John Topley's Weblog

November 2003 Article Archive

Unfinished eXPerience Redux

Monday, 24 November 2003

Windows superstar Raymond Chen has provided explanations for a couple of the Windows XP user interface oddities that I wrote about previously. See Exhibit A: The Welcome Screen and Exhibit D: Notepad. In the meantime, I've found three more exhibits.

Exhibit I: Semi-Transparent Icons

Realistic representations?

• A lot of the icons in Windows XP are strangely semi-transparent. They look pretty but don't support the metaphors they represent. When was the last time you saw a Notepad with a clear cover, or a folder with a see-through flap?

Exhibit J: Taskbar and Start Menu Properties

• The property sheet for the Windows Taskbar and Start menu has always featured a cool little graphic for illustrating what the various options do. Unfortunately in Windows XP Microsoft forgot to update the graphic from the beta (presumably) to reflect a design change in the shipping code. Notice the difference between the chevrons in the circular button that hides or shows the notification area icons:

Spot the difference.

Exhibit K: Picture Viewer

• This is actually a positive exhibit that I thought I'd include to prove that Microsoft did get a lot of things right. I was archiving some photographs to CD-R using Windows XP's built-in burning functionality—it's convenient and I didn't need anything more sophisticated—when the wizard helpfully asked me if I wanted to include a picture viewer on the disc:

Maybe next time, but thanks for asking.

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Sermon On The Web

Tuesday, 11 November 2003

I was asked by a colleague today why I favour using HTML DIVs over tables for laying out my JavaServer Pages. This is the reply I gave…

“In the beginning (1990 actually) God created HTML and it was pretty much text and hrefs and God saw that it was good. Then Man thought that it looked kind of dull and wouldn't it be good to spruce it up a bit with images and fancy graphics, and so the people in the land of Netscape who ruled the world begat their own HTML tags and lo, websites could have blinking text and funny little GIF animations and Man saw that it was indeed like, cool. Then the time of Dreamweaver came and lo, the dot com boom was upon Man. And the tribe of web designers with ponytails and Saabs wanted to make sites with precise layouts, even though HTML was never designed thus. And so it came to pass that tables were used to lay out web pages in a way that pleased the designers and looked quite good in most of the browsers of the age, even though they all had differences in the way they rendered HTML.

But all was not well in the kingdom of the Web. The Gods were angered, for they saw that their creation had become bad, for presentation had become mixed with content and Man had not heeded their Word. And their anger begat a new child, the cascading style sheet and they passed down new commandments to Man, saying that thy shall not mix presentation with content and thy shall always specify a valid DOCTYPE for thine document and thy shall use tables to present tabular data and not for page layout. Man was slow to adopt CSS and there were the dark times of the version four browsers, but Man began to learn his lesson and learnt the way of the DIV and he became a regular disciple of the teachings at the temple of the W3C validator.

So after the six ages of IE it came to pass that the Gods smiled down upon Man and saw that with his help they could at last begin building the Semantic Web and all would be well in the web of data.”

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Living With The Pocket PC

Saturday, 08 November 2003

I've just bought a couple of accessories for my Pocket PC. I got the official Hewlett Packard USB combined cradle and charger and a 256 MB Secure Digital card, both from eXpansys UK (recommended). Unfortunately all is not well.

I bought a nice capacious SD card so that I could copy some of my MP3 collection to it but even this isn't straightforward. I assumed that the ActiveSync software would have the intelligence to automatically start filling the storage card once my MP3 files had used up the internal memory (or at least offer this as an option) but alas, no. No problem I thought, I can use my universal media reader to copy the files to the card directly in one hit. This worked fine at the Windows XP end and the card showed up as a removable drive formatted using the FAT file system. However when I inserted the card in the h1910 it prompted me to format it. I guessed that formatting it on the Pocket PC would sort things out and tried copying the files directly again. It didn't work.

It appears that you have to use the internal RAM as a buffer, synchronising a few files at a time from the desktop PC to the h1910 and then using the Pocket PC File Explorer to move them to external storage.

If anyone knows a way around this ridiculous limitation then I would really love to hear from you!

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