Click 'No' to confuse



  • Too bad this pop-up is in Dutch (really, what is with applications running on a UK English Windows deciding to display Dutch simply because I happen to live in the Netherlands?). But don't worry, I'll try to translate.

    No space left on G:/pool/main/l/linux, cancel installation?

    The directory G:/pool/main/l/linux has insufficient space left. Click 'Yes' to cancel, or 'No' to ignore and continue anyway. Choose 'No to All' to ignore all future space-related notices.


    So, where shall I begin? The lack of the 'No to All' button? The total confusion created by the choices? The fact that you can choose to ignore that my drive doesn't have enough space (what is going to do? write beyond the capacity of it)? Why didn't they just create their own dialogue box with Cancel/Ignore/Ignore all buttons (heck isn't that even a standard option in Windows message boxes)?

    Or maybe the fact that when I clicked Yes, the progress bar going nuts, the programming exploding, giving me three "this application has crashed" messages.

    Tough one.



  • @pbean said:

    So, where shall I begin?

    Windows' message box API. Or rather, the fact that it's still being used and there's no standard replacement yet (that I know of; speaking classic WINAPI here, not counting in .NET).

    Sure, it creates consistency; but at what cost?


  • Java Dev

    I know I've seen at least one occasion in the past where ignoring an 'insufficient space' warning was useful. That was the installation of the original baldur's gate, which totalled 2.2 GB. The windows API at the time would not indicate free space available above 2 GB, so as a known issue you had to bypass the error.

    I've also had cases where I'd get an error (such as insufficient disk space) where I'd be able to manually clear up the issue (delete stuff) then proceed. In that case a 'retry' button would make more sense though.



  • @derula said:

    Windows' message box API. Or rather, the fact that it's still being used and there's no standard replacement yet (that I know of; speaking classic WINAPI here, not counting in .NET).

    Sure, it creates consistency; but at what cost?

    This isn't the default message box options. The default message box doesn't have a "Yes to All" button, just "Yes, No, Cancel". This is a custom extension of the default message box.



  • @derula said:

    @pbean said:
    So, where shall I begin?

    Windows' message box API. Or rather, the fact that it's still being used and there's no standard replacement yet (that I know of; speaking classic WINAPI here, not counting in .NET).

    Sure, it creates consistency; but at what cost?

     

    Except this one isn't using the Windows message box API. I think Unetbootin uses GTK or something.



  • @Soviut said:

    @derula said:
    Windows' message box API. Or rather, the fact that it's still being used and there's no standard replacement yet (that I know of; speaking classic WINAPI here, not counting in .NET).

    Sure, it creates consistency; but at what cost?

    This isn't the default message box options. The default message box doesn't have a "Yes to All" button, just "Yes, No, Cancel". This is a custom extension of the default message box.

    Really? Weird. I only ever used Delphi to be honest, and the default message boxes there had Yes, No, Cancel, Ignore, Retry, Abort (yes, Abort AND Cancel, which was a bit confusing because they both were localized to Abbrechen), Yes to all, No to all (I think... or not?). I was almost sure it just encapsulated the WinAPI calls, like many of partially renamed and slightly differently structured functions did.



  • @pbean said:

    @derula said:
    @pbean said:
    So, where shall I begin?

    Windows' message box API. Or rather, the fact that it's still being used and there's no standard replacement yet (that I know of; speaking classic WINAPI here, not counting in .NET).

    Sure, it creates consistency; but at what cost?

    Except this one isn't using the Windows message box API. I think Unetbootin uses GTK or something.

    While that doesn't need to be a contradiction per se, now that you mention it, the message box has a window icon in the upper left corner which I'm pretty sure winapi boxes don't have.



  • @derula said:

    While that doesn't need to be a contradiction per se, now that you mention it, the message box has a window icon in the upper left corner which I'm pretty sure winapi boxes don't have.


    I'm pretty sure they do:

    http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms645505(v=vs.85).aspx

    To display an icon in the message box, specify one of the following values.

    MB_ICONEXCLAMATION, MB_ICONWARNING, MB_ICONINFORMATION, ...

     
    Even though "Yes to All" and "No to all" are not standard Win API, there is SHMessageBoxCheck which supports "Dont Show Me This Dialog Again" functionality.




  • @derula said:

    Windows' message box API. Or rather, the fact that it's still being used and there's no standard replacement yet (that I know of; speaking classic WINAPI here, not counting in .NET).

    Sure, it creates consistency; but at what cost?

    TaskDialog WinAPI. Don't be confused by the mention of "also available from .net" in first paragraph.

    @derula said:

    Really? Weird. I only ever used Delphi to be honest, and the default message boxes there had Yes, No, Cancel, Ignore, Retry, Abort (yes, Abort AND Cancel, which was a bit confusing because they both were localized to Abbrechen), Yes to all, No to all (I think... or not?). I was almost sure it just encapsulated the WinAPI calls, like many of partially renamed and slightly differently structured functions did.

    Delphi isn't using raw WinAPI, it's using the Borland VCL widget/env/wtf library. You can make WinAPI calls, and use the "real" MessageBox() call, but the defaults are not using it.

    Also, real MessageBox() does not have the "to all" options - see uType.



  • @Mole said:

    I'm pretty sure they do:

    http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms645505(v=vs.85).aspx

    To display an icon in the message box, specify one of the following values.

    MB_ICONEXCLAMATION, MB_ICONWARNING, MB_ICONINFORMATION, ...

    Not that icon, I meant the one in the title bar.



  • @bannedfromcoding said:

    Delphi isn't using raw WinAPI, it's using the Borland VCL widget/env/wtf library.

    Yes, but certain things in there were (maybe still are) pretty much just a wrapper of an API function with slightly different parameters... or so I remember... nevermind it doesn't matter anyways.



  • Ah, if only there was ‘UK English Windows’. I think what you have is ‘English’, as in American English.

    No-one mentioned the forward slashes in the G: network drive path? It bothers me slightly to have to add in the trailing backslash myself.

    Is it not the Windows convention that shift-clicking ‘No’ delivers ‘No to All’ functionality?



  • @pbean said:

    Except this one isn't using the Windows message box API. I think Unetbootin uses GTK or something.

    Certainly not GTK. It looks too natively for GTK. Plus GTK actually has sane API for message boxes.

    It might be using wxWindows, but that would mean using the native API (wxWindows is just a thin wrapper on top of it and given it's modelled after MFC, it has all it's shortcomings too).


  • ♿ (Parody)

    It uses Qt4:
    @Unetbootin said:

    What is it written in, where's the source code, and how can I compile it?

    UNetbootin is written in C++, using the Qt4 toolkit. Source code is available from the source zip package, or from the git repository on Sourceforge, or the bzr repository on Launchpad. The Linux version is compiled using g++, while the Windows version is cross-compiled using mingw32. Both use a statically linked version of qt4 (to eliminate external library dependencies). Executables are compressed using UPX to reduce file size.

    Given that the point is to create live Linux USB drives, they probably didn't bother with changing the path separators, especially since forward slashes work on windows. The only English translation I see is for Australia. Being from the US, I have little knowledge and less experience with internationalization, so I couldn't begin to explain why you got Dutch, except maybe the mirror system gives you the translation based on your IP address or something.



  • @boomzilla said:

    Being from the US, I have little knowledge and less experience with internationalization, so I couldn't begin to explain why you got Dutch, except maybe the mirror system gives you the translation based on your IP address or something.

    Windows, no matter what language version, lets you select "your location" in Regional Options. Some frameworks use that for UI language selection. Others use the system language. Both of these lead to lots of pain.

    With the first, you end up with single "localized" apps in your mostly-English system; me (and about a third of the people I talked to about this) find it quite hard to switch between languages all the time, and get confused by this. (My friend still laughs at the time when after I was told to switch from English to native I answered "All right, sure" and continued in English, while believing I did switch.)

    The second option forced me to obtain and install a local-language edition of Windows on a machine, despite everything else in the company running on English, because that particular system was supposed to cater to people not knowing English, but chose its own language by sniffing system language.

    There are workarounds, such as AppLocale patch. But they sometimes lead to more conflicts. What really shoud be done is to have a language preference in Regional Settings (there's one, but it's meant to choose codepage for legacy unibyte apps) that all the (future) software would check, AND a way to set the language per-app.



  • @derula said:

    I only ever used Delphi to be honest...

    You have my unending sympathy.



  • @pbean said:

    really, what is with applications running on a UK English Windows deciding to display Dutch simply because I happen to live in the Netherlands?

    I have the same problem with my HP machine, even though I set it to English when installing Windows, some programs insist on being in Swedish (it was the first option when installing). And no, I don't live in Sweden nor have a Swedish keyboard layout or any other setting that would suggest me being able to understand Swedish. There must be some setting somewhere deep in the registry somewhere that is set wrong but I haven't been able to find it. I even tried searching the source code of one of the offending programs to see how they get their locale settings, but I didn't get very far.

    One thing I noticed though was that these programs tended to be the ported from Linux / crossplatform kind of programs. So I came up with a workaround: set an environment variable "LANG" with the value "en_US".



  •  @Soviut said:

    The default message box doesn't have a "Yes to All" button, just "Yes, No, Cancel".
    The default MessageBox is OK/Cancel.



  • @SlyEcho said:

    I have the same problem with my HP machine, even though I set it to English when installing Windows, some programs insist on being in Swedish (it was the first option when installing).
    Go to Regional and Language Settings (or Region and Language), switch to another region and location (you can skip the keyboard settings and language for non-Unicode programs), apply the changes, then switch back to English. Certain programs are known to corrupt these settings (one well known example is Access 97, but there are others), which results in some programs seeing other settings than you actually have.@SlyEcho said:
    So I came up with a workaround: set an environment variable "LANG" with the value "en_US".
    This works for anything gettext-based (and gettext by default checks your region to determine what language to use).

    Speaking of keyboards, does anybody here using non-English keyboard layout, have the problem of Windows 7 randomly switching to US English layout, even when that layout is not even installed? Happens pretty regularly for me on several machines, and I haven't found the reason yet (it's not Alt+Shift - it does nothing when I'm using Slovenian layout, but does switch me back if I was switched to the English layout).



  • @Mole said:


    Even though "Yes to All" and "No to all" are not standard Win API, there is SHMessageBoxCheck which supports "Dont Show Me This Dialog Again" functionality.
    *boggle* You think the presence of the SHMessageBoxCheck option in some way mitigates or reduces the non-existence of the "Yes to all" and "No to all" functionality?  Otherwise why mention it in contrast ("even though....")?




  • @ender said:

    Speaking of keyboards, does anybody here using non-English keyboard layout, have the problem of Windows 7 randomly switching to US English layout, even when that layout is not even installed? Happens pretty regularly for me on several machines, and I haven't found the reason yet (it's not Alt+Shift - it does nothing when I'm using Slovenian layout, but does switch me back if I was switched to the English layout).
    The school computers here (in Canada, running Win7) love to randomly switch to French (which is installed) while I'm typing, or occasionally even Chinese (which isn't installed). Drives me nuts, especially since the French layout changes a lot of symbol keys like {} and .



  • @lolwtf said:

    @ender said:
    Speaking of keyboards, does anybody here using non-English keyboard layout, have the problem of Windows 7 randomly switching to US English layout, even when that layout is not even installed? Happens pretty regularly for me on several machines, and I haven't found the reason yet (it's not Alt+Shift - it does nothing when I'm using Slovenian layout, but does switch me back if I was switched to the English layout).
    The school computers here (in Canada, running Win7) love to randomly switch to French (which is installed) while I'm typing, or occasionally even Chinese (which isn't installed). Drives me nuts, especially since the French layout changes a lot of symbol keys like {} and \.
     

    My keyboard sometimes switches from "United States-International" to "English (United States)" randomly and without warning.  I usually don't notice it until I start getting extra spaces after apostrophes and quotation marks (in the US-Int layout those are deadkey accents).

    Much less frequently the language will change from English to Chinese, which I do have installed.  I figure whatever's causing one is causing the other because they're the top two settings on my Language Band.



  • @da Doctah said:

    My keyboard sometimes switches from "United States-International" to "English (United States)" randomly and without warning.
     

    There's a keyboard shortcut for that, but I can't remember all of them - I think Ctrl-RightShift switched to RTL text input. I remember hitting it back in the mIRC days and freaking out when words came out backwards. Easy enough to hit without realising.



  • @bannedfromcoding said:

    @boomzilla said:
    Being from the US, I have little knowledge and less experience with internationalization, so I couldn't begin to explain why you got Dutch, except maybe the mirror system gives you the translation based on your IP address or something.
    Windows, no matter what language version, lets you select "your location" in Regional Options. Some frameworks use that for UI language selection. Others use the system language. Both of these lead to lots of pain.
    With the first, you end up with single "localized" apps in your mostly-English system; me (and about a third of the people I talked to about this) find it quite hard to switch between languages all the time, and get confused by this. (My friend still laughs at the time when after I was told to switch from English to native I answered "All right, sure" and continued in English, while believing I did switch.)
    The second option forced me to obtain and install a local-language edition of Windows on a machine, despite everything else in the company running on English, because that particular system was supposed to cater to people not knowing English, but chose its own language by sniffing system language.
    There are workarounds, such as AppLocale patch. But they sometimes lead to more conflicts. What really shoud be done is to have a language preference in Regional Settings (there's one, but it's meant to choose codepage for legacy unibyte apps) that all the (future) software would check, AND a way to set the language per-app.
     

    Yep. There are 2 settings of interest, your location, and your "Format" choice. Some applications base their localisation on your location (which is a huge wtf... 80% of the people at my work live in the Netherlands but aren't Dutch), while most base it on the format settings. In fact, when I select the Dutch format, Windows itself lists weekdays everywhere in Dutch, rather than using the system language. No application ever actually bases their localisation on the system language, which is actually the only way to determine what language the user might prefer an application in. What part of the world I'm, what currency I use to pay stuff, or how I would like to see my dates formatted have absolutely nothing to do which language I prefer to use applications in, or even which languages I understand.

     

    As for the keyboard issues, try this suggestion.

    Go to the regional settings, the Keyboards and Languages tab and press Change keyboards. Select the one you want as default, then be sure to press apply. Then remove any of the ones you don't ever want to use. Then go to the Advanced Key Settings tab and disable the keyboard shortcuts.

     That's one of the first things I do on any new computer (together with disabling all the accessibility settings, like sticky keys (ewwww!) and mouse whateves), and have never had any issues.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @pbean said:

    What part of the world I'm, what currency I use to pay stuff, or how I would like to see my dates formatted have absolutely nothing to do which language I prefer to use applications in, or even which languages I understand.

    Obviously not for you personally, but it's all probably the most obvious and correct (at least, without asking further questions) indicator of any of that for most people.



  • @pbean said:

    What part of the world I'm, what currency I use to pay stuff, or how I would like to see my dates formatted have absolutely nothing to do which language I prefer to use applications in, or even which languages I understand.
    Only problem with this is what to do if Windows isn't available in your language, but the programs are, and you'd like them in your language (eg. in these parts Windows 2000 wasn't localized).
    @pbean said:
    Go to the regional settings, the Keyboards and Languages tab and press Change keyboards. Select the one you want as default, then be sure to press apply. Then remove any of the ones you don't ever want to use.
    Already done.@pbean said:
    Then go to the Advanced Key Settings tab and disable the keyboard shortcuts.
    Tried this, too, and the only effect was that when Windows switched me to the US English layout, I had no way of switching back (the shortcuts do nothing when I'm in my preferred layout, but they do switch me back when I'm not).



  • @boomzilla said:

    @pbean said:
    What part of the world I'm, what currency I use to pay stuff, or how I would like to see my dates formatted have absolutely nothing to do which language I prefer to use applications in, or even which languages I understand.

    Obviously not for you personally, but it's all probably the most obvious and correct (at least, without asking further questions) indicator of any of that for most people.

     

    It's obvious that, because I pay in euros rather than pounds, I must therefore also speak Dutch? Country has nothing to do with language, especially in these times. They should base it on the language of your OS.

    @ender said:

    @pbean said:
    What part of the world I'm,
    what currency I use to pay stuff, or how I would like to see my dates
    formatted have absolutely nothing to do which language I prefer
    to use applications in, or even which languages I
    understand.
    Only problem with this is what to do if Windows isn't
    available in your language, but the programs are, and you'd like them
    in your language (eg. in these parts Windows 2000 wasn't localized).
    @pbean said:
    Go to the regional settings, the Keyboards and
    Languages tab and press Change keyboards. Select the one you want as
    default, then be sure to press apply. Then remove any of the ones you
    don't ever want to use.
    Already done.@pbean said:
    Then go
    to the Advanced Key Settings tab and disable the keyboard
    shortcuts.
    Tried this, too, and the only effect was that when
    Windows switched me to the US English layout, I had no way of switching
    back (the shortcuts do nothing when I'm in my preferred layout, but they
    do switch me back when I'm not).

    Windows is available in so many languages, I can't imagine that any application does have a language which Windows doesn't have. But even then, that's probably a minority of the cases, and not the majority.

    As for the keyboard issues, no idea then. If you only have one layout, select that as default and disable all keyboard shortcuts for changing layouts, it "should" work.

     


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @pbean said:

    Country has nothing to do with language, especially in these times. They should base it on the language of your OS.

    I agree with you that your language selection would be a lot better, you have to know that a statement like, "Country has nothing to do with language," is complete bullshit. Yes, even today.



  • @pbean said:

    Windows is available in so many languages, I can't imagine that any application does have a language which Windows doesn't have. But even then, that's probably a minority of the cases, and not the majority.
    Windows 7 is available in 36 languages. GIMP for example more or less supports 110 language variants (88 if variants are excluded).@pbean said:
    As for the keyboard issues, no idea then. If you only have one layout, select that as default and disable all keyboard shortcuts for changing layouts, it "should" work.
    It worked up to and including Vista. Something broke in Windows 7 (also, it seems that the longer I use the system, the less it switches me; I don't remember when it last happened on my home machine, but I got a new computer at work a few months ago, and at first I had it happen several times per day, while now it's happening 2-3 times per week).



  • @ender said:

    Go to Regional and Language Settings (or Region and Language), switch to another region and location (you can skip the keyboard settings and language for non-Unicode programs), apply the changes, then switch back to English.

    I know this is a little late but I finally got around to try that and I can confirm that it works.

    Thank you!


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