Re: Dragging to the Taskbar in Windows XP

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From: Dave Vandervies
Subject: Re: Dragging to the Taskbar in Windows XP
Date: 21:45 on 25 Feb 2007
Somebody claiming to be Aaron Crane wrote:
> 
> Dave Vandervies writes:
> > Most windows I've dealt with behave differently on drag-and-drop
> > depending on what part of the window you drop in.  Trying to guess
> > what you meant would be far more hateful than giving you an easy way
> > to bring the window to the front so you can drop it where you want it.
> 
> Ah, the old defence of "the software is hateful because it was designed
> to be hateful".  In my book, that still makes it worthy of hate.

No argument there.  But sometimes (way too often), this indicates an
inherent hatefulness in the software, and the observed behavior really
is the least hateful.


> There's no reason why a Windows-like GUI couldn't have made this work as
> users expect.  The only thing needed would be to allow applications to
> specify the behaviour for drop events on their taskbar icon, just as
> they currently specify differing behaviours for drop events on different
> parts of their windows.
> 
> I don't know anything about Windows GUI programming, so I might be
> wrong; but I suspect that a future Windows release could acquire this
> functionality without affecting existing software

I suspect it would require something other than a brain-dead-simple
extension of the current drag-and-drop model, but this would probably
be The Right Way to deal with it.
It would just move the hatefulness to the implementation of the new
model and the backward-compatibility hacks for programs that don't use
it, though.  This would probably be The Right Thing (deal with the hate
once when you build the software instead of every time somebody has to
use it), but it still wouldn't eliminate (and probably wouldn't even
reduce) the overall hatefulness.


>     (for which you'd
> presumably get a variant of the existing stupid error message, with
> additional text along the lines of "this application does not support
> drag-and-drop to its taskbar icon").

...and we'd still be complaining about that, of course.


dave

-- 
Dave Vandervies
dj3vande@xxxxxx.xxx

Plan your future!  Make God laugh!
There's stuff above here

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