The Secret Button
codersnotes.com
codersnotes.com
I grew up with Windows 98, so for me the X button would be the baseline that feels perfectly logical and natural. But I want to ty and explain why I think it doesn't contradict the above logic:
I think a long-standing design rule in Windows is that the X button action should have as few side-effects as possible apart from closing the window: Closing dialogs and tool windows typically does nothing except closing the window - and your user expectation is that you can trivially restore those windows if you wanted.
For "Yes/No" or "OK/Cancel" type dialogs, the X button typically maps to the action with the least consequences - i.e. "No" or "Cancel". When all choices have consequences is sometimes even disabled to force the user to make a conscious choice.
In the events where closing a windows has direct, irreversible consequences - e.g. closing a program that has unsaved data - the program is expected to show some kind of confirmation: An "Are you sure" or "Do you want to save?" dialog. So in effect, clicking the X button is even safe in these cases because all that click will do is bring up a confirmation dialog.
All of this requires more effort from the developers of applications, but I think treating the X button as a non-destructive action by default actually gives the user more confidence to explore the UI because there is an obvious way how to safely get back.
Yet, I was never able to make any sense about the Windows double-click required standards. It just looked completely arbitrary, like any action MS wanted to map into a click, but there was an action mapped there already, they made it a double click. I am pretty sure the author is rationalizing that line about side-effects.
That is not possible for the window on the left monitor, because there is something to the right (the other monitor), thus, the pointer will not "stick" and it is harder to close the window (you have to actually aim).
Enter the "invisible button": For windows on the left monitor, just mash the mouse into the upper left corner and double click. No aiming necessary.
In Windows 10, most apps still have this button. But it seems to be tied to using the classic Win32 APIs or something. Modern "Metro" apps like the calculator do not have this invisible button any more. Let's hope that that style never catches on ...
> "Up and down" made sense. "Line and box"? Windows 95 brought a lot of advantages, but we lost so much of the little touches along the way.
This is a typical migration problem: The line and box icons represent the Taskbar and the full screen window, so they actually make much more sense than Up and Down arrows, but this user still hasn't adapted. Hard to blame him: With Aero, windows don't look like rectangles anymore and bubbles would better represent the Taskbar than a line.
For the same historical reason he likes double clicking for powerful actions, except click vs double-click doesn't have any logic or consistency anymore, mostly since we introduced the Web and the single click. <s>No click is even enough to upgrade to Windows 10 </s>.
Heck, my parents keep double-clicking everywhere in Windows, including in web pages. Submitting forms twice is so much a problem in companies that jQuery plugins exist to discard the second click on links and buttons.
Consistency and user migration path are hard problems. It's necessary to remove features sometimes.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/lazarus-form-... https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/lazarus-form-recov...
I'm the guy in the xkcd comic
Everything will have to be taken away eventually, so Microsoft's approach of trying to support things forever is fundamentally flawed.
They do seem to have made a decent shift away from that now though, thankfully.
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dsyme/2012/07/05/more-c-net...
I do it. I still use KeePassX 1 because it's much more user friendly for me and provides more settings.
Fitts, Paul M. (June 1954). "The information capacity of the human motor system in controlling the amplitude of movement". Journal of Experimental Psychology. 47 (6): 381–391. doi:10.1037/h0055392. PMID 13174710.
* * * This shit dates from the nineteen-fucking-fifties. * * *
And people fuck it up all the time.
This is why we cannot have nice things.
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Notes:
1. I will be that guy and note you misspelled it. I've done that plenty myself.
This is one thing that pisses me off about stuff switching to web apps. We had this stuff mostly figured out in the 80s and early 90s, but now web developers are all re-inventing it, often from scratch, or using different or conflicting standards. Now menus close when you mis-point by one pixel, the tab key in forms only sometimes works, drop-downs look different on every single webpage. All the UI work and knowledge of the 70s, 80s, and 90s out the window. Sigh.
In general, opinion seems to be divided as to whether the possessive form of a singular noun ending in 's' takes an apostrophe 's' or just an apostrophe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apostrophe#Singular_nouns_endi...
That'd make a great tombstone.
It's probably not meant to be clicked. That's why it is invisible.
Personally, I still use alt-space when somebody has managed to move a window out of the screen: you can still activate it, but you cannot see it.
At least practical for me, who never uses Windows, but gets called when people are stuck.
Ms have a long track record of supporting legacy interactions and interfaces - for instance, you could still use fileman and progman in win7, although by that stage it did involve installing them yourself. They shipped with every version up to xp. http://chorusofone.no-ip.org/computerstuff/win7progman.html
That's pretty much the only way to get offscreen windows back onto the desktop - "Alt+Space, M, Left arrow, Up arrow".
It's certainly added a fun little extra layer of puzzle to my life. I bet this is how Catherine felt about Atrus' door puzzle locks as she wandered Myst Island.
> A single click on the button brings up the system menu. I never bothered about that much, because this button isn't really meant to be single clicked
I disagree here. I feel single click is more useful than the the double click to close.
Edit: assuming you have a keyboard with an insert key, and that it's not in a ridiculous location, of course.
The way Chrome's UI is handled on Windows seems quite interesting in general. You can see glimpses of it when it breaks or some other program tries to make sense of it, such as screen recording of Chrome windows.
The icons don't appear to the right/left of the play button but the buttons are still there and work if you tap where the icon used to be.
FWIW, the icons do still appear in the Control Center menu when a podcast is playing: http://i.imgur.com/mUWrIYy.png
Are you using iOS 9?
Which was intuitive in the windows 3.0 days because the icon of the top level window was slightly longer (like the space bar) than in the MDI child windows (like the minus sign).
MDI was used by the old Opera browser and it is what later became browser tabs.
Although I am wondering if it has ever bitten anyone by accident, especially given that double-clicking elsewhere on the top bar will maximise a window (and I do this frequently). Could be unfortunate.
Other not really documented leftovers of previous UI standards: I still sometimes use Ctrl-insert and shift-insert for copy and paste, which still work in a surprising number of apps, but not everywhere. I picked up the habit in the DOS 5 era with QBasic/Edit, but it seems to have been an IBM standard from 1987: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access
Especially useful in terminal apps/ssh clients, where you really don't want to be pressing Ctrl-C by accident.
Interesting tidbit: There is even a context menu on scroll bars - no idea who would use this, but it is there.
Think of how hard it would be to re-implement a dropdown, for instance: You would need to implement keyboard navigation (arrow keys), jump-to-entry (using the letter-keys), srolling with the mouse wheel, flipping through entries while the dropdown menu is closed and probably a thousand other things that I never used but some people do.
In the end I think I cheated and drew the list box on the parent with an option to go up or down depending on it's relative position.
Certainly was complicated.
It is for accessibility. Alternative input methods, like emulating the mouse by keyboard for instance, might not have mouse-drag functionality, but will have a right-click function.
The link I posted above links to another one with more historical context. I'd never clicked that the icon was meant to look like a space bar.
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/jensenh/2006/06/08/you-wind...
I was born in the late 80s, so hit the tail end of Windows 3.1 and mostly grew up on 95 and 98. The article says,
> The familiar up/down arrows got replaced by "line" and "box" buttons, and the new close button appeared at the top-right. "Up and down" made sense.
I have absolutely no idea what "up and down" are supposed to mean. Z order? Y position on the screen? No clue.
There's a setting to have it always displayed I think.
Artifacts from the past :)
I suspect the problem here is more related to GTK3 and the new window manager, but I can't prove it. I just know it's broken now.
It seems a little weird that they didn't just remove the button, except of cause as others point out it would break the work flow of some people.