Discussions

14 minutes ago, fanbaby wrote

Boy, when will web designer understand that the px unit was a mistake? I guess never, since they are been thought to think in pixels. SSSStop it! The web wasn't designed to be PDF. Oh well, it's a lost war anyway. Keep on making sh!tty web sites that LOOK good.

That's not the problem at all. Browsers do actually treat px as a relative measurement in CSS. The problem is actual raster images in web pages. There's not much designers can do about that. It's really a problem for web browsers to solve, which they do mostly with the zoom modes in IE8+. These enlarge bitmap graphics and then adjust all CSS measures appropriately to match. If you're using a high-dpi monitor you get the page the size you expect it to be but with crisper text.

That's also ofc what Safari does on 'retina display' devices. Apple aren't like "we're going to whine about web designers not making everything dpi-aware and asking them to redesign the whole web". No, they just scale up images and CSS measurements by 2x and you get a normal looking page just with crisper text.

4 hours ago, evildictaitor wrote

Look, I'm not saying deleting shortcuts without a prompt is a good idea - I'm just saying that it's a valid action for the OS to take. The sole purpose of a shortcut is to take you to a target file. If that file isn't there then the only purpose of the shortcut has vanished, and hence leaving the shortcut around clutters up the folder. The reason will be that uninstalling programs often doesn't delete the shortcut files they inevitably dropped on the desktop during install, and this was an attempt to stop your desktop becoming a shortcut cemetery.

And what about the effort I put into manually changing parameters to run my program? That's why I have all these shortcuts.

So, deleting shortcuts to clean up after broken uninstallers is a 'valid action'. But that's not the only reason people have shortcuts on their desktop. Windows has just added more idiocy to fight idiocy and broken the general case: That the OS shouldn't delete user files without warning.

@Craig_Mathews Thanks for the tip. I managed to edit the file you mentioned but I couldn't change it's owner back to TrustedInstaller as there is no user called that which is weird.

@Dr.Herbie  This 'clean up'/'balls up' process only runs once a week (01:00 on Sunday night on my machine) - it might not have actually run during your experiment. As far I can tell from the PS script, it doesn't take any account of whether the drive the target is located on it available.

# Function to check whether the shortcut is validfunction Test-ValidLink([Wmi]$wmiLinkFile = $(throw "No WMI link file is specified")){    if(($wmiLinkFile -eq $null) -or ([String]::IsNullOrEmpty($wmiLinkFile.Target)))    {        return $false    }    return Test-Path $wmiLinkFile.Target}

Or in my case, they point to build targets that might not have been produced due to compile errors.

It's another case of Windows trying to be clever and do stuff automatically when there is no automatic action that makes sense for every scenario.

And even if you want to argue that it's acceptable to delete broken shortcuts without prompting the user because that's the right thing to do 99% of the time, why in the name of great suffing **** does it not put them in the recycle bin? Who is that helping? The PM who came up with this is a complete jackass.

Windows 7 deletes shortcuts from your desktop if they point on files that no longer exist. It doesn't prompt you to clean up the desktop like XP did, it just deletes them. It doesn't even put them in the recycle bin, FFS.

Seriously, who thought this was a good idea?

Win8 is a very comsumer focused move - a last ditch attempt to stop Apple taking over that space. But the majority of Microsoft's income is from corporate sales and I can't see IT wanting to install Win8. They will most likely stick with Win7 indefinitely - Win7 will be the new Windows XP.

Oh dear god, not the fuzzy text threads again.

There's one way to settle it: put out a beta with the new design and VS2010 look as switchable themes and then use the usage stats reporting to see which is most popular. Make that one the default look of the shipping version but still include the other one.

Of course that would depend on VS being themeable which I don't think it is even though it's a WPF application.

3 days ago, JoshRoss wrote

Going live in 3, 2, 1. I've never cared for the live branding anyways.

-Josh

When you can sign into more than one account at the same time (or at least swap between them without having to log out and back in every time), then there will be cause for celebration.

The thing that strikes me about this whole UI controversy is: What exactly is wrong with VS2010?

My impression is that the Visual Studio team has a designer on their staff and they like to feel like they contrubuted something even though it's not needed, and this is the result.

Marmite!