them are pretty useless. I especially hate those e-mails that tell you to "forward this e-mail to a friend to show you care". Or, even worse, "If you don't forward this to x people on within x hours of reading it then something bad happens to you"...

And when you finally find an e-mail that is actually worth while forwarding to others, the e-mails look quite messy. It usually contains trash like "> > >" to show this e-mail was forwarded a few times.

My advice: If you care about netiquette, clean up mails before you forward them.

This is one way to clean them up:

1. Copy the contents of your mail to Word:

2. Press ALT and use your mouse (left-click and drag) to select the area you wish to trim:

3. Press the Delete button; the superfluous characters have now been deleted:

4. Copy and paste the text back to your e-mail...you just saved your friends an annoyance!

Easy pickings...

2006-07-31T23:30:00.000+02:00

Though it's pretty easy to argue that anything that comes out of the Redmond code-mines is per definition annoying, for me the really big ones are 1. the utterly crap 'cmd' prompt 2. the bolted on security and 3. the tyrrany of 'user friendly'.

Issue 1. is easily fixed by installing the cygwin tools. To which I'll add my personal hot as sh*t tip: install Ruby on Rails under cygwin and apache and MySQL under Windows.

Issue 2. is harder to fix, but I have found that the most effective way to secure a XP box is to SWITCH OFF all the windows XP security stuff - no firewall, no guards, no marketing driven false sense of security. Then remove all the Norton Anti-Virus/Zone alarm Crap and you'll have your computer back again. Most importantly though is NEVER EVER use Outlook, do not install the various yahoo/google/gurglefroop IE toolbars and 'helpers' and in fact only use IE when you have no choice. Run Opera or Firefox for the web and use Thunderbird as a mail client.

Issue 3. Is hardest to fix, in fact you can't really and you have to 'make do' and 'live with it'. Maybe I'll write about how to make the pain go away a little in some other posting.

Top 10 IE7 Annoyances

2006-07-31T15:25:00.000+02:00

Chris Prillo lists the top 10 annoyances of Internet Explorer 7 beta 3.

Read it here.

The Annoyance Factor

2006-07-31T14:49:00.000+02:00

Now here's for some good, old-fashionate straight-forward thinking. A definition of 'The Annoyance Factor' in Ron McDaniel's own words:

The annoyance factor is the % of people that are less than happy with your product or service but not so unhappy as to complain.

He then goes on to say something important about software:

Think about the user interface with the annoyance factor in mind. Most people will find ways around software quirks. They learn to get around the little problems. But is your software really good, or just not really bad enough to generate complaints? If a large percent of your users are existing in the annoyance area, you are sitting on a time bomb. Any seemingly minor hiccup could trigger widespread desertion that could put you out of business.

In a better world, companies that create annoying software would indeed be out of business.

Windows Genuine Annoyance

2006-07-31T14:22:00.000+02:00

Big brother is watching you: Microsoft has introduced Windows Genuine Advantage to verify if your software is kosher or not. Martin Laplante at Reverse Zone in a shattering review:

This is one of those times when I am happy that I set Microsoft Update to make me review what it is about to download and install on my machine. Most of the time nearly half the updates just don't apply to me. I don't like installing software I don't need, and Microsoft/Windows Update seems pretty poor at figuring out what software I have installed, and shows poor judgment in upgrading versions unnecessarily.
I had to laugh today when I saw that Microsoft Update thought that would want to install a Windows Genuine Advantage notification application. This is not a security update or a bug fix. In fact it has no benefit for me, only potential disavantages when it gets it wrong, and it will slow down the logon process and mess with the desktop.
Now, I am meticulous about properly licensing software. I install and uninstall software all the time, and reinstall it on new machines when the licence terms allow it. Windows Genuine Advantage has never helped me and it often hinders me in doing legitimate things. When I reformatted a hard drive and reinstalled Windows XP from the original media (full retail version not OEM) I wanted to install SP2 first for safety and then check for recent drivers and stability of the suspect drive before consuming one of my XP licence keys. No deal. Windows Genuine Advantage tells me it won't let me get SP2 because I haven't activated the licence yet. This is a foolish restriction because it is easy, but a pain, to get around this perfectly legally.
Microsoft is just being petty and calling me a thief, just because I buy the more expensive retail version of their software in packs of 5 or 10 and manage the licences properly. Now they want to annoy me not just when I use the convenient Microsoft Update web site but every day. Thanks but no thanks. I'll have to turn off the "always trust Microsoft" settings too just in case they try to sneak this in under false pretenses again.

He has hit the nail on its head.

Welcome to my new blog!

2006-07-31T11:47:00.000+02:00

Dear readers (assuming there's someone out here reading my blog),

Welcome to my new blog. In this blog, I hope to post some issues with MS Windows, MS Office, OpenOffice.org, Firefox and other software I use. Sometimes, I am able to offer workarounds, sometimes not.

All visitors are welcome to contribute to this blog with their tips & tricks and suggestions.

I am looking forward to a fruitful cooperation!

Yours truly,
Cheski