UI Bites
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I would bet that roughly 0.0% of people searching for products on walmart.ca are looking for an online marketplace, rather than, say, what's available at their local store or even Walmart's own online offerings.
I don't know about people who search for products on walmart.ca (why would anyone do that?), but as someone who searches for products on walmart.com, I'm looking for a product to be shipped/delivered to my home, and I'll buy it from whatever seller has it, whether that's my local Walmart store, some Walmart warehouse, or a 3rd-party seller. I'll generally prefer Walmart's own store/warehouse, because I can get free shipping/delivery, and it's usually quick, which aren't necessarily true of 3rd parties. But if a 3rd party has what I'm looking for and Walmart themselves don't, I'll buy it from the 3rd party. I placed an order last night for 3 items, and all 3 are coming from (different) 3rd parties, because that's who had the things I wanted.
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@HardwareGeek fair enough. Whenever I want some online stuff, I look on ebay, amazon or some Chinese site. But whenever I look on Walmart I usually want to see what's at my local store.
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Whenever I want some online stuff, I look on ebay,
I used to buy a bunch of stuff on eBay, but I got out of the habit when I was out of work and didn't have money to spend, and I never really got back into the habit of looking for stuff there.
amazon
IMHO, despicable scumbags, due to the way they treat their employees. I avoid at all costs.
or some Chinese site.
I generally avoid, unless it's on eBay or a Walmart 3rd-party seller.
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Swiss site, which apparently works better
although it probably runs on a clock
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Swiss site, which apparently works better
although it probably runs on a clock
Not on my watch!
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something that you have absolutely no chance of ever being able to remember.
I used to know the 26-character hexadecimal WEP key for my first router.
Obvious hyperbole is revealed as being an obvious hyperbole. Thank you Captain Obvious for saving the day!
(do I need to add a
:sarkmark:?)(and don't take it as a personal attack, the anecdote and continuing sub-thread is par-for-the-course here, I'm just teasing you)
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@Tsaukpaetra said in UI Bites:
Swiss site, which apparently works better
although it probably runs on a clock
Not on my watch!
That's a well-timed pun.
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Status: Teams is
.Well, not that it's news to anyone.
I'm watching an end-of-hackaton meeting where everyone gives small 2 min talks about what they did. Everyone shares their screen to show a (not always very...) sexy picture of what they did. It's kind of boring and most topics are so out of what I do that I'm doing something else at the same time, on my computer's second screen.
Teams decides that every time the presenter changes, the Teams' meeting window should be brought back to front. Slightly annoying, but actually kind of makes sense. Teams also decides that all Teams windows (including e.g. the main window with chats) must be brought to the front. That's annoying, no activity is happening in that window. At least I can minimise that one, but still.
But the real
is that Teams does this context switch in such a way that it randomly changes the stacking order of other, unrelated windows! For windows that are partly overlaid by a Teams window, I can, with a very open mind, accept that there might be a reason. But when there are two totally unrelated windows, and they don't overlap with any Teams window, and actually they're both on a totally different screen, why the hell does it suddenly change the stacking order????
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@remi Because Teams is "not allowed" to focus steal like that. If you're focused on one Teams window, Teams is supposed to be able to redirect your focus (and bring to front) another window. Otherwise, the most Teams should be allowed to do is flash taskbar buttons. Whatever Teams is doing to allow itself to bypass that restriction -- whether brain surgery on the window manager, hijacking some other program's message loop to force focus to Teams, or other asshattery -- is messing with Windows' ability to maintain Z-order.
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I would bet that roughly 0.0% of people searching for products on walmart.ca are looking for an online marketplace
I think it's the logic of, "nobody's using this feature. Obviously they can't find it, so let's make it impossible to miss."
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@Applied-Mediocrity said in UI Bites:
@Tsaukpaetra said in UI Bites:
Swiss site, which apparently works better
although it probably runs on a clock
Not on my watch!
That's a well-timed pun.
Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.
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@TwelveBaud said in UI Bites:
@remi Because Teams is "not allowed" to focus steal like that. If you're focused on one Teams window, Teams is supposed to be able to redirect your focus (and bring to front) another window. Otherwise, the most Teams should be allowed to do is flash taskbar buttons. Whatever Teams is doing to allow itself to bypass that restriction -- whether brain surgery on the window manager, hijacking some other program's message loop to force focus to Teams, or other asshattery -- is messing with Windows' ability to maintain Z-order.
Ah yes, reminds me of the good old back and forth on Raymon Chen's blog.
Raymond: Don't do that. It's not supported, unacceptable, and what if two programs did that?
Reader: Well, there's Microsoft Program X that does that too.
Raymond: Please read the ground rules. Shaming specific programs is not allowed and Microsoft programs doing something wrong does not disprove that it's wrong...Then the shell team comes up with new ways of preventing programs from doing horrible things, introduce tons of new heuristics detecting it, and dozens of backwards compatibility shims, blaming horrible developers who "got a nice bonus for that feature". And five minutes later another team at Microsoft goes out of their way again to break it.
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@Applied-Mediocrity said in UI Bites:
@Tsaukpaetra said in UI Bites:
Swiss site, which apparently works better
although it probably runs on a clock
Not on my watch!
That's a well-timed pun.
Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.
US politics go
. 
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@TwelveBaud So Teams team is "not allowed" to steal focus using
SetForegroundWindowand therefore has cooked up some entirely stupid idea that does the same, except worse, but does not trigger people during code review? I hope I'm completely misunderstanding things here
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@Applied-Mediocrity I suspect it's more like:
So Teams
teamis "not allowed (by Windows, not by Teams' development team)" to steal focus usingSetForegroundWindowand therefore has cooked up some entirely stupid idea that does the same, except worse, but does not trigger people during code review?And suddenly it's still a
, but an unfortunately very common one. "We can't code this feature because the system doesn't let us so let's find some hacky workaround that more or less works but not quite, rather than questioning whether this feature is a good idea or not or what we should do to officially have the system let us do it."
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@Applied-Mediocrity I suspect it's more like:
So Teams
teamis "not allowed (by Windows, not by Teams' development team)" to steal focus usingSetForegroundWindowand therefore has cooked up some entirely stupid idea that does the same, except worse, but does not trigger people during code review?And suddenly it's still a
, but an unfortunately very common one. "We can't code this feature because the system doesn't let us so let's find some hacky workaround that more or less works but not quite, rather than questioning whether this feature is a good idea or not or what we should do to officially have the system let us do it."“SetForegroundWindow only works in special circumstances (such as startup), because otherwise it’d be annoying as fuck. How can we still be annoying as fuck?”
Yeah, surely someone must have thought that.
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@remi How can Windows not allow that? Does it check every banned call and in case it deduces that it's Teams, it does nothing but calls home to ring alarm bells in the Windows veep's office?
The question I actually have is why they don't have any code reviews then? Because it would be very easy to spot the offending code - in the end you must use some WinAPI to do said brain surgery.
Gah.
DestroyPhysicalMonitor
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@Applied-Mediocrity I suspect it's more like:
So Teams
teamis "not allowed (by Windows, not by Teams' development team)" to steal focus usingSetForegroundWindowand therefore has cooked up some entirely stupid idea that does the same, except worse, but does not trigger people during code review?And suddenly it's still a
, but an unfortunately very common one. "We can't code this feature because the system doesn't let us so let's find some hacky workaround that more or less works but not quite, rather than questioning whether this feature is a good idea or not or what we should do to officially have the system let us do it."“SetForegroundWindow only works in special circumstances (such as startup), because otherwise it’d be annoying as fuck. How can we still be annoying as fuck?”
Yeah, surely someone must have thought that.
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@Applied-Mediocrity said in UI Bites:
@remi How can Windows not allow that? Does it check every banned call and in case it deduces that it's Teams, it does nothing but calls home to ring alarm bells in the Windows veep's office?
Those API calls probably require the process to have some admin rights, which Teams hasn't (because if they required it when installing then not everyone could install Teams on their machine and they wanted maximum virality to drive adoption).
Now if any application can freely call these APIs, then it's back to another type of
, namely what can Teams be doing to fuck up the use of an API so badly (and the answer is probably that they decided to not use the API and instead reinvent the wheel and do it themselves, because it's so much more 
).The question I actually have is why they don't have any code reviews then? Because it would be very easy to spot the offending code - in the end you must use some WinAPI to do said brain surgery.
Have you read @topspin's post just above?
"How can we still be annoying as fuck?” Yeah, surely someone must have thought that.
(maybe he was sarcastic, but I'm betting that's what happened for real, either by a clueless dev team or by a
, or both, or other)
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Those API calls probably require the process to have some admin rights
Yes, they do. Pray tell how does it do any brain surgery on the window manager without any rights? If there is a way, that's not just evil, that's a malware-level hole that Ormandy would like to tell the world tweeting it from the rooftops.
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@loopback0 said in UI Bites:
The UK website just shows badly sized blurred images while the page loads for some reason.
“Big on Quality” indeed.
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“SetForegroundWindow only works in special circumstances (such as startup), because otherwise it’d be annoying as fuck. How can we still be annoying as fuck?”
Someone needs to hack the source for the version of Teams used internally at Microsoft so it pops on top every time someone tries to use MSVC. That'd get the whole behaviour disabled rapidly.
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@Applied-Mediocrity said in UI Bites:
The question I actually have is why they don't have any code reviews then?
Code reviews? Who would do them? Remember, this is the company that has end users doing their QA.
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@Applied-Mediocrity said in UI Bites:
Pray tell how does it do any brain surgery on the window manager without any rights?
Obviously badly, given the end result.
Maybe it doesn't use those API and that's why the end result is fucked up. Maybe it uses those API but in a brain-dead way that fucks up the end result. Maybe it's those API themselves that behave in a brain-dead way. Who knows?
I have no idea who's fault it is (and remember that blame can be freely shared between many parties without reducing each party's share), all I can see is the moronic end result.
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@Applied-Mediocrity said in UI Bites:
I have no idea
who'swhose fault it isFTF
(and remember that blame
can be freely shared between many parties without reducing each party's shareis not a conserved quantity)FTF
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Who knows?
Which is why I mentioned
who has extensive MalarkeySoft knowledge and yet explained it in a way I refused to understand. Thank you for participating in a discussion that did nothing whatsoever to explain the strange behavior. Yay, WTDWTF! 
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@Applied-Mediocrity said in UI Bites:
Thank you for participating in a discussion that did nothing whatsoever to explain the strange behavior.
I didn't know that posting, and thereafter discussing, a UI bite here meant I should try and explain it.
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@remi You certainly don't, especially if, as it turns out, you don't know. Which is why - and I repeat - I asked
.
Now kindly stop Gąsk-lighting me.
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Really looks like something went wrong, but it's just
askingscreaming at me to review the invoice a second time (I already confirmed once).
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Internationalization / localization are hard.
And german has a stränge alphabet. E.g. it comes with anü.
On the "upload" page of Flickr, I can add photos, and add some extra information to them. Sometimes, it is "hinzufügen", and sometimes it is "hinzufügen".
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@BernieTheBernie Yeah, escaping/descaping is hard and everybody gets it wrong. Not related to localization as much as not being able to enforce utf-8 consistently everywhere and using &entities; instead, and then not keeping track of what needs to be html-escaped and what not. In
the edited notifications for some threads have &entities; in them though none of the other notification types does.
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In Confluence, the page URLs are normally of the form
https://confluence.somewhere.xy/display/SPACE/Slightly+cleaned+page+title, which is perfectly sensible. Unless, that is, the page title contains some special (for very broad definition of special) characters, in which case it becomeshttps://confluence.somewhere.xy/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=666. So now not only you can't tell what the link you've got is supposed to be for, but if you don't have permissions to that space you don't even know which space to request permissions to.
Besides the fact it does not tell you you don't have permissions, it just tells you the page does not exist, but it's pretty obvious it is a permission issue when someone just copy&pasted you the link from their browser.
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@dkf And yet everybody uses it. And I've certainly seen a lot of tools that would be EMRWTF.
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@dkf What do you have for replacement? There was some movement to switch to OneNote here, but
(especially the obtrusive autocarrot).
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What do you have for replacement?
We're using Google Docs/Drive right now. Yes, it's just a pile of files, but that's pretty much what Confluence devolves into anyway, and it's one heck of a lot easier to find things in it because the searching works (
).
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@dkf Yeah, search in Confluence sucks coyote balls. For us, however, cross-references are quite important. In the OneNote documentation they are really missing badly.
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For us, however, cross-references are quite important.
Agreed. That's another thing we like about the pile of google docs approach.
In the OneNote documentation they are really missing badly.
How long have Microsoft been failing to understand what a link is? Yes, they understand part of it, but the totality of comprehension seems to have evaded that part of Washington State for three decades or so. At this rate, they're almost as bad some very expensive scientific publishers I've known…
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How long have Microsoft been failing to understand what a link is?
We use Sharepoint and a combination of the wiki and document libraries and it works pretty well.
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How long have Microsoft been failing to understand what a link is? Yes, they understand part of it, but the totality of comprehension seems to have evaded that part of Washington State for three decades or so. At this rate, they're almost as bad some very expensive scientific publishers I've known…
It is specifically the concept of a canonical link that Microsoft is failing to understand, or at least implement with any semblance of sanity. Each document on the office365 conglomerate has two links, a web one (with https:// scheme) and an application one (with a custom scheme), and one does not work in some contexts and the other does not work in other contexts and you never know which you should use to make things work. So depending on what you do it only works in the web version of the apps or only in the thick ones or does work from the thick ones, but goes through the browser and sometimes fails to go back and so on.
… since this is largely about the switching between the web and thick versions of the apps, Google Docs have it easier, because they don't have any thick versions.
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@loopback0 said in UI Bites:
How long have Microsoft been failing to understand what a link is?
We use Sharepoint and a combination of the wiki and document libraries and it works pretty well.
As long as you stick to the wiki and don't risk the onenote abomination, I suppose.
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How long have Microsoft been failing to understand what a link is?
Laughs in MSDN
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@topspin
I tried getting that reference but only got a 404
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@topspin
I tried getting that reference but only got a 404Search in Bing instead. You'll still get a 404 but it'll be a different 404 with a link to the internal search engine that won't get you there directly but can get you to the article that has a link to the one you're searching for
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@sloosecannon
I literally can't follow that explanation
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One
girlGoToMeeting, twocupsscreens.The GoToMeeting main window (where you can see the presentation, videos of other participants etc.) can be freely moved around, as you'd expect.
The control panel with some menus, controls for sound etc. ... not so much. It's stuck on one of the two screens (the one it showed up initially, which also is the "main display" (where the task bar is), I assume this is not a coincidence), and while I can move it around, I cannot move it to the other screen.
Yet another example of reinventing the wheel, badly.
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But wait, there's more!
The main GoToMeeting window has this button:
(which shows the participants' video on one screen and the presentation on the other)So GoToMeeting's developers are perfectly aware that two screens is a thing, and they even wrote some code to take advantage of it. And yet they still prevent the Control Panel from being moved to another screen.
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The control panel with some menus, controls for sound etc. ..
Wait until you discover that the little pop-up overlay for the webcams is actually a transparent window separate from the window it's visually a part of, and that yes, they can get desync from each other.
guess how I know!
